Thursday, September 17, 2020

Bram Stoker's Sources

This list of the books Bram Stoker mentions in his notes for Dracula has been making its way around the internet:

Folklore and Superstition
The Book of Were-Wolves: Being an Account of a Terrible Superstition by Sabine Baring-Gould (1865)
Credulities Past and Present by William Jones (1880)
Curious Myths of the Middle Ages by Sabine Baring-Gould (1877)
The Devil: His Origin, Greatness and Decadence by Rev. Albert Réville (1871)
The Folk-Tales of the Magyars by Rev. William Henry Jones and Lewis L. Kropf (1889)
Legends and Superstitions of the Sea and of Sailors — In All Lands and at All Times by Fletcher S. Bassett (1879)
On Superstitions connected with the History and Practice of Medicine and Surgery (1844) by Thomas Joseph Pettigrew
The Origin of Primitive Superstitions: And Their Development into the Worship of Spirits and the Doctrine of Spiritual Agency among the Aborigines of America by Rushton M. Dorman (1881) 
Sea Fables Explained by Henry W. Lee (1883)
Sea Monsters Unmasked by Henry W. Lee (1883) 
Traité des superstitions qui regardent les sacraments (1700-04) by Jean-Baptiste Thiers 
Transylvanian Superstitions by Emily Gerard (1885)

Dreams, Sleep, and Mesmerism
The Natural and the Supernatural: Or, Man — Physical, Apparitional and Spiritual by John Jones (1861) 
On the Truths contained in Popular Superstitions – with an Account of Mesmerism by Herbert Mayo (1851) 
Pseudodoxia Epidemica, or Vulgar Errors by Sir Thomas Browne (1646) 
The Other World: Or, Glimpses of the Supernatural — Being Facts, Records and Traditions by Rev. Frederick George Lee (1875)
Religio Medici or The Religion of a Doctor by Sir Thomas Browne (1646) 
The Theory of Dreams (1808) by Robert Gray and John Ferriar


Transylvania and Other Regions
An Account of the Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia: with various Political Observations Relating to Them (1820) by William Wilkinson
Germany, Present and Past (1879) by Sabine Baring-Gould
The Golden Chersonese by Isabella L. Bird (1883)
Magyarland: Being the Narrative of our Travels through the Highlands and Lowlands of Hungary by Nina Elizabeth Mazuchelli (1881) 
On the Track of the Crescent: Erratic Notes from the Piraeus to Pesth by Major E. C. Johnson (1885) 
Roumania: Past and Present by James Samuelson (1881) 
Round About the Carpathians by Andrew F. Crosse (1878) 
A Tarantasse Journey Through Eastern Russia in the Autumn of 1856 by W. A. Spottiswoode (1857) 
Transylvania: Its Products and its People by Charles Boner (1865) 


Other
Anecdotes of Habits and Instincts of Birds, Reptiles and Fishes by Sarah Lee (1853) 
The Birds of Transylvania by Charles A. Danford and John A. Harvie-Brown (1875)
Fishery Barometer Manual by Robert Henry Scott (1887)
History and Mystery of Precious Stones by William Jones (1880) 
Superstition and Force — Essays on The Wager of Law, The Wager of Battle, The Ordeal and Torture by Henry Charles Lea (1878) 
A Whitby Glossary by Francis Kildale Robinson (1876) 

Plus there are these texts in the London Library that have Stoker's annotations in them:

L'Antiquité at au Moyen Age by Alfred Maury (1860) 
Narratives of Sorcery and Magic by Thomas Wright (1851)
Things not Generally Known. Popular Errors Explained, John Timbs (1858)

This list of sources is a good example of what I wrote about before, how the imaginations of 19th-century Europeans were stimulated by the vast array of knowledge they could easily access about the world.

On a more personal level it made me start thinking about all the books that influenced my own novel.

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