Bogeyman And Gentleman: The Real-Life Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

Abram Brown

Robert Louis Stevenson had spent the night in his sickbed enveloped by a nightmare that had descended like a swift-forming fog, swirling together memories and discarded thoughts. Illness plagued Stevenson his whole life, and he’d suffered especially after he and his wife, Fanny, moved to Dorset on the English seaside in 1884. He had spent the previous evening trying to recover from a respiratory infection, but a fever kept restful sleep from him, and Fanny eventually roused him after he cried out several times.
To Fanny’s surprise, he rebuked her for waking him. He’d wanted to stay within that shrouded mix of thoughts, where an idea had started to form—a fine tale of a bogeyman and his mirrored opposite, a gentleman. Stevenson, then in his mid-30s and already a famous author after Treasure Island was published in 1881, rose and went down to eat with his family. There, he was obviously “in a very pre-occupied frame of mind,” his stepson Lloyd Osbourne observed, hurrying “through his meal—[an] unheard-of thing for him to do—and on leaving said he was working with extraordinary success on a new story.” The writer left very clear instructions: He was not to be disturbed, even if the house caught fire.
For three days, Stevenson wrote constantly, filing “page after page” from bed. Later in life, Fanny would reflect on this moment in their lives, thinking back on what inspired Stevenson’s marathon effort, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. She recalled that her husband had recently read an article in a French scientific journal about the subconscious, about the mind’s inner workings and buried desires. Yet that was not the only thing on Stevenson’s mind when the dream came to him. There was something else, too, and Fannie knew it: “his memories of Deacon Brodie.”

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