Bram Stoker’s notebook offers cryptic clues to Dracula

Private notebook discovered by author’s great-grandson has ‘clear parallels’ with Jonathan Harker’s journal in vampire novel.

 

The discovery of Bram Stoker's private notebook has shed new light on his classic vampire tale Dracula.

By Alison Flood

The private notebook of Bram Stoker has been discovered in an attic on the Isle of Wight, offering cryptic clues into the origins of the author’s most famous work, Dracula.

Providing a snapshot of Dublin between 1871 and 1881, as well as a window on the life of the very private Stoker, the notebook was found by the author’s great-grandson, Noel Dobbs. Dobbs sent photographs of pages from the book to his relative, Stoker’s great-grandnephew Dacre Stoker, author of the recent novel Dracula: The Un-Dead, and Stoker has worked to decipher his ancestor’s “terrible” handwriting with Dr Elizabeth Miller of the Transylvanian Society of Dracula. The Lost Journal, complete with annotations, is now lined up for publication by Robson Press next year, marking the centenary of Bram Stoker’s death in 1912.

The 100-odd-page notebook covers the period when Stoker was a student at Trinity College in Dublin and a clerk at Dublin Castle, written in a clear precursor to the journalistic style of Dracula and containing the author’s earliest attempts at poetry and prose. “There are some definite parallels between this notebook and Jonathan Harker’s journal, and certain entries from Bram’s notebook actually resurfaced twentysomething years later in Dracula. Because he wrote little about himself, Dracula fans and Stoker scholars have largely been free to speculate about Bram. Rumours and myths have taken on a life of their own. Now, with this chapter of Bram’s life revealed, the rest of his life will be more accurately interpreted,” said Dacre Stoker.

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