by James Reese
67. Rossetti’s brother, Michael, was Walt Whitman’s English publisher. A sister, Christina, was herself a poetess of repute.
68. Stoker leaves me to explain.
Rossetti, in a gesture that has since endeared him to Romantics yet horrified his contemporaries, had his wife exhumed years after her burial. In the passion of her passing, he had buried with her many of his unpublished poems. These he wished to recover. Lest any readers doubt the impression this had upon Stoker, they are referred to Dracula, chapter 16, wherein Lucy Westenra, thought to be dead but decidedly not, is dug up and done in none too nicely by her fiancée, Arthur Holmwood.
69. After months of negotiation, Caine succeeding in seeing Rossetti’s Dante’s Dream of Beatrice installed in Liverpool’s Walker Art Gallery, where it remains to this day. By “successfully,” Stoker no doubt refers to the 1,500 guineas Caine got Rossetti for the painting, a sum comparable to £75,000 to-day.
70. Among the “innumerable sympathies” Stoker refers to, we may safely number the following:
Their shared state of artistic servitude and/or indenture; their love of the theatre; their literary ambitions; their nocturnal lifestyle; and the sexless marriages each would make. These marriages we may less safely attribute to what modern biographers refer to as the writers’ homosexuality, presumed latent in Stoker’s case but active in Caine’s. That said, we moderns must tread lightly through the world of the Victorian homo-social, reminding ourselves that the word “homosexual” would not even enter into usage until 1892.
71. One such was a woman wont to appear upon the stairs; a second kept to the scullery, while a third “lived” in a disused bedroom overlooking the Thames. This was a topic on which Rossetti was silent. Once, when Caine offered to sleep in the affected bedroom, and so dispel the myth of its guest, Rossetti forbade him to do so. When pressed to explain himself, Rossetti would say only that he had seen and heard the dead.
Compare this to the welcome given to Jonathan Harker by his host at Castle Dracula: “You may go anywhere you wish in the castle, except where the doors are locked, where of course you will not wish to go. There is a reason all things are as they are, and did you see with my eyes and know with my knowledge, you would perhaps better understand.” Dracula, chapter 2.
Compare, too, Rossetti’s three ghosts with Dracula’s daughters.
72. “No man knows till he has suffered from the night how sweet and how dear to his heart and eye the morning can be.” Dracula, chapter 4.
As regards chloral: it is a clear, colorless, and slick liquid rendered from the action of chlorine on ethanol. When mixed with water, it becomes chloral hydrate, a powerful soporific, the strength of which was not appreciated by the Victorian-era doctors who prescribed it so freely.
73. A wise allocation of duties, it would same, Stoker standing 6'2" to Caine’s 5'3".
74. On stationery of the White Star Line.
75. Short of videlicet; from the Latin and meaning “that is to say, or namely.”
76. Again, Caine’s success bears mentioning. His fourth novel would sell in excess of a quarter-million copies its first year in print. Such numbers would try the friendship of any two authors, surely; but further complicating the friendship was the fact that Stoker had had to borrow from Caine £600, a quite considerable sum. Caine, it seems, gave the money gladly. That said, Caine would soon find himself deeply indebted to Stoker in his turn, owing not to money matters but rather to a certain favour asked of his friend.
77. Stoker either copied all his correspondence before sending it—which seems very Stoker-like in its surety, yet unlikely, given how busy he was—or asked that his letters be returned to him once he had determined to compile the Dossier. Also, smudges throughout the Dossier may indicate Stoker’s occasional use of manifold-paper, a precursor to carbon paper. In any case, we can be glad that Caine disregarded Stoker’s directive in this case.
78. Stoker digs at Caine here with this allusion to “secret Scottish vows,” as the Dossier will make clear.
79. This cryptic paragraph sent me down into the shallow pit of Stoker biography, where I quarried the following:
Stoker, when yet resident at No. 27 Cheyne Walk, ferried to and from the Lyceum upon the Thames. On 14 September 1882, as the Twilight approached its dockage at the end of Oakley Street, Stoker saw an elderly man leap overboard. Reaching down, Stoker succeeded in taking hold of the man’s coat; but the would-be suicide resisted rescue. Nonetheless, Stoker stripped down and jumped into the river. Drawn from the Thames, the nearly drowned man was taken to the Stoker home. There he succeeded in his goal, dying upon the dining table.
