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Beyond Dracula pp 54–96Cite as

Palgrave Macmillan

‘Un Vrai Monsieur’: Chivalry, Atavism and Masculinity

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Abstract

There is a still discernible ironic edge to The Entr’acte’s response to Stoker’s attempted rescue of a Thames suicide. Through the incident, the columnist mocks the theatrical partnership of Irving and Stoker, holding up the latter as a sort of managerial Sancho Panza to his employer, and suggesting further that this physical heroism may be paralleled by equally spectacular feats of business acumen in the future.

Mr. Irving is fortunate in having for his manager a muscular Christian like Mr. Bram Stoker. Should the popular tragedian ever get out of his depth, he knows that his faithful Bram is ready to take the necessary header, and be to the rescue.

The Entr’acte, 23 September 18821

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Notes

  1. ‘Merry-go-Round’, The Entr’acte, 23 September 1882, p. 3. Stoker was awarded the Bronze Medal of the Royal Humane Society for his efforts, becoming Case 21,808 in the Society’s General List of Cases.

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  2. Thomas Hughes, Tom Brown at Oxford [1861] (London: Macmillan, 1880) p. 99.

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  3. Bram Stoker, Personal Reminiscences of Henry Irving, 2 vols (London: Heinemann, 1906) Vol. 1, pp. 31–2 (Hereafter PRHI).

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  4. Bram Stoker’s entry in the Baptismal Register of St John the Baptist, Clontarf, renders his father’s profession simply as ‘Gentleman’ (Entry 62, 3 December 1847). The record of his marriage at St Ann’s Church, Dublin, gives the author’s ‘Rank or Profession’ simply as ‘M.A.’, and his father’s as ‘Esq.’ (Entry 120, 4 December 1878).

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  5. Mark Girouard, The Return to Camelot (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981) p. 260.

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  6. Bram Stoker, A Glimpse of America (London: Sampson Low, Marston and Company, 1886) p. 23 (Hereafter GA).

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  7. Women have their own, separate, code of honour. See Bram Stoker, The Mystery of the Sea [1902] (Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 1997) p. 193 (Hereafter MS).

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  8. Bram Stoker, Lady Athlyne (London: William Heinemann, 1908) p. 188 (Hereafter LA).

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  9. Bram Stoker, The Snake’s Pass [1890] (Dingle: Brandon, 1990) p. 77 (Hereafter TSP).

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  10. Alfred, Lord Tennyson, ‘The Marriage of Geraint’ [1857], The Marriage of Geraint, Geraint and Enid (London: Macmillan, 1892) p. 11, 11. 363–8.

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  11. Tennyson, ‘The Marriage of Geraint’, p. 10, 11. 326–44; p. 1, 11. 12–13; TSP 44, 73.

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  12. Other examples in Stoker’s fiction include MS 44; The Lady of the Shroud [1909] (Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 1994) p. 74 (Hereafter LS); The Lair of the White Worm [1911], bound with Dracula (London: Foulsham, 1986) p. 358 (Hereafter LWW).

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  13. Nicholas Daly, ‘Irish Roots: The Romance of History in Bram Stoker’s The Snake’s Pass’, Literature and History 4/2 (1995) 42–70 at p. 53; David Glover, Vampires, Mummies, and Liberals (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996) p. 53.

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  14. See Alfred Nutt, Studies on the Legend of the Holy Grail (London: The Folk-Lore Society, 1888) pp. xi—xiv.

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  15. See R.S. Loomis, The Grail (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991) pp. 36–8, 40.

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  16. Dick rather pointedly lists Giraldus Cambrensis, Edmund Spenser and Gerard Boate among those who have written historically about the problems of Ireland’s topography (TSP 56). For further examples see Liz Curtis, Nothing but the Same Old Story (London: Information on Ireland, 1988) pp. 53, 89; Edith Somerville and Martin Ross, Some Experiences of an Irish R.M. [1899] (London: Longmans, Green and Company, 1903) p. 56.

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  17. L.P. Curtis, Apes and Angels (Newton Abbot: David and Charles, 1971) pp. 68, 75. A representative example of Erin may be seen in the anonymous cartoon ‘Ha! Ha!! Revenged!!!’, a supplement to The Weekly Freeman, 23 May 1885.

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  18. See John Tenniel, ‘Two Forces’, Punch, 29 October 1881, p. 89; ‘The Fenian Pest’, Punch, 3 March 1866, p. 89.

