He would eventually produce fourteen books of fiction including Dracula. He also began legal studies at the advanced age of thirty-nine and was called to the bar in 1890. Here, finally, was a profession Florence found socially acceptable, and henceforth she never referred to her husband as a theatrical manager or an author, but only as a barrister.

Irving’s Lyceum specialized in classical and romantic productions, with Irving himself usually in the role of a dramatic heavyweight, frequently a rather menacing one: Shylock, Macbeth, or Mephistopheles; his forte was the malevolent and the tormented. Though Stoker never asked Irving to play the role, it is impossible to believe that he did not have a stage version, with Irving in the lead, in mind when he wrote Dracula. As many critics have noted, the role of the Count would have been a natural one for Irving, and echoes of Irving’s great roles are to be found in Dracula’s text. From one of Hamlet’s speeches (act 3, scene 2), for example:

’Tis now the very witching time of night,
When churchyards yawn, and hell itself breathes out
Contagion to this world. Now could I drink hot blood
And do such bitter business as the day
Would quake to look on.

Shortly after the publication of Dracula, Stoker arranged a reading of a dramatic version at the Lyceum, in order to protect the copyright but also to interest Irving in playing the role. Irving made no comment at the time; when Stoker asked him later what he thought, he replied in one dismissive word: “Dreadful!” Perhaps he thought the vampire’s role too small (in the novel, the Count is “on stage” in less than one-sixth of the text); perhaps he didn’t want Stoker rising from his subordinate position in the partnership. In any case, he never considered taking the part; in retrospect, this seems nearly as bad a mistake as his decision not to play Sherlock Holmes when Conan Doyle offered him the role. Irving’s old-style romanticism was going out of fashion, and he himself was becoming something of an anachronism; either of these roles would have gone far toward reviving his career.

On October 13, 1905, an ailing Henry Irving played Thomas à Becket; after the performance he spoke to the audience, as was his custom. It was, as Stoker’s biographer Barbara Belford commented, his last salute “to those who had given him all he ever knew—or cared to know—of love” (Belford, p. 300). An hour later he died in the lobby of his hotel. There was no bequest for Stoker, no mention of him at all in the will. Irving, who had in 1895 become the first actor to receive a knighthood, was buried in Westminster Abbey.

With Irving’s death, Bram Stoker’s life lost its focus and its purpose. In failing health himself, he was not able to find another theatrical job, and worked hard, instead, at journalism and fiction, but in spite of the success of Dracula, Stoker never made much money from his writing—although his last novel, The Lair of the White Worm ( 1911 ) did well. Stoker died in 1912, at the age of sixty-four. His great-nephew Daniel Farson, who wrote a biography of Stoker in 1975, claimed that he died from the effects of syphilis, but subsequent analysis has not confirmed this diagnosis; it seems more likely that his symptoms were due to strokes. If Stoker enjoyed love affairs with members of either sex, he did so with the utmost discretion, and in any case his preferred role was not the dashing lover but the avuncular confidant.

Florence Stoker survived her husband by twenty-five years. As executor of his estate she tried to make the most of his literary remnants, and when she discovered that the German director F. W.

Murnau’s 1922 silent film Nosferatu was largely inspired by Dracula, she accused the producers of copyright infringement and tried for years to get the print destroyed. Fortunately, she failed in this, and Nosferatu remains as a major work of German expressionism. In 1930, Universal Pictures paid Florence $40,000 for the rights to film Dracula; since that time, Count Dracula has been filmed more often than any other fictional character except for Sherlock Holmes.

 

Dracula is not a psychologically knowing book, but it is very much a product of its time—a time, that is, when ideas about the nature of repression and the unconscious were not yet current but were definitely in the air. It appeared at a turning point in social and intellectual history. Between 1895 and 1900 Sigmund Freud was developing many of the major ideas that would inform Freudian psychology—dream interpretation, the unconscious, and the repression of unpleasant or amoral thoughts—and in 1897, the year of Dracula’s publication, he began his program of self-analysis. His seminal text The Interpretation of Dreams was published in 1899.

It is probably no coincidence that the 1890s and early 1900s produced a spate of brilliant proto-Freudian novels. Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) was one of the most striking examples. In this gruesome tale, Freud’s concepts of the ego, the id, and the superego are given nearly perfect fictional form before these ideas were current or even formulated: The respectable Dr. Henry Jekyll—the quintessential ego perfected by a vigilant superego—becomes at night a hideous and murderous monster, Mr. Hyde, who personifies all the horrid qualities we fear are lurking, repressed, in our ids.