life
Charlotte Stoker
1818–1901
Charlotte Matilda Blake Thornley Stoker was Bram’s mother, a storyteller and a participant in the social debates of nineteenth-century Ireland. Her surviving writing gives her a voice of her own in the family’s history.
Remembering cholera in Sligo
As a girl, Charlotte experienced the 1832 cholera epidemic in Sligo. She later recorded the fear and suffering it brought to the town. Her account survives among the Stoker Family Papers at Trinity College Dublin. It offers important historical testimony, as well as a possible context for the atmosphere of disease and threatened life in Bram’s later fiction.
It is tempting to draw a direct line from every frightening family story to Dracula. The surviving account and its possible influence should be distinguished: Charlotte’s experience is documented; the precise ways it shaped Bram’s imagination remain a subject for interpretation.
Mother and reader
Charlotte followed Bram’s writing closely. Her surviving letter about Dracula connects the novel with one of its first family readers. Read the correspondence alongside the family inscriptions and later recollections: each preserves a different kind of evidence.
A continuing connection
The publication following the rediscovery of Gibbet Hill supported the Rotunda Foundation’s Charlotte Stoker Fund for research into preventing acquired deafness in vulnerable newborn babies.
The family memorial
The memorial at Mount Jerome records Charlotte’s death and remembers Abraham, who died and was buried in Italy. Its inscription also names Emily and Sir William Thornley Stoker.
Read the memorial inscription
In memory of
ABRAHAM STOKER
who died in Italy Oct 12 1876 Aged 77
and lies in Cava de Tirrini
CHARLOTTE M. B. STOKER his wife
who died in Dublin on March 15 1901
in her 83rd year and is buried here
Here also lies EMILY, the most beloved wife
of SIR WILLIAM THORNLEY STOKER
who died Nov 19 1910 aged 67 years
And the above
SIR WILLIAM THORNLEY STOKER, Bart.
who died 1st June 1912
aged 67
Explore further
Read about Abraham Coates Stoker and Bram’s siblings and child. For Charlotte’s surviving correspondence, see the image-by-image reading transcriptions; missing and uncertain text is marked rather than reconstructed.