Something in the Blood: The Untold Story of Bram Stoker, the Man Who Wrote Dracula

by David J. Skal

Overview

A groundbreaking biography reveals the haunted origins of the man who created Dracula and traces the psychosexual contours of late Victorian society.

First published in 1897, Dracula has had a long and multifaceted afterlife—one rivaling even its immortal creation; yet Bram Stoker has remained a hovering specter in this pervasive mythology. In Something in the Blood, David J. Skal exhumes the inner world and strange genius of the writer who birthed an undying cultural icon, painting an astonishing portrait of the age in which Stoker was born—a time when death was no metaphor but a constant threat easily imagined as a character existing in flesh and blood.

Just as in his celebrated histories The Monster Show and Hollywood Gothic, Skal draws on a wealth of newly discovered documents with "the skills of a fine detective" (New York Times Book Review) to challenge much of our accepted wisdom about Dracula, Stoker, and the late Victorian age. Staging Stoker’s life against a grisly tableau of the myriad anxieties plaguing the Victorian fin de siècle, Skal investigates Stoker’s "transgendered imagination," unearthing Stoker’s unpublished, sexually ambiguous poetry and his passionate youthful correspondence with Walt Whitman—printed in full here for the very first time.

Born into a middle-class Protestant family in Dublin in "Black 47"—the year the potato famine swept the country—Stoker was inexplicably paralyzed as a boy, and his early years unfold alongside a parade of Victorian medical mysteries and horrors: cholera and typhus, frantic bloodletting, mesmeric quack cures, and the gnawing obsession with “bad blood” that colors Dracula. While destined to become best known for his legendary undead count, Bram Stoker would become a prolific writer, critic, and theater producer, rubbing shoulders with Henry Irving, Hall Caine, and Lady Jane Wilde and her salon set—including her fated-to-be-infamous son Oscar.

In this probing psychological and cultural portrait of the man who brought us one of the most memorable monsters in history, Skal reveals a lifetime spent wrestling with the greatest questions of an era—a time riddled by disease, competing attitudes toward sex and gender, and unprecedented scientific innovation accompanied by rising paranoia and crises of faith. Stoker’s battle resulted in a resilient modern folktale that continues to shock and enthrall; perhaps the most frightening thing about Dracula, Skal writes, "is the strong probability that it meant far less to Bram Stoker than it has come to mean to us."

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781631490101
Publisher:	Liveright Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	10/04/2016
Pages:	672
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 9.40(h) x 2.20(d)

About the Author

David J. Skal was one of the world’s preeminent authorities on Bram Stoker, Dracula, and monsters in popular culture. His book Hollywood Gothic: The Tangled Web of Dracula from Novel to Stage to Screen (Norton, 1990) was hailed as “the ultimate book on Dracula” by Newsweek; The Monster Show: A Cultural History of Horror (Norton, 1993) has had multiple translations and is widely considered the standard historical and critical survey. As a filmmaker, he wrote, produced, and directed a dozen DVD and Blu-ray documentaries on Universal’s classic horror and science fiction films, as well as a behind-the-scenes chronicle of the Academy Award–winning film Gods and Monsters. Skal guest-lectured extensively at major colleges, universities, and cultural organizations in North America and Europe, with speaking engagements at sites such as the Huntington Library, the British Library, and the Musée du Louvre. He additionally taught courses based on his books at the University of Victoria and Trinity College Dublin, where he was also appointed a Long Room Hub Visiting Research Fellow for Something in the Blood: The Untold Story of Bram Stoker (Liveright, 2016), chosen by the Mystery Writers of America as a 2017 Edgar Award finalist for biography and criticism. His official website was monstershow.net.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Bram Stoker: The Final Curtain? xiii

Chapter 1 The Child That Went with the Fairies 1

Chapter 2 Mesmeric Influences 45

Chapter 3 Songs of Calamus, Songs of Sappho 85

Chapter 4 Engagements and Commitments 141

Chapter 5 Londoners 191

Chapter 6 Pantomimes from Hell 239

Chapter 7 The Isle of Men 273

Chapter 8 A Land Beyond the Forest 305

Chapter 9 Undead Oscar 379

Chapter 10 Mortal Coils 423

Chapter 11 The Curse of Dracula 499

Acknowledgments 581

Notes 585

Bibliography 615

Index 629

Editorial Reviews

Skal has been chasing Dracula for more than a quarter-century, since his 1990 debut, Hollywood Gothic, a chronicle of the villain's evolution from an animalistic literary monster to a debonair screen star. He's written a biography of Tod Browning, director of the original movie, and co-edited an annotated version of the novel. His command of the material combined with his gifts as a storyteller manage to make this an authoritative book without a dull moment, its wandering narrative always returning to the shadowy corners of Victorian sexuality.

