123 years ago today on 26 May 1897 Bram Stoker's Dracula was published by Archibald Constable & Co in London. Stoker who worked in law after he graduated from Trinity College & wrote a legal textbook is distinguished in TCD history by being the only person to be both Auditor of

the Historical Society & President of the Philosophical Society. He became a civil servant, working for the Irish courts service for 13 years and was made Inspector of Courts of Petty Sessions (a new post) in 1876, a position which required him to travel around the country to

ensure the efficiency of the courts in petty sessions districts dealing minor legal affairs. After 3 years of this he was well-qualified for the writing of his first proper book, the ‘dry as dust’ The Duties of Clerks of Petty Sessions in Ireland (1879). It took Stoker 7 years to

write Dracula. The working title for the novel was ‘The Undead’. It was changed by the publisher at the very last minute, just before publication in 1897. Stoker told his son, Noel, that the story was inspired by a nightmare he had after a supper of crab salad.
The Manchester

Guardian, declared that it was a novel ‘more grotesque than terrifying’, explaining that while ‘it says no little for the author’s powers that in spite of its absurdities the reader can follow the story with interest to the end’, it was still ‘a mistake to fill a whole volume

with horrors’.
In the 1980s, the original Dracula manuscript was found in a barn in rural northwestern Pennsylvania. Nobody knows how it made its way across the Atlantic. That manuscript, now owned by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, begins on page 102. Jonathan Harker’s journey

on a train, once thought to be the beginning of the story, was actually in the thick of it. This raises a question: what was on those first 101 pages? We may never know.