The answers to these enduring riddles of Stoker’s plot and intent are connected to the novel’s racial implications, which become salient when read against the backdrop of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show. Its drama, in which the American Anglo-Saxons are hardened in the crucible of frontier race war, had a distorted reflection in Dracula, a dark parable about urban Anglo-Saxons threatened by a frontier hero gone bad. In the twentieth century, scholars have often examined the racial and cultural anxieties that underlie horror and western film genres.66 Tracing the shadowy connections between Bram Stoker and William Cody provides some startling clues not only about the meaning of the novel Dracula, but also about William Cody’s signal, and probably unwitting, contribution to the development of frontier and gothic traditions as racial myths in the transatlantic fin de siècle.
To look at Cody’s glorious legend in the shadowy twilight of Stoker’s art is to discover new meanings within it. While scholars of Cody and of the frontier routinely evaluate Wild West show nostalgia and frontier triumphalism, they have been less willing to acknowledge its darker twin, the contemporary fear of the frontier as a place of racial monstrosity. This anxiety had stalked Cody’s career ever since he consorted with mixed-blood scouts on the Great Plains, and Cody himself had played on it, by situating himself as the unquestionably white man who yet mastered the miscegenated—degenerated—world of frontier and wilderness. The conjoined study of Buffalo Bill and Count Dracula suggests such fears informed a gothic frontier myth, featuring not a clear-cut conquest of the wilderness by white settlers, but the transformation of the pioneer into something more racially powerful—and infinitely twisted—that threatens the decadent metropolis.67 The points of contact between the creators of these tales, Stoker and Cody, combined with the many significant correspondences between novel and show, command our attention. From the relative superficialities of plot and character to the deeper issues of the book’s perspectives on race—blood—the ghost of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West haunts this greatest work of vampire fiction.
THE PERSONAL HISTORIES that connect William Cody and Bram Stoker reveal how entangled the social and literary worlds of frontier myth and gothic terror actually were. Dracula is, in the words of Richard Davenport-Hines, “an intensely personal book,” through which Stoker responded to developments in his private life.68 Figures in Dracula were often warped reflections of friends and colleagues in the London theater world. Cody’s arrival among that circle constituted Stoker’s most immediate and significant exposure to the American West prior to his visit to California in the 1890s.
William Cody and Bram Stoker were almost exact contemporaries. Stoker was born in Dublin, in 1847, the son of an Anglo-Irish civil servant, and educated at Trinity College. His early writings consisted of theater reviews for Dublin newspapers and horror stories, which made him a favorite of Dublin’s literary elite, including Lord William and Lady Jane Francesca Wilde, parents of Stoker’s college acquaintance, Oscar Wilde. In the late 1860s, Stoker was much taken with the stage performances of a young English actor named Henry Irving, the leading light of the new Romantic school of acting. In 1876, the same year Cody took the “first scalp for Custer,” Stoker met the thirty-eight-year-old Irving at a private gathering where Irving recited a poem in his honor, which sent Stoker into what he called “something like hysterics.”69 Irving was well on his way to becoming the Victorian era’s most famous actor, and by 1878 Stoker had signed on as manager for his London theater, the Lyceum. Stoker worked for Irving for the next twenty-eight years, until the actor’s death, and the relationship profoundly affected his life and his literary work.70
That Irving provided an uncertain bridge to a life of culture and wealth helps to explain Stoker’s obsessive interest in the actor’s affairs. Stoker was not only adulatory of Irving, but captivated by his presence and devoted to following his every move. As one contemporary remarked, “To Bram, Irving is as a god, and can do no wrong.” Stoker’s wife, Florence Balcombe Stoker, was a legendary beauty. She rejected Oscar Wilde’s proposal of marriage to accept Stoker’s, and George du Maurier, the author of Trilby, acclaimed her one of the three most beautiful women he had ever seen. But the marriage was cold, and Stoker’s devotion to Irving subsumed his personal affections. In the considered judgment of one biographer, Stoker’s friendship with Irving was “the most important love relationship of his adult life.”71
For all this, Stoker seems to have been largely unappreciated by his employer and idol. Henry Irving was a self-absorbed and profoundly manipulative man. He enjoyed cultivating rivalries between his followers, and to remain in his circle required constant, careful courting of his notoriously fickle affections. Understandably, Stoker felt most secure when Irving took an interest in him personally, as he did in the early 1880s, and he became anxious and jealous when Irving turned his gaze to other men, as he did by 1885. 72
Scholars have long agreed that the keys to the Dracula tale’s origin and meaning lie in the manager’s relationship with Irving in the 1880s. The later years of that decade and the early 1890s—the period of Stoker’s first work on Dracula—were years of crisis for the manager, as he fought with others in Irving’s company to defend the position he had worked so hard to attain. The friction provided the basis for new literary directions. He began to write his rivals for Irving’s attention into his morbid fiction, such as his depiction of the Austin brothers, employees of Irving’s whom Stoker envied and despised, as bloodthirsty twins in his horrifying tale “The Dualitists,” which he published in 1887.73
There is virtual unanimity on the point that the figure of Dracula, which Stoker began to make notes for in 1890, was inspired by Henry Irving himself. Stoker originally intended the work as a play, with the tragedian in the leading role (Irving derided the novel—“Dreadful!”—and would have nothing to do with it).74 Stoker’s numerous descriptions of Irving correspond so closely to his rendering of the fictional count that contemporaries commented on the resemblance. He would remain devoted to Irving, producing a gushing two-volume memoir after his employer’s death. But Bram Stoker also internalized the fear and animosity Irving inspired in him, making them the foundations of his gothic fiction.75
