Seeking Hyde

by Reed, Thomas;

  “Of course I do.” “Would you still feel that way?” “I suppose.”

  Stevenson eyed him warmly. “Do you think I shouldn’t?” asked the boy. “I have had an experience or two lately,” Stevenson offered in response, “that have led me to believe that we can sometimes influence the way significant matters unfold far more consequentially than we ever thought we could.”

  “In what way?” “It’s actually part and parcel with what I was just saying about how one’s thoughts evolve as one moves through life. I don’t know that this is just the right time to go into particulars.” He looked over at Fanny, who nodded. “Suffice it to say that there are times to stand back and accept things. Established attitudes or situations we are not particularly able to change. I nonetheless believe there are other times when we have to summon up a little more boldness and faith. Shape our collective destinies.”

  “You remind me of Valentine,” chuckled Lloyd. “How so?” “She used to say it might be pleasant to change history. Don’t you remember?”

  “Well,” said Stevenson. “Valentine turns out to be quite a wise woman.”

  “My, but we’re getting philosophical,” observed Fanny. She stared out the window and then wiped with her handkerchief at the border of an expansive patch of frost. “Look,” she said, pointing to the shape. “It’s a pistol!”

  Newport, R.I., U.S.A.20 January, 1889

  My dear Symonds,

  So, long it went excellent well, and I have had a time I am glad to have had. Ere we cast ourselves upon the waters, my erstwhile Edinburgh nursemaid, dear old Cummy, braved the Despicable City to bid her boy farewell. She came down with Ferrier’s saintly sister, Elizabeth, and James even surprised us on the quay at Tilbury, with a case of champagne in tow. Medicinal comforts for the voyage, he proclaimed. Our first port of call was Le Havre, where we took on the most unlikely consignment of apes, cows, and over one hundred horses! Fanny, as you can imagine, was apoplectic; Lloyd (as Sam now calls himself) was consummately charmed. Small wonder the rates The Dear One had been able to obtain were so very reasonable!

  O it was lovely on our stable-ship, chock full of stallions; she rolled heartily, rolled some of the fittings out of our stateroom, and I think a more dangerous cruise it would be hard to imagine. But we enjoyed it to the mast head, all but Fanny; and even she perhaps a little. When we got in, we had run out of beer, stout, curaçao, soda-water, water, fresh meat and (almost) of biscuit. But it was a thousandfold pleasanter than a great big Birmingham liner like a new hotel; and we liked the officers, and made friends with the quartermasters, and I (at least) made a friend of a baboon whose embraces have pretty near cost me a coat.

  Really enjoying my life, in sum. There is nothing like being at sea, after all. And O why have I allowed myself to rot so long on land? My reception here was idiotic to the last degree; if Jesus Christ came, they would make less fuss. The pilot who took us into New York Harbor somehow heard I was on board, and refused to leave the ship until he had met the man who had inspired the play that has somehow taken Broadway by storm. It is very silly and not pleasant, except where humor enters; and I confess the poor interviewer lads pleased me.

  As you can imagine, I have continued to give much thought to our past adventures and was reassured to find in the American press no fresh news of our man. It has been hellish difficult accepting that I shall likely never know if my shilling shocker played any role in inspiring the late depravities. I sometimes dream of stealing into the blighter’s house to look for a certain theatre receipt, that or a certain slender volume in soft covers. Had our discourse been more civil that wild night in West Hampstead, perhaps I might have asked him directly. Yet my dilemma nicely captures, does it not?, the difference between the cask-of-all-answers that is fiction’s to tap and the damned ambiguities of life itself. (Though bless ambiguities, really, in the end!) While I continue to regret having loosed my wretched Hyde upon the world, you and I have at least mopped up some of his loathsome offal.

  I will be sure to let you know how we get on in Newport, curious specimens that we are in the peripatetic little ménage I call Family.

  Love to Janet and my kindest regards to your brave young friend.

  Yours ever,

  R. L. S.

  Author’s Note

  The strict historicist in Lloyd Osbourne (as we must now call him) might be pleased with a good portion of what you have just finished reading. It is very much in line with what we know of Stevenson’s life—as reflected, for example, in the very different (but each of them very useful) biographies of Ian Bell, Frank McLynn, and Claire Harman. Anyone interested in the writer will count it a great blessing that he left behind, along with a number of personal sketches and memoirs, eight volumes’ worth of letters, wonderfully presented in the Yale edition of Bradford Booth and Ernest Mehew. While I have necessarily taken great liberties putting spoken words into the mouth of one of Victorian Britain’s most lively conversationalists, many of the letters included here are direct or slightly edited transcripts of Stevenson’s actual correspondence—as is Symonds’s first letter to the author regarding Jekyll and Hyde. It seems only fair to have let these people speak for themselves where their doing so felt reasonable and appropriate. Experienced readers of Stevenson will also notice, beyond the selections from Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde that head each chapter, numerous images and phrases are borrowed from his writings. All of the poems cited here, as well, are from Stevenson’s pen; most may be found amongst the timelessly charming pages of A Child’s Garden of Verses. Finally, the account of Stevenson’s unpublishable Oedipal reverie is a close transcription of one portion of his remarkable “Chapter on Dreams.”

