Sources and
Acknowledgments

T he historically aware may already know that Tom Sayers was a living person, a bricklayer and bare-knuckle boxer who rose to fame in the 1850s. After basing a stage act on his sporting achievements and taking it on the road, he died in retirement at the age of thirty-nine.

Sayers lived again in the imagination of Amalgamated Press writer Arthur S. Hardy, who resurrected and mythologized him in the pages of a weekly story paper titled The Marvel. Hardy (real name Arthur Joseph Steffens, born September 28, 1873) had been an actor-manager and a sportsman before working for the penny dreadfuls. He began writing in his dressing room while waiting for stage calls. Sayers the bricklayer became Sayers the contemporary gentleman, the bare-knuckle fighter became a Queensberry Rules boxer, the circus turn became a legitimate stage actor and performer in Music Hall boxing sketches.

Hardy’s writing was fresh and lively, his storytelling driven by the moral certainties of his era. Any expression of thanks must begin with him, and with Eric Fayne, editor of The Story Paper Collector’s Digest, and all the other “Old Boys” of both genders who once welcomed an eager thirteen-year-old Sexton Blake fan into their company.

By the latest count, there are at least four major Bram Stoker biographies. The first to be written, by sometime ghost-hunter Harry Ludlam, created a template for those that have followed. Ordered and useful, it lays out most of the basic facts with no attempt to decorate or interpret. The next, by Daniel Farson (a great-nephew of Stoker’s) is rambling and padded but contains some additional secondhand material and some useful flashes of family lore. Barbara Belford brings academic method, some new discoveries, and a modern psychological approach; I should add that Professor Belford was also a friendly and encouraging correspondent. Paul Murray’s equally valuable work approaches its subject from a more personal angle. Laurence Irving’s landmark biography of his actor-grandfather Henry Irving mentions Stoker only occasionally, but effectively gives us a month-by-month schedule for his working life. Taken together with Stoker’s own Personal Reminiscences of Henry Irving, these documents help to bring into focus a hardworking writer and man of the theater who might otherwise have been remembered chiefly as one of nature’s devoted lieutenants.

Once the project was off the ground, I was aided in my initial search for material by Richard Dalby, Stoker collector and definitive bibliographer. As well as giving generously of his time and allowing me access to his collection, Richard supplied me with photocopies of Stoker’s pamphlet A Glimpse of America and of Snowbound, Stoker’s (then) hard-to-find anthology of linked stories about a touring theatrical troupe. Snowbound has since been republished by Desert Island Books.

Scott Meek and Archie Tait, then of Zenith Productions, took an option on film rights that sponsored most of the research that followed.

Another generous correspondent was the late Leslie Shepard of the Dublin-based Bram Stoker Society, with further help from secretary/ treasurer Dr. Albert Power and David Lass of The Bram Stoker Club. In New York, I was grateful for the chance to visit Dr. Jeanne Keyes Youngson and her private museum of memorabilia. President of both The Count Dracula Club and of The Bram Stoker Memorial Association, Dr. Youngson also made my day by letting me hold the Oscar awarded to her late husband, Days of Thrills and Laughter silent movie anthologist Robert Youngson (and yes, they’re as heavy as they look).

Dr. Michael David Chafetz, one of my oldest friends, took on the job of setting up contacts for the U.S. leg of the research.

My first point of contact in Philadelphia was the ball of fire/bundle of energy that is Sharon Pinkenson of the Philadelphia Film Office. Thanks also in Philadelphia to Richard Tyler at the historical commission, and the staff of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. Leslie Mars looked after me at the Rosenbach Museum, where I enjoyed the rare privilege of being able to go through Bram Stoker’s working papers for Dracula.

In Richmond, I was guided by the sharp insight and hyperefficiency of Catherine Councill of the Virginia State Film Office and her coworker, Marcie Kelso, both of whom engaged with my needs so thoroughly that their enthusiasm seemed to exceed even my own. Further thanks to Laura Oaksmith, and to LuAnne Brannen at the Metro Richmond Motion Picture and Television Office; to Roy Proctor for his company at dinner and his chronology of Richmond’s theatrical scene from 1890 to 1910, and to Miles Rudisill at the Byrd Theater and Doug Selzer at the Empire.

Also in Virginia: thanks to Kathy Walker Green at the Governor’s Mansion, Teresa Roane at the Valentine Museum, Kip Campbell and Carolyn Parsons at the Virginia State Library and Archives, and Frances Pollard, senior librarian with the Virginia Historical Society.

In Louisiana, my gratitude goes to Konita Berthelot at the Louisiana Film Commission in Baton Rouge, and to her coworker Phil Seifert, who came on the road with me for a couple of enjoyable days spent exploring estates and old plantation houses along the Mississippi. Further thanks to Jessica Travis at the Historic New Orleans Collection, and to the staff of the Howard Tilton Library on the Tulane University campus.

Returning home, it’s thanks to Marian J. Pringle, senior librarian at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, and to Christopher Sheppard at the Brotherton Collection, Leeds University Library.

And after I’d pulled it all together, it’s thanks for guidance and management to Julia Kreitman, Howard Morhaim and Kate Menick, Shaye Areheart and Anne Berry, Abner Stein, and Mike Moorcock for the final steer that has led me, over the past three or four years, to this unexpected place.

And, finally, a special nod to a correspondent whom I only ever knew as “Scary Gary” and who, in the early days of this project, supplied me with Xeroxed material from his own archives of weird and bizarre material from throughout the ages.

Gary, wherever you are…thank you. But stay right there. That’s close enough. Okay?