On May 26, 1897, an epistolary novel written by a circumspect citizen of Irish origin whose fondness for literature as a dedicated reader and free-time author appeared in London bookstores and a few days later in those of the main British cities. and her passion for the theater led her to abandon her comfortable existence as a senior civil servant and expert in tariffs and trade at the service of the English administration in Ireland for the performance of the private secretary of one of the great stage stars of her time. Administrator at the service of the great Henry Irving, and manager of the “Lyceum”, a theater that the actor had bought a few years before, Abraham Stoker, who was the name of the signer of that novel, began writing when he was a student at the prestigious Trinity College. from Dublin, and he maintained that hobby from then on, first writing books of a technical and didactic order, to later enter the field of fiction with short stories and some early forays into works of a greater caliber until completing twelve works. That novel called “Dracula”, whose publication is now one hundred and twenty-seven years old, was his creative peak and would become, over time, the most extraordinary example of a Gothic story ever written and one of the masterpieces of horror literature. . Its protagonist, the Romanian aristocrat today, Count Dracula, is a creation of universal knowledge, protagonist of innumerable artistic and commercial manifestations of all kinds, prototype of creature of the night, infernal seducer, leading figure of the genre of anticipation and vampire par excellence. He is, for example, the fictional character most times taken to the movies.
“Dracula” was not going to be called that, but “Count Wampyr”, and its author did not initially have an exact idea of what he wanted to reflect on the blank pages of that project, except his desire to write a disturbing and dark story. probably inspired by the traditional Irish legends that his mother whispered to him at the head of his bed when as a child he had to take a long and forced rest as a result of an illness that prevented him from walking and whose nature is still a mystery today. In 1897, when he put an end to his immortal creation, Bram Stoker was 50 years old and had managed to consolidate an excellent professional, personal and economic position, becoming an assistant, secretary, organizer, administrator, manager and even a personal friend of Henry Irving, king of the British scene of the time, an excessive and deified character to whom he remained attached until the death of his mentor late in the following century. Stoker was therefore, when his masterpiece was put up for sale, a very popular character in the gallant and cultural circles of London at the time, and his presence in reading rooms, exhibition halls, clubs and soirees and social gatherings of lineage and high crest was almost essential in the middle of the Victorian era with Great Britain and its empire as a reference of political and economic potential throughout the world. On the other hand, the character walked on the arm of an elegant, intelligent, irresistible and very beautiful wife, a lady who aroused admiration and desire in her wake called Florence Balcombe, daughter of a lieutenant colonel of the Royal Fusiliers, born in Newcastle, although she lived with her family in the same Dublin landscape as Clontarf and on the same street in Marino Crescent that the Stokers inhabited. She was therefore a young woman desired and admired by a legion of suitors, Oscar Wilde among them.
Florence and the two stout young men who were courting her formed an almost perfect picture of harmony in that upper-middle-class neighborhood near the bay. Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills, who would come to be known and admired as Oscar Wilde, and Abraham Stoker, were both over six feet tall and maintained a deep friendship despite their considerable differences. The first was a dark-haired, dreamy and excessive young man, with an infectious humor and free spirit, tender, kind and divinely irresponsible. The second, on the other hand, was red-haired, had a rigorous mathematical mind and was serious, formal, exact, hard-working, conventional and demanding of himself. Both had coincided in the classrooms of Trinity College, and while Stoker progressed in the branch of exact and accounting administrations and became one of the mainstays of the collegiate athletics and rugby teams, Wilde was happy studying thought and delving into Greco-Latin culture. , classical literature and dead languages. Both were head over heels in love with Florence, but when Wilde was awarded a handsome scholarship to Oxford University, Stocker seized the opportunity, proposed to her and married her. Her friend attended the wedding and spent the banquet joking, being silly and raising her elbow. When that was over, she said an affectionate goodbye to both of them, wished the couple eternal happiness, and vanished forever. She barely set foot in Dublin again. The friendship that had united that magical trio broke inevitably and paradoxically, none of the three was really happy. Florence and Bram had a son who was named Irving Noel and they were never intimate again. Wilde married an aristocratic lady named Constance Lloyd with whom he had two children and from whom he separated when a homosexuality scandal was discovered that led the writer to jail. Wild became a pest that needed to go into exile in Paris to try to live in harmony with himself. There he died in exile and alone in 1900. He rests in the Pêre Lachaise cemetery.
Stoker traveled abroad with some frequency, accompanying his employer on the tours that the actor developed throughout the continent. And as part of his courtship, he arrived in the United States where he later met and corresponded profusely with the poet Walt Whitman, whom he admired from a very young age. But although he was very familiar with Paris – it is said that he accompanied Irving on his constant visits to Parisian brothels where he contracted the syphilis that ended up killing him – and probably despite himself because it is very likely that Stocker jealously concealed his homosexuality and pleasure houses were a true sacrifice for him – he never traveled to Romania and, therefore, did not have the slightest information about the territories of Vlad Tapes, the former Wallachian warlord called “the Impaler” who has been supposed to be the inspirational figure of the character in the novel. The reality is that Stoker surely did not hear of Vlad Tapes in his life, and that it was the old Irish legends that guided him in the conception of Dracula as a vampire. Some sources suppose that he met the Hungarian scholar Arminius Vambery in London who guided him through the paths of Eastern European mythology, and some even suppose that the profile of his creature is directly inspired by that of the musician Franz Liszt although, looking at it carefully , who could most resemble is the godlike Henry Irving himself, his employer whom he ended up cursing.
Irving, whose real name was John Henry Brodripp, died at the age of 67 in October 1906, after suffering a stroke while performing a play in Bradford and previously falling down a staircase. In his will he did not leave a penny to his former secretary Stoker with whom he had recently fallen out and whom he had fired.
From that dramatic incident, Bram Stoker fell into a spin. Alone, bankrupt, constantly changing residence forced by his dwindling resources, the author of “Dracula” died of tertiary fever caused by syphilis in dark apartments near the Thames on April 20, 1912. The building was reputable doubtful, and by then old Stoker was drinking much too much. Five days earlier, the “Titanic” had sunk in Newfoundland and given the magnitude of the tragedy, Stoker’s death went completely unnoticed.
Stocker was cremated in the same crematorium that held Keith Moon’s ashes. You have to visit yours accompanied by a guard of the enclosure. Just in case…
2023-05-27 22:29:47
#Bram #Stoker #story #universal #vampire
