Foreword
Bram Stoker is best known, of course, as the author of Dracula, published in 1897 to glowing reviews, though it was not at first, a bestseller. The novel has since become iconic, the foundation of the vampire genre, one could argue, because vampires in general, and Count Dracula in particular, seemed perfectly suited to movies, of which there have been hundreds.
The same might be said for Stoker’s other great novel of gothic horror, The Jewel of Seven Stars, upon which you are about to embark. Though only mildly successful in its day, this novel, too, lent itself perfectly to film and has been adapted a number of times for movies and television. In Jewel, it is the mummified Egyptian Queen Tera rather than Count Dracula who rises from a grave to seek power and continued life, and it is a different group of people who abet that reanimation. But like Dracula, The Jewel of Seven Stars is cinematic in setting, characters, and plot.
Jewel is part of what has been styled Egyptian Gothic. The mummified ancient Queen Tera has been brought to England for an unwrapping and potential return to life, with plenty of ancillary supernatural help from ancient Egyptian artifacts surrounding the queen to make that happen.
Just as in Dracula, there are any number of standard Gothic tropes in The Jewel of Seven Stars, including a dark and foreboding clifftop mansion that looks out over the angry sea where waves crash against the rocks below. Indeed, the climax of the story takes place during a dark and stormy night when the lights go out at just the right moment and our hero and first-person narrator, young lawyer Malcolm Ross, finds himself enlisted in saving the life of the woman he loves, Margaret Trelawney, daughter of the Egyptologist and adventurer Abel Trelawney. Perhaps Malcolm succeeds. Or perhaps he doesn’t, as you will see.
Abraham “Bram” Stoker was born in Clontarf, a village that is part of larger Dublin, Ireland, in 1847. Sickly as a child, he didn’t stand or walk until he was seven years old. By the time he was a student at Trinity College-Dublin, however, he’d overcome those childhood infirmities and was an outstanding soccer and rugby player. His degree from Trinity was in mathematics, and after graduation he worked in the civil service in Dublin Castle, the seat of government in nineteenth-century Dublin, when Ireland was a restive but firm part of the British Empire.
It was during his time in the civil service that he became an unpaid drama critic for local newspapers, and it was in that role that he met and admired the celebrated Sir Henry Irving, an actor and stage manager. Stoker worked for Irving until the actor’s death in 1905.
Irving hired Stoker to be his personal manager, helping run the Lyceum Theatre in London that Irving had purchased and accompanying Irving on his tours to America and elsewhere. It is generally thought that Irving’s mannerisms and appearance were the inspiration for Stoker’s Count Dracula. It is also thought that much of Stoker’s more melodramatic passages in his novels, especially in Dracula and The Jewel of Seven Stars, emerge from his stage work with Irving.
Stoker’s career writing fiction began with shorter works published in Irish newspapers and magazines, and his first true novel was The Snake’s Pass in 1890. Set in the bleak but dramatic scenery of the West of Ireland, the novel details the battle between St. Patrick and the King of the Snakes. Two more novels followed, The Watter’s Mou’ and The Shoulder of Shasta, the latter set in California after one of Stoker’s tours there with Sir Henry Irving.
Then, in 1897, his masterpiece, Dracula, was published to good reviews and became, ultimately, one of the most important gothic novels of the entire genre. The novel made vampirism a popular topic in books and films right up to today.
The Jewel of Seven Stars, published six years later, was not as widely praised in its day as Dracula had been; but like Dracula, it lent itself to film and, like its predecessor, it has had its own kind of rising from the grave as the source of a number of movies, including Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb (1971), The Awakening (1980), The Tomb (1986), and Bram Stoker’s Legend of the Mummy (1998).
For the modern reader to fully appreciate The Jewel of Seven Stars, it is useful to put the story into context, to read it as a reader might have in England in the first decade of the new twentieth century. The British Empire was at its height those days, controlling through its colonies or protectorates about one-fourth of the world’s population and territory. It was the largest empire in history, and it was England’s ships that made that possible, either carrying trade goods or as part of the Royal Navy.
From 1882 to 1922, the British Empire included Egypt, which the British effectively ruled through what was known as the Veiled Protectorate. The Empire depended on the Suez Canal (completed by the French in 1869) as a shortcut to its Asian colonies, so when Egypt fell into political turmoil, the British took advantage of that turmoil to invade Egypt and secure the Canal. That task completed, the British then extended their military and political control throughout the rest of the country. Though Egypt was nominally under the control of Khedive Tewfiq and his successors, it was British administrators who “advised” Egypt’s government and it was the British military who occupied the country.
This British occupation brought enough calm to the country that British (and other European) adventurers were free to explore Egypt in search of archaeological treasures. This freedom for British explorers to search, and some might say plunder, the great treasures of Egypt’s history lies at the heart of The Jewel of Seven Stars. It was those archaeological treasures, and the adventuring explorers (like Jewel’s fictional Abel Trelawney) who found them and brought them home to England, that led to the popularization of those adventurers in the newspapers, magazines, and books of the day back home in England, where many of their acquisitions remained in private hands. This acquisitive nature on the part of the Empire also lies at the heart of The Jewel of Seven Stars. The stories of great treasures buried in hidden caves or locked in the depths of large pyramids were of enormous interest to British readers. It was part of Bram Stoker’s genius to blend the existing gothic motifs of the supernatural, motifs that had been exciting readers since Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto in 1764 and Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho, in 1794, with elements tied firmly to Ancient Egypt and the deep interest in Egyptology on the part of the British public.
Taking advantage of the information so readily available on Egypt’s wonders, and taking advantage of the public’s interest in such things, Stoker published The Jewel of Seven Stars in 1903, clearly hoping to return to the gothic motifs that had brought him such critical success in Dracula. In both novels there is a pervasive sense of supernatural dread; in both there is a young woman facing great danger from that supernatural being; and in both there is a talented young lawyer who is determined to save the young woman from her fate. And in both the setting incorporates the Old World of strange and supernatural artifacts and beings and moves those beings to the New World of modern England, the center of the Empire.
One of the most interesting things for the modern reader is the ending, or endings, of The Jewel of the Seven Stars. Happily, this fine edition of the book holds both. The original ending is somewhat obscure, but Queen Tera seems to have found success in returning to life; but at the expense of the lives of some of the intrepid explorers who helped her return. In the 1912 edition, revised by Stoker and published in 1912, the ending is clear as a bell and quite uplifting, with less death and more happiness.
Also, in the 1912 edition, Stoker removed Chapter 16. As you will see (the chapter is included in this edition), the chapter questions which gods might be better, the old gods of Ancient Egypt or the new gods worshiped in then-modern Britain. These religious questions were troublesome, perhaps, to the readers of the day.
This fine edition of The Jewel of Seven Stars has been edited by Deborah Kevin, as part of her work toward the MA in Creative Writing/Publishing at Western Colorado University. This innovative Publishing MA was created by Concentration Director Professor Kevin J. Anderson, best-selling writer and editor, and publisher of WordFire Press.
—Dr. Rick Wilber
Visiting Assistant Professor of Creative Writing
Genre Fiction Thesis Coordinator, Genre Fiction Concentration
Western Colorado University
January 2021