Bram Stoker's Inspiration for Dracula?

In Christmas 1929 M R James was asked to contribute an essay to a specialist publication called The Bookman on the genre of the ghost story. This essay which he entitled Some Remarks on Ghost Stories is a very good read on the articles and books written in that field from the earliest days of folklore to his present and is always is highly informative. But the one surprising theory for someone usually very reticent for making any sort of publicity seeking statement was his remark on Bram Stokers Dracula.

He commented on the fact that he had read Dracula in the late eighteen-eighties and whilst he had found that “it suffered from excess” he also fancied that Stoker had based his book on a story titled The Vampire of Kring which had been published in the fourth volume of a magazine called Chamber’s Repository published in the eighteen-fifties.

Peter Haining researched this claim in his book M R James Book of the Supernatural and actually published the story on page fifty. It is an interesting read, with the magazine itself dated by Haining on the 14th of November 1856. He remarked that there are some elements of Stokers tale which resonate with this folkloric offering but unfortunately we cannot resurrect James unlike the count to get his full report on what convinced him of the connection.

On reading the story published by Haining, there are some ideas that bear a resemblance to Dracula, a character “Grando” who even after burial resumes living with his wife in the marital abode, and is found later residing in his coffin “with a pleasant smile and a rosy flush”. The other details of the story follow the usual hammer house style of vampire script to a “T”, Mysterious deaths, peasants bearing torches, a magistrate and monk chasing down the vampire. The only departure was that Grando was decapitated by one of the braver peasants, rather than a Van Helsing figure with a sharp wooden stake.

Even if Stokers tale was found to have suffered from excess by James, it did not stop him going to see one of the most classic versions of Dracula, the 1931 film with Bela Lugosi, which was viewed by him a year after it was released in 1932. He enjoyed it thoroughly and remarked that he was “Most impressed by the atmospheric qualities”! Evidently the excess of the book did not deter him enjoying the film version.


01/06/2013 Further to the posting below, Rosemary Pardoe, the author of the great "Ghosts and Scholars website, (www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~pardos/GS.html) commented.

It's an interesting question as to whether MRJ would have fitted in with the people who appear on quizzes like QI. The one time he was invited to record a radio programme, he refused, which means that - very disappointingly - we have no recordings of his voice (though we DO have one or two films of him participating in formal events at Eton: there is at least one in the on-line Pathe News archive, and maybe more, though no one has made a serious effort to work through them all). Who can know how he'd have reacted to being in front of a camera? I think participating in the QI style of quizzes requires one to be something of a show-off and egotist, and I'm not sure MRJ would have been enough of either (appearing in classical plays at Cambridge is not quite the same thing). MRJ today would be more likely to be fronting documentaries, at which I think he could have been very pleasingly accessible, learned but witty, in the style of - say - Diarmaid MacCulloch.
But this is all guesswork, of course - though fun to ponder.