On 8 August 1890, Bram Stoker walked down to the public library at the Coffee House End of the Quay in Whitby and picked up a book from 1820.
He’d checked into Mrs Veazey’s guesthouse at 6 Royal Crescent at the end of July. He was business manager to the actor Henry Irving, he’d come straight off a gruelling tour of Scotland, and he had a new story on the go. It was set in Styria, in Austria. The villain was called Count Wampyr.
The book was by William Wilkinson, who had been the British consul in Bucharest. In it was a footnote: “Dracula in the Wallachian language means Devil.”
Stoker wrote the name down, along with the date. Count Wampyr never recovered.
Whitby had more to give him. Five years earlier a Russian ship, the Dmitry, had run aground on Tate Hill Sands below East Cliff, out of Narva with a cargo of silver sand. In the novel she becomes the Demeter, out of Varna, carrying silver sand and boxes of earth. The newspaper cutting that reports her arrival in the storm is dated 8 August, the same day Stoker found the name.
He spent six more years on the book. Dracula was published in 1897, and his working notes survive at the Rosenbach in Philadelphia.
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