Stoker became interested in theatre while in school and reviewed plays as a theatre critic for a newspaper owned by Sheridan Le Fanu, who authored “Carmilla,” the best known vampire story before “Dracula.”

Stoker and Oscar Wilde were very good friends. In 1878, Bram Stoker married an ex-girlfriend of Oscar Wilde’s, souring their friendship. Stoker, the devout Catholic, also discovered some of Wilde’s habitual hidden debaucheries, and was appalled.

While in London, Stoker became the personal manager of Henry Irving, the greatest Shakespearean actor of the times. It is thought that Irving and his lascivious ways were Stoker’s main “model” for “Dracula”.

Novel–writing was a supplementary source of income for Stoker; his books were well reviewed, but he never got rich from them.

Stoker spent seven years on and off researching European vampire folklore in preparation for writing his novel.

Stoker made several trips touring the “vampire” lands of Eastern Europe, especially Transylvania.

While visiting Romania, Stoker was entertained by an innkeeper who regaled him with tales of the terrifying national hero, “Dracula” (“Son of the Dragon”) who had preserved Romanian sovereignty against the invading Ottoman Turks despite being greatly outnumbered.

The idea for Dracula came to Stoker in a nightmare, after hearing the innkeepers tales, about a debauched royal—a combination of Oscar Wilde, Henry Irving and Vlad the Impaler?—crawling out the window of a castle ruins and descending the wall in the manner of a cockroach, no doubt eager to get on with the night’s hunt for innocent virgins.

Stoker was never financially secure enough to rebuke his employer Irving nor his high society contacts like Wilde about their dissolute lifestyles—the very sort of shenanigans Stoker saw as undermining British man—and womanhood, so he instead sent his warning in his allegorical vampire tale.

Dracula’s bite was meant to represent what for Stoker, in his mind, was the purest evil: sex without love. Drinking blood was the mockery of the Christian communion ritual.

Bram Stoker was related to Arthur Conan Doyle. Such a shame we never saw an official cross-over between Dracula and Sherlock Holmes written by the pair.

Believed to have been lost or destroyed, Bram Stoker’s original 541-page manuscript of Dracula was discovered in the early 1980’s in a Pennsylvania barn. Included with the typed manuscript covered with corrections, was the handwritten title page with it’s original title "THE UN-DEAD." The title had been changed at the last minute before publishing. When auctioned the manuscript was purchased by Microsoft’s co-founder Paul Allen.

Bram Stoker's personal diary entries shed a light on some of the books influences. In it there is a remark about a boy who catches and keeps flies in a bottle that might be the origin of the mentally disturbed Renfield character who aids Dracula.

The first adaptation of Dracula was for the stage and was performed only once before the book was even published.

In 1819 the first acknowledged vampire novel was written by John Polidori called ‘The Vampyre’. Polidori wrote the book after spending a summer with Mary and Percy Shelley. Mary being the writer of ‘Frankenstein: The Modern Prometheus’.