Comments on: Dacre Stoker: Blood Relatives

By: Infinite Summer: Dracula » Blog Archive » Ian Holt: The Horror Among Us

Fri, 02 Oct 2009 17:46:45 +0000

[...] « Dacre Stoker: Blood Relatives [...]

By: Anthony

Anthony — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 03:34:07 +0000

I’ve always wondered if another member of the Stoker family might some day take up the pen! Looking forward to reading your take on Bram’s characters, Dacre. Thanks for giving us a little insight to growing up with a somewhat infamous last name.

By: Elizabeth Miller

Elizabeth Miller — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 20:59:09 +0000

Good to see you here, Dacre! Hope you can drop in every now and then and contribute to the discussion.

True, Bram Stoker never visited Transylvania. In fact, his original intention was to have his vampire (”Count Wampyr”) come from Styria (in Austria). What triggered the change of setting was an article entitled “Transylvanian Superstitions” by Emily Gerard, an amateur folklorist from Scotland (published in _The Nineteenth Century_ in 1885). Gerard makes reference to beliefs in vampires (the “nosferatu”) in Transylvania. Stoker took copious notes from her article and worked much of it into the early chapters of _Dracula_.

He also drew on several popular geography/travel books published in Britain during the 19th century, most notably _Transylvania: Its Products and its People_ (Charles Boner, 1865), _The Book of Were-Wolves_ (Sabine Baring-Gould, 1865) and _Round About the Carpathians_ (A.F. Crosse, 1878).

By: infinitedetox

infinitedetox — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 20:08:08 +0000

That’s really interesting about B. Stoker never actually traveling to the places he describes — I wonder if, as a writer of things fantastical, this allowed him to draw a more phantasmagoric portrait of Transylvania and environs than would have been the case if he actually had been there? Maybe going to Transylvania, experiencing it as a necessarily banal real-world locale, would have drained some of the magic from his conception of the place.

In Chapt. 1 he characterizes to the Carpathians as “the centre of some sort of imaginative whirlpool.” From Stoker’s standpoint, separated from his subject by the distance of many miles and cultures, I imagine this must have seemed the case.