| Charlotte Stoker | |
| Birth Name: | Charlotte Matilda Blake Thornley |
| Birth Date: | 1818 |
| Birth Place: | Sligo, Ireland |
| Burial Place: | St. Michan's Church, Dublin, Ireland |
Charlotte Matilda Blake Thornley Stoker (1818–1901) was an Irish writer, activist and the mother of Bram Stoker.[1] Stoker used some of the stories she told him in his literature.[2]
Charlotte Thornley's father was Anglo-Irish Captain Thomas Thornley of the 43rd Light Infantry. He had fought in France against Napoleon's army. After returning to Ireland, Captain Thornley enlisted in the Irish Constabulary. His ancestors traced their roots to 1584, with ancestors in Derbyshire who emigrated to Ballyshannon in the 1780s, mostly working as yeomen. Her ethnic Irish mother, Matilda Blake, was one of twelve children. Her ancestors were politically active, including sheriffs and mayors.[3]
Charlotte Matilda Blake Thornley was born in Sligo in 1818. She was Thomas and Matilda's eldest child and was followed by two brothers.
Her father was a policeman, and they lived on Castle Street (now Teeling Street), near the police barracks. In 1832, she was living in Sligo during a cholera epidemic. Two weeks into the epidemic, they fled to stay with relatives in Ballyshannon, returning when the epidemic resolved. When her family escaped, it impacted the rest of her life. In 1873, she recorded her experiences in Experiences of the Cholera in Ireland. Bram Stoker incorporated some of her stories about the epidemic into his literature, such as "The Invisible Giant" in Under the Sunset.[4] Marion McGarry proposes that her description of the epidemic also inspired Dracula.
In 1844, Charlotte Thornely married Abraham Stoker, a civil servant, who was twenty years her senior. They lived together in Dublin, later moving to Clontarf.[5] They had seven children together: William Thornley, Matilda, Abraham, Thomas, Richard, Margaret, and George.[6] Charlotte, though untutored, provided their early education.
When her youngest child, George, turned eight, Stoker began her activist work for women, the poor, and the disabled. She belonged to the Statistical and Social Inquiry Society of Ireland. Seeing the harsh workhouse conditions and speaking with women who wanted to be more than servants in poor households, she reported her findings to Dublin newspapers. She recommended that women in workhouses be taught cooking and framework so they could emigrate to English colonies, to "new countries [where] there is a dignity in labor, and a self-supporting woman is alike respected and respectable."
In May 1863, Stoker supported the establishment of state schools for deaf-mute children. Her speech supporting the school was heard by William Wilde.
Charlotte and Abraham had taken on considerable debt due to educating their sons.[7] To survive on Abraham's pension more comfortably, they moved, with their two daughters, to France in 1872. They later moved to Italy, where Abraham died.
In 1885, Stoker returned to Dublin, where many of her children lived. At the end of her life, as Charlotte's eyesight failed, she feared going blind and hoped to die first.
Accounts of Charlotte Stoker's date of death and place of burial vary. Some claim 1901, while others 1902. She was either buried at Mount Jerome Cemetery or Saint Michan's.[8]