Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Robert Louis Stevenson

       Contents

       Introduction

      The Plague Cellar

      Thrawn Janet

      The Body Snatcher

      The Misadventures of John Nicholson

      The Pavilion on the Links

      The Merry Men

      Markheim

      Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde

       Introduction

      From his earliest years, Stevenson’s engagement with the world of the imagination, was a strange marriage of moral and supernatural forces. His young nurse Alison Cunningham (‘my second Mother, my first Wife’) had thrilled him with stories of the sufferings of the Covenanters in the ‘killing times’ of Scotland’s past and, as in the works of James Hogg, these tales were soon spiced with accounts of witchcraft and possession. Indeed the omnipresence of the devil and his works had long been a potent factor in the Scottish understanding of what the spiritual life might be, so that the righteous had always felt besieged by potent forces from without themselves.

      —Or indeed, from within, for surely the arch tempter is no more than a projection of all that we fear and all that we desire in the depths of our own hearts? This division, and this ambiguity, was to rule Stevenson’s imagination for the rest of his life. It leads us into strange territory in which history, geography, folklore, the scientific, the moral, the physical and the spiritual, all meet and mingle with the symbolic freedom of somehow materialised dreams. (This is indeed the hidden narrative realm of that fervent young ‘mother-wife’: divided and yet also deeply intimate, puzzling, dangerous, attractive and thrilling.) These are the roots from which Stevenson’s best fiction stems, and it is these roots which allow us to claim a deeply Scottish genesis for stories such as ‘Jekyll and Hyde’ and ‘Markheim’, even although they are, in fact, physically located in London.

      So it was very much under ‘Cummie’s’ spell that Stevenson planned ‘A Covenanting Story-Book’ in his teens, listing in his notebooks possible titles such as ‘Satan’s power exemplified: the story of Baillie Grierson and Mrs Elspeth Montcleith’; ‘Strange Adventures of the Reverend Mr Solway’; ‘the Devil of Crammond; or indeed ‘The Story of Thrawn Janet’. The only one of these early stories to survive is ‘The Plague Cellar’ which dates from 1864 or perhaps 1866. Never published (and indeed Stevenson forbade its publication when it turned up among his family’s papers) ‘The Plague Cellar’ shows how strongly the growing boy’s imagination was marked by Covenanting tales of blood and righteousness. Indeed, the budding author planned a novel about the Covenanters, but finding the task beyond his 16 years he produced a little pamphlet instead, The Pentland Rising (1866), which marked the bicentenary of the insurrection and the battle of Rullion’s Green.

      Published at his father’s expense Stevenson’s ‘first book’ was full of passionate indignation at the fate of the ‘martyrs’ who were executed in Edinburgh and Glasgow, but ‘The Plague Cellar’ is a more ambiguous piece of work altogether, even although it contains references to actual historical figures such as John Neilson of Corsack (whose tortured ghost appears to Ravenswood) and James Sharp the minister in favour of episcopacy who condemned the Covenanters at their trial. Clearly the work of an apprentice writer, ‘The Plague Cellar’ still displays what would become Stevenson’s characteristically vivid use of setting, weather and physical contrast (snow and fire) and, whether intended or not, it is markedly ambivalent about the faith it seems to sympathise with. Thus the power of the scriptures is represented by painted Dutch tiles, but these Biblical scenes of miracles are distorted by the flames of the fireside until they seem like visions from some inferno. Then again, Ravenswood enters the plague cellar intent on knowledge, power and vengeance for his defeated cause – but what he finds there is only madness, emptiness and mystery. To enter that cellar has been death for generations, and even those who boarded it up had to die: it is indeed the symbolic repository for the unconscious drives that attract us so strongly, but which we cannot bear to face.

      The same deeply Scottish combination of religiosity and terror (righteousness and blood) marks ‘Thrawn Janet’, early planned, but not written for nearly 20 years when it was published in Cornhill Magazine for October 1881. Stevenson tells us that the story was written in the summer of that year, during a visit to his parents’ house at Kinnaird, above Pitlochry. It was followed in the same months by a first draft of ‘The Merry Men’, and in these two stories we can see how the author’s imagination was moving from its folk-roots in tales of supernatural wonder towards a more complex account of what was beginning to dawn on him, in more existential terms, as the terror of being.

      In ‘Thrawn Janet’, the local community is convinced from the start that old Janet M’Clour is a witch. The voice of reason, in the shape of the reverend Soulis, a keen young minister fresh from his college learning, thinks it knows better. But in the end it is the broad Scots voice of the community which is proved correct in all its prejudices, for Soulis is overwhelmed by his encounter with the ‘black man’ who has inhabited Janet’s dead body, and he is left a sadder and a wiser soul. (The black man was a common Scottish manifestation of the devil.) The story ends on a note of self satisfaction, for the folk voice which narrates it has been proven right, concluding that ever since then ‘the deil has never fashed us in Ba’weary.’ But Soulis is fashed, for he is a grim and haunted creature, walking the roads and ‘groaning aloud in the instancy of his unspoken prayers’. In a strange transformation of roles and sex, the minister himself has become the very figure of terror and speculation among the parish folk that Thrawn Janet used to be. He has sained the community all right, but at the cost of his old self and all his former assurance.

      Fettes, who tells the story of ‘The Body Snatcher’ has also been ruined by what he saw. As class assistant to the notorious ‘Anatomist’ Robert Knox (given only as ‘Mr K—’ in the story) he too has aligned himself with the forces of science and medical progress, except that we soon see him to be a weak-willed and dissipated young man. In the cause of self-advancement, Fettes is too easily persuaded by Wolfe Macfarlane, his immediate superior, to go along with the murderous practices of Burke and Hare, and indeed to turn a blind eye to Macfarlane’s own murder of the importunate Mr Gray, who seems to have some strange hold over that young ‘man of the world’. ‘Wolfe’ is well named, for he divides humankind between ‘lambs’ who believe in ‘Hell, God, devil, right, wrong, sin, crime, and all the old gallery of curiosities’, and ‘lions’ like himself (and the aspirant