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Donnybrook Fair : ‘The days of Donnybrook Fair and all it meant, the days of the stage Irishman and the stagey Irish play, of Fenianism and landlordism are rapidly passing away, if they have not even now [come] to an end [to be replaced by] a strenuous, industrious spirit, spreading its revivifying influence so rapidly over the old country as to be worth more than historical bitterness and sentimental joys.’ ("The Great White Fair in Dublin [...]", 1907.)
Bibl. details: ‘The Great White Fair in Dublin: How there has arisen on the site of the old Donnybrook Fair a great exhibition as typical of the new Ireland as the former festival was of the Ireland of the past’, in The World’s Work: An Illustrated Magazine of Efficiency and Progress, Vol. 9 (1907), p.570-1; quoted in William Hughes, ‘“For Ireland’s Good”, The Reconstruction of Rural Ireland in Bram Stoker’s The Snake’s Pass’, in Irish Studies Review, Autumn 1995, pp.17-21; p.21.)
Note to Gladstone : ‘I deem it a high privilege to be able to address you in the first person and to be able to put before you a book of my own, though it be only an atom in the intellectual Kingdom where you have so long held sway. [...] It is a story of a vampire - the old medieval vampire but recrudescent today [...] the book is necessarily full of horrors and terrors but I trust that these are calculated to cleanse the mind by pity & terror. At any rate there is nothing base in the book, and though superstition is fought in it with the weapons of superstition, I hope it is not irreverent.’ (Cited in Belford, Bram Stoker, 1996, p.274-75.)
‘The Censorship of Fiction’, in The Nineeteeth Century & After (1906): ‘A close analysis will show that the only emotions which in the long run harm are those arising from sex impulses and when we have realised this we have put a finger on the actual point of danger.’ (Quoted in Belford, op. cit., 1996, p.312.).
Simply killing! : ‘Never before did I understand the pleasure of killing a man. Since then, it makes me shudder when I think of how so potent a passion, or so keen a pleasure, can rest latent in the heart of a righteous man. It may have been that between the man and myself was all the antagonism that came from race, and fear, and wrongdoing; but the act of his killing was to me a joy unspeakable. It will rest with me as a wild pleasure till I die.’ (The Mystery of the Sea, rep. edn. Sutton 1997, p. 260; cited in Andrew Smith, ‘Bram Stoker’s The Mystery of the Sea: Ireland and the Spanish-Cuban-American War’, in Irish Studies Review, Vol. 6, No. 2, August 1988, pp.131-38, p.137.)
Bram Stoker, Snake’s Pass (1890): “A gombeen man, is it? Well, I’ll tell ye”, said an old, shrewd-looking man at the other side of the hearth. “He’s a man that linds you a few shillings or a few pounds whin ye want it bad, and thin niver laves ye till he has tuk all he’ve got—yer land an’ yer shanty an’ yer holding an‘ yer money an’ yer craps; an’ he would take the blood out of yer body if he could sell it or use it anyhow!” [Italics mine.]
Further: ‘[T]his leather strap attached to the handles of the chest each had around his shoulder, and so, willy-nilly, they were dragged to their doom. Never mind! they were brave fellows all the same, and faithful ones - they never let go the handles - look! their dead hands clasp them still. France should be proud of such sons! It would make a noble coat of arms, this treasure chest sent by freemen to aid others - and with two such supporters!’ (ibid., p.239); [Phelim Joyce, on the use of the money:] ‘Take it I will, an gladly; but not for myself. The money was sent for Irelan’s good - to help them that wanted help, an’ plase God! I’ll see it doesn’t go astray now!’ (p.240.)
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