Robert
Louis Stevenson
Born: November 13, 1850 in Edinburgh Scotland
Died: December 3, 1894 in Samoa
As a child, Stevenson also heard stories about local citizens who lead double lives in the rigid Victorian times. One he knew well was that of William Brodie, a prominent Edinburgh citizen who was a dignified city councilman and businessman by day and a drunkard, gambler, womanizer and robber by night.
Louis showed early promise as a poet but at his father's insistence also studied law. He also seems to have developed other habits.
"My hair, as I think I have said, is long," he wrote in 1874 a letter to his friend Sidney Colvin from a Welsh seaside hotel where he was staying with his parents. "I eat, I am seen about the garden with large and aged quatros, making cigarettes and inhaling the seductive pipe....I go down to the drawing room in the evening, where I listen to the music and say nothing. I wonder what the devil they think of me."
In Edinburgh, Louis had recurring dreams of leading a double life: by day working as a surgeon and by night haunting the seedy parts of town. This was perhaps the life he would have lead had he become the lawyer his father wanted him to me. Instead, he consulted a doctor who gave him an opiate.The dreams stopped.
When Louis told his parents he was an agnostic, they were overcome with grief. His father went so far as to tell him he was sorry he'd ever married his mother and had a child. They decided to send him to stay with a cousin, hoping her minister husband would rekindle his faith. The guilt-ridden Louis agreed to go, but the plan backfired when instead he developed a crush on his cousin's friend. Seeing his talent and charmed by him, she helped foster his career.
Louis and his cousin Bob Stevenson, an imaginative person who grew up reading the Arabian Nights and later became a professional painter, were inseparable in 1875 when both met Fanny Osbourne, who was to become Louis's wife. The two Stevensons "pursued girls together and smoked hashish (when they could get it)," wrote his biographer James Pope Hennessy. "They professed agnosticism and derided every tenet that their parents held sacrosanct. Seen together they were always laughing..." But Stevenson was not to shed his Victorian upbringing, nor his physical ailments, so easily, even after he followed Fanny to California, married her and took her to live with him in Bournemouth, England.
"I was dreaming a fine bogeytale," he said to Fanny when she woke him from a nightmare one night in 1885. He began writing the next morning and for three days he lay in bed writing furiously. When he completed the tale, he read it to Fanny, who told him he had missed the point of his own story. It was an allegory that he should have written, she said, not a straight piece of sensationalism. Stevenson decided his wife was right and threw the 40,000-word manuscript into the fire, rewriting it in another three-day fury. "The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde," published in 1886, "caught the imagination of every reader, from Queen Victoria downward," wrote Pope. It was reviewed in The Times, made the theme for countless church sermons, and sold forty thousand copies in the first six months.
In the story, respectable Dr. Jekyll famously transforms into the hideous monster Mr. Hyde by taking a drug, a white powder Jekyll has developed. Taking the potion again brings Jekyll back to his former self. Much speculation has ensued about the basis of this fiction in Stevenson's life. Pope points to his experience with medications, and with watching a friend die from alcoholism and tuberculosis. In a 1971 paper published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA, 1971 Apr 5;216 (1):90-4), "The Strange Case of Robert Louis Stevenson: A Tale of Toxicology,") Myron Schultz theorized that cocaine is the culprit. He points to the fact that Stevenson wrote the story so quickly, despite his physical debility, and reported being exhilarated instead of exhausted by the experience. Cocaine had just been made available for medical use, and many doctors were endorsing it, including Sigmund Freud. Arthur Conan Doyle, Stevenson's contemporary and the author of the Sherlock Holmes mysteries, also took cocaine.
In our own kind of modern Victorianism, two psychiatrists, Eric Altschuler and Daniel Wright, recently decided Dr. Jekyll meets six of the seven criteria for a diagnosis of "substance dependence" and recommend the story as "a useful primer for patients, their families, and physicians on substance dependence and its treatment." Aware that Stevenson used hashish and opium, and that cocaine was available at the time, Altschuler and Wright conclude that these drugs wouldn't have produced the effects described in his tale, and speculate that he may have tasted a hallucinogenic mushroom, or that one of his doctors may have accidently synthesized a hallucinogen while trying to treat him.
Stevenson as Jekyll writes that his worst fault was "a certain impatient gaiety of disposition, such as has made the happiness of many, but such as I found it hard to reconcile with my imperious desire to carry my head high, and wear a more than commonly grave countenance before the public." He called the perennial war between good and evil with man's soul "the curse of mankind" and worked to develop a potion that would separate them in himself. Freud called this the id and the ego and tried psychotherapy instead.
After Jekyll first drinks his potion, he writes, "I felt younger, lighter, happier in my body; within, I was conscious of a heady recklessness, a current of disordered sensual images running like a millrace in my fancy, a solution of the bonds of obligation, an unknown but not an innocent freedom of the soul. I knew myself, at the first breath of this new life, to be more wicked, tenfold more wicked, sold a slave to my original evil; and the thought, in that moment, braced and delighted me like wine. I stretched out my hands, exulting in the freshness of these sensations; and in the act, I was suddenly aware that I had lost in stature." Apparently the yoke of original sin laid heavy on Stevenson.
It's possible Stevenson felt guilty and conflicted about his enjoyment of the strange, Eastern ritual of hashish smoking. Hyde's first horrible act is to trample a child like "some damned Juggernaut." In British-controlled India, at Puri in Orissa, the followers of the eighth incarnation of Vishnu, Jagannath ('Lord of the World'), annually dragged in procession a statue of the deity on an enormous car, under the wheels of which many devotees are said to have flung themselves to escape the cycle of karma-samsara (reincarnation). "The exotic, the foreign, the disreputable aspects of Hyde are exactly what attract Jekyll to him, but in attaching himself to Hyde Jekyll assures his own moral and physical destruction," writes Philip V. Allingham of Lakehead University (Ontario). Demonstrating his transformation to his disbelieving colleague Layton, Jekyll/Hyde says to him, "[Y]ou who have so long been bound to the most narrow and material views, you who have denied the virtue of transcendental medicine, you who have derided your superiors--behold!" Earlier in the story, Lanyon likens the early relationship between himself and Jekyll to that of Damon and Pythias, who is sentenced to death by King Dionysius, the god of revelry.
At the end of his life in Samoa, Stevenson would "welcome a melanga, or visiting party, with a high chief's etiquette. The bowl of chewed kava that was expected was offered by the maids," wrote Pope. "All the liveliness and this eager and friendly hospitability must have formed a glorious compensation for the invalid years when Louis could scarcely bear to see anyone, or to move far from his bed." Robert Louis Stevenson died of a brain hemorrhage on December 3, 1894 at the age of 44. He chose to be buried on Mount Vaea in Samoa.
Painting: Robert Louis Stevenson by John Singer Sargent (1887)
Copyright 2006
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