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  19. See ‘Allen. Bog of’, J.M. Ross, The Illustrated Globe Encyclopcedia, 12 vols (London: Thomas C. Jack, 1882) Vol. 1, p. 66.

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  20. See J.S. Donelly, ‘Landlords and Tenants’, W.E. Vaughan, ed., A New History of Ireland V (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989) pp. 346–9.

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  21. See Samuel Smiles, Self-Help [1859] (London: John Murray, 1902) pp. 285–7 on ‘the general probity of Englishmen’ as the foundation of the success of British commerce; and p. 382 on ‘consistency’ and character.

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  22. Bram Stoker, The Man (London: William Heinemann, 1905), p. 226 (Hereafter TM). Similar figures appear in Dracula, The Watter’s Mou’ and in the short story ‘Crooken Sands’.

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  23. Bram Stoker, ‘The Great White Fair in Dublin’, The World’s Work, IX (1907) 570–6 at p. 571.

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  24. See John Hutchinson, The Dynamics of Cultural Nationalism (London: Allen and Unwin, 1987) pp. 115–16, 119.

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  25. Stoker, ‘The Great White Fair in Dublin’, pp. 570, 571. Notably, the exhibition favoured Italian Renaissance architecture rather than structures of indigenous design for most of the major exhibition buildings. See William Hughes, “‘Introducing Patrick to his New Self”: Bram Stoker and the 1907 Dublin Exhibition’, Irish Studies Review no. 19 (Summer 1997) 9–14.

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  26. Bram Stoker, Dracula [1897] (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996) p. 349 (Hereafter D). Everard senior also appears to favour his son’s withholding of money set aside to pay off debt in order to gain interest: TM 199.

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  27. Victor Sage, Horror Fiction in the Protestant Tradition (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988) pp. 180–2. Fontana quotes Lombroso’s observation that in criminals ‘the nose is often aquiline like the beak of a bird of prey’: Ernest Fontana, ‘Lombroso’s Criminal Man and Stoker’s Dracula’, Victorian Newsletter 66 (1984) 25–7 at p. 26.

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  28. Charles Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals [1872] (London: Watts and Company, 1934) pp. 123–4.

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  29. Bram Stoker, ‘The Judge’s House’ [1891], Dracula’s Guest (Dingle, Brandon, 1990) p. 37 (Hereafter DG).

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  30. Bram Stoker, The Jewel of Seven Stars (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996) pp. 9–10 (Hereafter JSS).

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  31. Andrew Smith, ‘Bram Stoker’s The Mystery of the Sea: Ireland and the Spanish-Cuban-American War’, Irish Studies Review, 6/2 (1998) 131–8 at pp. 132, 137.

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  32. Thomas Carlyle, Past and Present [1843] (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1927) p. 172.

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  33. Bram Stoker, Miss Betty [1898] (London: New English Library, 1974) p. 141, my emphasis (Hereafter MB).

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  34. Bram Stoker, Seven Golden Buttons, MS dated 1891, f. H15 (Brotherton Collection, Leeds University) (Hereafter SGB).

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  35. Bram Stoker, Under the Sunset (London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle and Rivington, 1882) p. 6.

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  36. Cesare Lombroso, The Man of Genius (London: Walter Scott, 1891) p. 14.

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  37. Bram Stoker, ‘The Red Stockade’, Cosmopolitan Magazine, 17 (1894), 619–30 at p. 627. The use of ‘white-livered’ as a signifier for cowardice may be traced back at least as far as The Merchant of Venice (III. ii. 83–6).

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  38. This proverb is used also in LS 38 and MS 186. James Hogg uses the phrase in The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner [1824] (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987) p. 102.

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  39. The name is used as an alias in Arthur Conan Doyle’s ‘The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle’, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes [1892] (New York: Belmont Tower Books, 1974) p. 168.

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  40. The symptomatology of Harold’s Retrobulbar Neuritis is accurately described in the novel. See G.A. Berry, Diseases of the Eye [1889] (Edinburgh: Young J. Pentland, 1893) pp. 233–4.

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  41. Bram Stoker, The Shoulder of Shasta (Westminster: Constable, 1895) pp. 227, 216 (Hereafter SS).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Bath Spa University College, UK

    William Hughes (Lecturer in English)

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© 2000 William Hughes

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Hughes, W. (2000). ‘Un Vrai Monsieur’: Chivalry, Atavism and Masculinity. In: Beyond Dracula. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230598874_3

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