The Man Who Was Jekyll and Hyde (2 page)

This powerful block of furniture appeared not just in his reality but also in his dreams, even later in life; it is often claimed to have inspired him to write at least two of his creations: first, a play entitled
Deacon Brodie or the Double Life
(co-written with his occasional collaborator W.E. Henley) that was presented to lukewarm receptions on stage in New York and London, where George Bernard Shaw called it ‘childish and unbelievable’, but second, and more importantly, his allegorical novella
Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
that horrifically highlights the good and bad sides of a respectable person. This not only became an instant bestseller but also lent its title to everyday use in the English language: anyone showing contrasting personality traits is a ‘Jekyll and Hyde’ character. It seemed to touch a nerve in a moment of sociological identity crisis, while the strict mores of Victorian respectability were being challenged by a wave of technological change.

‘I want to write about a fellow who was two fellows,’ the author asserted to friends early in his career. So he spent many years seeking an effective story to play with the idea that even good people were capable of heinous behaviour, or, as he later put it himself: ‘I had long been trying to find a body, a vehicle, for that strong sense of man’s double being which must at times come in upon and overwhelm the mind of every thinking creature.’ There is little doubt that, for him, the Brodie theatrical creation was a big step towards ‘finding’ Jekyll as the holy grail.

Stevenson’s stepson Lloyd Osbourne wrote:

I don’t believe that there was ever such a literary feat before as the writing of
Dr Jekyll …
Louis came downstairs in a fever; read nearly half the book aloud; and then, while we were still gasping, he was away again, and busy writing. I doubt if the first draft took so long as three days.

The good doctor’s birth might have been an easier creative development than the constantly revised and reconceived Brodie play, but it was still a harsh experience. The pangs started in the author’s Bournemouth health retreat in the autumn of 1885, when his American wife Fanny was alarmed at his moaning and thrashing about in bed in the small hours. She recalled: ‘I was awakened by cries of horror from Louis. Thinking he had a nightmare, I awakened him. He said angrily: “Why did you wake me? I was dreaming a fine bogey tale.” I had awakened him at the first transformation scene.’

He nonetheless managed to salvage many scenes from this nightmare to form the basis for the novella that has since become iconic, still a best-seller today and adapted to many feature films and countless stage plays. After it was written ‘in a fever’, there was more drama between the couple when he read the ‘finished’ story out loud to Fanny – who then suggested that he’d got it wrong, that it should have been more allegorical. He flew into another rage, threw the manuscript on the fire and ran out of the room. An hour later he was back, shouting, ‘You were right, you were right!’ – and immediately began scribbling again, completing a second version in another three frantic days, fuelled – some say – by drugs essentially meant for his lung condition.

What had been the problem? ‘In the first draft’, according to Stevenson’s cousin Graham Balfour, in his
The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson
(1901), ‘Jekyll’s nature was bad all through and the Hyde change was worked only as a disguise.’

It was a lesson the author obviously took to heart, for in a subsequent reworking of the Brodie play he expressed his concern ‘not to make Brodie pure evil’. He was certainly getting the hang of this split-personality theme that emerged again and again in his life and work. Some examples follow:

We have all our secret evil. Only mine has broken loose; it is my maniac brother who has slipped his chain.

(
Deacon Brodie
play, 1888, Act III speech)

Many a citizen was proud to welcome the Deacon to supper, and dismissed him with regret at a timeous hour, who would have been vastly disconcerted had he known how soon, and in what guise, his visitor returned.

(Robert Louis Stevenson on Deacon Brodie in
Edinburgh Picturesque Notes
)

I saw for the first time the appearance of Edward Hyde … When I looked upon that ugly idol in the glass, I was conscious of no repugnance, rather of a leap of welcome. This, too, was myself. It seemed natural and human. In my eyes it bore a livelier image of the spirit, it seemed more express and single, than the imperfect and divided countenance I had been hitherto accustomed to call mine. And in so far I was doubtless right. I have observed that when I wore the semblance of Edward Hyde, none could come near to me at first without a visible misgiving of the flesh. This, as I take it, was because all human beings, as we meet them, are commingled out of good and evil …

(From ‘Henry Jekyll’s Full Statement of the Case’, chapter ten of
Strange Case of
Dr Jekyll And Mr Hyde
)

It was on the moral side, and in my own person, that I learned to recognise the thorough and primitive duality of man; I saw that, of the two natures that contended in the field of my consciousness, even if I could rightly be said to be either, it was only because I was radically both.

