Mysterious and magical mavericks

WHEN we hear the words ‘Dracula’ and ‘Narnia,’ they instantly conjure up images of mythical darkly romantic figures and mystical lands filled with adventure and foreboding in equal measure. These characters and places transcend literature and are central to the world’s cultural landscape. They have been adapted countless times for cinema and TV as well as giving birth to appreciation societies and conventions globally who pay homage to the characters of Dracula and Aslan. However, what is less known is the creators of these magical figures and lands, Bram Stoker (above left) and CS Lewis (above right), hailed from Ireland. Moreover, these imaginative Irish writers were heavily influenced by their time spent in Scotland. The backdrops of their creative mindscapes were influenced by the Caledonian landscape which they spent a considerable amount of their time in to draw inspiration for their imaginative masterpieces.

Stoker’s early life

Abraham (Bram) Stoker was born on November 8,1847, in Clontarf, Dublin the third of seven children and was brought up in a comfortable middle-class family. In early childhood Stoker was subject to an undiagnosed illness and spent much of his early years bedridden and consequently he did not start school until aged seven. Although he made a full recovery, Stoker later spoke of his childhood illness as a time when: “...he was naturally thoughtful, and the leisure of long illness gave opportunity for many thoughts which were fruitful according to their kind in later years.” Clearly the dark gothic imagination was forming in his early years which would give birth to his most iconic character, Count Dracula.

Trinity love triangle

Stoker made a full recovery from his childhood illness and went on to attend Trinity College Dublin. During his time at university, he excelled as an athlete and became friends with a fellow sportsman who was a boxing champion at Trinity—his name was Oscar Wilde. Stoker and Wilde struck up what was to be a lifelong friendship which would survive the early trauma of a love triangle, over their competition for the affection Dublin beauty, Florence Balcombe. Stoker was able to woo her from Wilde who had been her long-term suitor and would eventually marry her much to the consternation of Wilde, which may come as surprise to given playwright’s later complex private life.

After graduating in Mathematics, Stoker and his family resettled in London. Stoker became a close friend of Henry Irving, the most of famous actor in Victorian Britain. Partly because of the influence of Irving he was appointed as the business manager of Lyceum Theatre in the West End and became an integral member of London’s high society. It was during this time Stoker further developed his own creative talents and began to collaborate with other writers, most notably one of his distant relatives, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes. The two Celtic chroniclers of Victorian London wrote several works including the darkly romantic novel: The Fate of Fanella (1892). Both were keen to examine the underbelly of late 19th century Britain.

Stoker in Scotland

When not busy running the most successful theatre in the Victorian London, Stoker and his family would holiday in Cruden Bay. Between 1892 and 1910, Stoker took a month-long holiday in the Aberdeenshire coastal village, this provided time for him to write. He began penning Dracula there in 1895, whilst residence in the Kilmarnock Arms Hotel. During holidays Stoker frequently visited the nearby gothic ruins of Slains Castle. Stoker later recalled that it was the influence of Slains Castle and Whitby Bay that inspired his visual depiction of the iconic Count Dracula’s Castle.

Published in 1897, Dracula captured the mood of the foreboding of the late Victorian era. It was a time of deep unease within British society which witnessed the Jack the Ripper murders and anti-Semitism in Whitechapel. The troubled British psyche of last decades of the 19th century was also portrayed in literature by other Celtic outsiders. The Scot, of Irish ancestry, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was introducing the iconic detective Sherlock Holmes to an eager Victorian readership. His fellow Scot Robert Lewis Stevenson unleashed Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde on a fear fixated audience. Whilst Oscar Wilde served up his only novel, the chilling classic A Picture of Dorian Gray. These Celtic writers’ shed light on the dark side of Victorian moral rectitude. What is remarkable is Stoker personally knew all these writers. When not visiting Wilde in Europe after release from Reading Gaol, he was putting on a theatre production of Jekyll and Hyde at the Lyceum, whilst writing novels with his distant cousin Conan Doyle. The Dracula author was a man with literary talent and connections whose reputation was becoming international in nature.

The Count and the Presidents

By the early 20th century, Stoker’s literary output brought him worldwide fame, which saw him being invited to the White House on two occasions to meet Presidents William McKinley and Teddy Roosevelt. Not content with meeting presidents, the Dracula author was also a friend of William Gladstone. Stoker himself was ardent supporter of the Liberal Prime Minister’s plans for Home Rule for Ireland within the British Empire. The author’s life straddled literature, theatre, politics as well as having a keen interest in science. In every sense, the creator of Count Dracula was a Renaissance man.

Dark demise

Dracula would be the only vampire themed novel that Stoker would write. A complex individual he took a keen interest in science and science-based medicine whilst maintaining and interest in the occult most notably mesmerism, the belief in animal attraction, which is central theme of his iconic novel. Dracula, whilst not explicitly mentioning syphilis, used a vampirism as metaphor for the spreading of the killer disease which had reached epidemic levels in Victorian society. In an ironic twist of fate, the historical evidence strongly suggests, Stoker himself would succumb to the disease of Venus. He died on April 20, 1912, aged 64 and instructed that his body be cremated, which was a rare occurrence for a Christian in the Edwardian period. The mystery surrounding the cause of his death and choice of funeral arrangements have added fuel to the legend of Bram Stoker and given another layer of the macabre to his darkly romantic creation Dracula.

