There are few literary masterpieces that have lasted as long and caught the public’s fascination as Dracula. Bram Stoker, the author of the Gothic masterpiece created one of literature’s most memorable characters that continue to live on centuries after its creation.

Dracula, the blood-thirsty, shapeshifting vampire who lives in a gloomy Transylvanian castle and curses his victims, was immortalized not only through the brilliant novel itself but many stage productions and Hollywood movies as well.  

Although much is known about Bram Stoker’s monster (that only the mention of Dracula’s name brings into the imagination the spitting image of the mysterious alluring vampire), less is known about Bram Stoker himself. Here are some interesting facts about the famous Dracula creator and the life before and after the novel’s creation:

Bram Stoker: Early Life, Family, and Education

1. When was Bram Stoker born?

The famous writer we know as Bram Stoker was born as Abraham Stoker at 15 Marino Crescent in Clontarf, Dublin, Ireland on November 8th, 1847, and you can view the address on Google Maps. His father was a civil servant father and a charity worker while his mother was a writer.

2. Bram Stoker had six siblings

Charlotte and Abraham Stoker had seven children, and Bram was the third. Their eldest child was Sir Thornley Stoker, who was one of Ireland’s leading physicians and performed some of the first brain surgeries in Ireland.

3. As a child, Bram Stoker spent most of his time ill in bed

Bram Stoker was bedridden with a mysterious disease until the age of seven. While the nature of the disease was never discovered, he did recover eventually and was able to start attending school. Stoker wrote wistfully of this period saying: “The leisure of extended sickness afforded a chance for numerous ideas which were profitable according to their sort in subsequent years.”

4. Bram Stoker’s mother entertained his sick leaves with horror stories

While retrospectively, these tales did help shape young Bram Stoker’s imagination, some of them may be considered age-inappropriate by some. Charlotte Stoker had grown up in the northwest of Ireland during a horrible cholera outbreak in 1832, and she had captivated the young ill Stoker with grim and vivid tales of mass graves and how the living had been unintentionally buried alongside the dead.

5. Where did Bram Stoker go to college?

Bram Stoker enrolled in Trinity College Dublin in 1864 and did very well. Bram Stoker majored in mathematics, graduating with honors in 1870 and going on to get his MA in 1875. He was the only Trinity student to hold both roles of the auditor of the College Historical Society and the president of the University Philosophical Society.

6. Bram Stoker was also quite the jock in college

Bram Stoker’s childhood illness, whatever it was, had no long-term physical impact on him. He was an accomplished university athlete competing in a variety of sports, including rugby for Dublin University. He also won awards in shot put, weightlifting, high and long jumping, gymnastics, and race walking. Among his finest undergraduate accomplishments was being named “Dublin University Athletic Sports Champion.”

Bram Stoker: Life & Times

7. Bram Stoker followed his father’s footsteps and became a civil servant

Bram Stoker began working as a civil servant at Dublin Castle after graduation. Stoker’s father had previously worked as a civil servant at the castle and assisted his son in obtaining a place there. Bram did, however, dabble in journalism and theatrical criticism on the side and wrote for the Dublin Evening Mail.

8. Bram Stoker married Oscar Wilde’s childhood sweetheart

In 1878, Bram Stoker married Florence Balcombe, an aspiring actress and celebrated beauty whose former paramour had been Oscar Wilde. Six months into their relationship, Wilde presented Florence a small gold cross with his name inscribed on it on Christmas morning 1876, a gesture that was widely viewed as a precursor to an engagement. Oscar was an undergraduate at Oxford University at the time, so the couple saw little of one other, and their bond seemed to fade with time.

9. Bram Stoker had previously known Oscar Wilde before that

Oscar Wilde and Bram Stoker were colleagues at Trinity College in Dublin, and Stoker had suggested Wilde for membership in the university’s Philosophical Society while he was president. While he was disappointed by Florence’s decision, Wilde was eventually won over by Stoker, and the two of them ended their quarrel. Stoker was accepted into Wilde’s literary group and later traveled to France to visit Wilde during his stay there.

10. How many children did Bram Stoker have?

Irving Noel Thornley was born in late 1879, and the fact that the Stokers had only one child has been used as an argument to prove that their marriage was platonic. Daniel Farson, Stoker’s great-nephew, said Florence refused to have a physical relationship with her husband after Noel was born. However, his alleged source denied this. Another once-popular but now widely debunked notion is that she avoided her spouse because Bram Stoker had syphilis.

