How Bram Stoker Handled A Soul-Sucking Boss

What do Dracula and The Devil Wears Prada have in common?

Recently I attended the opening of a gourmet chocolate kitchen. As I sampled the delicious goods, someone asked, “Are you in The Industry too?”

The amazing chocolatier, you see, has a day job. He’s a sound engineer. He’s done films you’ve heard of.

In Los Angeles, you can’t go to a gathering without being asked, “Are you in The Industry?” Meaning, of course, the entertainment industry, which permeates the city like a layer of smog.

Or fog, if you lived in 19th century London like Bram Stoker (1847-1912).

Stoker knew The Industry well. For over twenty years, he was the personal assistant (PA) to Henry Irving, a leading actor of his time and the first to be knighted.

A BRILLIANT PUBLIC SERVANT

Stoker knocked around in his 20s, attending graduate school, writing theatrical reviews, publishing a few short stories and working as a civil servant. At age 29, he wrote a textbook called The Duties of Clerks of Petty Sessions in Ireland, which became a classic in the field.

UNTIL HE MET DRACULA

The same year, however, Stoker penned a flattering review of Henry Irving’s performance of Hamlet.

Irving invited Stoker to his hotel room to talk about himself. He recited a poem for Stoker, The Dream of Eugene Aram, about a schoolteacher who batters an old man to death for a bit of gold. The performance mesmerized Stoker:

So great was the magnetism of his genius, so profound was the sense of his dominancy that I sat spellbound. Outwardly I was as of stone...The whole thing was new, re-created by a force of passion which was like a new power.

Irving and Stoker became close friends, or perhaps, master and acolyte. According to biographer Barbara Belford, the hypnotic, self-centered Irving is the man who was Dracula.

In 1878, Irving acquired the Lyceum Theatre in London. He asked Stoker to become his PA and theatre manager, a position Stoker held until 1899, when Irving sold his interest -- without telling Stoker.

What could have caused such a rift?

THE CHILLING MASTERPIECE

Two years earlier, Stoker had published Dracula, at age 50. Stoker wrote a few minor novels in his 40s, but none of them rivaled Dracula. According to Belford,

The novel's genesis was a process, which involved Stoker's education and interests, his fears and fantasies, as well as those of his Victorian colleagues. He dumped the signposts of his life into a supernatural cauldron and called it Dracula.

When Stoker asked his employer of almost 20 years what he thought of Dracula, Irving replied, “Dreadful!” He refused to star in a theatrical adaptation.

Barbara Belford speculates that Irving felt it beneath his dignity to act in a play written by an employee.

Stoker and Irving's relationship, however, appears more complicated than that. Did Irving just see an unflattering portrait of himself in the novel? Or was it something else? Certain members of The Irving Society believe that Stoker might have been privy to a very dark secret about Irving. (See "The Ripper and The Lyceum" in First Knight, their Society journal.)

After Irving sold the Lyceum, Stoker stayed on as his personal assistant for a few more years, but the two eventually drifted apart.

Henry Irving died in 1905, probably never realizing he'd turned down the role of the century.

Finally free, Bram Stoker wrote prolifically until he died in 1912 at age 65. He produced several more novels and a biography of Irving. Stoker’s widow Florence published a short story collection, Dracula's Guest and Other Weird Stories, after his death.

In 1922, the unauthorized movie Nosferatu became the first adaptation of Stoker’s novel. Florence Stoker sued the filmmakers for copyright infringement and won.

Although ruled derivative, Nosferatu originated the idea that sunlight could kill a vampire, a concept Dracula doesn’t explore.

WHAT LATER BLOOMERS CAN LEARN FROM BRAM STOKER

• You can spend 10 months as a PA and write The Devil Wears Prada, but it takes 20 years under the thumb of an soul-sucking egotist to produce something the caliber of Dracula.
• Start doing now what you dream of doing later.

SOURCES
The Irving Society
Belford, Barbara. Bram Stoker and the Man Who Was Dracula.