by Rick Wilson
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 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 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 h
er 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 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 an
d 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.
2
HIS LIFE AND LOVES
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.
