by James Reese
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ALSO BY JAMES REESE
The Witchery
The Book of Spirits
The Book of Shadows
Credits
Jacket design by Julie Metz
Jacket photograph of curtain by Art Becker; caped man by Matthias Clamer/Getty Images, Met Police Archive/Mary Evans Picture Library
Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
THE DRACULA DOSSIER. Copyright © 2008 by James Reese. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
EPub © Edition SEPTEMBER 2008 ISBN: 9780061981913
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1. On letterhead of the Brunswick Hotel, Madison Square, Fifth Avenue at 25th St., New York, NY.
2. Means “Little Tommy” in the Manx language; addressee of this and subsequent letters contained in the Dossier is Thomas Henry Hall Caine. The careful reader of Stoker’s work will recognize “Hommy-Beg” as the dedicatee of Dracula. The less careful reader is advised to take greater care.
3. The Lyceum Theatre Company, of London, England.
4. Reference here is to Henry Irving. Suffice it to say—here, now—that Henry Irving, Lord of the Lyceum Theatre, was the foremost actor of his day. As he writes, Stoker has been in Irving’s employ as Company Manager and informal aide-de-camp for ten-plus years.
5. Ellen Terry, actress; AKA the Lady of the Lyceum, though history whispers that Irving and she were Lord and Lady in other ways as well. As a measure of her (and Irving’s) standing, consider this: Amongst the monied women of England, Ellen Terry was second only to Queen Victoria. And Terry earned it all.
6. The first few sheets of the letter do indeed show the referenced stains on the upper left corner.
Here, and throughout my transcription of the Dossier’s originals, I italicize where Stoker and his correspondents underscored. To underscore is to unsettle the eye of to-day’s reader, or so I find. You, Mlle Durand, will have your own opinion, to which you are welcome.
7. Dante Gabriel Rosssetti, poet-cum-painter; primary amongst the Pre-Raphaelites. Remember the name (if it is not known to you already).
8. Greeba Castle, Caine’s home on the Isle of Man. Caine always claimed he was a Manxman, island born and bred, though he was Liverpudlian by birth. One may safely suppose that his domicile upon the island had more to do with its lack of an income tax.
Mary: Caine’s young wife; Ralph: his only slightly younger son.
9. Webster’s; meaning 2: “the present or current month.”
10. Joseph Harker, the Lyceum’s newly-hired scene painter and namesake of Dracula’s hero, Jonathan Harker.
11. Sir Richard Francis Burton: explorer; translator of the Arabian Knights, the Kama Sutra, and the Tantric text Vikram and the Vampire; and—to judge from the description that follows—a model for Count Dracula.
12. Sexless, in other words.
13. Walt Whitman, of course.
14. Whitman was then resident on Mickle Street, Camden, New Jersey, a ferry’s ride from Philadelphia and so a half-day distant from New York City.
15. Trinity College, Dublin.
16. Rather premature, as it would turn out: though Whitman was indeed unwell, he would not die for another four years. If he and Stoker corresponded further—as seems likely—we have no record of it.
17. The ellipses that follow are Stoker’s, not mine. He must have deemed the deletions too “squirm-inducing” for inclusion in his letter to Hall Caine.
18. True. Though the diagnosis is unknown, Stoker did not walk before the age of seven. Bedridden, he read, setting aside his books only when his father pushed his bed nearer the window so he could watch his siblings at play upon the strand.
19. He was not.
20. Allowed.
21. And so it was, much to the bane of later biographers, myself included.
22. And so the play would have been Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s The Rivals.
23. J. S. LeFanu: co-owner of Dublin’s Evening Mail, yes, but more importantly the author of the early vampire novel Carmilla. It is likely Stoker had been introduced to LeFanu by the Wildes, whose neighbor he was in Dublin’s Merrion Square.
Stoker is due some credit here. Prior to his unpaid employ at the Evening Mail, reviews of theatrical productions appeared at a day’s remove from the performance, and so the traveling companies often found they’d left behind a hit. Stoker asked his bosses to extend his nightly deadline so that his reviews might appear in the next day’s edition. Soon the practice spread, till now it is of course the norm.
24. It would seem Stoker put down his pen only to take up a fork, yet his contemporaries never go beyond “burly” in describing him. And if Stoker’s habit of remarking upon meals is given to Jonathan Harker in Dracula, Harker’s wife, Mina, is made to share her creator’s fascination with trains: “…I am the train fiend…. I always make a study of the time-tables.” Dracula, chapter 25.
