That all went away when Bram died. Before his death, the Stokers’ finances were strained, perhaps because they lived beyond their means in a great London house that subsumed much of Bram’s savings. And while he made a comfortable income from his time at the Lyceum, the only one of his lurid commercial novels to still be selling well by the time of his death in 1912 was Dracula, a lascivious book that Florence was at best indifferent to if not outright embarrassed.
Florence was also a woman always haunted by appearances. Not unlike a character in Wilde’s books, she began refusing to have her picture taken after she turned 40. And following Bram’s death (which evidence also persuasively suggests was due to complications from syphilis), the invitations stopped altogether. She was remarked upon, often, for retaining her beauty for a woman of her age by the time she was 54 and tending Bram’s deathbed. But the back-handed compliment did little to pay the debts left by her husband’s estate, even after she auctioned off his books and papers, which included the Dryden copy of the first folio Shakespeare, a sheaf of original notes of Walt Whitman’s lecture on Abraham Lincoln, and molds of Lincoln’s death mask.
As per Skal’s book, she wrote a friend, “I made £400 on the ‘Bram Stoker Library,’” a quarter of which she surmised was “rubbish.”
Yet for the rest of her life—which would extend for another 24 years—her only source of income or notoriety was Stoker’s backlisted book, the one she even mysteriously found a lost chapter for and published as Dracula’s Guest (though some suspect it was not finished by Bram’s hand). She was wedded—bound, really—to the shadow of the vampire.
Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horrors
When Prana Film premiered Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horrors at the Berlin Zoological Garden on March 4, 1922, they brazenly put in their program that it was “freely adapted” from Dracula by Bram Stoker. The names and settings had been changed—Dracula became Count Orlok, Jonathan Harker was now the German Thomas Hutter, and Mina’s Christian name transformed into Ellen. Yet right down to the film’s new title—“Nosferatu”—nearly everything about its origins is owed to Stoker.
It is, indeed, a common misconception in pop culture that “nosferatu” has always meant “vampire” in Latin or some other dead language. This inaccuracy was first created by Emily Gerard’s essay “Transylvanian Superstitions,” where Bram read “nosferatu” was the Romanian word for “vampire.” This was wrong. “Vampir” is the Romanian word for “vampire.” Nevertheless, Stoker eagerly included the term in his notes and wound up using it as an interchangeable word with “vampire,” “the undead,” and other descriptors for the children of the night.
ncG1vNJzZmhqZGy7psPSmqmorZ6Zwamx1qippZxemLyue8yoraKdXa%2B8r7GOp6asnpWnrrXBjJqlnWWknbJuwc2hpqWxXayus3nTqGSbraKueqJ5wqWYrKuZmHpyfI9msJ6Zoqh6orPOaA%3D%3D