Who Was Dracula? Read Online Free PDF

mother recounted rich Irish folk myths—delicious horror stories—and his father detailed the latest theatrical productions.
    He was born Abraham Stoker, named after his father, in Clontarf, a quiet seaside town on the outskirts of Dublin. Little Abraham, later shortened to Bram, was the third of seven children.
    His namesake, Abraham Senior, was twenty years older than his wife, a civil servant who worked a monotonous job in the parliamentary section of Dublin Castle. Charlotte Thornley, his wife, was from Sligo, on the northwest coast of Ireland. She remembered the colorful stories of her Irish forbears, lived through the horrors of the cholera epidemic that swept her hometown when she was fourteen, and heard the scream of the Banshee when her mother died.
    The Stokers were a comfortably middle-class Church of Ireland family—Protestant—living in Clontarf during the Irish potato blight of 1845. Abraham Stoker’s civil service job meant that the family avoided the horrors of this famine, even if they shared the economic calamity of the country.
    After he regained his strength, Bram was a good student if not an inspired one. His brothers were all achievers, and three became physicians. His mother was devoted to their education, and she became a reformer, campaigning for government-supported schools for the deaf and the education of women in workhouses. His father spent frugally, but regularly indulged in pit seats at the Theatre Royal and watched star performers whenever he traveled. For his son, he replayed the great Edmund Kean’s amazing performance in
A New Way to Pay Old Debts
and described the French magician Robert-Houdin’s masterful “eye,” taking in everything at a glance.
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    In 1863, following in his older brothers’ footsteps, Bram entered Trinity College, at the time Dublin’s renowned Protestant university. He had overcome and overcompensated for his early physical ailments. He was six feet, two inches tall, weighed 175 pounds, and excelled at sports: rowing, walking, running, swimming, and weight lifting. He also played on the rugby team.
    His academic pursuits took a backseat, but he was invited to join The Phil (The Philosophical Society) and The Hist (or Historical Society, a parliamentary debate group). Stoker was an inspired debater, with an ability to think quickly on his feet. He was naturally shy, but he had learned to mix easily in university groups.
    Abraham Senior retired from the civil service in 1865, which made the family finances shaky, especially with two sons at Trinity. Bram took a year off from school and worked for a year at Dublin Castle, where his father had worked. He later returned to school and graduated in 1871. He went on to earn a master’s degree in mathematics. His mother and father decided that their pensions would carry them further if they lived abroad in France or Switzerland. They departed in 1872, leaving their five sons behind in Dublin. Bram moved in with his older brother Thornley, who was a physician.
    Bram Stoker had inherited his father’s interest in the theater and even appeared in some Dublin plays—his acting roles seem to have been inspired by his fine, deep, assertive voice, which he found during debates at Trinity. He first saw Henry Irving perform at the Theatre Royal, Dublin, in 1867, when Stoker was nineteen and Irving was twenty-nine. Irving was touring with the St. James Company and played Captain Absolute in
The Rivals
, by the Dublin-born playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan. As Stoker had seen other actors in this popular role, he was able to carefully assay Irving’s “business,” the clever little pauses or gestures that an actor would use to individualize a part.
    Irving was already becoming known for his intelligent interpretations. Rather than bluster through a role, he imbued the part with subtleties, giving the impression that one could see the character thinking, reacting,