Epigraph: ‘Dracula offers the illusion of immortality, the subconscious wish we all have for limitless life. He is a man of tremendous brain and physical strength, with a strange dark herois[m?]. He is either a reincarnation or he who has never died. He is a superman image with erotic applea for women who find him totally alluring. I many ways he is everything people would like to be - anti-hero or villain - and, like the much maligned Rasputin, he is part saint, part sinner. Men also find him irresistible because they cannot stop him.’ ( Christopher Lee).

Shows theatrical poster for Theatre Royal, Dublin, advertising ‘the Bride of the Isles: A Tale found on the popular legend of the Vampire’, by Lord Byron [not], with verses from his description of the Vampire (‘Wicked souls are often permitted/To enter the dead form of other men/Assume their speech … /And thus roam the earth/But … must wed some fair and virtuous maiden/Who they do after kill, and from/Her veins drain eagerly the purple stream/Of life … To save them from from extermination.’ [10]

Narrates the discovery of the original typescript of Dracula in a barn in Pennsyvlvania, belonging to the descendents of ‘Quincey P. Morris’ in the novel; now in the hands of antiquarian dealing John McLoughlin (The Book Sail, Orange, California) since 1984. Original notes in Rosenbach Collection, Penn.

Contract for ‘The Un-dead’ signed with Archibald Constable, 20 May 1897, 2 whitehall Gdns. Westminster. [20]

Few men have played the part of fidus Achates to a great personality with more gusto. Mr. Stoker must have found his new life thoroughly congenial. He shared Irving’s counsels in all his enterprises; went about with him in the closest relationships of confidential friend and right-hand man; assisted at the many brilliant entertainments which his chief gave during the heyday of The Lyceum in London; met and was cordially treated by people of all sorts and conditions; and knew thoroughly the ins and outs of the financial side of the riskiest of all professions. From 1878, the year in which Irving became lessee and manager of The Lyccum, to 1905, when he died, fhe takings exceeded two millions. When the crash came, Stoker remained loyally at his friend’s side, during years thich would have been fatal to less enduring spirits by the contrast which they afforded to the dazzling triumphs which preceded them. (Obit. for Bram Stoker, The Times [sic], 22 April 1912.)

‘The castle of Dracula now stood out against the red sun and every stone of its broken battlements was articulated against the light. As we looked there came a terrible convulsion of the earth so that we seemed to rock to and fro and fell to our knees. At the same moment, with a roar that seemed to shake the very heavens, the whole castle and the rock and even the hill on which it stood, seemed to rise into the air and scatter in fragments, while a mighty cloud of black and yellow smoke, volume on volume, in rolling grandeur, was shot upwards with inconceivable rapidity. Then there was a stillness in nature as the echoes of that thunderous report seemed to come as with the hollow boom of a thunder-clap—the long reverberating roll which seems as though the floors of heaven shook. Then, down in a mighty ruin falling whence they rose, came the fragments that had been tossed skyward in the cataclysm. / From where we stood it seemed as though the one fierce volcano burst had satisfied the need of nature and that the castle and the structure of the hill had sunk again into the void. We were so appalled with the suddenness and the grandeur that we forgot to think of ourselves.’ (Penultimate page of Mina Harker’s Journal; cited in Haining, p.14).

Holds Dracula’s London house to have been 137 Picccadilly (adjac. to the Hard Rock Café). [29]

Cites contemporary newspaper stories of a blue (maneater) shark caught with a ine and hook at Cornwall; a report of Profesor roche and his Pack of 15 Real Wild Russian Wolves at the Royal Aquarium; a Scarlet Feaver epidemic; an advertisement for ‘Clarke’s World Famed Blood Mixture; and a Times court report dated 3 Oct. 1897 of one John Baines cahrged with assuaulting Annie Cummins, his partner, biting a piece out of her neck, the assault being witnessed by Constable Harker. [29-30]

conclusively, he refers to the day Sept 22, said to be a Thursday in the novel, as the date on which Mina and Jonathan see Dracula walking along Picadilly: the date and day in question being compatible with the calendar for 1887. [30]

Locates the original information about Voivoide and Dracula in An Account of the Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia, &., by Wiliam Wilkinson, British Counsel, publ. 1820, and marked as cat. No. 0.1097 of the Whitby local library. [33]

Stoker’s planning notes indicate that the three sections of the book were to be Book I, London, Midsummer; Bk II, Tragedy, incl. Whitby - ‘argument uncanny things’, and ‘Whitby - the storm ship arrives’ ; Book III, Discovery. [37]

Contribution of Dame Emily de Laszowsa gerard, contr. To The Nineteenth Century (London), in which his work sometimes appeared; her work incl. ‘Transylvanian Superstitions’, July 1885.

Prototypes of Dracula are Elisabeth Bathory (b.1560) and Vlad the Impaler, 15th c. Prince of Wallachia.