Christopher Frayling, born in 1946, is a British cultural historian whose career has moved between universities, public bodies and television. He read history at Churchill College, Cambridge, taught at the University of Bath, and in 1979 became Professor of Cultural History at the Royal College of Art. He was the College's Rector from 1996 to 2009, and has also chaired the Design Council and Arts Council England. He was knighted for services to art and design education.
His subject is popular culture, treated as seriously as any other kind of history: where monsters, gunfighters and screen villains come from, and what they reveal about the societies that invented them. That interest runs through Sergio Leone: Something to Do with Death, the first biography of the Italian director, and through The Yellow Peril, which follows Dr Fu Manchu and the rise of Chinophobia. On television he presented Nightmare: The Birth of Victorian Horror for the BBC in 1996. For the Dracula episode he followed Jonathan Harker's route across Europe to the castle.
His best-known book on the Gothic is Vampyres: Lord Byron to Count Dracula, an anthology with commentary that first appeared in 1978. It reprints a wide range of vampire writing, including Stoker's own research notes for Dracula. Thames & Hudson has since issued a revised and expanded edition that reaches into twenty-first-century vampire fiction.
On WebToTell he is the preface writer for the Penguin Classics Dracula, which Maurice Hindle edited, introduced and annotated. Read Stoker's novel first, with Frayling's preface as a way in. If the book leaves you curious about what Stoker inherited, Vampyres is the natural next step.