Some contemporary press accounts criticized Stoker for his actions, saying that a family man was wrong to risk life and limb, as indeed he had. On the lighter side, the Entr’Acte opined that “Mr. Irving is fortunate in having for his manager a muscular Christian like Mr. Bram Stoker. Should the popular tragedian ever get out of his depth, he knows that his faithful Bram is ready to take the necessary header and be to the rescue.” In the main, Stoker was lauded as a hero, receiving the above-referenced bronze medal from the Royal Humane Society.
As for Florence, who’d stood by as the suicide expired atop her Morris-style mahogany dining set, built to accommodate between ten and twelve living guests, she immediately launched a relocation campaign. Finally the Stokers did relocate, moving around several Chelsea corners to No. 17 St. Leonard’s Terrace, where they are resident as Stoker writes in mid-May of 1888.
80. The Burleigh Street entrance to the Lyceum Theatre was reserved for the exclusive use of Henry Irving, Ellen Terry, and Stoker.
81. B.C. is the Beefsteak Club, AKA the Sublime Society of Beefsteaks: the backstage room where Irving and his invited guests dined in Gothic splendour. To the gridiron—original to 1735 and a survivor of two fires on the site—which was suspended from the ceiling, Stoker added a modern range intended to vary the fare from the rumpsteaks of old. Armour lined the panelled walls on which were hung portraits of Irving’s artistic forebears—David Garrick, Edmund Kean, William Charles Macready—and of course Whistler’s full-length portrait of Irving himself as Philip II, the last accorded pride of place.
82. According to Stoker’s own Personal Reminiscences of Henry Irving (1906): “Sarah Bernhardt spent pleasant hours at the Lyceum—pleasant to all concerned…. Several times when she arrived in London from Paris she would hurry straight from the station to the theatre and see all that was possible of the play. It was a delight and a pride to both Irving and Miss Terry when she came; and whenever she could do so she would stop to supper. The Beefsteak Room was always ready, and a telephone message to Gunter’s would insure the provision of supper. Those nights were delightful. Sometimes some of her comrades would come with her. Marius, Garnier, Darmont or Damala. The last time the latter—to whom she was then married—came he looked like a dead man. I sat next him at supper, and the idea that he was dead was strong on me. I think he had taken some mighty dose of opium, for he moved and spoke like a man in a dream. His eyes, staring out of his white waxen face, seemed hardly the eyes of the living.”
83. Executive office.
84. Julius Caesar, of course; with particular reference to Act I, Scene I: “Enter FLAVIUS, MARULLUS, and certain Commoners.”
85. This reference to children at the Lyceum may refer to Gordon Craig, Ellen Terry’s son from an earlier, failed marriage, who, in adulthood, would become a noted theatrical designer and theoretician. (Ellen Terry seems to have borne Theatre as a dominate gene: her great-nephew would be John Gielgud.)
It may also refer to Noel Stoker, said by his father, in his Reminiscences, to be “adept in the application of gold leaf.”
However, it is safe to assume that Stoker does not refer to Henry Irving’s two young sons, who, though both would become actors, hadn’t much of a backstage life at the Lyceum. As legend has it, Florence Irving once met her husband in the wings with, “Do you plan, Henry, on embarrassing me like
this nightly?” After which Henry Irving moved into rooms of his own, never speaking to his wife again. She, however, was always present in his box on opening nights, glowering down on the stage and ready with some subacid comment. This was the woman, who, after all, had trained her boys to refer to their father as “The Antique,” and Ellen Terry as “The Wench.”
86. Tumblety is, in fact, thirteen years senior to Stoker in 1888: 55 to Stoker’s 42.
87. The pun is of particular interest, as from it we may conclude that Stoker is yet somewhat amused by Tumblety.
88. Stoker later amended this comment in the margins of his journal: “Neither Jimmy A. at the stage door nor Mrs. Foley in the lobby logged the mid-afternoon arrival of the American. Most strange.”