25. Drier than dust, in fact.
The Petty Sessions court service had been established in 1827 to deal with minor offences—sheep theft and such like, country crimes typically settled amongst the Irish by the taking up of cups and cudgels, in that order. Stoker’s codification of the travelling clerks’ duties remained in use for more than a century, and to it the rural Irish owe many an uncracked skull.
26. The lead role in The Bells, which was a cornerstone of Irving’s early success and thereafter a staple of the Lyceum’s Company’s repertory.
27. Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice.
28. Stoker is backed here by no less a source than George Bernard Shaw, Irish critic, playwright, and Nobel Laureate, who was never a fan of Henry Irving’s and blasted him time and again for what he deemed the actor’s “Bardicide,” going so far as to say:
“Henry Irving was an illiterate mutilator of every piece of fine dramatic literature he laid his hands on. Like all old actors, he slipped in the most puzzling way from complete illiteracy to the scraps of shrewdness and wisdom he had picked up from Shakespeare and the plays he had acted.”
29. Stoker would finish the letter, of course, but its thirty-six pages would require posting in two envelopes (extant), each
addressed to “T.H.H.C., Greeba Castle, Isle of Man,” and each bearing the admonition Confidential, twice underscored.
And “bloodless” is a reference to Stoker’s having begun the continuation on unstained stationery.
30. History attributes more than four hundred deaths to the Blizzard of 1888, one hundred in New York City alone.
31. The Stokers were then resident at No. 17 St. Leonard’s Terrace, Chelsea. Census returns indicate a household of five, including one Mary A. Dunhunter, cook, and Ada B. Howard, parlor maid. It would seem appearances were being kept up, and we may safely assume that Florence Stoker knew little of the financial shoals onto which her husband had drifted.
32. Wm. Frederick Cody, AKA Buffalo Bill, b. 1846, d. 1917.
33. New Woman: a term much in use in the day, and not always flatteringly. Dracula’s Mina Harker is meant to be such a one.
34. According to Vivien Allen’s Hall Caine: Portrait of a Victorian Romancer (1997; Sheffield Academy Press), Caine always kept rooms of his own in London and seems to have secreted himself away in the city when not at Greeba Castle.
35. Reticent indeed.
36. Words Stoker will come to rue.
37. Reference here, of course, is to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.
38. “Command” seems an interesting choice of words here. Is Stoker less willing than he lets on to undertake the memoir? He earlier writes that Caine simply suggested he do it. But does a suggestion become a command when one friend is steeling himself to ask the other for a sizeable loan, as Stoker was?
39. Here the reader might spare a thought for the otherwise contemptible Florence Balcombe Stoker.
Though she was twenty-one at the time—eleven years younger than Stoker—Florence might as well have been ten, so coddled had she been all her life in Dublin, where she’d only ever had to be beautiful. (The author George du Maurier referred to her as one of the three most beautiful women he had ever seen.) Florence, who’d never left home unchaperoned, now found herself in the streets of Covent Garden, amidst its tenements and lowly taverns, and amongst people—“peddlers, pick-pockets, porters, and prostitutes”—new to her and none too pleasing. One can hardly fault Florence for suggesting, or rather insisting, on the move to Chelsea.
40. “Consequence,” indeed. In fact, and in Victorian parlance, Sir William Wilde had left his wife “horribly involved.” Indebted, in other words. Ruined, in to-day’s terms.
41. By “rupture,” Stoker would seem to reference an odd but little-known fact of literary history: Florence Balcombe had broken off a long-standing engagement to Oscar Wilde in order to marry Bram Stoker.
42. Nota bene: no mention here of fatherhood. Irving Noel Thornley Stoker was born on 13 December 1879.
43. Perhaps so, but Lady Jane Wilde, AKA Speranza of the Nation, had hardly set herself up for a warm welcome in London.
From 1846—and spurred by the Famine—she had been publishing some of the most violently nationalistic poetry ever to come out of Ireland. That alone would hardly have put her in contention for London’s new Socialite of the Season, but the lady further lessened her odds of social success by the application of a fashion sense which the kind referred to as “personal,” the unkind “inappropriate” or worse.
44. The true Protestant bourgeoisie, in other words.
45. Reference here is to one of Shakespeare’s few and more famous stage directions, from The Winter’s Tale: “Exit, pursued by a bear.”
46. As various biographies I have consulted in the preparation of the Dossier put Lady Wilde’s birth date in either 1821, 1826, or 1829, let us agree to take the mean and say she was a quarter-century older than Stoker.
47. This very line later appeared in Oscar’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. If Stoker has his dates right—and it seems he does—Lady Wilde’s words predate her son’s novel by some sixteen years and give credence to Stoker’s earlier claim that Wilde’s work was, in large part, “larcenous.” But can one be liable if the line is stolen from one’s own mother?
