Beneath a turquoise-and-white domed ceiling and surrounded by oak shelving in the Dublin library once frequented by James Joyce and W.B. Yeats, Brian Cleary sits on the floor of Who's Alive? I happened to come across a book by Bram Stoker, the author of Dracula, who I believed I had never read.
Cleary, who suffered from sudden hearing loss and was taking time off from her job at a maternity hospital, discovered something strange while looking through the stalker archives at the National Library of Ireland. In an advertisement promoting supplements in the Dublin Daily Express on New Year's Day 1891, one of the products listed was “Gibbet Hill, by Bram Stoker.” He had never heard of it, so he went looking for traces. “It wasn't something you could Google and it wasn't even in the bibliography,” he said.
Cleary tracked down the supplements and found Gibbet Hill. “This is a lost story,” he realized. “I don't think anyone knows about this.'' The story begins with an anonymous narrator who encounters three children standing beside a memorial to murdered seafarers in Gibbet Hill, Surrey. This is the story of The location also features in Dickens' 1839 novel Nicholas Nickleby.
The four walk together to the top of Gibbet Hill. Distracted by the scenery, the narrator loses sight of the children. He took a nap among some trees, and when he woke up to see the children some distance away, a snake passed by his feet towards them. They seemed to be able to communicate with and control snakes. The children then attack the narrator. The story culminates with the snake wriggling out of the narrator's chest and sliding down the side of a hill.
Mr Cleary approached Stoker's biographer Paul Murray to debunk the story. Murray was excited but not surprised by the discovery. He had already discovered three similar stories, so he knew there was more stalker material out there. But “as I learned more about this story, I became more and more intrigued because it was published in 1890 and was almost certainly written,” he said. say. “That was the year Bram Stoker began work on “Dracula.''
The typical Gothic horror novel “didn't come out of nowhere,” said Murray, who has studied Stoker's development from the mid-1870s to the publication of Dracula in 1897. . It fit very well into my theory about Dracula's long pregnancy. And this seemed to me to be a kind of way station in the 20-plus year journey that Stoker has taken to evolve the novel. ”
Gibbet Hill has similarities to Dracula. There are Gothic imagery, a trinity of malevolent characters, and the depiction of eyes “shining with a dark unholy light”, which anticipates Dracula's eyes “shining with an unholy light”.
Another thematic similarity is “reverse colonization,” Murray said. At Gibbet Hill, two of the children are Indian. In Dracula, the story goes that a count from Transylvania, then on the borders of the known world, returns to threaten England. Dracula may be read as a critique of British imperialism, but it is also a “reverse colonization fantasy that forces the British to see themselves as potential victims,” writes David Higgins. He writes in “Reverse Colonization.''
A book with stories, commentary and artwork by Paul McKinley is now being published by the Rotunda Foundation, the official fundraising arm of Rotunda Hospital, where Cleary works. All proceeds will go to the newly established Charlotte Stoker Foundation (named after Blum's mother, who was a deaf campaigner) to fund research into risk factors for acquired hearing loss in newborns. will be donated to. A companion exhibition is being held at Dublin's Casino Marino, and the first public reading of the story will be held at Dublin City Council's Bram Stoker Festival.
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NLI director Audrey Whitty said discoveries of this magnitude were made “not very often.” Still, she emphasizes that anyone can make discoveries like Cleary's. “No one knows what lies undiscovered in national libraries around the world.”
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“Gibbet Hill'' by Bram Stoker rotunda foundation October 26th. Paul McKinley's exhibition 'Péisteanna' is currently on view at Casino Marino in Dublin. For more information about the Dublin City Council Bram Stoker Festival, please visit: bramstokerfestival.com