89. On letterhead of the Lyceum Theatre.
90. Lady Wilde had removed to 116 Park Street, near Grosvenor Square, some years prior.
91. The arrival of Tumblety and the consequent withdrawal of Hall Caine seem to have emboldened if not angered Stoker; and here he muscles his absent friend somewhat with an allusion to the tenderest of topics: his wife, Mary, and his marriage, which topic he takes up in the Dossier’s next entry.
92. Typed, undated, unsigned.
Here, for the first time, Stoker breaks form. It seems he returned to the Dossier at a later date, adding this memorandum as a sort of explication de texte. He would not have done this lightly, for in both the Dossier and later in Dracula, Stoker stands committed to the narrative device first tried by Wilkie Collins in The Woman in White; compare:
This, from Collins’s 1860 preface: “An experiment is attempted in this novel, which has not (so far as I know) been hitherto tried in fiction. The story of the book is told throughout by the characters of the book. They are all placed in different positions along the chain of events; and they all take the chain up in turn, and carry it on to the end,” with this, as adapted by Stoker and printed prefatory to Dracula:
“How these papers have been placed in sequence will be made manifest in the reading of them. All needless matters have been eliminated, so that a history almost at variance with the possibilities of latter-day belief may stand forth as simple fact. There is throughout no statement of past things wherein memory may err, for all the records chosen are exactly contemporary, given from the standpoints and within the range of knowledge of those who made them.”
Stoker’s reason for inserting the memorandum here soon becomes clear.
93. A loaded word for the Victorians: a “flirt” was a woman halfway down the road to ruin.
94. Not to mention illegal.
95. The opposite, then, of “suitable” behavior: new mothers were supposed to pile their hair high and lower their hems.
96. Country home of W. S. Gilbert, of Gilbert & Sullivan fame, a Beefsteak regular and “particular” friend of Florence Stoker.
At Grim’s Dyke, Gilbert maintained a zoo that must have amused young Noel. Gilbert pleasured in his colony of lemurs and monkeys, the founders of which he’d brought back from Madagascar. Two Persian cats and six mongrel dogs had places set for them at the Gilberts’ supper table. And if this seems an unlikely sphere for Florence Stoker, it must be remembered that she happily went wherever she would be admired; and W. S. Gilbert seems to have admired her much, so much so that there was talk and allusive cartoons appeared in Punch, none of which seems to have concerned Stoker himself.
97. Oscar Wilde, of course.
98. The composer Franz Liszt had sat in Irving’s box for the 99th performance of Faust and was feted afterwards in the Beefsteak Club. In Stoker’s Reminiscences of Irving, he offers this interesting, Draculian description of the aged Liszt: “…fine face—leonine—several large pimples—prominent chin of old man—long white hair down on shoulders—all call him ‘Master’—must have had great strength in youth.”
99. Evidently the military hat, peaked and plumed, earlier described.
100. Lillie Langtry was the mistress of the Prince of Wales.
101. Lady Wilde was dependent on the rents from family properties in Ireland, though these were collected, at best, inconstantly. Otherwise, her sons helped her as they could. How could they not, when such appeals as this factored in the family’s correspondence:
“If I am to be left in mere pauperism,” she once wrote to Oscar, “I see nothing for it but to take Prussic acid and get rid of the whole business at once—for I will not undertake the struggle for daily bread, which I see is my probable future fate. So dies Speranza. Goodbye…. Now I must go and do my tasks in the house. La Madre Povera” (Quoted in Mother of Oscar, by Joy Melville: 1994; John Murray Publishers).
In fact, Lady Wilde did undertake just such a struggle for her daily bread, writing pseudonymously, for Oscar’s Woman’s World, those same types of society articles Stoker says she so disdained.
