The Man Who Was Jekyll and Hyde Read Free Page B

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.
    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