11. Bram Stoker’s job as a theatre critic landed him the friendship of a lifetime…

In December 1876, Stroker gave a positive review of Henry Irving’s Hamlet at Dublin’s Theatre Royal. Irving was so pleased that he welcomed Stoker to dinner at the Shelbourne Hotel where Irving was residing. The two became instant friends — and this friendship and professional connection would soon prove to be a defining moment in Bram Stoker’s career, fueling his creative skill and his literary career.

12. …. which earned him a new job

Henry Irving offered Bram Stoker a managing post at his London production company, the prestigious Lyceum Theatre. Against his family’s wishes, Bram Stoker and his wife moved to London in the late 1870s, where he became acting manager and then business manager of Irving’s Lyceum Theatre. He held that post for 27 years.

13. Bram Stoker’s position as Irving’s business manager came in handy

Bram Stoker’s duties as business manager of the theater included traveling worldwide on Irving’s tours and becoming a part of London’s high society. Thanks to his new job, he came to close contact and rubbed shoulders with many iconic personas, including James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, William McKinley, and Theodore Roosevelt.

14. Bram Stoker wrote Henry Irving’s biography after he passed away

Bram Stoker produced a non-fiction book called Personal Reminiscences of Henry Irving (1906), while recovering from a stroke that happened shortly after Irving’s death.

Click on the vampire to buy Bram Stoker’s biography of Henry Irving!

15. Some believe that Bram Stoker was a closeted homosexual…

Perhaps it was because of the extraordinary fan letter Bram Stoker sent to Walt Whitman in 1876, in which he expressed his desire to meet the Leaves of Grass poet and described his own physical appearance in a semi-erotic manner. The affection Stoker had for Walt Whitman and Oscar Wilde — who were both believed to be homosexuals — as well as the apparent homoerotic themes of Dracula have led to scholarly hypotheses that Bram was a repressed homosexual.

16. …yet Bram Stoker frankly expressed he was against all that is queer

In 1912, Bram Stoker demanded imprisonment of all homosexual authors in Britain. Some believe that this was a way to disguise his own vulnerability and that the strain and stress of witnessing Oscar Wilde being persecuted must have created many of the presumed internally conflicted emotions that led Stoker to personally consider (and depict) homosexuality as a terrible and agonizing source of evil and misery.

What books did Bram Stoker write? Overview of Major Works

17. What was Bram Stoker’s first published work?

Published in 1875, The Primrose Path by Bram Stoker was his first book. The 10-chapter novella is a moralistic narrative on the dangers of alcohol. It was initially printed in The Shamrock, a weekly newspaper in Ireland that specialized in literature and art. The story was a hit and it ran for five consecutive issues in February and March of 1875.

Click to buy The Primrose Path by Bram Stoker!

18. While in college, Bram Stoker gave a speech that would later be published as a book

The Necessity for Political Honesty was a speech by Bram Stoker that he first presented in a meeting of the College Historical Society on November 13, 1872. This speech, other lectures, and his theatre criticism have been collected in A Glimpse of America — and other Lectures, Interviews and Essays.

19. Bram Stoker wrote a guidebook for other civil servants

Bram Stoker wrote his second non-fiction book called The Duties of Clerks of Petty Sessions while working as a civil servant, which was published in 1879. Stoker believed it was critical that a good guidebook be written to assist civil servants as there was no available guidance for them. Indeed, this book was regarded as the standard reference for clerks in Ireland’s petty sessions for many years.

20. The Snake’s Pass is the only Bram Stoker novel placed in Ireland

The Snake Pass was also the first novel that Bram Stoker published. He wrote it while working as directing manager for Henry Irving and was first published in 1890. The plot centers around an Englishman who inherits privilege and riches and travels through Ireland, and it’s the only novel by Stoker that takes place in his home country.

21. Cruden Bay inspired many of Bram Stroker’s works

Bram Stoker took regular month-long holidays, which he spent in Cruden Bay on a northeastern corner of Scotland. These holidays didn’t only give him the time to write, but some of his best works were inspired by that coastal village. Not only were two novels based in Cruden Bay (The Watter’s Mou’ and The Mystery of the Sea) but the nearby Slains Castle plausibly provided the visual palette for the descriptions of Dracula’s castle.

