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Bram Stoker
Photograph of Bram Stoker circa 1906

Today is the birthday of Bram Stoker (Abraham Stoker; Clontarf, Dublin 8 November 1847 – 20 April 1912 London); author, perhaps best known today for his 1897 Gothic novel Dracula.  During his lifetime, he was better known as the personal assistant of actor Henry Irving and business manager of the Lyceum Theatre in London, which Irving owned.

In 1878, Stoker married Florence Balcombe, daughter of Lieutenant-Colonel James Balcombe of 1 Marino Crescent. She was a celebrated beauty whose former suitor had been Oscar Wilde. Stoker had known Wilde from his student days, having proposed him for membership of the university’s Philosophical Society while he was president. Wilde was upset at Florence’s decision, but Stoker later resumed the acquaintanceship, and, after Wilde’s fall, visited him on the Continent.

The Stokers moved to London, where Stoker became acting manager and then business manager of Irving’s Lyceum Theatre, London, a post he held for 27 years. On 31 December 1879, Bram and Florence’s only child was born, a son whom they christened Irving Noel Thornley Stoker. The collaboration with Henry Irving was important for Stoker and through him he became involved in London’s high society, where he met James Abbott McNeill Whistler and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (to whom he was distantly related). Working for Irving, the most famous actor of his time, and managing one of the most successful theatres in London made Stoker a notable if busy man. He was dedicated to Irving and his memoirs show he idolised him. In London, Stoker also met Hall Caine, who became one of his closest friends – he dedicated Dracula to him.  Stoker’s inspirations for the story, in addition to Whitby, England, may have included a visit to Slains Castle in Aberdeenshire, a visit to the crypts of St. Michan’s Church in Dublin, and the novella Carmilla by Sheridan Le Fanu.  Stoker was a deeply private man and not much is known about his personal life.

After suffering a number of strokes, Stoker died at No. 26 St George’s Square, London on 20 April 1912. Some biographers attribute the cause of death to overwork, others to tertiary syphilis. His death certificate named the cause of death as “Locomotor ataxia 6 months”, presumed to be a reference to syphilis. He was cremated, and his ashes were placed in a display urn at Golders Green Crematorium in north London. The ashes of Irving Noel Stoker, the author’s son, were added to his father’s urn following his death in 1961. The original plan had been to keep his parents’ ashes together, but after Florence Stoker’s death, her ashes were scattered at the Gardens of Rest.

Dracula is an epistolary novel, written as a collection of realistic but fictional diary entries, telegrams, letters, ship’s logs, and newspaper clippings, all of which added a level of detailed realism to the story, a skill which Stoker had developed as a newspaper writer. At the time of its publication, Dracula was considered a “straightforward horror novel” based on imaginary creations of supernatural life.   It gave form to a universal fantasy and became a part of popular culture.

Charles Demuth
Self-Portrait, 1907

Today is the birthday of Charles Henry Buckius Demuth (Lancaster, Pennsylvania; November 8, 1883 – October 23, 1935 Lancaster); watercolorist who turned to oils late in his career, developing a style of painting known as Precisionism.

Gallery

“Nana, Seated Left, and Satin at Laure’s Restaurant”
(1916)
Museum of Modern Art

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  The Jazz Singer (1916)

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  Trees and Barns Bermuda (1917)

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  Turkish Bath with Self Portrait (1918)

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  The Boat Ride from Sorrento (1919)

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  Wild Orchids (1920)

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  Spring (1921)

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  Incense of a New Church (1921)

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  Roofs and Steeple (1921)

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  Aucassin and Nicolette (1921)

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  Study for Poster Portrait, Marsden Hartley (1921) (c. 1923–1924)

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  Sail: In Two Movements, 1919

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  Charles Demuth – Love Love Love, 1928, Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid

   

Margaret Mitchell

And today is the birthday of Margaret Munnerlyn Mitchell (Atlanta, Georgia; November 8, 1900 – August 16, 1949 Atlanta); author and journalist.  One novel by Mitchell was published during her lifetime; the epic American Civil War-era novel, Gone with the Wind, for which she won the National Book Award for Most Distinguished Novel of 1936 and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1937.  In more recent years, a collection of Mitchell’s girlhood writings and a novella she wrote as a teenager, Lost Laysen, have been published.

Margaret began using the name “Peggy” at Washington Seminary, and the abbreviated form “Peg” at Smith College when she found an icon for herself in the mythological winged horse, “Pegasus”, that inspires poets.

Although her family disapproved, Peggy and Berrien (“Red”) Kinnard Upshaw married on September 2, 1922; the best man at their wedding was John Marsh, who would become her second husband. The couple resided at the Mitchell home with her father. By December the marriage to Upshaw had dissolved and he left. Mitchell suffered physical and emotional abuse, the result of Upshaw’s alcoholism and violent temper. Upshaw agreed to an uncontested divorce after John Marsh gave him a loan and Mitchell agreed not to press assault charges against him. Upshaw and Mitchell were divorced on October 16, 1924.

On July 4, 1925, 24-year-old Margaret Mitchell and 29-year-old John Marsh were married in the Unitarian-Universalist Church.^[18]: 125 The Marshes made their home at the Crescent Apartments in Atlanta, taking occupancy of Apt. 1, which they affectionately named “The Dump” (now the Margaret Mitchell House and Museum).  While still legally married to Upshaw and needing income for herself, Mitchell got a job writing feature articles for The Atlanta Journal Sunday Magazine. She received almost no encouragement from her family or “society” to pursue a career in journalism, and had no prior newspaper experience.  During the time Mitchell worked for the Atlanta Journal, she wrote 129 feature articles, 85 news stories, and several book reviews.

