William Wilkinson

Serving as an English representative of the Levant Company, he was appointed to Bucharest in 1813 and worked in a period when British interests, local politics, and regional power struggles were closely tangled. He later sought a formal British consular post there, though that effort did not succeed.

His best-known work is An Account of the Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia (1820), a travel and political study of the region. The book has drawn lasting literary interest because it was one of the sources Bram Stoker consulted while preparing Dracula.

Later in his career he was posted to Syros, and he died in Paris on August 23, 1836. Although not widely remembered today, his writing remains a useful window into British views of eastern Europe in the early 1800s.