Bram Stoker’s dialects: nation, race, and speech in the early Irish fictions

ABSTRACT

In his early Irish novels, Bram Stoker uses Irish speech and Standard English to wrestle with Ireland’s precarious status in the United Kingdom. In The Primrose Path, Stoker distinguishes the speech of the Irish characters from the narrator’s Standard English, ultimately associating Standard English with the corrupting forces in London that doom the story’s protagonist. Contrarily, in The Snake’s Pass, Stoker ultimately imagines a joint Anglo-Irish Protestant rule that is enthusiastically accepted by the Irish Catholic residents, with Standard English literally overwriting local language. The curious and obscure tale “The Man from Shorrox’” offers a later, destabilised representation of England and Ireland, one in which the story’s Gothic doubling breaks down even the conventional attachment between spoken dialect and regional origin altogether.

KEYWORDS:

• Bram Stoker
• Irish literature
• dialect
• travel
• national tales

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Stoker, Personal Reminiscences of Henry Irving, 1:218.

2. Stoker, Personal Reminiscences, 1:218–19.

3. Stoker, Personal Reminiscences, 1:219.

4. Ibid.

5. Valente, Dracula’s Crypt, 40–41.

6. Ibid., 39.

7. The Irishness of these terms is easy to establish through searches of the HathiTrust collection or other databases of English texts from this period. Gertrude E. Johnson’s 1922 academic book Dialects for Oral Interpretation: Selections and Discussion offers comparative evidence as well. Johnson’s book – an American text that includes selections from British authors – contains seven sections of anthologised texts organised by ethnicity; the Irish section contains “gover’mint” (twice, on 181 and 212) and “iv” (more than two dozen times, pages 181 to 224), and neither term appears in texts of any other ethnicity that Johnson collects. The spelling of “gover’mint” may be especially interesting to contemporary readers who recognise the implied pronunciation of that word (with an elided “n” and the last vowel sliding to a short “i”) as Standard. However, John Walker’s Critical Pronouncing Dictionary confirms that the pronunciation would have departed from Walker’s Standardized English “guv-urn-ment” (235).

8. See note 6 above.

9. Stoker, Personal Reminiscences, 1:224.

10. Stoker, The Shoulder of Shasta, 20.

11. Valente, Dracula’s Crypt, 37.

12. Maunder, Bram Stoker, 43.

13. The Shamrock, 312.

14. Stoker, The Primrose Path, 315, italics original.

15. Stoker, The Primrose Path, 346 (italics original – as is the spelling, or misspelling, of “weirasthrue” that departs from the more conventional version Stoker uses for Jerry’s mother’s speech) and 364.

16. Sorensen, Strange Vernaculars, 174.

17. Overfelt, Dialogue and ‘Dialect’, 30.

18. Stoker, The Primrose Path, 290.

19. Ibid., 290.

20. Iid., 314.

21. Sheridan, Course of Lectures on Elocution, 38.

22. Ibid., 261.

23. Sorensen, Strange Vernaculars, 176.

24. Ferguson, “Nonstandard Language,” 229.

25. Buchelt, footnotes to Snake’s Pass, 10.

26. Stoker, Snake’s Pass, 10.

27. Ibid., 11.

28. Walker’s pronouncing dictionary confirms “on-nur” as long-established Standard English (255).

29. Stoker, Snake’s Pass, 31.

30. Ibid., 39.

31. Ibid., 79.

32. “New Fiction,” 206, qtd. in Stoker, Snake’s Pass, 269.

33. “Novels of the Week,” 850, qtd. in Stoker, Snake’s Pass, 268. Giving Norah the ability to write elegant English as well as speak it might have taken the implausibility too far, but Stoker sidesteps that potential problem by doubly filtering a letter she writes through English voices; her prose is paraphrased by Dick to Arthur, who then summarises it for the reader (198).

34. Stoker, Snake’s Pass, 101.

35. Hughes, “For Ireland’s Good,” 288.

36. Ibid., 247.

37. Ibid., 210.

38. Ibid., 225.

39. Ibid., 257 and 260.

40. Ibid., 106.

41. Glover, Vampires, Mummies, and Liberals, 45.

42. Stoker, Snake’s Pass, 77.

43. Painter, History of White People, 130.

44. Daly, Modernism, 80.

45. Stoker, Snake’s Pass, 252.

46. Ibid., 256.

47. Ibid., 256 and 237.

48. See note 46 above.

49. Stoker, Snake’s Pass, 29, 251.

50. Stoker, “The Man from Shorrox,” 657.

51. Ibid.

52. Ibid.

53. Ibid.

54. Ibid.

55. The difference between these forms is striking. “Throth” (meaning “truth” or “truly”) was a standard component of written Irish dialect when Stoker wrote. For example, it appears 17 times in Dick’s Irish Dialect Recitations of 1879 and 89 times in Samuel Lover’s Legends and Stories of Ireland. “Trooth” is much rarer; it does not appear in either of those texts (or others we have searched), and it seems to be a simple piece of eye-dialect.

56. We have found connections to Manchester-area cotton manufacture with the names of “Shorrock” and “Shorrocks.” In 1852, The Jurist includes among a list of insolvent debtors one “Charles Shorrocks, Manchester, sewing cotton manufacturer” and then refers to the same figure as being ordered to come before a judge (254, 271). In 1875, Capital and Labour documents the transfer of the cotton firm of “Messrs. Eccles Shorrock Brother & Co.,” whose subscribers include Eccles Shorrock, Joseph Shorrock, and Ralph Shorrock Ashtos, and which was located northwest of Manchester in Over Darwen, which later became Darwen (127). Later, The Manchester, Cotton District, and General Lancashire Commercial List records another cotton firm, Christopher Shorrock and Co., operating near Darwen (21).

57. See note 50 above.

58. Ibid., 659–60.

59. Stoker, “The Man from Shorrox,” 657. The narrator’s confusion about his own former location is compounded by his description of Irish political geography. The phrasing implies that Cromwell gave his name to some or all of Kilkenny, King’s, and Queen’s Counties, all of which were named well before the lifetime of Oliver Cromwell, generally the default Cromwell of Irish historical wrongs. The naming of King’s and Queen’s Counties (now Counties Offaly and Laois, respectively) does fit the narrator’s description to some degree; they were named as part of the Tudor effort to Anglicise and pacify the region in 1556. That timing brings us close to the influence of Thomas Cromwell as chief minister to Henry VIII, but that Cromwell was executed in 1540. We therefore surmise that the narrator’s phrasing evokes a range of English administrations and their real, historical attacks on Irish place names, land ownership, and culture. The narrator’s loose grip on the details of those attacks prefigures the mob’s mistaken killing of Mickey Byrne; there, too, well-founded resentments have trouble attaching to the correct personal agent.

60. Stoker, “The Man from Shorrox,” 662.

61. Ibid., 665–66.

62. Ibid., 666.

63. Ibid

64. Ibid., 657.

65. Ibid., 659.

66. Newman, “Bram Stoker’s Ireland,” 32.

67. Stoker, “The Man from Shorrox,” 669.

68. Terry Hale points out that “The Man from Shorrox’” “hinges on a traveller’s rights in common law to accommodation at an inn” (Hale, “Bram Stoker, Dracula, and the English Common Law,” 16). Given the real and potential violence driving the story, Hale’s insight further illuminates the importance of those kinds of public environments for housing the English-Irish interactions at the heart of all three of these narratives. The common law requires the violence to be delayed long enough for such interactions to develop.