In May 1926, after Mitchell had left her job at the Atlanta Journal and was recovering at home from her ankle injury, she wrote a society column for the Sunday Magazine, “Elizabeth Bennet’s Gossip”, which she continued to write until August. Meanwhile, her husband was growing weary of lugging armloads of books home from the library to keep his wife’s mind occupied while she hobbled around the house; he emphatically suggested that she write her own book instead:

For God’s sake, Peggy, can’t you write a book instead of reading thousands of them?

To aid her in her literary endeavors, John Marsh brought home a Remington Portable No. 3 typewriter (c. 1928). For the next three years Mitchell worked exclusively on writing a Civil War-era novel whose heroine was named Pansy O’Hara (prior to Gone with the Wind‘s publication Pansy was changed to Scarlett). She used parts of the manuscript to prop up a wobbly couch.

Gone with the Wind was popular with American readers from the outset and was the top American fiction bestseller in 1936 and 1937. As of 2014, a Harris poll found it to be the second favorite book of American readers, just behind the Bible. More than 30 million copies have been printed worldwide.

Gone with the Wind is a controversial reference point for subsequent writers of the South, both black and white. Scholars at American universities refer to, interpret, and study it in their writings. The novel has been absorbed into American popular culture.

Mitchell received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for the book in 1937. It was adapted into the 1939 film of the same name, which has been considered to be one of the greatest movies ever made and also received the Academy Award for Best Picture during the 12th annual Academy Awards ceremony. Gone with the Wind is the only novel by Mitchell published during her lifetime.

Margaret Mitchell was struck by a speeding automobile as she crossed Peachtree Street at 13th Street in Atlanta with her husband, John Marsh, while on her way to see the movie A Canterbury Tale on the evening of August 11, 1949. She died at age 48 at Grady Hospital five days later on August 16 without fully regaining consciousness.

The driver, Hugh Gravitt, was an off-duty taxi driver who was driving his personal vehicle when he struck Mitchell. After the collision, Gravitt was arrested for drunken driving and released on a $5,450 bond until Mitchell’s death.

Gravitt was originally charged with drunken driving, speeding, and driving on the wrong side of the road. He was convicted of involuntary manslaughter in November 1949 and sentenced to 18 months in jail. He served almost 11 months. Gravitt died in 1994 at the age of 73.

Margaret Mitchell was buried at Oakland Cemetery, Georgia. When her husband John died in 1952, he was buried next to his wife.

Prose from Gone with the Wind

• “The trouble with most of us Southerners,” continued Rhett Butler, “is that we either don’t travel enough or we don’t profit enough by our travels…. I have seen many things that you all have not seen. The thousands of immigrants who’d be glad to fight for the Yankees for food and a few dollars, the factories, the foundries, the shipyards, the iron and coal mines &mdash all the things we haven’t got. Why, all we have is cotton and slaves and arrogance. They’d lick us in a month.”
  • Chapter 6

• Before the war there had been few cotton factories, woolen mills, arsenals and machine shops south of Maryland, a fact of which all Southerners were proud. The South produced statesmen and soldiers, planters and doctors, lawyers and poets, but certainly not engineers or mechanics. Let the Yankees adopt such low callings.
  • Chapter 8

• “In the end what will happen will be what has happened whenever a civilization breaks up. The people who have brains and courage come through and the ones who haven’t are winnowed out. At least, it has been interesting, if not comfortable, to witness a Gotterdammerung.”
• “A what?”
• “A dusk of the gods. Unfortunately, we Southerners did think we were gods.”
  • Chapter 31

• “It isn’t that I mind splitting logs here in the mud, but I do mind what it stands for. I do mind, very much, the loss of the beauty of the old life I loved. Scarlett, before the war, life was beautiful. There was a glamor to it, a perfection and a completeness and a symmetry to it like Grecian art. Maybe it wasn’t so to everyone. I know that now. But to me, living at Twelve Oaks, there was a real beauty to living. I belonged in that life. I was a part of it. And now it is gone and I am out of place in this new life, and I am afraid. Now, I know that in the old days it was a shadow show I watched. I avoided everything which was not shadowy, people and situations which were too real, too vital. I resented their intrusion. I tried to avoid you too, Scarlett. You were too full of living and too real and I was cowardly enough to prefer shadows and dreams.”
  • Chapter 31

• I cannot understand why I did not desert. It was all the purest insanity. But it’s in one’s blood. Southerners can never resist a losing cause.
  • Chapter 34

• There ain’t nothin’ that walks can lick us, any more than it could lick him, not Yankees nor Carpetbaggers nor hard times nor high taxes nor even downright starvation. But that weakness that’s in our hearts can lick us in the time it takes to bat your eye.
  • Chapter 38
• Hardships make or break people.
  • Chapter 40

• These women, so swift to kindness, so tender to the sorrowing, so untiring in times of stress, could be as implacable as furies to any renegade who broke one small law of their unwritten code. This code was simple. Reverence for the Confederacy, honor to the veterans, loyalty to old forms, pride in poverty, open hands to friends and undying hatred to Yankees.
  • Chapter 47

• Drink and dissipation had done their work on the coin-clean profile and now it was no longer the head of a young pagan prince on new-minted gold but a decadent, tired Caesar on copper debased by long usage.
  • Chapter 63

• She was seeing through Rhett’s eyes the passing, not of a woman but of a legend — the gentle, self-effacing but steel-spined women on whom the South had builded its house in war and to whose proud and loving arms it had returned in defeat.
  • Chapter 63