As significant as Stoker’s experience in Irving’s circle was in these years, it is surprising that no scholar has noticed how deeply Buffalo Bill Cody ingratiated himself with that circle in the same period. When Cody and Irving first met is not clear. Cody read of Irving’s 1883 arrival in New York in the Chicago newspapers, which ran banner headlines announcing the event, just as he was appealing to Salsbury to manage the Wild West show at the close of its first season. Of course, Cody’s theatrical reputation was in lowbrow melodrama, and any chance for an introduction to highbrow Irving was remote. Most likely, England’s leading actor met Cody for the first time in 1886, when the Englishman saw the Wild West show at Erastina. Irving gave the show a rave review in advance of its 1887 London debut, predicting it would “take the town by storm.” Even before the show embarked for London in 1887, people were introduced to Buffalo Bill as “friends of our mutual friend, Henry Irving.”76
Irving and Cody found each other useful. By befriending Irving, an actor who had received unprecedented elite and royal patronage (William Gladstone offered to make Irving the first actor to receive a knighthood in 1883), Cody found entree to English society and validation for the cultural message of his educational exposition, culminating a strategy for enhancing his own myth which he had been developing for at least a decade.77 For his part, Irving was a slender, pale man, his appearance ill-suited to the commanding stage roles he so enjoyed.78 Consorting with Cody reinforced his position as a masculine and authoritative figure. Their companionship in certain ways embodied and expressed the busy exchange of cultural statements across the Atlantic that typified this and later periods. Americans sought out actors like Irving to provide elements of high culture that seemed weak or absent in much of the United States, and to reassure themselves by appreciating
“highbrow” theater that they possessed at least as much potential for cultural development as Europeans. English people drew on frontier spectacles and myth for their own complicated reasons, not least of which was a need for reassurance about their own racial and political destinies.
In April 1887, shortly after the arrival of the Wild West show in London, Cody took his cowboys and Indians to see Henry Irving in a play at the Lyceum. As stunning as the stage performance was, the real show was this Wild West appearance in the audience.
This was a vintage Buffalo Bill moment, when an ordinary activity became a performance imbued with mythic significance for cast members and for the public on both sides of the Atlantic. The Wild Westerners’ costumed visit to the Lyceum highlighted the achievements of American civilization in making the progress from rude and savage origins to this apex of Western culture, the premier theater in London. Seating Red Shirt, “chief” of the show Indians, and Buck Taylor, “King of the Cowboys,” in the royal box suggested the “natural nobility” of the cowboys and Indians, and simultaneously validated the royal traditions of England as springing from a warlike and “natural” past. Irving exploited the event to full effect, inviting cowboys, Indians, and Cody onstage after the show, thereby becoming one of their manly company for a moment. On their departure, crowds jammed the streets to watch.79
Through the early summer of 1887, even a cursory reader of society columns could track their movements together. At Cody’s invitation, the actor attended a special showing of the Wild West show before its public opening. He returned for opening day, too, and thereafter he had a private box at the Wild West arena. He hosted Cody at dinner parties at his own Lyceum’s Beefsteak Room and escorted him to numerous dinners at the most fashionable London clubs. As in New York, invitations to Buffalo Bill frequently mentioned Irving as a mutual acquaintance, and an autographed photo of the American would remain in Irving’s possession until the day he died.80
The London theatrical world—Stoker’s world, and the cultural milieu in which Dracula was conceived and written—received Buffalo Bill’s Wild West with what can only be described as near hysteria. The Wild West show inspired theatrical comedies, burlesques, and even a melodrama, entitled Buffalo Bill. Gilbert and Sullivan, fresh from their success with The Mikado, were rumored to be contemplating a musical comedy about the Wild West.81 Cody inspired new fashion: men and boys began to appear with red sashes tied around their waists, and some even sported large “Buffalo Bill” hats.82
Stoker could not have helped but notice Cody’s influence in any case, but the American’s connection with his employer put him at the center of Stoker’s attention. Irving did more than socialize with Cody. He spent so much time promoting the Wild West show that newspapers attributed its commercial success to him, the actor serving as a kind of highbrow analogue to the mass advertising of the show’s colorful, ubiquitous posters. “Mr. Irving, the tragedian, and Mr. Partington, the bill-poster, have each contributed to make Mr. Cody, alias ‘Buffalo Bill,’ the most talked about man in London.” 83 Cartoons in the penny press depicted them together, with Irving as Cody’s patron, or advance agent.84 Inseparable but distinct as they seemed to be in the public eye, humorists exploited the paradoxical friendship by making them interchangeable. Comics referred to Irving as a “great western showman” who would soon transform himself into a “Texan cow-boy” in order to attract Queen Victoria to one of his performances the way she had been lured out to see the Wild West show. Stoker himself saved a clipping from Punch magazine alleging that Cody would shortly take over the part of Mephistopheles in Faust (which Cody and his Indians and cowboys had watched at the Lyceum).85
In May, after watching the official opening of the Wild West show, Irving congratulated Cody on his London debut. “No one rejoices more than I do at your business success which may ever continue.” Apologizing for being “tied to the stake here day and night,” Irving offered to “drive you into the country in the company of a few good friends, of which I am, I shall be proud to call myself one.”86
During all this time, Stoker watched the actor’s relationship with the frontiersman closely. He treated all of Irving’s friendships with a mixture of suspicion, envy, and resignation, and since he was as much Irving’s social secretary as his theater manager, he perhaps knew more about his employer’s affection for Cody than anybody but Irving himself. Twenty years later, the manager looked back on the season that Buffalo Bill “struck London … like a planet,” and recalled how he and Irving together drove the American to Oatlands Park, where the roads were thronged with a fortuitous, ready-made audience of people. The grouping of Cody, Irving, and Toole “took the public taste,” wrote Stoker, “and we swept along always to an accompaniment of admiring wonder, sometimes to an accompaniment of cheers.”87
Henry Irving, England’s great tragedian, the first actor to be offered a knighthood—and Cody’s social patron in 1887 London. Courtesy Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, United Kingdom.