48. Lady Wilde was, amongst other things, a polyglot, fluent in ten languages. She had learned Swedish preparatory to Sir William’s being awarded the Order of the North Star by King Karl XV in 1862.
49. As the modern reader may be less well versed than Hall Caine in the infamous court proceedings of the nineteenth century, I offer here the first verse of a smoking-room ballad both men would have known:
50. Odd that Stoker should place this as primary amongst Sir William Wilde’s many accomplishments, which included pioneering eye/ear surgery, radicalization of the treatment of the deaf, advancements in the fields of anthropology, folklore, and, yes, Egyptology.
51. It falls to me to inform the reader of the Dossier that Stoker would appropriate the Saqqara story some years later, using it to frame his 1903 novel The Jewel of the Seven Stars, itself now mummified. Among Stoker’s considerable oeuvre, Dracula alone is immortal. Ironic, that.
52. Budge, here, is E. A. Wallis Budge (later Sir), then an Egyptologist of growing repute in the employ of the British Museum and later its Head of Antiquities. It is to Budge’s translation of The Book of the Dead that we still turn to-day, more than one hundred years after its initial publication.
53. Thornley Stoker had, at the time of which Stoker writes, recently been appointed to the post of visiting surgeon at “Dean Swift’s Hospital for the Insane,” or St. Patrick’s Hospital, Dublin, a position similar to that held by Dracula’s Dr. Seward.
54. Reference here is to Sir William Wilde’s Irish Popular Superstitions (1852), in which Stoker would have read of the dearg-due, or “red bloodsuckers” of ancient Ireland, as well as the Tuatha De Danan, or “deathless ones.” Of equal interest, of course, would have been Lady Wilde’s work, poems as well as stories replete with references to the supernatural.
55. Stoker indulges here in something of an inside joke. The Woman in White was an absurdly popular novel amongst the Victorians, and one to which Stoker turned often, borrowing its structure for both Dracula and this its precursor, the Dossier.
56. Dublin Castle; where Stoker worked in his position as Clerk, Second Class, in the Civil Service. Clerks could only absent themselves from the Castle with the permission of the Senior Clerk, and were accountable for all their time as measured in half-hour increments. Later, upon his appointment as Inspector, Petty Sessions, Stoker’s situation would be less restrictive, but only slightly more stimulating.
57. Stoker is too kind here. Speranza, newly impoverished and unhappy at having had to leave Ireland, was a long while establishing herself in London. She only did so at the time in which—not of which—Stoker writes, that is to say 1888; and her ascension was due entirely to Oscar’s increasing renown. In 1888, he accepted the editorship of a popular magazine, Woman’s World, and published his Happy Prince and Other Tales.
58. Another visitor diarized: “Went with mother to see Lady Wilde to-day. There she sat all alone in her glory in such wee rooms that mother and I later wondered how she had gotten into them—she seemed rather like a ship in a bottle.”
59. Stoker would seem to allude to a lingering chill in family relations; and indeed, though Lady Wilde appears to have fast forgiven Stoker, still she begrudged Florence for having cast her As-car aside.
60. Some of Lady Wilde’s contemporaries, Shaw and Yeats among them, went so far as to suggest that Speranza’s disdain of light was symptomatic of a sort of gigantism.
61. Speranza demurs here, as she was arguably still the most famous—or infamous—of the Wildes.
Indeed, Oscar would write of his first American tour—on which he did make quite a “stir”—that he was happy to find himself known as Speranza’s son; for his mother was well remembered as both poet and patriot by those who had emigrated at the time of the Famine. Even as late as 1891, when the Dublin magazine Lady of the House held a poll to name the “greatest living Irishwoman,” Speranza took 78 percent of the vote.
62. Rossetti did indeed keep
a wombat—which he was wont to nurse on his lap, upside down, whilst tickling its tummy—and which he much mourned. The Pachyderm Plan? It grows more plausible the deeper one delves into Rossetti’s biography.
63. It is likely the lady refers here to having to convert her library to cash, as she had had to do with Sir William’s library—Stoker’s library—before departing Dublin.
64. Much as Irving had done with Stoker, some years later. Caine’s acquaintance with Irving actually predated Stoker’s: the year of “the lad’s” review was 1874, when Caine was but twenty-one.
65. Had Stoker sensed a rival upon the scene? If so, one sympathizes. Hall Caine was a man who, though six years Stoker’s junior, had already met and impressed Henry Irving with skills much like Stoker’s own. It bears remembering that Stoker, in August of 1881, was yet very much enamored of Henry Irving, and happy in the great man’s employ.
66. Wife, not wombat.