(From the same passage as above)

But the greater question about these works that has long been open to debate is: was his haunting by the Brodie story and the Brodie bedroom cabinet the essential inspirational root for Jekyll and Hyde? It is often assumed to be the case by Robert Louis Stevenson enthusiasts, but the Edinburgh place where the six-drawer cabinet is now accommodated – in the Writers’ Museum in Lady Stairs Close off the Lawnmarket, just opposite the one-time workshop of Deacon Brodie – seems to hedge its bets about that, while allowing it to be a prompter for the Brodie play. Mounted on the wall beside the exhibited curiosity, which can still send shivers running down a viewer’s spine, is a caption that reads:

Cabinet of mahogany veneer, one of only two known pieces of furniture made by William Brodie (1741–1788). Deacon of the Incorporation of Wrights and a member of the Town Council of Edinburgh, Brodie led a double life by becoming a burglar by night, a crime for which he was eventually hanged.

The cabinet was in Stevenson’s own room as a child, at 17 Heriot Row, and fuelled his imagination. Later, he collaborated with WE Henley in writing a play on Brodie’s life, in which the cabinet was featured thus:

‘And then, you know, there is the tall cabinet yonder; that it was that proved him the first of Edinburgh joiners, and worthy to be that Deacon and their head.’

(
Deacon Brodie or The Double Life
)

No mention here of Dr Jekyll, and some are not even convinced by the Brodie case. For others who can accept
some
influence, crediting the cabinet and its maker as the catalytic spark for the creation of Jekyll is definitely a step too far; they tend to reject this idea as overly convenient and romantic. But surely the best authority on what inspired the author to create Dr Jekyll would be the author himself, and here (just as the question is being addressed) comes a fortuitous development. A friend who has long been a student of Robert Louis Stevenson draws our attention to a yellowed, barely legible newspaper cutting he has just found in his garage during a house move. It contains the following words spoken by Stevenson to a
New York Herald
reporter asking him in 1887 about the genesis of Jekyll and Hyde:

EVOLVED IN DREAMS

Robert Louis Stevenson Describes How He Finds His Plots

Reporter: ‘There is a great difference of opinion as to what suggested your works, particularly the
Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
and
Deacon Brodie
.’

RLS: ‘Well, this has never been properly told. On one occasion I was very hard up for money and I felt that I had to do something. I thought and thought and tried hard to find a subject to write about. At night I dreamed the story, not precisely as it is written, for of course there are always stupidities in dreams, but practically it came to me as a gift, and what makes it appear more odd is that I am quite in the habit of dreaming stories. Thus, not long ago I dreamed the story of Olalla which appeared in my volume
The Merry Men
, and I have at the present moment two unwritten stories which I likewise dreamed.

‘The fact is that I am so much in the habit of making stories that I go on making them while asleep quite as hard, apparently, as when I am awake. They sometimes come to me in the form of nightmares, in so far that they make me cry out loud. But I am never deceived by them. Even when fast asleep I know that it is I who am inventing and when I cry out it is with gratification to know that the story is so good. So soon as I awake, and it always awakens me when I get to a good thing, I set to work and put it together.

‘For instance, all I dreamed about Jekyll was that one man was being pressed into a cabinet when he swallowed a drug and changed into another being. I awoke and said at once that I had found the missing link for which I had been looking for so long, and before I again went to sleep almost every detail of the story, as it stands, was clear to me. Of course, writing it was another thing.’

Reporter: ‘Deacon Brodie?’

‘I certainly didn’t dream that, but in the room in which I slept as a child in Edinburgh there was a cabinet – and a very pretty piece of work it was too – from the hands of the original Deacon Brodie. When I was about nineteen years of age I wrote a sort of hugger-mugger [confused] melodrama which laid by my coffer until it was fished out by my friend WE Henley. He thought he saw something in it and we started to work together, and after a desperate campaign we turned out the original drama of Deacon Brodie as performed in London and recently, I believe, successfully in this city.