102. William Butler Yeats, then twenty-three, would win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923. As for Constance Wilde, she had married Oscar in 1884 and already borne two children by this time—Cyril and Vyvyan; but she had only just begun to bear, too, the lengthening line of Oscar’s “sporting fellows.”
103. Ellen Terry and Stoker referred to each other, oddly, as mother and daughter. An extant photo of Terry is inscribed to Stoker, “To my ‘Ma’!—I am her dutiful child. Ellen Terry. Feb. ’88.”
104. Reference here is of course to Sherlock Holmes, the character created by Arthur Conan Doyle (later Sir), another of Stoker’s writer-friends more successful than he.
105. Bradshaw’s Guide, published between 1839 and 1961, provided railway timetables for all the routes in Britain. Stoker’s well-thumbed Guide for the year 1888 is, in fact, part of the Dossier, and its perusal confirms a 9.14 train to Purfleet on the day in question.
Purfleet, fifteen miles east of London on the north bank of the Thames, is where Stoker will later situate Count Dracula’s London estate and its adjacent asylum, run by a Dr. John Seward. (Compare to Dr. Thomas Stewart, already introduced to the Dossier and soon to reappear.)
106. Author and novel in question are, of course, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, published in 1886 and later played upon the Lyceum stage to great acclaim, not, however, with Henry Irving in the titular roles but rather Richard Mansfield. Stoker’s presentation copy of the novel was part of the Sotheby’s lot acquired by my relation. It is now in my possession, the final pages still uncut—interesting that Stoker found reason never to finish his friend’s “damn good” novel about a man split in two.
107. The youngest of the Stoker brothers, George was then in the early stages of a medical career that would be nearly the equal of Thornley’s. He was a specialist in diseases of the throat, in which capacity he consulted often at the Lyceum; was a proponent of now-standard oxygen treatments for sores, burns, etc., based on methods he observed amongst the Zulus; and was the author of With the Unspeakables; or Two Years Campaigning in European and Asiatic Turkey, to which his writer-brother would later turn for its descriptions of Transylvania, a land Bram Stoker himself would never visit.
108. Odd, this reference to flies.
Readers of Dracula will already have recognised in Penfold his novelised doppelgänger, Renfield, who is servile to the Count; and who, far from not hurting flies, ingests them and other lesser species in the hopes of subsuming their souls, via their blood, and thereby achieving immortality. The Penfold of the Dossier seeks the opposite, of course: suicide via exsanguination.
Such is the work of the fictioneer, I suppose: enfolding the real and the irreal.
109. This entry is enciphered and was entered into Stoker’s journal more than one full week after his first experience of the Golden Dawn. In the interim, presumably, Stoker needed to re-familiarise himself with Bacon’s cipher; but it is evident, too, that he researched the Order.
110. The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn was a secret society, and Stoker—initially—respects this. Therefore, the precise location of the Order’s Isis-Urania No. 3 temple
is unknown, though some scholars situate it near the British Museum. It is my supposition that the Temple was not fixed at all, but rather moved and re-created as it suited its adepts.
As regards “the appointed hour,” we may assume it was in the late afternoon or early evening, as Stoker’s absence from a Friday night at the Lyceum would hardly have been tolerated by Henry Irving.
111. Constance Wilde, of course.
112. Latin for “He who suffers, conquers.” This was likely the motto chosen by Constance Wilde upon her own initiation into the Order.
113. So much for secrecy.
114. As Stoker does not situate the Golden Dawn historically, here or elsewhere in the Dossier, I shall take this opportunity to do so.
The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn was founded in London in February of the year in question, 1888. The local Temple was inaugurated as Isis-Urania No. 3. Its original members were, variously, Qabalists, Rosicrucians, Freemasons, Theosophists, and other occultists. These adepts committed themselves to the evolution of, firstly, the self; and then, perforce and secondly, humanity in toto. This they sought to achieve via the mysteria—a series of secret, initiatory rites involving astrology, divination, alchemy, astral work, etc., progressing unto practical or applied magic, most particularly, and of greatest relevance to the Dossier, invocations for the summoning of spirit forms. And, to paraphrase Hamlet, “Therein would lie the rub.”