Unfortunately, as Count Dracula has loomed ever larger in popular culture, Bram Stoker, his creator, has faded into the background. His obscurity is particularly unfortunate for Trinity since he attended university here and was an important figure in college history as the only person to be both Auditor of the Historical Society (Hist) and President of the Philosophical Society (Phil). Indeed, Stoker once described the Hist as Trinity’s ‘supplementary school’, and he should know, given that he served in the offices of the Society Librarian, Record Secretary, and in 1872 was elected Auditor (by one vote). It is probably true to say that Bram probably spent more time in the gym and in college societies than he did in the lecture hall or the library. His athletic achievements while a teenager in Trinity are extraordinary for someone who had been extremely fragile and even close to death while a child. There hardly seems to have been a sport in which he did not participate and he apparently excelled in rugby, walking races, gymnasium, sling shot, high jump, trapeze, and rowing. He was on the rugby team, and in 1867 won prizes for weight-lifting and for the five- and seven-mile walks. Stoker’s conviviality, sociability and devotion to physical health and exercise, all developed and perfected in Trinity, can certainly still be felt in his greatest novel. Dracula , after all, is a text in which a group of physically robust, intelligent, literate and companionable young men form a kind of discussion club (what commentators have dubbed the ‘Crew of Light’), complete with a secretary keeping detailed notes, all under the direction of an older mentor. Hist and Phil speeches and debates sometimes involved the supernatural and the Gothic, so there is certainly no real gap between Stoker’s life as a Trinity student and his work as a popular novelist. Moreover, he may even have first encountered that iconic name, Dracula, while attending Trinity. Jason McElligott, the Director of Marsh’s Library, has demonstrated that Stoker visited the library seven times in 1866 and 1867, and called for an eclectic variety of very specific items. Lurking in one volume Stoker consulted, Peter Heylyn’s Cosmographie (1652), is a reference to ‘Dracala’, and the ‘battell of Cassova’ (1448), cited in the Count’s speech to Jonathan Harker as one of the key events in his family’s history. We can (perhaps), situate Dracula’s ‘origins’ in Stoker’s social, sporting and reading habits while a student in Trinity – reason enough to bring the author out of the shadows of his most famous creation.
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