“One day Louis came down to luncheon in a very pre-occupied frame of mind, hurried through his meal–an unheard of thing for him to do–and on leaving said that he was working with extraordinary success on a new story that had come to him in a dream, and that he was not to be interrupted or disturbed even if the house caught fire. Hearing his first draft, my mother insisted that it would be better as an allegory, not a mere ‘crawler.’ After violent protest, Louis burned the draft and completely rewrote it, opening up the allegorical aspect. It took such hold of him that he finished the rough in three days–a tremendous stint of work.” — Lloyd Osbourne, stepson of RLS

By the end of 1885, the star of Robert Louis Stevenson as a popular author and very minor poet was gradually rising but with the publication of “Jekyll & Hyde” in January 1886, his name soon exploded onto the scene. Within months Stevenson and his two-faced character were crossing boundaries throughout the English-speaking world and you couldn’t even go to church to get away from the new craze. Margaret Stevenson, the author’s mother, saw it happening. On Oct. 2, 1887, while en route to Saranac Lake from New York City with her now famous son and traveling servant, Valentine Roch from Switzerland, Margaret wrote a letter from a Plattsburgh hotel to her sister, Jane Balfour, in Scotland. “I went to the Presbyterian Church this morning, and had a very good sermon, in the course of it the minister, in speaking of yielding to evil, said that by doing so, ‘in the end Hyde would conquer Jekyll.’ Was it not odd that I should just happen to hear that in this out of the way place? And moreover, the last sermon I heard in New York was on the same subject.”

“Jekyll & Hyde” is the story that made Robert Louis Stevenson a legend in his lifetime. Today, thanks to cultural evolution, we are desensitized to the shock value Stevenson’s gothic novelette would have had on the Victorian mindset of the late 19th Century. Stevenson, if you like, is the one you can blame for kicking open the door into forbidden things with this story and enabling generations of artists to freely explore the dark side in all of us, so that now we are all used to it and nothing shocks us anymore.

Stevenson did receive criticism for taking this step toward a general immorality, even from friends. One of his best friends, John Addington-Symonds, who found the book “brilliant but painful,” wrote to Louis to say, “At last I have read Dr. Jekyll. It makes me wonder whether a man has the right so to scrutinize ‘the abysmal deeps of personality.’ It is indeed a dreadful book, most dreadful because of a certain moral callousness, a want of sympathy, a shutting out of hope. The art is intense … Poe is as water. As a piece of literary work, this seems to me the finest you have done–in all that regards style, invention, psychological analysis, exquisite fitting of parts, and admirable employment of motives to realize the abnormal. But it has left such a deeply painful impression on my heart that I do not know how I am ever to turn to it again.”

Did Stevenson really open up a Pandora’s box of human misbehavior like some people think to this day? Was it just coincidence that ‘Jack the Ripper’ started making news about the same time ‘Jekyll & Hyde’ became a catch-phrase? A concerned public wanted answers so when RLS came to Saranac Lake he wrote an essay called A Chapter on Dreams which appeared in the January 1888 issue of Scribner’s magazine. He says, “I had long been trying to write a story on this subject, to find a body, a vehicle, for that strong sense of man’s double being which must at times come in upon and overwhelm the mind of every thinking creature. I had even written one, The Travelling Companion, which was returned by the editor on the plea that it was a work of genius and indecent, and which I burned the other day on the ground that it was not a work of genius, and that ‘Jekyll’ had supplanted it.”

Stevenson’s title at publication was Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, no ‘The’. Since it came out, the story has generated a never-ending stream of critical commentary. This particular sample is provided because the writer, Katherine Linehan, Professor of English at Oberlin College, is a member of the Stevenson Society of America in Saranac Lake. “As a horror thriller, the tale sweeps up forcefully along in a build-up of suspense which reaches a partial climax … and then draws us into a still more gripping spiral of dread through the documents of two dead men. Moreover, as a horror thriller about human duality which shows the relentless supplanting of the most presentable side of self by the most unpresentable one, the tale exhibits a remarkable ability to hit a nerve and produce a shock of recognition for generation after generation of readers. Yet, as an allegory, the tale proves confoundingly difficult to pin down.”

Robert Louis Stevenson, the “weevil in a biscuit” of Skerryvore, had done it. He had produced something that was here to stay and in a big way, a literary ‘shock and awe’ event. Louis had no premonition of what was waiting for him overseas. He didn’t even know that he would be going overseas again because his father, Thomas Stevenson, hadn’t died yet.