From the Mirror archives

May 26, 1897

Our photo shows actor Terence Stamp during rehearsals for Dennis Rosa’s stage version of Dracula at London’s Shaftesbury Theatre. The first copies of the vampire classic, by Irish writer Bram Stoker, appeared in bookshops on this day in 1897. A manager at London’s Lyceum Theatre, Stoker was inspired to write Dracula after visiting Whitby in 1890. The original manuscript of the Victorian Gothic novel was found in a barn in Pennsylvania in the 1980s and bought by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen.