The Man Who Was Jekyll and Hyde (3 page)

Indeed, there was much comfort and beauty there for him – not least in the drawing room with its Victorian furnishing, grand piano and three tall windows looking out over the site of that famous gas lamp, whose human lighter inspired him to write the words:

For we are very lucky, with a lamp before the door,

And Leerie stops to light it as he lights so many more;

And O! before you hurry by with ladder and with light,

O Leerie, see a little child and nod to him tonight!

It was here, in this room, that his literary talent was first recognised – by one of his mother’s friends. His mother, Margaret, ‘had been ridiculing him in the way that mothers of teenage boys do, in their exasperation,’ says John Macfie, ‘when Robert appeared – having overheard it – and protested: “I’m not as bad as you’re painting me!” He was then persuaded to read out one of his poems to his mother’s friend, the wife of a London university professor, who was visiting, and she was so impressed that she introduced RLS and his work to various London literary circles. That was the start of his becoming known outside his home.’

And he sensed there was much more to be experienced beyond that front-door lamp. Gradually, he grew away from the ever-so-Presbyterian Cummy and, when he got off to university, ‘he felt then free to keep bad company’. How bad was it? ‘Pretty bad,’ says Macfie, a lawyer in his day job, with six children ranging from 22 to 7 years old. ‘He relished the dark and the light; loved picturing himself – this rebellious teenager – sitting in a brothel parlour by the stove, with long hair and a red velvet jacket, writing bad poetry and being mothered by the girls.’

The source of this revelation? The man himself. He admitted in his letters that he kept ‘very mixed company’ that would be regularly renewed by the actions of the police and magistrates. It got to the stage that, addressing a friend, he volubly appreciated his elegant home not for its beauty or comfort but for the fact that its stairs up to his bedroom were made of stone rather than wood; so that when he came home in the dead of night, there would be no creaking to be heard.

When Stevenson escaped from his
douce
middle-class life into the murky, sexy Old Town underworld, it was, of course, that split-personality syndrome rising to the surface as it would repeatedly for the rest of his life – and as it surely did, even more dramatically, with Deacon Brodie. ‘I think what RLS was going through was similar to that which had gripped Brodie,’ says John Macfie. ‘It was the adrenalin rush of being bad – of maybe being caught, maybe not. It was exciting for him – for them – to get ever-nearer to the edge.’

Indeed, he almost saw the other side of that coin as sinful in its own way. The sins he attributed to Jekyll were the essential Edinburgh ones of secrecy and puritanism that governed his youth, and – like many other socially inhibited people of that time and place – the author was tempted every so often to reject it. His consequent bad behaviour is quite widely acknowledged by writers and students of his life and work. Examples? The Edinburgh crime writer Ian Rankin wrote, ‘As a teenager, he would tiptoe from the family home at dead of night and make his way to the more anarchic and seamy Old Town where drunks cavorted with harlots and a man could let his hair down.’ This is echoed by the Boston College ‘horror professor’ Raymond McNally, who said RLS defied ‘the staid British Victorian traits of propriety and piety by engaging in his own secret life of narcotics, alcohol and sexual decadence’, adding: ‘He was overtly respectable but loved to frequent – in his words – the whores and thieves in the lower part of town.’

His wanderings into the dark side were not like Hyde’s joyless lust for evil, however; they were powered by bohemian romanticism verging on fantasy. And the ghost of Deacon Brodie would have been ever-present here for him too, walking at his shoulder in smirking silence, risen from the living man’s recall of long Old Town walks with Cummy in his childhood ‘where he could still see the narrow, alley-like sidestreet that was Brodie’s Close, and the court and mansion, with its elaborate oaken door, where Brodie and his sister had entertained Scottish gentry’.

Here society’s contrasts were tightly focused – especially before the advent of the population-splitting New Town in the mid-eighteenth century – where rich and poor, good and evil had long lived alongside each other around that narrow ridge of rock on which most of the city’s history had been played out. The human capacity for these differences to be contained within individual hypocritical personalities simply fascinated Robert Louis Stevenson. In his mind they were all dramatically personified in Brodie, who strutted these streets by day – with a fancy walking stick for effect – and lurked within its shadowy closes by night, clutching a dark lantern under a black cloak.

