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Bram Stoker and Dracula
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Bram Stoker
was born in Dublin in 1847 and wrote his first stories while working in the Irish civil service. A meeting with Sir Henry Irving in 1877 led him to quit his job and move to London, where he became Irving's manager and close friend. Forgettable adventure novels followed, until in 1890, on holiday in Whitby, Stoker began to become interested in writing a story of vampires and the undead, already popularized in "Gothic" novels earlier that century. Using first-hand observation of a town he knew well - he stayed at a house on the West Cliff, now marked by a plaque - Stoker built a story which mixed real locations, legend, myth and historical fact: the grounding of Count Dracula's ship on Tate Hill Sands was based on an actual event reported in the local papers. The novel was published in 1897 and became synonymous with Stoker's name; it's been filmed, with varying degrees of faithfulness, dozens of times since.
With many of the early chapters recognizably set in Whitby, it's hardly surprising that the town has cashed in on its
Dracula Trail
- ask at the tourist office for details. The various sites - Tate Hill Sands, the abbey, church and steps, the graveyard, Stoker's house - can all be visited. Keen interest has also been sparked amongst the
Goth
fraternity, who now come to town en masse a couple of times a year (usually in late spring and around Halloween) for a vampire's ball, concerts and readings; their unofficial headquarters is the otherwise sedate
Elsinore
pub on Flowergate. A kind of truce has been called with the authorities at St Mary's church, who understandably objected to the more lurid goings-on in the churchyard at midnight; these have largely been curtailed and now there's even a special Goths service held at the church. Other useful information
for tourists (each section contains more specific sub-sections): |
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United Kingdom,
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