The second edition of Under the Sunset, published in the summer of 1882, underwent a radical change, with an increased total of forty-eight illustrations. Of these, twenty-eight had appeared in the first edition, five were redrawn, and fifteen were new. In this second edition, the definition of some plates is sharper, especially that for “The Castle of the King.”

By this time, Stoker had begun his long association with the actor Henry Irving at the Royal Lyceum Theatre in London. He served not only as Irving’s faithful and devoted “acting manager,” but also his most loyal friend, from December 1878 right up to the actor’s death in October 1905. Stoker had been one of Irving’s most ardent fans ever since first seeing him perform as Captain Absolute in The Rivals in 1867.

Ellen Terry, Irving’s most regular co-star at the Lyceum, praised Bram Stoker as “one of the most kind and tender-hearted of men. He filled a difficult position with great tact, and was not so universally abused as most business managers.”

In a 1902 encyclopedia, Stoker is described as

a strong, red Irishman; physically as hard as nails, with a keen eye, and a slightly ferocious expression, possessing, as the manager of a great theatre should, an overflowing amount of energy, and a forty-horse power of work. He accompanies and manages Sir Henry’s tours at home and abroad; supervises every detail, convoys the company across the Atlantic on one steamer while Sir Henry takes his passage on another, manages “the front” of the house, and stands like a buffer between the great actor and all worries inseparable from such a life as his.

In his position at the center of London’s social world, Stoker was ideally placed to submit articles and short stories to magazine editors who were all regular visitors to the Lyceum’s “Beefsteak Room.” One of these was the eminent drama critic Clement Scott, editor of the Theatre magazine during the 1880s, who commissioned a seasonal Christmas story from Stoker in October 1886 for the delectation of all their theatrical friends. The resulting tale, “The Dualitists; or, The Death Doom of the Double Born,” which probably ranks as his most horrifying story, was published by Scott in the Theatre Annual for 1887, and would undoubtedly have been read (if not enjoyed) by his large theatrical fraternity.

One line on the last page—“stakes driven through their middles to pin them down in their unhallowed graves till the Crack of Doom”—is a clear pointer to some of the ideas contained in Dracula ten years later.

Stoker continued to experiment with adult fantasy and horror in a series of very different atmospheric short stories for magazines and Christmas numbers, of which the four best examples all appeared during his most creative period (1890—94): “The Burial of the Rats,” “The Judge’s House” (Holly Leaves, December 5, 1891), “The Secret of the Growing Gold” (Black & White, January 23, 1892), and “The Squaw” (Holly Leaves, December 2, 1893); Holly Leaves was the name given to the Christmas numbers of the very popular British weekly Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News). These last two stories have an exceptionally Poe-like quality in their style. “The Squaw” developed from a visit made by Stoker to Nuremberg ten years earlier—as the narrator teasingly observes: “Nurnberg ... was not so much exploited as it has been since then. Irving had not been playing Faust, and the very name of the old town was hardly known to the great bulk of the travelling public.”