Tarlton Law Library
Jamail Center for Legal Research

     In his essay "A Chapter on Dreams," Robert Louis Stevenson revealed that certain of the scenes of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) and plot elements of much of his other fiction came to him in dreams. He amusingly referred to his "Brownies," the "little people" in his unconscious who had engaged in businesslike literary collaboration with him and were welcome successors to the "night-hag" who sent him frightening dreams when he was a child. Stevenson dreamed of Jekyll and Hyde in Bournemouth, England, while his body was racked with a fever following a lung hemorrhage and the delirium of his sleep's visions was possibly heightened by the drugs that his doctor had prescribed. Stevenson appears to have dreamed the idea of Jekyll and Hyde in great detail and clarity, and even attributed to his Brownies the invention of the powders that induced Dr. Jekyll's personality changes. He cried out in horror during his sleep, causing his wife, Fanny, to rouse him, "much to his indignation." He told her that he "was dreaming a fine bogey tale" and gave her a rapid sketch of Jekyll and Hyde up to the point when she had awakened him. At daybreak he passionately set to work on the story. He closeted himself in his sickroom for three days and then emerged with a completed thirty-thousand-word manuscript, which he read aloud to his wife and his stepson, Lloyd Osbourne. To his intense disappointment, Fanny was highly critical of his treatment of the story. She told him that he had trivialized the idea by writing a "thriller" and had failed to emphasize the allegorical message of his strange dream: that propensities for good and evil coexist uneasily in the human soul. "In the first draft," wrote Stevenson's official biographer, Graham Balfour, "Jekyll's nature was bad all through, and the Hyde change was worked only for the sake of a disguise." Fanny's appraisal of her husband's work was not always reliable, but in this instance Stevenson recognized the justice of her comments; he threw the manuscript into the fire. His action was not one of artistic pique, for he immediately proceeded to rewrite the story in the vein Fanny had suggested and did not want his creativity to be inhibited by excessive use of the original draft. After three more days of work, according to Fanny's account, the second manuscript of Dr. Jekyll was completed and, after six weeks of polishing, it was given to Stevenson's publishers and to the world. The book's success was immediate. It pleased Queen Victoria, 

became the theme of church sermons, sold forty thousand copies during the first six months, and was adapted by a number of playwrights.
     The unusually clear dream vision of Jekyll and Hyde and the terror it inspired in the thirty-six-year-old Stevenson suggest that the idea had a strong root in Stevenson's personality. From biographical data and the comments of Stevenson's contemporaries, we are able to determine that this was indeed the case and that the concept of an outwardly respectable man leading a double life whose dark side included immorality or even crime preoccupied Stevenson from his early childhood.
     The image of Jekyll and Hyde appears to have had its origin in a real personage of Stevenson's native city of Edinburgh -- Deacon Brodie (1741-1788). William Brodie was a successful carpenter and cabinet-maker and so highly regarded in his craft that he became "deacon" or president of the Edinburgh carpenters' trade. Far from having the solid churchgoing habits that his title might suggest to those unacquainted with its professional significance, Deacon Brodie spent many happy hours on Sunday mornings making wax impressions of the door locks of friends and neighbors who were at services. For Brodie led a double life -- by day he pursued his carpentry, and at night he was a daring housebreaker. The houses and offices he raided (at first alone and later as leader of a gang of three other men) included many he had previously visited to make repairs or perform other work of his trade. Between blows of hammer and strokes of saw he had taken the opportunity to make copies of keys and locks and to observe room arrangements and the arrival and departure schedules of inhabitants and workers. Some victims who witnessed his nighttime incursions thought they recognized him under his black gauze mask, but kept their own counsel, out of either friendship or disbelief. The next morning Brodie would condole with them on their losses or would be in attendance at the town council, of which he was an ex officio member, helping formulate plans to catch the audacious criminal. Brodie's career ended when a member of his gang gave him away to the authorities after a disappointing raid on the Scottish Excise Office. Brodie fled and was caught in Holland, where he was making profitable use of his fugitive hours learning the art of forgery from an itinerant expert.
     The Deacon was hanged in 1788 at the Edinburgh Tolbooth Prison. Legend has it that he was hanged on a gallows that he had built in the course of his carpentry for the city, but unfortunately this supreme irony is not borne out by chronology.
     Deacon Brodie seized on the imagination of his townspeople and they have never forgotten him. In addition to the fascination of his double life, it was obvious to the people of Edinburgh that he was not attracted to crime primarily by love of gain, although it cannot have 