The closes were the narrow alleys that separated the towering buildings known in these days as ‘lands’, where some floors were so unreachably sky-high – up to twelve levels – that older folk became marooned, with only more youthful, helpful others to depend on for provisions of water, food and coal. ‘It was at one point the worst housing in Europe,’ comments John Macfie.

***

But do we have a straight lineage from Brodie to Jekyll/Hyde? A particular strand tends to be drawn on – often by zealous student observers – to claim the idea of a direct literary inspiration. But surely most writers themselves will shy from crediting this or that spark as an immediate prompting for any idea, believing more in an amalgam of influences. In the case of Stevenson’s
Treasure Island
, for instance, a variety of prompters are put forward for the island model: a map he spontaneously drew to entertain his stepson Lloyd in the late Miss MacGregor’s cottage in Braemar, ‘with the rain hammering against the window’; his regular views of the seabird-whitened islet of Fidra off the shore of North Berwick; and those of another muddy, nameless islet he knew in the fast-flowing Allanwater near the cave that ‘inspired’ his home for Ben Gunn. Talking of which, in the actual town of Bridge of Allan where he spent many a family holiday, there was (and still is) a chemist’s shop he frequented, where the hunched apothecary is said to have given him a model for Hyde.

And in the same way, all kinds of other factors from the author’s experience have crowded into the scenario of Jekyll (pronounced in Scots like ‘treacle’). There were his ‘Brownies’ – the little people who visited his dreams with their own ideas worth developing; there was the influence of family friend James Simpson, whose story of conducting the first trial of chloroform in 1847 surely influenced his thinking about powerful personality-changing potions; and, yes, there was Brodie.

He has sometimes been called ‘the father’ of Jekyll and Hyde, and a few scholars have taken issue with that, just as they might with the title of this book –
The Man Who Was Jekyll and Hyde
– arguing that he was, of course, a different person (or persons, if you like); but it can’t be denied that William Brodie was, as literary influences go, quite exceptional; in a class of his own. It seems justifiable then, without even trying to claim him as direct inspiration, that this concept can be comfortably embraced with a mere smidgen of poetic licence.

So let’s say it: the lineage, or building blocks, of the Jekyll tale came in large degree from the real-life double-life man, through the Brodie bedroom cabinet and stage-play, and out through the dream-with-cabinet into the creation of the split-personality doctor.

But this book is not all about that. It is the remarkable story of the human enigma that was Deacon Brodie himself. The man who defied his class and his own societal grooming to become a rampant robber of his own friends and business contacts. Was he just weak? Just evil? Just romantic? Just mischievous? Keen to be contrary just for the sake of it? Or all of these things and more? Whatever he was – as Stevenson discovered and believed for most of his life – he was a man of many mysterious dimensions.

The following pages tell his tale without further comment, inviting the reader to reach his or her own conclusions about the Strange Case of Deacon William Brodie.

The yellow leaflet that sits on every table beside the menu says most of it, really. The off-street café that today occupies Brodie’s Close, the cavernous Lawnmarket premises where the Brodie family once lived and worked, is called, aptly enough, The Deacon’s House Café. It serves up lots of facts about our anti-hero – printed beside his etched image on that leaflet – along with its range of ‘home-made soups, freshly prepared salads and sandwiches with an excellent selection of home baking and puddings’.

The close, or alleyway, was originally named after Francis, the family’s pillar of the community back then. But it is his infamous son we think of when visiting it now. Beside its potted biography of Brodie junior – a full-colour, full-size effigy of whom stands guard at the close-mouth pavement – the busy tourist-attracting establishment tells its own part in his tale:

The present café was at one time Deacon Brodie’s workshop. The Brodie house, which no longer exists, was probably further down the close which at one time extended all the way down to Cowgate. When the property was renovated in 1962 the remnants of swords, muskets and uniforms were discovered under the floorboards of the café. These may have been hidden there by soldiers during the uprising in 1745. The stone archway in the kitchen area dates back to 1420, when monks used the cellar as a brewing house.

