Turfed out by his landlady, an Irish hack went roaming around Whitby – and turned what he saw into a horror classic. On the 125th anniversary of Dracula’s birth in the Yorkshire town, our writer retraces Bram Stoker’s trail of gore
If you stand on the pavement outside the Royal Hotel on Whitby’s West Cliff and look out across the harbour town as the sun goes down, you can pretty much see, in their entirety, the early chapters of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Across the bay, in the shadow of the half-ruined abbey, sits St Mary’s Churchyard, where Lucy Westenra was attacked by the vampiric count. Below is Tate Hill Sands, where the ship carrying Dracula ran aground, its crew missing, its dead skipper lashed to the wheel. The 199 steps, known locally as the Church Stairs, rise to the East Cliff, up which Dracula, in the guise of a black hound, ran after arriving in Whitby.
It is the same view that Stoker himself would have seen, aside from one or two modern flourishes, exactly 125 years ago – a view that would become synonymous with his novel Dracula. It was at the end of July 1890 that the flame of Stoker’s classic was kindled. Stoker, then the business manager of the actor Sir Henry Irving, had just endured, with his theatrical company, a somewhat disastrous tour of Scotland. Irving decided they should all take a month’s holiday and then regroup; he suggested Stoker try Whitby on the north Yorkshire coast, where Irving had once run a circus.
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