The Man Who Was Jekyll and Hyde Read Free

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