Dracula the Dubliner!

Dracula

As it’s doppelgänger week on Facebook I’ve chosen another Dubliner for my alter ego, Count Dracula! OK he was based on Vlad the Impaler in Wallachia (now Transylvania in Romania) but inspired by Irish writer Sheridan Le Fanu's 1871 "Carmilla", about a lesbian vampire who preys on a lonely young woman, Dubliner Abraham (Bram) Stoker was the author of the 1897 novel “Dracula.” Indeed, whilst Vlad did impale 25,000 Ottoman Turks defeated in battle (They were lowered onto a stake inserted in their rectum and left to die as they slowly slid down) the inspiration for the stake through the heart came from Mount Jerome Cemetery, Dublin. There suicides were interred in an unconsecrated vault outside the wall and a stake put through their heart to stop “the Devil claiming their soul.” That will teach them!

Although, loosely based on the macabre and cruel character of Vlad Tepes or Vlad the Impaler, a 15th century prince of Wallachia in Transylvania, a region also renowned for stories of vampires and werewolves, Stoker had plenty of material to draw on from early and contemporary Irish history. The Great Famine (1845-47) and subsequent cholera outbreaks fuelled many stories of horror and of people being buried alive. In Celtic times storytellers were passed on of dreadful tales of the "undead", those who were destined to wander the earth forever seeking the blood of others. These ghouls were known to have had bad blood or droch fhola (pronounced as druc ula!).


Bram Stoker

There is another Dublin connection to classic gothic horror fiction with a strong Faustian theme. The birthplace of Bram Stoker, author of Dracula, is 15 Marino Crescent Dublin and when he and Oscar Wilde when young they were both in love with a girl who lived at another house in this short crescent on the Northside of Dublin. Oscar Wilde used the Crescent and the room in the garret as a setting of his only published novel “The Picture of Dorian Gray.” There are passages in this novel, which has a certain autobiographical content, which ring true today.

“Each class would have preached the importance of those virtues, for whose exercise there was no necessity in their own lives. The rich would have spoken on the value of thrift, and the idle grown eloquent over the dignity of labour.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dracula


Marino Crescent, Dublin