For the next few years, Cody and Irving were found together at surprising times, and in such degree that they seemed to shadow each other. The English actor made a special trip to Bristol in 1891 to meet Cody—with his usual retinue of Sioux Indians—at the Bristol train station.88 That same year, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West and Irving’s Macbeth overlapped in Glasgow. When Irving was feted at Glasgow’s Pen and Pencil Club, who should appear for the dinner but William Cody, who himself became the subject of a drunken, patriotic homage by an expatriate American with the temerity to toast the frontiersman during Irving’s party.89
Stoker had his own relationship with Cody, although like all of the manager’s social bonds that were mediated through Irving, it paled in contrast to his employer’s high-profile companionship with the American. Stoker requested, and received, souvenir photographs of Cody in 1887, as well as a complimentary season ticket to the Wild West show when it returned to London in 1892. He received Cody’s requests for theater tickets on the American’s business card, and from his business partner Nate Salsbury he received gifts, “beautiful Indian arrows which I shall always value,” in 1893.90
What did Stoker think of Cody? Hints survive in long-unnoticed places. In the early 1890s, as Dracula progressed, Stoker wrote other gothic stories, including one about an American frontiersman (like Cody, from Nebraska) who is crushed in an iron maiden by a vengeful black cat at a castle in Germany. The frontier figure was so useful to the author that he resurrected him as the Texan vampire hunter Quincey Morris, in Dracula.91
The author explored themes of the American West further with a western novel, his only work set on the American frontier. Published in 1895, The Shoulder of Shasta features an Englishwoman, Esse, who takes a tour of California. There she falls in love with an American frontiersman bearing the memorable if unfortunate name of Grizzly Dick. But what stands out, for anyone who knows Stoker’s social context in the 1890s, is how very familiar Grizzly Dick is. His hair flows down over his shoulders, he wears embroidered buckskins, and in a singular oddity, this hunter’s daily wardrobe includes high black boots with Mexican spurs. At one point, a man in the novel compares him to Buffalo Bill Cody, a rather unsubtle hint of the character’s inspiration, for Dick’s outfit is almost a point-for-point description of Cody’s costume in his most famous photographs from the 1887 London season.92
Cartoonists lampooned “The Two Great Western Showmen,” Buffalo Bill Cody and England’s leading stage actor, Henry Irving. From Illustrated Bits, May 21, 1887.
It is a singular story in other ways. In a genre characterized by frontier heroes who save white womanhood from the clutches of wilderness savagery—wild animals, Indians, and bandits—Esse falls in love with Grizzly Dick after she saves him from a bear. He is oblivious to her affections, and she pines away for him, growing weak and deathly pale after her return to San Francisco. Her salvation arrives in the form of a strapping English artist named Reginald (he might as well have been called Bram; Stoker was proud of his phys
ique, and his athleticism) who becomes her new love interest and her fiancé. Her health returns as she forgets all about Dick.
The climax comes when Dick, through a miscommunication, receives an invitation to Esse’s party in San Francisco. Dick abandons his buckskin for silk. He arrives a fop, his hair professionally curled beyond recognition, desperately trying to fit himself into urban society. He makes the transition from frontier to high society, like Cody did, but does what Cody would not: adopt the dress of his social betters. He has become a fool. Insulted by snobby guests, he pulls his bowie knife. Then, humiliated at his loss of control and horrified that he has drawn a weapon in the company of ladies, he hurls the knife to the ground, where the blade plunges into the floorboards. None of the men present is strong enough to remove it—except for Reginald, who presents it to Grizzly Dick as a gesture of friendship. In the ambivalent ending, Dick is persuaded to put his old clothes on, and he returns to the wilderness, while Esse and Reginald are left happily to marry.
Louis S. Warren Page 45