Dracula could put £1m bite on an eager bidder

BRAM Stoker’s original manuscript copy of Dracula, partly written in Scotland and claimed by some as the greatest horror story ever written, could fetch more than £1 million at auction.

The long-lost 529-page script - with a different ending as well as extensive scrawled revisions and deletions by Stoker - bears the Irish author’s hand-lettered titled page: The Un-Dead.

It was only days before publication in 1897 that the title was simplified to the memorable name of its main character, the blood-sucking Transylvanian count who left his ancestral castle for a taste of British blood.

The unique copy of the book, which took seven years to complete, reveals that Stoker deleted 102 pages in late stages of editing.

Heavily amended in ink, the typescript also contains an ending never seen by generations of readers - a graphic description of the destruction of Castle Dracula in a sudden volcanic cataclysm.

The scene was deleted from the final version, possibly because author or publishers were considering a sequel in which the count somehow returns from the grave.

The first edition Dracula had a print run of 3,000 copies priced at six shillings (30p) each, with Stoker receiving a royalty of one and sixpence (7.5p) per copy after the first 1,000 were sold. In the event, the book went on to become a fantastic success. It has been translated into 44 languages, millions of copies have been produced as well as innumerable published studies of the work, and Dracula has become the most filmed character after Sherlock Holmes.

The whereabouts of the script remained a mystery until 1980 when it turned up in New England. Four years later it was acquired by the current owner, an American collector of 19th century literature.

Christie’s in New York have given the manuscript an estimate of $1million - $1.5 million when it goes under the hammer on April 17.

Francis Wahlgren, head of the book department at Christie’s, New York, however, believes it could fetch much more - perhaps $2 million.

He said yesterday: "It is highly unusual for the manuscript of a major work of fiction to be entirely lost from sight for almost a century. But in the case of the original typescript of Dracula, the very existence of which was not suspected until its discovery in 1980, such a sudden re-emergence seems appropriate, as if mirroring the mysterious disappearances and reappearances of Count Dracula in Stoker’s classic horror novel.

"Today, well over a century since it was first published, Dracula continues to assert a compelling hold on popular imagination."

Abraham Stoker, born in Dublin in 1847, moved to London in 1877 and began writing Dracula in 1890, possibly inspired by a nightmare mentioned in his notebooks which are kept in the Rosenbach Museum, Philadelphia.

The author derived material from sources such as Legends of the Wallachian Prince Vlad the Impaler, Faust and early vampire stories. He wrote it at his home in Chelsea, west London, and Cruden Bay, Scotland.