The New York Times Book Review - Jason Zinoman

★ 08/08/2016
Known today almost exclusively as the author of Dracula, Bram Stoker (1847–1912) is thoroughly scrutinized in this sumptuous biography. Drawing on a wealth of research, Skal (Hollywood Gothic: The Tangled Web of Dracula from Novel to Stage to Screen) finds credible influences for Stoker’s classic novel in several key figures in his life: his strong-willed mother, who entertained her sickly young son with terrifying accounts of a cholera epidemic she lived through in the 1830s; Oscar Wilde, whose mother’s salons he frequented and whose onetime love interest, Florence Balcombe, he eventually married; and Henry Irving, the renowned actor whom he served as business manager. As depicted by Skal, Stoker was a tireless workaholic who readily absorbed creative ideas from his experiences. Skal also breaks new critical ground, noting Dracula’s similarities to Drink, a novel by Hall Caine, to whom Stoker dedicated his novel. Skal writes with intimate familiarity about his subject and his habits, and he has organized a remarkable amount of information into an engrossing narrative. There will likely be more biographies written about the author of Dracula, but they are not likely to surpass the achievement of this one. 16 pages of color and 80 black-and-white illustrations. Agent: Malaga Baldi, Baldi Agency. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

2016-08-03
An exhaustive portrait of the author of Dracula and his suppressed emotional life.Skal (Halloween: The History of America’s Darkest Holiday, 2016, etc.), a cultural historian and horror film and literature critic, delves into Bram Stoker’s life (1847-1912) deeper than others before him—and there have been countless critical considerations of Dracula’s provenance since its appearance in 1897, many of which the author shares here. An exemplary gentleman of a certain class, Dublin-born Stoker embodied the anxieties of the highly charged Victorian era, especially fears about the (sexual) body, disease, miasmal vapors, and blood-borne “contagion” and “degeneration.” Indeed, Stoker gleaned early on as a bedridden child (born at the height of the Irish famine, no less) the ghastly tales his mother told about the cholera epidemic of her youth. Skal underscores how strikingly similar Stoker’s life was to that of Oscar Wilde. They both attended Trinity College, where they absorbed “pseudoscientific theories of mind, body, and eros,” were fascinated by the theater and fairy tales (terrifying theatrical pantomimes, in Stoker’s case), were drawn to the homoerotic work of Walt Whitman (Stoker wrote him bashful fan letters), and were romantically connected to the same woman, Florence Balcombe, who rejected Wilde and married Stoker. Skal uses Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray as a kind of touchstone against which to explore themes of male attraction and “the leprosies of sin,” foretelling Wilde’s public downfall and the “submerged self” that Stoker injected into his character Count Dracula. Mostly, however, Stoker was a man of the theater, the acting manager for the famous actor Henry Irving at London’s Lyceum Theatre for over 25 years, and such a workaholic that Skal wonders how he could have found time to write (stories, criticism, novels) so prolifically. The author also assiduously sifts through Dracula productions from then until today. A wild, occasionally messy, ultimately enthralling work of biography.

Kirkus Review

"A keepsake for any Dracula enthusiast."

Seattle Times

"A consistently entertaining, sumptuously illustrated ramble through ‘Stokerism.’"

Spectator

"[A] gossipy, entertaining book filled with fascinating digressions and juicy connections."

Boston Globe

"Sharply written, well-researched (with judicious use of recent discoveries), attentive to detail, and entertaining to read. Skal’s is the finest, most balanced biography of Bram Stoker yet written."

Sir Christopher Frayling

"Skal proves to be an ideal guide…surely successful in his efforts to revivify his subject and to reveal that even those shadows we think we know may contain obscurities that move of their own volition and which, tantalizingly, remain just out of sight."

Times Literary Supplement

★ 02/01/2017
When Skal (The Monster Show: A Cultural History of Horror) includes "Untold" in the title, he is referring to the recently discovered letters written by Stoker (1847–1912) about his childhood, as well as correspondence with the eminent poet Walt Whitman. This audiobook is more than a simple biography; it is also a literary examination behind the history of Stoker's Dracula. For example, through recently discovered writings about his own past, Stoker talks about the Irish mythologies that frightened him as a boy. Skal believes that this had much to do with the style and atmosphere of the great 1897 novel. Further investigations lead to Stoker's friendship with Oscar Wilde before and during Wilde's trials and incarceration. Stoker was married but seemed to have had little interest in women, leaving Skal to interpret the sexual ambiguity of not only Stoker but of the character Dracula as well. James Patrick Cronin performs well as the narrator. His pronunciation of the Irish names, locations, and mythological creatures is spot-on. VERDICT Since this audiobook also includes the full text of Stoker's freshly revealed letters, it would be an engrossing listen for Dracula and Stoker fans, as well as literature students and faculty. ["For serious students of horror literature and Victorian culture": LJ 12/16 review of the Liveright: Norton hc.]—Jason L. Steagall, Gateway Technical Coll. Lib., Elkhorn, WI

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