TheBramauthor Stoker Bram Stoker (1847-1912), whose real name was Abraham, best remembered as the author of Dracula, was born in Marino Crescent in Clontarf, Dublin in 1847, the son of a government official. He was not expected to live. Despite having been an invalid as a child he became a student at Trinity College and later one of the leading athletes of Dublin University. When he left University he became a civil servant and worked in the Irish Civil Service for ten years; on this experience he based his work The Duties of Clerks of Petty Sessions in Ireland, published in 1878. He combined his job as a civil servant with that of drama critic for The Evening Mail and The Dublin Daily Mail. Throughout his life Bram Stoker was entangled in the world of theatre. At the age of 19 he set eyes on the famous actor Henry Irving for the first time at the theatre in Dublin. Twelve years later they met properly. Stoker wrote of that meeting: That night for a brief time, in which the rest of the world seemed to sit still... began a friendship as profound, as close, as lasting as can be between two men. From that meeting sprang Stoker s lifelong friendship with the actor. Subsequently Irving asked Stoker to become his business manager and confidential secretary in the running of the Lyceum Theatre, the focus of cultural life in Victorian London, where he moved with his wife, Florence Anne Lemon Balcombe, former fiancée of Oscar Wilde and reputed to be one of the three most beautiful women in England. It was a hard life, with punishing hours, involving socialising until the small hours of the morning. He supplemented his income by writing a large number of sensational novels; in 1897, after some unexceptional novels, he published Dracula, his most famous vampire tale and the inspiration of countless films and plays, and sold over a million copies. By the time Dracula was being written the Lyceum Theatre was in financial decline. Irving permitted Stoker to stage a read-through of Dracula on the Lyceum stage for copyright protection purposes. Yet he snubbed his colleague and friend, muttering Dreadful and walking out of the theatre. k 67