Love at first bite

Legends cling to Bram Stoker’s life. One interesting cluster centres on his wife, Florence. She was judged, in her high years, a supreme London beauty. She preserved her Dresden perfection by denying her husband conjugal access.

Bram consoled himself with warmer but more dangerous ladies of the night; such satisfactions came at greater cost than a few sovereigns. According to David J. Skal, a quarter of men of Stoker’s bohemian class (including all of those central to his book) were infected with syphilis. And Bram? Skal thinks so too.

Florence Balcombe, when a young Dublin beauty, was courted by Oscar Wilde as well as Bram. Oscar she was not inclined to — because of his ‘curly teeth’ quite possibly. Stoker, a good looking ‘Red Irishman’, had winning gnashers, though how perfect is uncertain. Skal’s ominous opening sentence is: ‘There are no photographs of Bram Stoker smiling.’

The subject of Victorian teeth is a rich and relevant one. Skal expatiates on Oscar’s set. The mercury he took for his syphilis (probably) turned his ivories ‘black’. Others described them as merely ‘greenish’. The standard whitener, ‘a caustic wash of nitric acid’, washed the enamel away, Skal tells us, leaving soft grey pulp.

Oscar habitually covered his teeth with a theatrical flourish of the hand — no smiling. By the end of his life, his teeth were ‘horribly decayed’, as André Gide recalled. He died with dentures. Stoker’s two immortal characters — Dracula and Arabella — the snake-fanged heroine of The Lair of the White Worm — have teeth to die for. Literally.

Stoker is immortal in literary terms for one thing only: he was the man who wrote (with unknown assistance, Skal tells us) Dracula. His tale of the Transylvanian vampire — the least welcome asylum seeker in English literature — was originally entitled The Un-Dead.