S toker, B ram

Abstract

Abraham Stoker junior (1847–1912) was born into a Protestant family, resident in the north Dublin suburb of Clontarf. His father was a minor official in the British civil administration of Ireland, though as the recent scholarship of Paul Murray (2004) has indicated, the family's Irish antecedents predate the Act of Union and connect this self‐confessed liberal advocate of paternalistic Victorian Home Rule to a more militant eighteenth‐century nationalism. Educated initially at home and later at a Dublin day school run by an Anglican clergyman, the young author was inducted into the rituals and tenets of a common masculine identity that connected the middle and upper classes of Irish society with their English counterparts. The educative ideal of mens sana in corpore sano – a healthy mind within a healthy body – which Stoker proudly espoused as his personal credo in his 1906 biography of the actor Sir Henry Irving, functions as a perplexing parallel to the writer's own youth and adolescence. A sickly child, at one stage blind and certainly unable to stand upon his own feet as an infant, Stoker grew to be a successful college athlete, and maintained his interest in athletics, rugby football, and weightlifting when he himself entered the Irish Civil Service in 1866. That said, his university career at Trinity College Dublin, where he was associated with Willie and Oscar Wilde and John Butler Yeats, was academically undistinguished. Though he did achieve recognition in the debating chamber, and was – uniquely – appointed both Auditor of the University's Historical Society and President of the rival Philosophical Society, he did not graduate with “Honors in pure Mathematics” as he was later to claim, and his MA was awarded, as is customary at Dublin, Oxford, and Cambridge, without further study.