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Dracula: was the actor Henry Irving the inspiration for the world’s most famous vampire?
Bram Stoker found Irving spellbinding — and both inspired Joseph O’Connor’s new novel
Joseph O’Connor
The Sunday Times,
In 1847, a dark year for Ireland, famine ravaged the countryside. There were horror stories of half-starved evictees devouring the dead. A kind of zombie imagery was often deployed. “The survivors were like walking skeletons,” observed the English Quaker William Forster. “The town of Westport was a strange and fearful sight, its streets crowded with gaunt wanderers.” In Dublin, on November 8 that year, Abraham Stoker was born.
His Sligo mother had written a gruesome memoir about the effects of cholera on the poor. His father was a civil servant who worked in Dublin Castle, seat of British rule in Ireland. Bram, a lonely child, suffered an illness that made him almost lame, and he rarely attended school. Perhaps his mother read him the ghostly…
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