This Day in Literary History (‘Dracula’s’ Stoker Meets Future Theater Boss Irving)

December 3, 1876—A relatively young man comes under the influence of an older, all-consuming master who, over many years, slowly drains his life essence away. No, we’re not referring to the hapless clerk Renfield and the lord of the castle where he’s unlucky enough to be an overnight guest, Dracula. Rather, this is the creator of the Romanian count, Bram Stoker, and the British theater giant he would serve for nearly a quarter-century, Sir Henry Irving.

I was immediately taken with the image accompanying this post, a photograph on a paperbound edition of Dracula, even though, technically speaking, it didn’t look like any of the film versions of the famous vampire that I’d seen. The source, revealed on the back cover, established the reason for my fascination, as well as its connection to the subject of this post: It’s Irving, appearing as Mephistopheles in Goethe’s Faust. The same hypnotic, commanding stare translated easily to the written page as Dracula—and could also, with more self-centeredness than bottomless evil, make Stoker do Irving’s bidding.

The two men met on this date in Dublin, when Irving--successor to Edmund Kean and predecessor of Laurence Olivier as an actor-manager of a major London theater--was appearing in Hamlet. The 30-year-old Stoker had followed his Protestant Irish father into the civil service, and though he did his best at his job (including writing a manual, The Duties of Clerks of Petty Sessions in Ireland, that even he admitted was "dry as dust"), he needed another outlet for his restless energy. He found it in the Dublin Evening Mail, to which he contributed unpaid theater reviews, including an extremely flattering one of Irving’s Hamlet.

The actor invited the civil servant-theater wannabe to another performance, this time in a hotel room. Stoker encountered a man whose very physical presence was striking, as summarized by Michael Kilgarriff in an article called “The Knight From Nowhere” on the website of The Irving Society:

“Henry Irving was a tall, slender figure—about 6' 2"—with hair worn longer than was customary, a clean-shaven chin—again unusual for the times—a long, strikingly sensitive face and a dominant, rather sardonic, presence which both fascinated and intimidated.”

Once Stoker had followed up on Irving’s invitation to talk about himself, the great man began to recite the poem “The Dream of Eugene Aram,” a violent, lurid tale of a teacher who beats an old man to death for a bit of gold.

As Stoker recalled three decades later in Personal Reminiscences of Henry Irving (1906), Irving’s recitation rendered him “hysterical”:

“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.”

If it were anyone else describing the impact of this privately acted melodrama, comparisons to a certain famous character might not have been drawn. But this is the creator of Dracula, mind you, and the whole thing not only makes sense but seems inevitable in light of that.

The actor went into the other room for a short bit, emerging with a photograph inscribed, "My dear friend Stoker. God bless you! God bless you!! Henry Irving. Dublin, December 3, 1876."

Dracula has been frequently interpreted in Freudian terms that heavily stress sexual elements barely restrained by Victorian mores. Literature’s great vampire not only overwhelms females, but males, too. (He warns his “brides” in the castle against taking Jonathan Harker, noting “This man belongs to me”--and if that still doesn’t get the point across, “Now I promise you that when I am done with him you shall kiss him at your will.”)

Some recent biographers of Stoker and Irving see the following summary by Stoker of his first encounter with his future friend-employer in similar homoerotic terms: “In those moments of our mutual emotion he too had found a friend and knew it. Soul had looked into soul! From that hour began a friendship as profound, as close, as lasting as can be between two men.” That closeness contrasts sharply with the distant, chilly relations that both men had with their wives over the next few decades.

Three years after their first encounter, Irving asked Stoker to be business manager and confidential secretary of his Lyceum Theatre. It was a heady but demanding position. Irving was determined on nothing less than elevating acting to a respectable profession in Britain. In this, he succeeded overwhelmingly. There were, of course, other landmark actors before him in the nation (notably David Garrick and Edmund Kean), but Irving was the first in a now-long line of actors knighted for their achievements that have included Laurence Olivier, John Gielgud, Ralph Richardson, Alec Guinness, Ian McKellan, Richard Attenborough, and Anthony Hopkins.

At the center of this great enterprise, Stoker met most of the great names in British society. But the hours were long and the stress enormous. Irving didn’t risk offending contemporary tastes (as George Bernard Shaw complained, his unwillingness to commission new plays left the London theater scene a vast desert), but constantly put his company in peril through his spendthrift ways in making the Lyceum an ornate showplace. Moreover, he disregarded the wishes of his vibrant star, Ellen Terry, to broaden her roles to include comedy.

In 1898, the whole financial structure collapsed, and Irving was forced to sell his interest in the Lyceum— without telling Stoker beforehand. Stoker remained associated with Irving until the actor’s death in October 1905, but the old intimacy and trust had to be gone.

At least some of that might have resulted from tensions over Dracula. Irving had been playing Mephistopheles in Faust in the several years before the novel was published in 1897, and Stoker— who had already turned his hand to short fiction when he had the time— thought that his horror tale had potential as a theatrical vehicle for his boss.

It never came to pass. In May 1897, the long-suffering business manager had another indignity to endure. The novelist was conducting a staged reading of his play, perhaps to secure a copyright, when his boss was asked his opinion of the work. “Dreadful” came the reply, a stage whisper that, legend held, was loud enough to be heard throughout the theater.

Stoker was correct that his work could be translated beyond print; he simply was wrong to imagine that it belonged on the stage. Even the Hamilton Deane-John Balderston adaptation that became successful on both sides of the Atlantic in the 1920s was, in essence, a drawing-room horror melodrama.

It took film--a medium only in its infancy when Stoker wrote his clunky play, and still barely developed at the time of his death in 1912--to use location filming and movement to realize the full dramatic potential of Dracula.

One wonders, had Irving lived to see Bela Lugosi become a matinee idol playing the undead monster, if the actor-impresario would have reconsidered his rapid dismissal of a role that could have been his; if he would have wondered if it had been really worthwhile to take his ambitious assistant down a peg; or if he witnessed something in the role itself that reminded him of his own all-devouring nature, and blanched at the sight.