Stevenson's Life and the Making of the Novel
Robert Louis Stevenson was born in Edinburgh in 1850, the only child of a prosperous family of lighthouse engineers. The city shaped him profoundly. Victorian Edinburgh was a place of dramatic social geography: its elegant New Town of Georgian terraces sat within walking distance of the overcrowded, disease-ridden closes of the Old Town. Respectability and squalor occupied the same small map, and the city's professional classes moved between them with a discretion that amounted to a social art. Stevenson absorbed this double landscape from childhood, and it is the imaginative ground on which Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is built.
Stevenson studied engineering briefly at Edinburgh University before switching to law, qualifying as an advocate in 1875, though he never practised. His real vocation was writing, and he pursued it against the wishes of his father and against the persistent ill health — almost certainly tuberculosis — that would define and eventually end his life. He spent much of his adult life seeking climates that would ease his lungs: the south of France, Switzerland, the English south coast, and ultimately the Pacific island of Samoa, where he died in 1894.
The immediate circumstances of the novel's composition are well documented. Stevenson wrote the first draft at Bournemouth in the autumn of 1885, reportedly completing it with extraordinary speed. He was living at a house called Skerryvore, a period of relative domestic stability but also of confinement, since his health kept him largely indoors. His wife Fanny Stevenson recalled that he woke from a dream with the central image of a man undergoing a transformation, and that the draft was written, revised, and substantially rewritten within a matter of weeks. The book was published in January 1886, initially as a cheap paperback shilling shocker, and sold with remarkable speed.
The Double Life in Edinburgh's History
Stevenson drew on a specific Edinburgh legend that was well known to educated Scottish readers: the historical figure of Deacon William Brodie, a respectable cabinetmaker and town councillor by day who led a gang of burglars by night. Brodie was hanged in 1788, by tradition on a gallows he had himself helped to design. Stevenson had been fascinated by Brodie since childhood — he and W. E. Henley had co-written a play about him in the early 1880s — and the Brodie case gave him the structural idea of a single man inhabiting two irreconcilable social identities. The novel does not retell Brodie's story, but the moral architecture is the same: a man of standing who uses the cover of respectability to pursue a secret life of transgression.
The novel is set in a version of London rather than Edinburgh, but the city it imagines — foggy, gaslit, divided between prosperous professional streets and sinister back courts — owes as much to Edinburgh's topography as to any real London district. Stevenson's London is a moral landscape as much as a geographical one.
Victorian Science and the Context of Duality
The scientific premises of the novel belong firmly to their moment. The 1880s were a period of intense public debate about the relationship between the body and the mind, heredity and character, civilisation and instinct. Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species (1859) and The Descent of Man (1871) had established that human beings were continuous with the animal world, and that the veneer of civilisation was evolutionary rather than divinely guaranteed. Jekyll's theory — that the human personality is not unified but composite, and that its elements can be chemically separated — is a fictional extrapolation of ideas that were genuinely circulating in Victorian scientific and psychological culture.
The emerging discipline of psychology, associated in Britain with figures such as Henry Maudsley, was producing accounts of divided consciousness, dual personality, and the hidden life of instinct beneath rational behaviour. Stevenson was a wide reader and was aware of these debates, though the novel transforms them into Gothic fiction rather than engaging with them as science. Jekyll's experiment is presented as plausible enough to be terrifying, not as a technical blueprint.
Respectability, Secrecy, and Victorian Professional Culture
The novel's social world is that of the upper-professional London male: lawyers, doctors, men of science, Members of Parliament. This is a world governed by reputation, discretion, and the unspoken agreement not to inquire too closely into a colleague's private affairs. Utterson's instinct throughout the novel is to suppress scandal rather than expose it, and the other professional men around him behave similarly. This is not mere cowardice on Stevenson's part; it accurately reflects the codes of the Victorian professional classes, for whom public reputation was a form of social capital that had to be protected at almost any cost.
The novel was published at a moment when several high-profile scandals were testing those codes publicly. The 1880s saw growing journalistic exposure of hidden vice among respectable men, and the question of what lay behind the facade of Victorian respectability was genuinely live. Stevenson does not write a social-problem novel — he writes a Gothic fable — but the fable draws its charge from anxieties that were real and current.
Dated Timeline of Relevant Events
- 1788 — Deacon William Brodie hanged in Edinburgh; his double life becomes part of Scottish cultural memory.
- 1850 — Robert Louis Stevenson born in Edinburgh, 13 November.
- 1859 — Darwin publishes On the Origin of Species, establishing evolutionary continuity between humans and animals.
- 1871 — Darwin publishes The Descent of Man, applying evolutionary theory directly to human nature and morality.
- 1875 — Stevenson qualifies as an advocate in Edinburgh; does not practise law.
- 1880 — Stevenson marries Fanny Osbourne; the couple settle intermittently in Britain, their movements shaped by his ill health.
- Early 1880s — Stevenson and W. E. Henley co-write Deacon Brodie, or The Double Life, a stage play.
- 1884 — Stevenson settles at Bournemouth, where relative stability allows sustained writing.
- Autumn 1885 — First draft of Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde written at Bournemouth.
- January 1886 — Novel published in London as a paperback; rapid commercial success follows.
- 1894 — Stevenson dies at Vailima, Samoa, aged forty-four.
A Note on What the Novel Does Not Do
Stevenson simplifies and concentrates. The real history of Victorian double lives was socially varied and often involved class difference as much as individual psychology — men of means exploiting the poor in ways that the novel only glances at. Jekyll's Hyde is a figure of pure moral evil rather than a sociological type, and the novel's interest is in the philosophical problem of duality rather than in its material conditions. Readers alert to what the novel leaves out will find that absence as revealing as what it includes.