The Man Who Was Jekyll and Hyde Read Free Page A

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