‘We were both young men when we did that and I think we had an idea that bad-heartedness was strength. Now the piece has been all overhauled, and although I have no idea whether it will please an audience, I don’t think either Mr Henley or I are ashamed of it. We take it now for a good, honest melodrama not so very ill done.’

So where is the magic link between Mr Brodie and Mr Hyde? His mention of ‘a man being pressed into a cabinet’ is a pretty clear one. But there are several other clues to the relationship in the novel.

The respectable Dr Jekyll discovers that he is able to transform himself into Mr Hyde by means of a potion and so yield to his evil side – a world of self-serving pleasure and crime that includes murder. He later writes that, as the other half of his personality, Hyde steadily became the more dominant one – ever more powerful and uncontrollable.

In his real-life experience, something similar seemed to happen to William Brodie as he became – despite having some redeeming traits such as love for his families, some erudition, a sense of humour and a superficially charming way with people – totally possessed by his wicked other side.

The similarities between him and Stevenson’s fictional bad guy are often noticeable in the novel. At one point, for instance, Mr Utterson, the lawyer, comments: ‘This Master Hyde, if he were studied … must have secrets of his own; black secrets by the look of him; secrets compared to which poor Jekyll’s worst would be like sunshine … it turns me cold to think of this creature stealing like a thief.’

In his 1955 book
The Fabulous Originals
, Irving Wallace points out what he believes are more borrowings from Brodie’s life, such as: Hyde was once discovered in his laboratory disguised by a mask and Brodie often employed crepe masks in his double life; after the murder, Hyde had a song upon his lips as he compounded the draught, and Brodie had a song upon his lips on the eve of his greatest crime; Hyde dressed himself in black, as Brodie did – shedding his daytime white jacket and breeches – when morphing into his bad self and heading out on a robbery; Brodie used various houses, just as Jekyll and Hyde lived in various houses.

And where were the houses? There has long been a question mark over the Jekyll setting. It is supposed to be London, but Scots readers in particular tend to recognise that ‘the black old streets in which Hyde slinks on his evil path amidst carefully undescribed squalor and committing, for the most part, carefully unspecified sins, are Edinburgh streets’. So asserted author Moray McLaren in his 1950 centenary book
Stevenson and Edinburgh
, adding:

The heavily furnished, lamp-shaded interior of Dr Jekyll’s unostentatiously prosperous house is the inside of any well-to-do professional man’s home in the New Town of Edinburgh. The contrast is not so much between black evil and golden goodness as between dark dirt and gloomy respectability. The stage throughout is only half lit. It is an Edinburgh Winter’s Night tale.

***

That prosperous New Town house was familiar enough to Stevenson, as it was in such a home that he lived from the age of six to his university years. Today, the elegantly Georgian No. 17 Heriot Row, built in 1804, remains very much as he left it – minus the furniture he had taken to Samoa on moving there for his health in 1890 – and the current owners, John and Felicitas Macfie, are devoted not just to the building’s continuing welfare but to the idea that genuinely interested people can share it to some extent. While stressing that it is a private home and not a museum, they are relaxed about opening it up to bed-and-breakfast guests and special-occasion parties, and they kindly gave this writer a tour that included the very bedroom where Robert Louis Stevenson had those very dreams in full view of that very ‘inspirational’ cabinet.

It is a modest room, about 10ft by 20ft, with one square, cross-hatched window facing out on to the street. It is easy to picture the ‘two pillows at my head’ by that window and take in his view back into the room, where that cabinet – to the right of the door as he looked ahead – would have stood directly in front of him with a gap between it and the bed.

It is easy to imagine, too, how it would have occupied and dominated his waking moments as well as his dreams; how its big, brown bear-like silhouette might have ignited nightmares – which in turn would have prompted his flight to nursemaid Allison Cunningham (Cummy, as he knew her) in her back room with a view over to Fife, just a few steps along the adjoining corridor. That’s where she, and often his father Thomas – famed builder of remote Scottish lighthouses – would show their softer side, comforting the troubled boy and telling him romantic stories that would fire his fertile imagination in, we assume, a different way from the bad dreams.