22. The Mystery of the Sea‘s psychic character was based on a real encounter

In 1901, Bram Stoker was on vacation and met an old woman who supposedly had supernatural powers. This woman was the basis for Gormala, a character with psychic abilities who shows up in The Mystery of the Sea. While this novel did feature supernatural elements, it’s still considered a political thriller.

23. The Mystery of the Sea is considered one of Bram Stoker’s most underrated writings

Although The Mystery of the Sea earned many positive reviews when it was first released, scholars believe it has since been eclipsed by Dracula’s success. Bram Stoker’s brilliance is evident in the way he draws on personal experience and incorporates layers from the Spanish–American War and the sixteenth-century dispute between Spain and Elizabethan England, using these happenings to observe important themes of his time such as cultural identity and evolving concepts of womanhood.

24. Bram Stoker wrote a full book on index cards

Seven Golden Buttons was originally written on index cards sometime between 1890 and 1891. It wasn’t published until 2015 when the index cards were found and transcribed.

25. When was Bram Stoker’s Dracula published?

Bram Stoker’s Dracula was first published on May 26, 1897 by a company called Archibald Constable and Company, which currently exists as an imprint of the Little, Brown Book Group.

Click on the vampire to buy Dracula by Bram Stoker!

26.  Dracula was originally named something else

Dracula took Stoker seven years to write, and the working title for the novel at the time was The Undead. Among many other changes that were made to the original manuscript, the publisher altered its title at the last minute, right before it was release in 1897. An American edition was published in 1899.

27. We owe Dracula‘s inspiration to a bad dinner

Bram Stoker was notoriously private and was very careful not to reveal what inspired the concept of Dracula. However, he informed his son Noel that the narrative was inspired by a nightmare he experienced after eating a crab salad for dinner that didn’t sit well in his stomach.

28. One of the most common theories is that Dracula was inspired by Vlad the Impaler

Dracula’s full name was Vlad II Draculae, which is where Bram Stoker obtained the title of his famous novel. Also, Vlad the Impaler was known for his brutality, and his actions are likely to have inspired many of the terrible tales of supernatural influences connected with the traditional vampire, such as washing his hands in the blood of his victims and, in some accounts, dipping his bread in bowls of it.

29. Others believe that Dracula was based on Henry Irving

Some scholars believe that Dracula’s character was a way for Bram Stoker to express his frustrations from his horrible boss and dear friend. They suggested that the charismatic Henry Irving was the basis for Dracula as both are “sexually ambiguous figures who could drain the life out of those around him and yet exert a fascination that made the soul-destroying experience pleasurable.”

31. Henry Irving didn’t like Dracula

Henry Irving did not really care for the part of Count Dracula. More than a century ago, the actor turned down a role in a staged reading of Bram Stoker’s thrilling new novel. Irving despised Dracula, whether or not he was influenced by him. Stoker asked Irving what he thought after watching a presentation of the piece, and Irving’s sole response was, “Dreadful!”

31. Bram Stoker might have based the heroes of Dracula on his brothers

Two of the heroes of Dracula are doctors: Dr. Van Helsing and his former pupil Dr. Seward, who finally led the mission to defeat Count Dracula. There has been a widespread suggestion that Stoker’s brothers were the inspirations for these characters: His elder brother, Sir Thornley Stoker, and his younger brother, Dr. George Stoker. In his novels, it is also suspected that Bram sought counsel from his brothers on some medical aspects.

32. Bram Stoker wrote Dracula in the height of the Jack the Ripper era

Dracula was written by Bram Stoker in 1890, two years after Jack the Ripper ravaged the streets of London. Stoker’s work was inspired by the gruesome atmosphere created by these atrocities. Stoker’s novel connects the two dreadful people in a way that raises more concerns than it answers, but it undoubtedly proves the terrifying real-life effect on his fictional universe.

33. Oscar Wilde’s father inspired one of Bram Stoker’s writings

Oscar Wilde’s father was William Wilde, and he was an enthusiastic Egyptologist who frequently shared his adventure stories with Bram Stoker. This is believed to have inspired The Jewel of Seven Stars, which was published in 1903. The novel, besides being a horror, explores themes of feminism and imperialism.

Click to buy Bram Stoker’s The Jewel of Seven Stars!

