3/25/2023 0 Comments Jekyll feat of the monster withinFrom what else is known about the history of the piece, its genesis can thus be fairly well established: Scholars have debated the veracity of this event ever since, but a recently-discovered letter by Fanny appeared to confirm that she burned the draft after showing it to literary critic WH Henley, a friend and confidante of Stevenson’s who served as the model for Long John Silver in Treasure Island. Currently bedridden, Stevenson set about capturing the nebulous concept in a three-day frenzy of writing, but his wife (who acted as the custodian of his public image) was appalled at his semi-biographical treatment of the tale and persuaded him to burn the manuscript after suggesting an alternative approach the first draft of ‘Jekyll and Hyde’ was thus lost to posterity, its content - like the solution to Dickens’s The Mystery of Edwin Drood - a matter only for the speculations of the literati. Of the half-remembered nightmare, two key incidents stood out: the distraught face of a gentleman seen briefly at a window and the same gentleman, pursued for some unspecified crime, mixing a powder and transforming into another before the startled gaze of the onlookers. ![]() But before he could bring the idea to fruition, he was shaken awake from a sedated sleep by a fever dream which seemed to suggest a new variation on the same theme. Stevenson had suffered from ill-health since childhood and required constant medication he and his wife Fanny had moved to Bournemouth for the sea air, where he had thought to further elaborate the Deacon’s life into a fiction which he titled ‘The Travelling Companion’. In 1884, Stevenson was the celebrated author of Treasure Island and more, and he had co-authored a play on the subject called ‘Deacon Brodie, or a Double Life’, which opened at the Prince’s Theatre in London in July. Edinburgh-born Stevenson had long been fascinated by local legend relating to the case of Deacon William Brodie, a respected 18th-century cabinet-maker and councillor by day but the leader of a gang of burglars by night, who was tried and executed in the city in 1788. ‘Jekyll and Hyde’ was crafted by Stevenson as a mystery, but the origin of the story is something of a mystery in itself. Unlike his Gothic predecessors, however, the pseudonymous ‘Edward Hyde’ was not a physical entity of rotting flesh or Undead blood but a psychological conceit - a creature who literalised previously hidden aspects of the human psyche - which opened him up to almost limitless interpretation in a post-Freudian world which saw him as the first modern ‘monster of the id’. THE most famous literary monster after Dracula and that of Frankenstein is undoubtedly the enigmatic protagonist of Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1886 novella, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Robert Louis Stevenson, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886)
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