Bram Stoker & Dracula

Bram Stoker grew up in a land of legends with tales of ghosts and horror beasts. He was bed-ridden until he started school at the age of seven because of a long illness. During these years, his mother told him incredible stories that he used to write.

Others fact that influenced mainly in the Dracula story was:

• Bram Stoker lived near a cemetery used for buried suicidal. Moreover, the legend told that a stake had to be driven in this heart to prevent them from coming back to hell because if they returned they would torment people’s lives.
• The pantheon of Stoker’s family was a church in which there were incorrupt bodies because of a few particular atmospheric conditions.
• When he spent his summer vacations in the town of Whitby he found in a library a book about the history of Vlad Tepes, the most famous villain of Wallachia who was known for using impalement with his enemies.
• Bram Stoker liked Vlad Tepes for the main character of his book and he took not only the description about him but also the name of Dracula (dracul in original language) of the family of Vlad Tepes.
• Anyway, the story about Elisabeth Báthory’s life influenced in the final story of Dracula. Báthory was born in the kingdom of Hungary and she was known to have tortured and killed between 36 and 700 young women over a period of many years, and it was commonly believed that she committed these crimes in other to bathe in or drink their blood, believing that this preserved her young.
• Other characters of his book like Mina and Lucy were real in a Stoker’s life. They were his neighbours when he was on his summer vacations in Whitby.
• People like Lord Byron, Mary Shelley and Polidory and his works suggested Stoker more things for his book like white skin, black clothes…One important book, which was written by Polidory “The Vampyre”, contains some of these things.
• Finally, Sir Henry Irving was a real-life inspiration for the character of Dracula in reference to his personality.

Bram Stoker was written his novel for a long time and the result was very good. Listing to all things, people and facts that influenced on this, it would be like writing another parallel novel.

Esta es mi exposición de inglés acortada, así doy carpetazo al tema de Drácula, lo cual es una pena porque la Báthory tiene un post para ella sola, pero bueno, no tengo tiempo, todo sea por liquidar promesas.