Dracula as Cholera: The Influences of Sligo’s Cholera Epidemic of 1832 on Bram Stoker’s Novel Dracula (1897)
- 17 November 2022
- journal article
- research article
- Published by Springer Science and Business Media LLC in Journal of Medical Humanities
- Vol. 44 (1), 27-41
- https://doi.org/10.1007/s10912-022-09763-0
Abstract
The paper argues that historic events in the western Irish town of Sligo were more substantial in shaping Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula (1897) than previously thought. Biographers of Stoker have credited his mother, Charlotte Thornley Stoker, for influencing her son’s gothic imagination during his childhood by sharing tales of the Sligo cholera epidemic she had witnessed in 1832. While Charlotte Stoker’s written account of Sligo’s epidemic Experiences of the Cholera in Ireland (1873) influenced Bram Stoker, it is argued that as a voracious library researcher he is likely to have cross-referenced it with other historical accounts. Furthermore, by viewing the text of Dracula through the lens of Charlotte Stoker’s account and the historical reportage of the epidemic, clear parallels emerge. Ultimately, the striking similarities between Sligo’s cholera are marshaled to argue that Count Dracula may be read as the personification of Sligo’s cholera.This publication has 3 references indexed in Scilit:
- Writing Ireland into Europe: An Edition of Three Nineteenth-Century PoemsThe Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, 2004
- The Cholera Epidemic in Ireland, 1832-3: Priests, Ministers, DoctorsArchivium Hibernicum, 2003
- The ‘blessed turf’: cholera and popular panic in Ireland, June 1832Irish Historical Studies, 1983