ABSTRACT
Published in 1902, The Mystery of the Sea is the first novel that Bram Stoker produced after the collapse of the Lyceum Company made the 55-year-old Stoker entirely dependent on his own talents. At this point Stoker, who had written sporadically whenever he could take time away from his responsibilities, first to the Irish Civil Service and later to Henry Irving and the Lyceum, became a fulltime writer. Frequently pressed for money, Stoker experimented with most of the popular genres of his day, as Andrew Maunder and David Glover demonstrate. Eager to argue against those who see him only as a Gothic writer, Maunder points to ‘Stoker’s diversity as a writer in terms of genre, form and subject matter’ (9) and describes him as ‘indelibly linked to the popular fictional genres of the latenineteenth and early-twentieth centuries’ (9). Similarly Glover notes that his own study reads Stoker ‘as he most wanted to be read, as a popular writer’ (6). Given the fact that the nineteenth century was, as Grace Moore comments in the introduction to this collection, ‘the great age of the literary pirate’, and that Stoker also grew up on the coast, it is not surprising that he would write at least one novel that touches on a figure who appeared in popular literature during the nineteenth century, the romantic figure of the pirate. What is interesting to me, however, and what this chapter addresses is the way that Stoker refocuses his youthful interest in a romantic figure from the past to address contemporary social issues – including the state’s responsibility to its citizens and the balance of world power at a time when, because of industrialism and imperialism, important changes were taking place throughout the world. As a result, The Mystery of the Sea is not just Stoker’s experiment with a popular form but a work that uses the romantic figure of the pirate for social commentary.
