Bram Stoker's Influence On Dracula

Bram Stoker was a revolutionizing author of historical horror fiction in the 1800s. Stoker found most of his inspiration from spending many dinners with Henry Irving’s Theatre Company and his extensive time in the Theatre. Stoker began writing Gothic Horror due to his interests in vampiric mythology and all the stories his mother told him when he was bedridden as a child. Although myths and legends about vampires have been around for centuries, Stoker put his own spin on the tale and made it more evil than ever in his creation of Count Dracula. Many factors of Stoker’s life contributed to his great writing that changed the Gothic genre into the potency it is today.
Abraham “Bram” Stoker was born on November 8, 1847 in Dublin, Ireland, the third out of seven …show more content…
However, with further studies, it was concluded that Stoker derived his creation from different sources. One of which was the book, Account of the Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia. In a footnote, Stoker read that Dracula in Wallachian language means the “Devil”. If not for this novel, Dracula would have been named something entirely different closer to the name of Satan or Lucifer. It was also decided that Dracula was based on previous fictional vampires and was improved to sound more nefarious than his models. His son, Irving Stoker, also claimed that his father’s creativity was taken from his nightmares of Dracula (Bibel). Other inspirations for Dracula include The Vampyre, Carmilla, and The Land beyond the Forest:Facts, Figures and Fancies from Transylvania (Novels For Students). It is also interesting that the vampire hunters found in Stoker’s novel possessed the attitudes similar to that of the Victorian people at the time. This was shown in the novel’s literal and symbolic mentions of sexual matters and the role the Victorian men and women played during that time period (Novels For