STEVENSON, Robert Louis (Balfour)

(1850-1894)

   Scottish author, best known for works outside the sf field. As a student at Edinburgh University, he abandoned engineering for law, but never practised. He travelled widely, suffered most of his life from tuberculosis, and settled in Samoa in 1890. His early novel, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886; the usual vt from 1896 on being The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde), shows the influence of a Calvinistyouth on a hot, romantic temperament. An early version (which he scrapped), resulting from a nightmare, had an evil Jekyll using the Hyde transformation as a mere disguise. The published version has echoes of the case of Deacon Brodie, hanged in 1788 (and also the subject of the play Deacon Brodie, or The Double Life [1880; rev 1889] by RLS and W.E. Henley [1849-1903]), as well as of James Hogg's Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824), not to mention psychological theories that were then current. It is a Faustian moral fable which takes the form of a tale of mystery and HORROR. It precedes Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), which in some respects resembles it, by five years,and is the prototype of all stories of multiple personality, transformation (APES AND CAVEMEN) and possession; in some aspects it is also a tale of drug dependency.The plot takes the form of a spiral which moves gingerly into the heart-of-darkness of the climax, when the already dead Jekyll's written confession of his terrible fall is discovered and presented to readers as the last chapter of the text. Years before the tale begins, Jekyll (whose name RLS pronounced with a long "e") has begun to use drugs to dissociate his libertine side (cf Freud's "id") from his normal self. The evil self that surfaces, Hyde, in whose person (or persona) Jekyll enjoys unspecified depravities (we are given instances only of rage, brutality and murder), is less robust at first than the full man. But spontaneous metamorphoses into an increasingly dominant Hyde begin to occur, and after a temporary intermission larger and larger doses are needed for the "recovery" of Jekyll. Eventually supplies run out and, cornered, Hyde commits suicide. The symbolic physical changes (Hyde is young, stunted, nimble and repulsive) seem today unconvincing melodrama, and the silence about vices other than cruelty seems prudish, but the psychological power of the writing, including Jekyll's agonies, is patent. The story has been filmed many times (DR JEKYLL AND MR HYDE) and has beendeeply influential on the development of the theme of PSYCHOLOGY in sf.RLS wrote a deal of other stories with fantastic or supernatural elements, many to be found in New Arabian Nights (coll in 2 vols 1882); the contents of the 1st vol initially appeared in the magazine London in 1878 under the general title Latter-Day Arabian Nights, and were later reprinted as The Suicide Club, and The Rajah's Diamond (coll 1894) (CLUB STORIES). Othersappear in: More New Arabian Nights: The Dynamiter (coll 1885) by RLS with his wife Fanny Van de Grift Stevenson; The Merry Men, and Other Tales and Fables (coll 1887), which contains "Thrawn Janet", Markheim (1886Cornhill; 1925 chap), a good-angel story with a twist, Will o' the Mill (1886; 1901 chap US) and "Olalla"; Island Nights' Entertainments (coll 1893), which contains The Bottle Imp (1891 Black and White; 1896 chap US; vt Kaewe's Bottle 1935 chap UK); Tales and Fantasies (coll 1905), which includes The Misadventures of John Nicholson (1887 Cassell's Christmas Annual; 1889 chap US) and The Body-Snatcher (1884 Pall Mall ChristmasExtra; 1895 chap US); and Fables (coll 1914). Many further pamphlets containing RLS tales were published during his lifetime and after; of interest are The Waif Woman (written 1892; 1914 Scribner's Magazine; 1916 chap), When the Devil was Well (1921 chap US) and Ticonderoga: A Legend of the West Highlands (1923 chap US). Though it has no fantastic elements, Prince Otto (1885) is an interesting precursor of the RURITANIAN tale.

DIM/JC

   Other works: The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, and Other Fables (coll 1896), and many other collections whose titles feature Jekyll and Hyde; The Short Stories of Robert Louis Stevenson (coll 1923 US); Two Mediaeval Tales (coll 1930 chap US); The Tales of Tusitala (coll 1946);Great Short Stories of Robert Louis Stevenson (coll 1951 US); The Body-Snatcher and Other Stories (coll 1988 US); The Complete Shorter Fiction (coll 1991); several series of collected works.About the author: Frank Swinnerton's Robert Louis Stevenson (1915), though venomous, is a necessary purgative for the early adulation; the numerous subsequent studies are more balanced. Of special interest is Definitive Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde Companion (1983) by H.M. Geduld.

   See also: BIOLOGY; DEVOLUTION; GOTHIC SF; HISTORY OF SF; The MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION ; MEDICINE; METAPHYSICS; PARANOIA; PREDICTION; SCIENTISTS; SEX; SUPERNATURAL CREATURES; THEATRE; VILLAINS.