The nefarious thirst for human blood, a clove of garlic to ward off vampires, a stake through the heart as their optimum method of dispatch: these are the best-known marks of Bram Stoker’s Dracula.
But the gruesome details came not from Stoker’s own imagination but from the factual works of a maverick Scottish author, Emily Gerard, whose research into the folklore of Transylvania directly inspired him.
And now the author’s great-grandnephew Dacre Stoker is embarking on what he describes as “a big puzzle hunt” to learn more about the Scotswoman who travelled the Carpathian countryside interviewing people about their superstitions, writing two volumes on the subject and ultimately introducing Stoker to the term “Nosferatu”.
He said: “The first document that I found her name was an interview that Bram gave to Jane Stoddart in the British Weekly. She asked Bram: ‘Where’d you get this information?’ and he said there were quite a few bits of information but the most thorough was from an essay in the Nineteenth Century [a British literary magazine founded in 1877] by Emily Gerard.
“So that triggered my interest. Who was she and what did she contribute?”
Searching his ancestor’s notes, which are kept at the Rosenbach Museum in Philadelphia, he discovered significant references to Gerard’s research. He said: “Bram used the traits she described in the words of Van Helsing, when he’s explaining to the band of heroes what powers Dracula has, and how they’ve got to kill him.”
“In very obstinate cases of vampirism it is recommended to cut off the head, and replace it in the coffin with the mouth filled with garlic, or to extract the heart and burn it, strewing its ashes over the grave,” he added. Gerard wrote in The Land Beyond the Forest, a two-volume work published in 1888.
As much as Dacre Stoker, himself an author, has been dedicated to uncovering what motivated and influenced his ancestor, his attention has now turned to Gerard, who was born in the Scottish Borders in 1849 to a wealthy military family. “What kind of a lady grows up in an affluent family in Jedburgh and Airdrie but goes off to Transylvania and does something that is fairly risque for the time, looking into superstition?” he asks.
On a recent visit to Scotland to continue his research into Gerard’s life, he came across a bust of her mother at a museum in Airdrie, as well as an address for the family home in Lanarkshire.
Dacre Stoker says he is well aware of the strict social codes that attended Victorian women – what was it that made Emily rebel? He points out that she and her sister were writers, and published at least four novels in collaboration, so creative pursuit was apparently not denied women in her family.
He also notes that Scotland in the 19th century – where Stoker wrote chunks of Dracula while holidaying on the Aberdeenshire coast – was then a society where religion and superstitious belief coexisted quite comfortably.
After she married her husband, a Polish cavalry officer, in 1869, Gerard used her time when he was stationed in Transylvania to write about the culture and landscape of the area.
Dacre Stoker says he is convinced that Gerard’s work was responsible for Stoker changing the setting of Dracula’s castle from Austria to Transylvania.
“It must have taken courage for a young lady to travel the countryside and interview people about these beliefs, and then get an article published in the Nineteenth Century, which was a formidable magazine in London, and then get a two-volume book published.”
“Certainly this woman had an interesting spirit and I am keen to learn more.”
