Jekyll and Hyde Missed Christmas

The story as it is told

The legend begins in a sickroom. Robert Louis Stevenson was living at Skerryvore, and he was so ill that he sometimes had to lie motionless in bed and speak in whispers. Money was short, and for two days he had gone about racking his brains for a plot of any sort. On the second night, as he told it later, he dreamed a scene at a window, and another in which a man pursued for some crime took a powder and changed in front of his pursuers. He credited it to his Brownies, the unseen collaborators he said did half his work while he slept.

Then, as his stepson Lloyd Osbourne tells it, Stevenson came down to lunch one day preoccupied, hurried through his meal, which was unheard of, and said he was working on a new story that had come to him in a dream and was not to be disturbed even if the house caught fire. For three days a hush fell over the house. Servants and family tiptoed past his door, where he sat up in bed filling page after page without seeming to pause. At the end of three days he read the first draft aloud to his wife Fanny and to Lloyd, in a voice the greatest actor might have envied, and when he finished he looked at them in triumphant expectation.

Fanny's praise came with difficulty. Then she broke out with criticism: he had missed the point, missed the allegory, made it merely a story when it should have been a masterpiece. Stevenson was beside himself with anger, his hand shaking on the manuscript, and the scene grew so painful that Lloyd left the room. When Lloyd came back, his mother was alone, staring into the fire, and then they heard Stevenson coming down the stairs. He burst in. "You are right! I have absolutely missed the allegory, which, after all, is the whole point of it," he said, and he threw the manuscript into the fire. The only way, he told them, was to put temptation beyond his reach.

Another three days followed, hushed and anxious, with Stevenson writing in bed, the counterpane littered with his sheets. At the end of them came the Jekyll and Hyde that everyone knows. Some versions add that he was on cocaine. (The cocaine idea is a modern theory, and we do not state it as fact.)

What we can confirm

The dream part comes from Stevenson himself. In "A Chapter on Dreams," collected in Across the Plains (1892), he wrote that after two days "racking my brains for a plot of any sort," on the second night "I dreamed the scene at the window, and a scene afterward split in two, in which Hyde, pursued for some crime, took the powder and underwent the change in the presence of his pursuers." He was careful about how much the dream gave him, saying that "All the rest was made awake, and consciously," and that it supplied "the matter of three scenes, and the central idea of a voluntary change becoming involuntary."

The burned-draft scene comes from one witness, Fanny's son Lloyd Osbourne, writing almost forty years later in An Intimate Portrait of R.L.S. (1924). Osbourne remembers "three days" of writing, a reading aloud, his mother's criticism that Stevenson "had missed the allegory," and then: "he threw the manuscript into the fire!" A second three days of writing follows. His own numbers show the risk of relying on memory, because he says the result was "Sixty-four thousand words in six days," while the Project Gutenberg text of the finished novella runs to about 25,700 words, including the e-text's own front and back matter.

Later drafts survived. The Morgan Library holds the manuscript Stevenson sent to Charles Longman in late October 1885 (MA 628), "about six weeks after Stevenson first conceived of the idea," according to the Morgan's catalogue, and it is incomplete, with the central chapters missing. A leaf from a separate "Notebook draft" is at the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas (MS-4035), as the Stevenson scholar Richard Dury's EdRLS project notes. These drafts do not disprove a burning, but they do show the book went through more than one written stage over several weeks.

Then came the Christmas problem. The book was meant for December 1885, but the publisher Charles Longman later recalled that "when it was ready the bookstalls were already full of Christmas numbers, etc, and the trade would not look at it" (as quoted in Prideaux's bibliography and repeated in Sotheby's 2024 catalogue entry for a first edition). Longmans held it to January, and the Morgan dates the London first edition to January 9, 1886. Copies have the printed "1885" on the paper wrapper corrected in pen to "1886," as the Sotheby's copy shows. The book sold for one shilling, which put it in the cheap "shilling shocker" trade.

The facts

• Stevenson's dream account and its limits ("All the rest was made awake"). Across the Plains, "A Chapter on Dreams," Project Gutenberg #614, gutenberg.org
• Osbourne's three-days, burned-manuscript, second three-days account, and his "Sixty-four thousand words in six days." Lloyd Osbourne, An Intimate Portrait of R.L.S. (1924), pp. 62 to 66, archive.org
• Morgan MA 628 is the printer's copy sent to Longman in late October 1885, incomplete; Longmans first edition dated January 9, 1886. themorgan.org
• A Notebook-draft leaf is at the Harry Ransom Center (MS-4035, box 1, folder 1). EdRLS (Richard Dury), "Stevenson's handwriting," 2016, edrls.wordpress.com
• Printed 1885 on the wrapper, intended for December 1885, Longman's "bookstalls were already full of Christmas numbers" quote, hand-corrected to 1886. Sotheby's, Fine Books and Manuscripts, June 2024 lot, sothebys.com
• London first edition: Longmans, Green, 1886, 141 pages, wrapper reads "Price One Shilling." University of California Libraries copy, Internet Archive, archive.org

Related: What enters the public domain in 2027

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