Abraham Stoker was born in Dublin in 1847, a sickly child who could not walk until he was seven. He grew into a champion athlete, worked as a civil servant, and wrote theatre reviews in his spare time.

In 1878 he went to London to manage the Lyceum Theatre for the great actor Henry Irving, a job he held for twenty-seven years. He wrote novels on the side; Dracula (1897) was the sixth. It sold steadily but not hugely in his lifetime. He died in 1912.