Reviewed by: Bram Stoker and the Late Victorian World ed. by Matthew Gibson and Sabine Lenore Müller Roger Luckhurst (bio) Bram Stoker and the Late Victorian World, edited by Matthew Gibson and Sabine Lenore Müller; pp. xvi + 264. Clemson: Clemson University Press, 2018, $120.00, £85.00. Matthew Gibson and Sabine Lenore Müller's Bram Stoker and the Late Victorian World is a collection of nine essays and a coda, which includes a previously unpublished letter from Bram Stoker to Laurence Hutton. Derived from a 2015 symposium held at the University of Macau, where Gibson works, this essay collection is not unusual in having mixed results; the attempt to impose cohesion through three sections ("Professions," followed by the grand yet vague "Science, Technology, and Ideas" and "Politics and Society"), each with three essays, feels slightly arbitrary. These categories could have easily been reshuffled, since the editorial hand is very light on building connections between the authors, whose contributions are all effectively stand-alone articles. The editors appeal to empirical evidence over theory in their very brief preface, which is fine but tends to the granular or atomistic in approach. More evidence of dialogue or collaboration between authors might have been interesting. There is enough, however, to sustain the interest of researchers of Stoker; if the ambitions to situate him in wider contexts inevitably leave large areas untouched, the commitment to analyzing Stoker's body of work beyond Dracula (1897) is welcome. We are getting an ever-rounder view of Stoker's full career. Section 1, "Professions," starts with the eminent fin-de-siècle scholar Terry Hale diving into Stoker's legal career, first in the Dublin Petty Sessions court (for which Stoker wrote the manual for magistrates), and then as a middle-aged man in London training to be a barrister between 1886 and 1890. Hale speculates that Stoker might have felt vulnerable financially and in terms of professional status to undertake this arduous training while working for the impossibly demanding actor Henry Irving at the Lyceum Theatre. Stoker often worked for over eighteen hours a day, and was away from London for months at a time on theatrical tours in America, even as he studied for the bar. More importantly, Hale claims that Stoker's fiction, from The Snake's Pass (1890), consistently evidences a legal imagination, much as Wilkie Collins's sensational and labyrinthine fictions relied on five years of legal training. Hale has tracked down the barrister under whom Stoker was a pupil; his discovery of networks of connections around Frederick Inderwick offers genuine new research that deepens the rootedness of Stoker in multiple professional worlds of late-Victorian London. With a pleasing pedantry, Hale notes the endless laws that Count Dracula's upstanding enemies seem to break: unlicensed and medically negligent blood transfusions by Professor Van Helsing and Doctor Seward's [End Page 353] forging of a death certificate (it is a shame he does not remark on the terrible career of the solicitor Jonathan Harker, a man who breaks down hopelessly on his first important case, yet somehow gets promoted for it, nor on Seward's utterly useless attempt to be an asylum director or his spectacular misdiagnosis of Renfield's illness). The legal world evidently feeds into Dracula, although it is possible that Hale overstates the significance of these contexts. Rui Carvalho Homem's essay on Stoker and Irving's relation comes next, though it is perhaps misplaced in the "Professions" section. (I would have placed Rebecca May's later essay on the legal and medical contexts of coroner reports directly after Hale's to emphasize the centrality of late-Victorian professionalization to Stoker's work.) Homem offers a close reading of Stoker's extraordinary act of fealty to his narcissistic boss, Irving, suggesting that Stoker writes himself into the story of the actor's unprecedented successes. This seems uncontentious. Next, Gibson examines the influence of the visual and scenic arts on Stoker's fiction. Most interesting is the careful work done on the scenic painters who worked at the Lyceum, including W. L. Telbin. The scenic painter is a special profession, of course, but the collection is sketchy on...