Stoker's 'Dracula' manuscript expected to sell for £1m

Bram Stoker's original manuscript of Dracula is expected to fetch more than £1m when it goes up for sale today at Christie's in New York. The manuscript has been locked in a vault for nearly a century.

The 529-page script, with a different ending and extensive scrawled revisions and deletions by Stoker, bears the Irish author's hand-lettered title page, The Un-Dead. Just days before publication in 1897 the title was simplifed to the name of its main character, the blood-sucking Transylvanian count who swapped his remote ancestral castle to stalk London.

The first edition Dracula had a print run of 3,000 copies costing six shillings (30p) each, with Stoker receiving a royalty of one and sixpence (7.5p) per copy after 1,000 were sold. It has been translated into 44 languages and Dracula has become the most filmed character after Sherlock Holmes.

Stoker was born in Dublin in 1847 and moved to London when he was 30. He began writing the book in 1890 and it took him seven years to complete.