Bram Stoker was born on 8 November 1847 in Dublin, the third of seven children of Charlotte Thornley Stoker and her civil-servant husband, Abraham Stoker; Stoker remained bedridden with an undiagnosed illness for the first eight years of his life. During that period, according to biographers Harry Ludlam and Daniel Farson, Charlotte told stories of the cholera epidemic that swept Ireland in 1832. Both Ludlam and Farson, Stokers grand- nephew, believe those stories influenced Stoker's adult fascination with terror.
Stoker's childhood illness, which had hysteria-like symptoms, may have led him to imagine the predicament he would later create for his vampire victims: a helpless malaise and paralysis similar to the author's early infirmity. As Stoker himself states in Personal Reminiscences of Henry Irving (1906), I was naturally thoughtful and the leisure of long illness gave opportunity for many thoughts which were fruitful according to their kind in later years. The novels fascination with medical phenomena may also have been nourished by Stoker's relationship to his two physician brothers, George and William.
Stoker entered Trinity College in Dublin at age seventeen in 1864.
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