DRACULA COMES ASHORE: STOKER IN WHITBY
Bram Stoker was born in what is now known as Fairview in Ireland in 1847. As a small child he suffered debilitating illness and was nourished with stories from Irish folklore which helped shape his febrile imagination. His own heritage on his mother’s side included the lurid incident of a Sheriff hanging his own son.
After studying mathematics at Trinity College, Dublin, he took up writing. It was while penning reviews that he befriended actor Henry Irving and went on to become the business manager of Irving’s Lyceum Theatre in London. Stoker’s literary and theatrical connections were further strengthened when he married Oscar Wilde’s former beau Florence Balcombe and mingled with authors preoccupied with the supernatural, such as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and WB Yeats.
After a gruelling tour of Scotland with Irving’s theatre company, Stoker arrived in Whitby in 1890 to stay at Mrs Veazey’s guesthouse at 6 Royal Crescent on the town’s West Cliff. He was working on a new story set in Austria with a central character called Count Wampyr.
Every morning, Mrs Veazey would turn Stoker out of his rooms so she could clean, and he would install himself in the Reading Room on the first floor in the neighbouring Royal Hotel to write. Stoker undoubtedly drew inspiration from the locale of Whitby itself, just as Machen would a few years later. The West Cliff looks straight out at St Mary’s Norman church and the ruins of the Abbey of St Hilda perched on the cliff on the opposite side of the harbour, and these become prominent locations in Dracula.
The Abbey has a rich history. Abbess Hilda founded a double monastery of both monks and nuns at Whitby (Streoneshall) in AD 657 which was to become a centre of learning and the arts. Hilda’s monastery was built of wood and thatch. The towering and distinctive stone Benedictine Abbey was built centuries later and lasted until it was destroyed during the Reformation. Local folklore recounts that St Hilda eliminated evil snakes and serpents in Whitby by throwing them off the top of the Abbey cliff and that they turned to stone in the heat of her anger. This was a mediæval explanation of the spiral fossil ammonites found in the rocks below the cliffs. Victorian geologists
named a local species after her: Ammonite hildroceras. Today Whitby’s coat of arms depicts three St Hilda’s Serpents. It’s surely no coincidence that while he was a member of the
Daily Telegraph’s literary staff between 1905 and 1910, Stoker penned a novel called The Lair of the White Worm.
Stoker made use of his 1890 recuperation in Whitby by chatting to fishermen and conducting research into local stories and legends. He visited the library and museum on the Quayside (now Quayside Fish and Chips) where he thumbed through the records of The
Whitby Gazette. The real-life account of a coffin being blown off its horse-drawn hearse into the sea while crossing the harbour bridge, and the story of a Russian ship wrecked on the beach both became crucial elements in his developing vampire story.
The wrecked ship was called the Demetrius and it ran aground because the captain was drunk. Stoker changed the name to the Demeter in
Dracula – thus the ship on which the vampire is transported to England is named after the pagan goddess of fertility. Count Dracula bounds ashore at Whitby in the form of a dog – very likely taken from local legends of a supernatural black dog called Black Shuck. According to Harry Collett, who leads a fascinating Dracula tour of the town, the author had also come across stories from Germany of comatose plague sufferers being buried alive and trying to scratch their way out of coffins.
Dracula was originally called The Undead and was published in 1897 (see
FT257:34-41). The story, which has spawned countless adaptations, remains a vital part of Whitby’s appeal, and the town holds an annual Bram Stoker Film Festival over the Hallowe’en weekend.