Bram (Abraham) Stoker was born in 1847, the third of seven children, into a Protestant middle-class family living in Clontarf, a seaside suburb of Dublin. His father, also called Abraham, was a clerk working at Dublin Castle who, at the age of forty-five, had married Charlotte Thornley, twenty years his junior. The year of Stoker's birth was marked by starvation and disturbances following the potato famine of 1846. But Stoker's mother had lived through the cholera epidemic of 1832 in Sligo, and told her young son vivid stories about her experiences of the plague. Some of these stories form the basis of a graphic letter which she wrote later in life, and the influence of this letter is apparent in the preoccupation with death and burial that is a feature not only of Stoker's most famous…
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Citation: Pedlar, Valerie. "Bram Stoker". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 30 January 2003 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=4242, accessed 19 April 2024.]
