Customer Reviews

Bram Stoker And The Man Who Was Dracula

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If you open a copy of Bram Stoker and the Man Who Was Dracula you can see that the title page mentions a completely different title: Bram Stoker - A Biography of the Author of Dracula. To my opinion this title is much more relevant to the content of the book.

Indeed Barbara Belford draws an interesting picture of the person behind that gothic masterpiece Dracula. Like most biographies its starts with a description the parents and the youth of Bram Stoker, but then quickly puts the focus on the period when he actually wrote Dracula. At that time Bram was the assistant to the famous actor Henry Irving and hardly got out of the shadows of that self-centred man. According to the author Bram's obsession with the actor drove him to create the character of Count Dracula. This truly is an interesting thesis, but Barbara never really succeeds in getting convincing evidence on the table. A lot of her reasoning depends on heavily circumstantial evidence and assumptions on the personality of a man's life that was minimally documented. The fact that Barbara uses this link as a golden thread through the book becomes by times a bit tedious.

Apart from this flaw, this biography truly gives the reader a better understanding of the person of Bram Stoker, and Henry Irving for that matter. But it goes further than that: it paints a comprehensive picture of late-Victorian social and artistic life, dominated by an unstoppable drive for change and progress. On the brink of the new 20th Century, Bram Stoker is clearly a child of its time. Not surprising that his circle of friends include Oscar Wilde, Walt Whitman, Mark Twain and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Barbara is well aware of this impact and drapes this subtly though her story.

Not a lot has been written on the life of Bram Stoker, but this book certainly helps fill in this gap.

I think the author inserted a little too much of her personal interpretations, but still it was an interesting read.