Stoker, he later told a friend, “was a sassy youngster. What the hell did I care whether he was pertinent or impertinent? He was fresh, breezy, Irish: that was the price paid for admission—and enough: he was welcome!” (Belford, p. 45). Whitman’s friendship, his poetry, and his passionate doctrines remained centrally important to Stoker throughout his life.

Another hero acquired at this time would permanently change the course of Stoker’s career: the actor-manager Henry Irving. When Stoker first saw him on the stage, in an 1867 production of The Rivals, the actor was twenty-nine years old and just reaching the apex of his profession, a position he would hold until his death nearly forty years later. Irving was the heir of David Garrick and Edmund Keane, the progenitor of Laurence Olivier: He was, in other words, the biggest stage star of his day. Irving, Stoker later commented, was “a patrician figure as real as the persons of one’s dreams, and endowed with the same poetic grace” (Bram Stoker, Personal Reminiscences of Henry Irving, vol. 1, p. 3).

Once established as a drama critic, Stoker felt it a personal mission to boost Irving’s work and defend him from hostile reviews in other papers. The actor began to notice and appreciate the sympathetic, intelligent reviews he consistently received from the Evening Mail, and invited Stoker to dinner one night when he was in Dublin. They talked all night, and dined again the next evening. “Soul had looked into soul!” Stoker recalled. “From that hour began a friendship as profound, as close, as lasting as can be between two men” (Personal Reminiscences, vol. 1, p. 33).

In 1878, Henry Irving procured the Lyceum, one of London’s great theaters, and offered Stoker the job of acting manager, in charge of the business end of the company. Stoker accepted with alacrity, resigning his position at Dublin Castle and taking only a brief holiday to marry Florence Balcombe, a Dublin beauty who had the distinction of having also been courted by Oscar Wilde. (Wilde, along with his eccentric parents, had long been a friend of Stoker.) Florence’s face was legendary: “People used to stand on chairs to look at her” (Belford, p. 326), the Stokers’ son, Noel, recalled.

The Stokers’ marriage was singularly cool from the very beginning, and this would not change over the course of their thirty-four years together. It was a situation that perhaps suited them both; as Noel Stoker also remarked, Florence was “an ornament not a woman of passion” (Belford, p. 326), and she seemed perfectly content to spend her evenings in the company of one of her many swains, such as the dramatist and lyricist W. S. Gilbert, while her husband was at the theater. Her granddaughter thought her “cursed with her great beauty and the need to maintain it. In my knowledge now, she was very anti-sex” (Farson, pp. 213-214). As for Stoker, his true marriage was to Henry Irving, a selfish, devouring man who soaked up the talent, time, and devotion of his acolytes, of whom Stoker was the foremost; many readers have found an echo of Irving and Stoker in the relationship between the parasitical Dracula and his hapless victims. Except for an early sweetheart who died young, Irving had no important woman in his personal life. His work was all that mattered; as George Bernard Shaw once quipped nastily, Irving “would not have left the stage for a night to spend it with Helen of Troy” (Belford, p. 101 ).

Stoker’s job, which he held until Irving’s death in 1905, was a demanding one, but he managed to pursue other interests in the little spare time he had. In 1881 he published a collection of short stories called Under the Sunset; his first novel, The Snake’s Pass, appeared in 1890.