CS Lewis—The Irish maverick

“Thank the gods that I am Irish.” This maybe seen as an unusual quote to come from an East Belfast Protestant whose grandfather was a Church of Ireland priest, however, there was nothing ordinary in the life of Clive Staples Lewis. Lewis was born on November 29,1898, in East Belfast in an area which is is now recognised as a mile triangle of geniuses that produced George Best and Van Morrison as well as the Narnia author. The young Lewis developed a lifelong love of animals and when his dog was killed in a road accident, he renamed himself Jack after his pet and throughout the rest of life refused to answer to any other name. Like Stoker, Lewis was sick as a child and therefore, a lot of his early education was at home, where he became and avid reader of the animal fiction especially, The Tales of Beatrix Potter. These animal books were to become a key influence in his Narnia Chronicles.

When his mother died in 1908, his lawyer father sent Jack to Cherbourg House preparatory boarding school in England. His father’s intention was that the young Lewis would follow the conventional path of upper middle-class boys of successful entry to Oxbridge and then a career in the professions. However, Lewis had a strong strain of Irish rebellion in him and whilst still a teenager in school he embraced atheism and developed a fascination with Norse and Celtic mythology as well as the occult. Young Jack was determined to defy orthodoxy.

Lewis’ blood oath

Combined with his radical beliefs Lewis had a scarcely concealed dislike of the English. This was not the best social trajectory for an Irish boy amid the British establishment. Lewis later wrote of: “The strange English accents with which I was surrounded seemed like the voices of demons. But what was worst was the English landscape... I conceived a hatred for England which took many years to heal.” Young Jack’s seemingly inevitable conflict with the English was interrupted by a much wider dispute—the outbreak of the Great War.

On November 29, 1917, on his 19th birthday, Lewis arrived at the Somme. However, before he was sent to the front, young Jack struck a close friendship with Francis Paddy Moore, a young officer of Irish descent, who he met during his military training. Both promised each other if either was killed the other would take care of their family. Paddy was killed in action in 1918 and after Lewis was discharged, he kept his promise to his friend. Lewis established a close and much speculated upon relationship with Paddy’s Irish mother Janie King Moore, who was 26 years his senior. The author took care of her throughout the rest of her life, before her death from pneumonia in 1951. The precise nature of the relationship has never been firmly established, but like most of CS Lewis’s life, few things were conventional.

Aslan in Auld Reekie

After the Great War, Lewis returned to Oxford where he earned a first-class degree. During this time, he began to teach at the university, where he was encouraged to write about his love of mythology by his fellow professor JRR Tolkien, author of Lord of the Rings. His serial masterpieces The Chronicles of Narnia were published between 1949-54 and were partly written during Lewis’ professorial tenure at Edinburgh University. He later commented that felt more comfortable in Scotland than England, being among his fellow Celts and surrounded by medieval architecture of Auld Reekie. However, the main inspiration for the Narnia Chronicles was his love of the Mourne Mountains. He wrote of them: “I have seen landscapes... which, under a particular light, make me feel that at any moment a giant might raise his head over the next ridge.” Despite living most of his life in England, Ireland and its myths would never leave the soul of Lewis.

Unorthodox Christian

Under the influence of Tolkien, Lewis returned to Christianity and in his later years he wrote Mere Christianity (1952). This book was partly influenced by his deep dismay at the religious divide in North of Ireland and his desire to emphasise not what divided Catholic and Protestants on matters of doctrine, but what united them around the core beliefs of Mere Christianity.

However, despite his return to Christianity, Jack’s life would never be an orthodox one. In the late 1950s he met and fell in love with the Joy Davidson. Davidson was an American Jewish intellectual and former communist who had converted to Christianity. Davidson was divorcee with two boys and in the stuffy world of Oxford academia, this caused eyebrows to be raised. The couple’s relationship was brief, but happy, as Joy was diagnosed with cancer. Because of religious convention of the time, it was difficult for them to have a church wedding. However, the couple were eventually allowed to be married in a Church of England ceremony by sympathetic priest and friend of the Lewis, before Joy’s premature death in 1960. After her passing, Lewis adopted her two boys and raised them as his own. Despite his tragedy, Lewis’ rebelliousness did not wane. In later life, he refused a knighthood, which again caused disquiet in the hallowed halls of Oxford and across the English establishment.

Establishment plays homage

The maverick Irishman’s unconventional life trajectory would continue to the day of his of death from sepsis. He passed away on the same day as another son of Ireland was making international headlines about his own tragic end. Lewis died in November 22, 1963—the day of the Kennedy assassination. Throughout his life, Lewis could barely conceal his disdain for the English establishment, yet it was they who paid him their greatest posthumous tribute. On November 22, 2013, 50 years after his death, Jack’s coffin was reinterred in Poet’s Corner in Westminster Abbey. The proudly Irish CS Lewis lies at the very heart of the English literary establishment.

Global impact

Few writers have made such an impact on the international cultural landscape as Stoker and Lewis. The books Dracula and The Chronicles of Narnia are ubiquitous to world culture. Dracula has been translated into more than 30 languages and the Narnia Chronicles has sold more than 100 million copies. Their significance when they were published were extraordinary and they still cast a spell on modern culture long after they were first released. They have had global impact on the popular imagination, yet they had their origins in the mercurial minds of two Irish mavericks.

Dr David McKinstry is a teacher and poet whose poems are widely published and broadcast across Ireland and in the UK. If any readers wish to share their literary output with him, they can contact him at: davmick38h@yahoo.co.uk