SOURCE: Haining, Peter. Bram Stoker: Midnight Tales, edited by Peter Haining. London: Peter Owen, 1990, 182 p.

In the following excerpt, which is constructed of introductions to Stoker's stories in Midnight Tales, Haining determines the possible sources of and inspiration for the stories in the collection.

There is no question that the most famous of Bram Stoker's stories to have been inspired by a candle-lit dinner amidst the Gothic splendour of the Beefsteak Room was Dracula. The famous novel was not, in fact, the result of eating too much crab as Stoker liked to fantasize. It developed from a conversation about the vampire tradition in Transylvania which Stoker had with an acknowledged expert on Romanian folklore named Arminius Vambery, a professor at the University of Budapest. Vambery, a much-travelled and widely respected scholar, had come, appropriately, to see Irving in The Dead Hand on the night of 30 April 1890 and was...