Indeed, as we sit at one of about sixteen tables, enjoying its fine coffee and shortbread, that original stonework is still to be seen behind the servers’ display cabinet where the relatively new French owner Philippe Bachelet is also to be found. It somehow adds to the frisson of realisation that we are in the presence of history, in the very place not just where medieval Cambusnethan monks baked and brewed for charity but where Deacon Brodie’s eighteenth-century furniture was created. Reminders of that, in the form of newspaper cuttings featuring the notorious one-time proprietor, are pinned around the nearby wood-slatted wall, while the close-side wall with its three main windows sees the start of Andrew Glen’s room-circling biographical mural that illustrates the Deacon’s tale from 1745 to 1788, ending with how his misadventures inspired Robert Louis Stevenson to create the double character of Jekyll and Hyde. Its timeline goes like this, starting with a panel that recalls:

1745: Bonnie Prince Charlie with the Jacobite army and his arrival at Edinburgh, when William Brodie would have been four years old.

1782: Young Brodie acquires the family cabinet-making firm on his father’s death.

1785: Cabinet-makers at work in Brodie’s workshop, now the seating area of the café.

1786: Robert Burns visits Edinburgh and lives briefly in a house directly opposite Brodie’s Close.

1787: Brodie in the act of robbing a neighbour.

1788: The game is up! Brodie is arrested in Amsterdam.

1788: 1st October. Brodie and his accomplice George Smith are hanged.

1876: Robert Louis Stevenson writes a play called
Deacon Brodie or the Double Life
. This is followed ten years later by
Jekyll and Hyde
.

The upper part of the building is now used by its masonic owners, the Celtic Lodge Edinburgh and Leith No. 291, and it’s there that a visitor can get up close and personal with more spine-tingling links to the Brodies, father and son. In the temple at the top, where serious masonic business takes place, there is a mural showing the Brodies’ creation of ‘a marble table supported by an eagle burnished with gold’ and supplied to the Duke of Gordon; this accounted for the Roman Eagle Hall name of the biggest room – the size of a small church hall – where lodge members enjoy regular social ‘harmony’ gatherings. Once used as an extra workshop-cum-showroom for the Brodies’ products, it is now called the Thistle Room and is remarkable for what some suggest is the spiritual ‘possession’ of a large, ornately framed mirror near its entrance.

‘Because of it our cleaning lady will not go near the Thistle Room or Temple on her own,’ says Bill Boland, the lodge’s past master, treasurer and historian. Why? ‘One night, not twenty years ago, another past master was locking up securely for the night when, on glancing at the mirror, he noticed a shadowy figure appearing within it – and he swore it was Deacon Brodie, dressed in his finest, with three-pointed hat and formal tails.’

Any other eerie moments? ‘Nothing specific,’ he says, ‘but we have been visited over the years by quite a few psychics and they all say there is a very cold aura emanating from the mirror – which I don’t think was made by Brodie, who was himself a freemason with Canongate-Kilwinning Lodge No. 2. They say it suggests the presence of someone; and indeed one claimed what they had perceived was the spirit of Bonnie Prince Charlie.’

When you consider this characterful building and its imaginative café alongside the impressively high-profile pub named after Brodie just across the cobbled Lawnmarket street – with its highly graphic ‘good’ and ‘bad’ Brodie hanging signs – you can’t escape the thought that if the unlikely outlaw’s outlandish activities didn’t do much for his city’s reputation at the time, they left it with quite a romantic folk-tale legacy which it is quite happy to exploit these days.

But while these colourful establishments fit, in one way, with the general circus that is Edinburgh’s Old Town in the tourist-invaded summer – the ranks of shops selling rain-creased tartan tat as a backdrop to Festival-drawn thespians whose impromptu open-air performances magnetise crowds along the Royal Mile – they are also rather different, sincerely acknowledging in their own way a slice of Edinburgh’s rich history, albeit a less-than-honourable one. It has to be added that there are many fine shops here too, selling cashmere and whisky and international newspapers and fine food. It all adds up to a kaleidoscopic assault on the senses.

But it was not always so dazzlingly bright around here. The colours in those far-off eighteenth-century days, when the relatively dashing Deacon Brodie walked these cobbles in all his apparent respectability, were much more muted. Especially after darkness fell and the myriad closes between the sky-high tenements or ‘lands’ in all four sections of what is now known as the Royal Mile, running from the castle down to the Palace of Holyroodhouse – Castlehill, the Lawnmarket, the High Street and the Canongate – became shadowy refuges for those who would do you harm, little worried about relieving you of your money or your valuables or your life. A point with which our Mr Brodie was perhaps just a little too familiar.