"The Dracula Secrets" by Neil R Storey

 This book is subtitled "Jack the Ripper and the darkest sources of Bram Stoker".

It's a strange mixture of biography of Bram Stoker, the author of Dracula, from his early days at Trinity College Dublin to his long employment as the Actor Manager for Henry Irving and the London Lyceum Theatre. It touches on Stoker's friend, the author Hall Caine, who was hugely popular, rivalling Dickens, in late Victorian England and to whom Dracula is dedicated. It then details the career of quack American 'doctor' Francis Tumblety, who was a great friend (and possibly homosexual lover) of Hall Caine. Finally, we learn about the Whitechapel murders committed by Jack the Ripper.

The author's thesis is that Tumblety was the Ripper and that he confided in Hall Caine, this then becoming known by Stoker. The evidence for this is that Tumblety was suspected by the Met (but that he broke bail and fled to America) and that there were persistent rumours about Tumblety. This is supported by the fact that Hall Caine wrote a story in which an American confessed to a murder and the fact the the Special (Irish) Branch of Scotland Yard were interested in Tumblety who may have had associations with the Fenians, an Irish revolutionary group (some Scotland Yard detectives thought the Ripper crimes to be the work of a secret society). But a lot of the evidence is given as conjecture and insinuation:

• Tumblety "had a seeming mania for the company of young men" (Ch 9) so therefore he must have been homosexual. His feelings toward women was said to be violently denunciatory (Ch 10). 
• Bram Stoker died of a condition associated with syphilis and his wife (by whom he had only one son early in the marriage) didn't appear to suffer from the condition (Ch 10) which implies that he was homosexual. This is reinforced by the fact that Stoker's wife's only previous boyfriend had been Oscar Wilde (Ch 9)
• Tumblety sent telegrams from Piccadilly which was known to be a place where homosexual men picked up rent boys AND is a place where Jonathan Harker spots the Count in Dracula. (Ch 9)
• Tumblety was arrested in New York in June 1889 for soliciting young lads. (Ch 9)
• Two "imitation rings" were found in his effects after Tumblety died ... and two brass rings were taken from the body of Annie Chapman, a Ripper victim. (Ch 10)
• In Dracula, the count stores coffins in an address of Chicksands Street ... which is in Whitechapel (Ch 9)
• "Could this have been the voice of a murderer?" (Ch 9)
• "Could Caine's story have been influenced by an American doctor?" (Ch 9)
• "A man who had almost certainly been his homosexual lover" (Ch 9)
• "Is it possible that Caine and Tumblety could have met during the period of the Ripper crimes?" (Ch 9)

Some of the evidence contradicts itself, and this seems ignored by the author. For example, he quotes a letter from Chief Inspector Littlechild who headed Special Branch during the Ripper murders who says that Tumblety was a person of interest but "he was not known as a sadist (which the murderer unquestionably was)" (Ch 8) He quotes testimony at length from a man who claimed Tumblety had a collection of the pickled insides of women and later admits that the writer was "a perjurer and a fabricator of stories ... but ... her was not a pathological liar" (Ch 10). Another testimony claims that Tumblety recruited a young man as an amanuensis "as he personally was most illiterate" and later says that Tumblety sent many letters to this young man (Ch 9); he can't have been illiterate and a prolific letter-writer. 

To sum up, there is more rhetoric than evidence presented. 

• Nevertheless, there is a lot of fascinating information, especially for the ghoulish: 
• After Dante Gabriel Rossetti's model, muse and wife Elizabeth Siddal died he buried with her some love poems; he later regretted this and had her disinterred so he could publish them. His agent "conniver and blackmailer" Charles Augustus Howell oversaw the disinterment and, after Rosetti's own death, was found with his throat slit and a ten shilling coin in his mouth "a final payment for a slanderer". (Ch 9)
• Caine was a great friend of Rossetti and was with him at his death in Westcliff on Sea.
• Dracula was originally set in Styria in south-eastern Austria which was also where Le Fanu's Carmilla was set. (Ch 9)
• Stoker and his wife and son were the models for a cartoon by George du Maurier who wrote Trilby in 1894 which starred Svengali, the evil mesmerist. (Ch 9)
• In 1885 a Russian ship, the Dimitry, ran aground at Whitby; this was presumably the model for the 'Demeter from Valna' which carried Dracula to land (in the shape of a black dog) at Whitby. (Ch 9)
• Bram Stoker admired Christine Nilsson, a swedish operatic soprano; "it has been suggested Gaston Leroux based his character Christine Daae in Phantom of the Opera (1910) on her". (Ch 9)
• Pre-Vampire literature includes the German poem Lenore, about a horse ride with Death, and Irish legends of the Dearg-dul (red blood sucker) (Ch 1) not to mention the work of Sheridan Le Fanu (Ch 2)
• Stoker knew Oscar Wilde at Trinity College (Ch 2)

Much of interest, but the author fails to make his case.

November 2022; 252 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God