34. The Lair of the White Worm was his last (and most criticized) novel

Also known as The Garden of Evil, Bram Stoker’s The Lair of the White Worm novel was published in 1911, one year before Stoker’s death. Vampire horror expert and writer Les Daniels has described the writing as clumsy, and many critics believed it was one of the worst horror novels to ever be written. Buy it and see for yourself!

The Death & Legacy of Bram Stoker

35. No one is sure about how Bram Stoker actually died

In 1912, Bram Stoker passed away at the age of 64. He didn’t stop writing until his death, which some scholars believe was due to his exhaustion while others are sure it was because he suffered from a series of strokes. However, his death certificate names the cause as “locomotor ataxia 6 months,” which is presumed to be a reference to tertiary syphilis.

36. Bram Stoker chose to be cremated after his death

Following Bram Stoker’s death in 1912, his son Irving Noel Stoker had the ashes placed into his father’s urn. The initial intention was to preserve Bram Stoker’s wife’s ashes along with his but once Florence Stoker passed away, her ashes were scattered at the Gardens of Rest.

37. Florence Stoker took good care of her husband in his final days

Whether their marriage was platonic at that point or not as some scholars believe, it definitely wasn’t loveless. Bram suffered a stroke that permanently altered his gait and vision. He was frequently bedridden, and Florence tended for him. Stoker once wrote to a friend during his illness saying: “It’s harder on poor Florence (who has been an angel) than it is on me. She had to do all the bookkeeping and find the money to live on — God only knows how she managed.”

38. Florence Balcombe published a short story collection after Bram Stoker’s death

Florence Balcombe, as manager of Bram Stoker’s literary estate, released Dracula’s Guest and Other Weird Stories in 1914. Bram Stoker had gathered these stories before his death and Florence wrote a preface for them.

39. Florence Balcombe entered a copyright battle over the movie Nosferatu (1922)

In 1922, a German cinema company named Prana-Film had made an unlicensed remake of Dracula called Nosferatu. Despite modifications to character names, the copyright violation was clear, and with the help of the British Incorporated Society of Authors, Florence embarked on a three-year legal struggle seeking financial compensation and the destruction of all copies of the film. Although she eventually won her case, some copies of the film remained.

40. Bram Stoker’s great-grandnephew published a Dracula rewriting

In 2009, Dacre Stoker and his collaborator Ian Holt published Dracula: The Un-Dead. The two said they had based their book on Bram Stoker’s handwritten notes, from which they excised plot threads. Their aim was to develop a sequel that carried the Stoker family name.

41. There’s an annual festival held in Bram Stoker’s honor

In honor of the iconic writer’s literary talents, the annual Bram Stoker Festival is held in Dublin, his birthplace every mid-November. The Bram Stoker Estate is supportive of the event, which is financed by Dublin City Council and Fáilte Ireland. Scavenger hunts, walking tours, eerie discos, online creative workshops, videos, and podcasts are among the activities and events celebrating the legendary author.

42. Many famous actors have played Dracula

The Dracula character has appeared in plenty of movies, and some of the actors who have portrayed Bram Stoker’s creation include Gary Oldman (Bram Stoker’s Dracula, 1992), Bela Lugosi (Dracula, 1931), Christopher Lee (Dracula: Prince of Darkness, 1966, and many others), and Frank Langella (Dracula, 1979).

43. The Lair of the White Worm was adapted into a film

The 1988 British horror film The Lair of the White Worm was directed by Ken Russell (who was nominated for an Oscar in 1969 for directing Women in Love), and features a pre-fame Hugh Grant. The source material may not have been super-inspiring, as Ken Russell has admitted to being “disappointed” by Bram Stoker’s original novel.

Bram Stoker: Final Thoughts & Conclusion

It’s pretty clear that the life Bram Stoker lived looked nothing like the images of coffins, fangs, and stakes to the heart that his creation inspired. The Dracula author’s adventures, writings, and complicated relationships (with himself as well as others) will help Bram Stoker be remembered as someone who sustained his passions until the end of his life.

Read more literary content at Content Bash!

Want to learn more facts about your favorite literary superstars? Check out our lists on Mary Shelley, Philip K. Dick, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Oscar Wilde!

Are some of the words in this blog post to hard for you? Then you should check out our guide What Kind of Dictionary Should I Buy? And/or better yet, our guide to buying the 20-volume Oxford English Dictionary!

Image Credit: via Wikimedia Commons

*****This post contains affiliate links. If you use these links to buy something we may earn a commission. Thank you for reading!*****