Whitby: The unassuming ‘Goth capital of Britain’

Patrick Argent recounts the seaport’s unique relationship with the world-famous fictional vampire.

Whitby’s formidable literature connections that notably include Caedmon, Stoker, Charles Dickens, Lewis Carroll, George du Maurier and Elisabeth Gaskell, have always greatly outweighed its comparatively small size and somewhat isolated coastal location.

Of these names, the Irish writer Bram (short for Abraham) Stoker (1847-1912), would inadvertently create an enduring and widely adapted phenomenon that would be subsumed into a vibrant subculture, highlighted by Whitby’s visiting Goth aficionados over the past three decades.

One of Dublin’s numerous illustrious literary figures, Stoker was a former civil servant who became both the personal assistant to the famous actor Sir Henry Irving and the business manager of the successful Lyceum Theatre in London, which Irving owned.

Stoker’s fateful holiday visit to Whitby in the summer of 1890, would culminate in not only forming part of the setting of his Gothic magnus opus, but through Stoker’s research in the town, would crystalise the very name of the key protagonist.

Searching in the town’s Library Stoker discovered the Whitby Literary and Philosophical Society’s archive where he found two unrelated books, the latter of which would have a particular significance.

‘A Glossary of Words from The Neighbourhood of Whitby’ by F.K. Robinson saw Stoker note that ‘Barguests’ or ‘Boh-ghosts’ are ‘terrifying apparitions, taking shape human or animal’.

Secondly, the formally titled ‘An Account of the Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia by William Wilkinson’ where, on page 19, he recorded that the word ‘Dracula’ in the Wallachian language means Devil.

Stoker’s vampire would prove to have been originated in Whitby.

Initially published in 1897, comprising of a series of letters, diary entries, eyewitness reports and technical notes from doctors and scientists, Stoker’s lurid and sexually provocative vampiric tale recounts the central character’s relentless and literal, bloodthirsty pursuit of his victims.

The three chapters set in Whitby provide a broodingly atmospheric setting for the arrival of Dracula in England via the dramatic re-enactment of a real event.

In October 1885, the Russian schooner Dmitry sailing from Varna, had been skilfully steered through the two piers by her captain, coming ashore in the outer harbour during a raging storm.

Reimagined in the novel as Demeter, also a schooner from Varna, the captain becomes a corpse lashed to the ship’s wheel and the original ballast now accompanied by an unusual cargo of ‘50 great wooden boxes filled

with mould’, the physics-defying vampire leaping ashore in the form of a great dog.

Notably, Stoker’s evocative and detailed descriptions of the East Cliff and St. Mary’s churchyard offer a tangible sense of time and place in the narrative.

Uniquely, this newspaper The Whitby Gazette (founded in 1854 and subsequently published as a twice-weekly formal newspaper in 1858) is fittingly mentioned within the text, a factor that further emphasises the author’s extensive research and authenticity of the setting, imbued with ample local knowledge.

Concluding the Whitby chapters, the author has Dracula covertly departing Whitby for London via the town’s railway station in one of his aforementioned wooden boxes.

In his foreword to ‘Goths In Whitby’ - The Photographs of Mark Lamb’, the eminent cultural historian Professor Sir Christopher Frayling, pointedly argues that the origins of the Goth look derive from an unexpected source.

“In my view (and that of one or two specialist commentators), if there is one moment when the latter-day Goth aesthetic, and attitude, was born, it was not on the page or on the turntable; it was at the Victoria & Albert Museum’s Aubrey Beardsley exhibition in the summer of 1966.

“The fashionable pallor, the kohl eyeliner and dark lips, the black-fringed hair, the velvet textures, the silver jewellery and jet beads, the Eastern-influence kaftans and headbands sometimes with cabbalistic symbols on them, the gender ambiguity - it was all there if you looked hard enough”.

Professor Frayling continued: “Elsewhere in the Victoria & Albert Museum, there were early photographs of Queen Victoria, always seen in public in mourning dress after the death of her beloved Prince Albert in 1861 – a

fashion statement which stimulated the Whitby-based trade in jet-black jewellery no end: the Victorian cult of mourning which was to become an element in Goth bricolage”.

This would be substantially reinvigorated by the late 1970’s/early 1980’s punk rock/post-punk origins of the imagery and especially by the influence of Siouxsie Sioux, the strikingly visual lead singer of Siouxsie & The Banshees and associated bands such as The Cure, Bauhaus, The Danse Society etc. of that era.

Synonymous with this very distinct music genre, and galvanised by such bands, the idiosyncratic and tribalistic Goth faction and its associated monochromatic and exotic visual manner, has significantly outlived most of its subculture contemporaries.

The essential zeitgeist of Goth still lives on.

Portrayed in numerous film versions as Nosferatu, by Bela Lugosi, and most famously via Hammer Films, with Christopher Lee and subsequent others, the figure of Dracula has attained a particular timeless cult status within both cinematic history and that of wider popular culture.

A Victorian supernatural novel, a remote North Yorkshire seaport town and a post-punk sub-culture would seemingly form the unlikeliest of combinations.

The legacy of which, theatrically paraded twice-annually in the streets of the town, it can be arguably stated that it has successfully capitalised on its primary connections with Stoker’s irrepressible vampire tale.

Through festival founder Jo Hampshire since 1994, Whitby has firmly established an eccentric alter-ego as the veritable ‘Goth Capital of Britain’.

The Whitby Goth Weekend festival runs from April 24-27, and later in the year from October 30 - November 2, Details of which can be found at whitbygothweekend.co.uk.

Professor Sir Christopher Frayling appears at the Big Ideas By The Sea festival in Scarborough at St. Mary’s Church on Saturday May 24.

Details and tickets are available from the festival website at bigideasbythesea.com.