Very few people realize that Bram Stoker was, in fact, an Irishman and that his famous story may well have been a metaphor for “bloodsucking” English landlords preying on their 19th century Irish tenant farmers.
It is widely believed that Bram Stoker’s Dracula tells the story of the 15th century bloodthirsty Romanian Prince Vlad Dracula, better known as Vlad the Impaler. The Transylvanian prince got this name because he liked to impale his enemies on sharpened poles and watch them die slowly. This, according to Dennis McIntyre, the Director of Bram Stoker’s Dracula Organization, except for the setting, is very much an Irish story.
Dennis points out that Dracula comes from the Irish word “Droch Ola”, which means “bad blood”. Bram’s mother lived through the cholera epidemic of 1837 where she saw piles of dead bodies being pushed into mass graves using long wooden poles to shove the bodies. Many of the people were not yet quite dead and were buried alive. It was also common folklore in 1840’s
Having been born in 1847 in Dublin during the very height of the Great Famine where hundreds of thousands of people died or were forced to emigrate to the United States in former slave ships (known at the time as “coffin ships”), many believe Bram’s story was inspired by the behavior of the rich English landlords sucking the very life out of the Irish people.
Bram Stoker was educated at
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