Bram Stoker letter reveals how he felt about gothic masterpiece ‘Dracula’

A rare letter recently sold by a UK collector reveals Bram Stoker’s contemporaneous impressions of Dracula, his gothic horror masterpiece about a Transylvanian count with a taste for blood.

“Lord forgive me. I am quite shameless,” Stoker wrote to a recipient identified as “Williams” in 1897, just weeks after publishing the vampire legend.

The letter is “essentially one in a billion,” the seller told The Guardian; it reveals Stoker’s playful side, and perhaps a hint of pride in his book’s “dark theatricality.”

Few of Stoker’s letters have been preserved, and those directly referencing Dracula are “rarer than seeing a vampire in daylight.”