been inexpensive to support his passion for cockfighting and gambling and to maintain the three separate households he shared with his wife and two mistresses (and a total of at least five children). Surely it was a streak of romanticism that inspired his theft of the official mace from the College Library. He was a dandy, and saw himself in a dramatic light. He sang airs from John Gay's Beggar's Opera on the night of the Excise Office raid and in his last days in prison, leading a local newspaper to comment that he apparently identified himself with Captain Macheath and to advocate the banning of Gay's play from the stage.
     In the night nursery where Robert Louis Stevenson slept as a child were a bookcase and a chest of drawers made by Deacon Brodie. There is little doubt that his devoted nurse, Alison Cunningham ("Cummie"), who had the odd notion that the way to put an impressionable child to sleep is to tell him terrifying stories, regaled him with the exploits of Edinburgh's famous Deacon. When Stevenson was thirteen or fourteen years old, he made his first attempt at a play based on Deacon Brodie, and at nineteen, in 1869, he wrote a later draft. In 1879 his friend W.E. Henley, the hot-tempered, red-bearded, one-legged poet and critic who was to serve as the model for one of Stevenson's immortal characters, Long John Silver, "fished" the 1869 draft out of a trunk and persuaded Stevenson to collaborate with him on a new version. In their play, Deacon Brodie pursues his burglar's trade partly for the economic purpose of restoring his sister's dowry, which he had dissipated by gambling. At the same time, Stevenson and Henley introduce a philosophical interpretation which is underscored by the play's subtitle, "The Double Life." Deacon Brodie feels that his "naked self" is stifled by the social restrictions and hypocrisy of daytime Edinburgh, and leaps into his nights of crime as into a "new life." He invokes the night as "the grimy, cynical night that makes all cats grey, and all honesties of one complexion." When at the end of the play the Deacon, in a departure from his historical fate, dies in a duel with the police, he cries that he has found the "new life" at last. Unfortunately, Deacon Brodie, like Stevenson's other dramatic collaborations with Henley, was unsuccessful, and its American performances were not helped by the fact that Henley's brother, an untalented actor, was cast in the title role.
     The disappointing fate of the play by no means ended Stevenson's fascination with the figure of Deacon Brodie or his speculations about the existence of the unknown dark sides of men whose public characters were beyond reproach. Eve Blantyre Simpson, the sister of Stevenson's close friend Walter Simpson, reports that Stevenson would pace up and down before the Simpsons' library fire, and would "expatiate on the double life, speaking again of the Deacon. He would wonder what burglary 

some esteemed citizen of his own day was guilty of in the . . . [night]."
     The respected Dr. Henry Jekyll and his alter ego, the unspeakable Mr. Hyde, are the permanent embodiment of Stevenson's obsession with the double soul of man. To a modern generation, which has learned only relatively recently, through such studies as Steven Marcus's The Other Victorians, of the unpleasant aspects of the private conduct of the Victorians, Stevenson's tale seems to be as well suited to nineteenth-century England as to Deacon Brodie's Edinburgh of a century earlier. In fact, in a striking exception to the rule that history never repeats itself, a notorious criminal case was tried at Sheffield in 1879 that presented a close parallel to the exploits of Brodie. Charlie Peace -- known to his suburban community in London as "Mr. Thompson," a proper, violin-playing citizen, busy with his great assortment of pets, a regular attendant at parish church services and an outspoken critic of the pro-Turkish policies of the government -- was a professional housebreaker by night. When he was arrested in the course of a burglary, his identity was discovered and it was found that he had committed two murders, one of them years before. Peace was hanged for his crimes and his violin is now one of the prime exhibits in Scotland Yard's Black Museum.
     Yet it is possible that Jekyll and Hyde had a far more personal meaning for Stevenson than as a commentary on Victorian hypocrisy or a re-creation of Edinburgh's criminal history. After the overlay of makeup and illusion of the film and stage presentations of Jekyll and Hyde is removed, and one returns to Stevenson's original, it is striking to note that Mr. Hyde was not physically monstrous. He looked human, but those who saw him found something indefinably repellent in his appearance; something in his countenance and manner set him apart at the first glance. As Mr. Enfield observed, "There is something wrong with his appearance, something displeasing, something downright detestable. I never saw a man I so disliked, and yet I scarce know why." Significantly, Hyde is also described in the story as "much smaller, slighter and younger than Henry Jekyll," and Hyde dresses "in a fashion that would have made an ordinary person laughable; his clothes, although they were of rich and sober fabric, were enormously too large for him in every measurement -- the trousers hanging on his legs and rolled up to keep them from the ground, the waist of the coat below his haunches, and the collar sprawling wide upon his shoulders." In Jekyll's statement of the case, which concludes the story, the doctor confesses that looking upon the ugly Hyde in the mirror, he "was conscious of no repugnance. This, too, was myself." Jekyll explains Hyde's youth and puniness as due to the fact that the evil side of his character represented by Hyde was less robust and developed because of the restrictions of virtue and control to 

which Hyde had been subjected until he was finally given supremacy. However, when we recall that the vision of Jekyll and Hyde came to Stevenson full-born out of his dreams, there is room for speculation that the small size and youth of Hyde had even greater meaning. Stevenson as a young student in Edinburgh had led a rakish life in the unsavory quarters of his city, and his Bohemian conduct caused him difficulty with his parents. From the black velvet jacket (given to him by his father) that he wore during his adventures, he was given the nickname "Velvet Coat" by the sailors, sweeps, thieves and prostitutes with whom he consorted. He must have looked back at that period with considerable shame and it may not be too much to suggest that the dwarfish Mr. Hyde in his rich clothes has a close kinship with Stevenson's deepest memories of his own young manhood.
     Although Stevenson was amused by the speed with which the phrase "Jekyll and Hyde" passed into the language as a shorthand expression for split personality, there may be some poignancy as well as humor in his having signed a letter to his beloved mother shortly after the appearance of his famous tale: "I hope, Jekyll, I fear, Hyde."

* This article was previously published in Albert Borowitz, Innocence and Arsenic: Studies in Crime and Literature 26-32 (New York, Harper & Row, 1977)