  This fiction, to the extent that it is a fiction, grew out of a scholarly project I undertook a dozen or so years back, tracing the social and biographical origins of Stevenson’s little shilling shocker. The account I was able to render there, I felt, did not do justice to a profound literary-historical irony: that a story written in part as an act of moral contrition should, after one permutation, have been blamed for inspiring one of the most horrific series of crimes in European history. It is that singular misalignment between an author’s intentions and his possible impact that has driven this effort.

  I have, of course, taken some liberties with the historical record. Stevenson was in actual fact already in the United States by the time the Ripper began his macabre program. As you are now well aware, my fictional Stevenson delays his family’s emigration to America and remains in England in order to see the Symonds/Hallett affair through to the end. If he seems in this a cousin to Sherlock Holmes—or perhaps, at those specific times when Symonds is taking the initiative, more to Dr. Watson—my apologies. My own fin de siècle-loving brownies seem to have taken me irresistibly in that direction.

  I should say that when Stevenson resolves in these pages to move beyond writing about life to actually doing things that make a tangible difference, he is mirroring a pattern that became well established towards the end of the real author’s days. The most notable of many examples found Stevenson, during his last years, becoming what we would now call a political activist, boldly advocating for the native residents of Samoa, the island on which he spent the last four years of his life. Those Europeans who loved his writing found this real world involvement to be a damaging distraction. Most famously, Oscar Wilde declared, “I see that romantic surroundings are the worst surroundings possible for a romantic writer. In Gower Street Stevenson could have written a new Trois Mousquetaires. In Samoa he wrote letters to the Times about Germans.”

  Stevenson did not, however, abandon his fiction in Samoa, and one of the most compelling narratives that he wrote there—The Beach of Falesá—offers a striking model of a bystander to evil who ultimately risks everything to bring it to an end. The novella’s protagonist, Wiltshire, is a Cockney trader rather than a Scotsman of letters, but his ultimate confrontation with the “gentleman villain,” Case, shows Stevenson expl
oring in a fable the heroic virtue of setting aside quotidian business and literally coming to grips with a darkness. My brownies are thoroughly acquainted with Case and The Beach, since I have taught the book multiple times, and I strongly suspect that this had something to do both with my invention of Hallett and with our heroes’ subduing of the man. As for the possible creative influence of Wiltshire, I hope Stevenson would be pleased to be shown in these pages displaying some of the pluck and commitment of one of his more complex and under-appreciated protagonists. We know he loved to play, at least, at war.

  So, in a bid to make the long and involved history of Jekyll and Hyde even more interesting, I have sometimes taken real liberties with fact—albeit (I hope) in ways that reflect some well-established patterns in Stevenson’s later life and writings. Virtually everything you have read here up through Stevenson’s dismay at the charges brought against the play (in other words, Parts One and Two) is in line with broadly documented fact. All of the details of Saucy Jack’s crimes, as well, are historical, with the newspaper accounts drawn directly from the Times of London.

  While Stevenson and Symonds were indeed longtime friends, their meetings in London and their interventions in the Ripper investigations are complete fabrications. My hope, though, is that they are both compelling and plausible enough that I may be forgiven for distorting the true record.

  Finally, I believe it is already abundantly clear that Thomas Hallett is invented out of whole cloth, as is the shipping family of which he was the heir. Unfortunately—or perhaps fortunately—the historical figure for whom he stands in is now no more substantial than last week’s nightmare. We can only hope that, in some no-longer-documentable pattern of history, he was nonetheless held rigorously accountable for his crimes.

  Acknowledgments

  Thanks are due, above all, to my family, who patiently endured my decades-long obsession with Stevenson and his most riveting tale, offering support and encouragement when both were sorely needed. My wife Dottie, daughter Abby, and son Dan were with me all the way, from that endless 2002 slog up a sodden Samoan mountainside to stand by Stevenson’s grave, through a memorable fireside evening a dozen years later when I read them a draft of the Lizzie Stride chapter and they smiled approval over glasses of mulled wine, to their indispensable last-minute advice on the shape and tone of the whole. Thanks, too, to Dickinson College, for affording me the time to work on the first iteration of the book. Among my colleagues there, Susan Perabo helped me more than she probably knows. Her extraordinariness as a writer is matched only by her ability to inspire and improve the writing of others.

  Among the world’s avid preservers of the Stevenson legacy, John Macfie of Edinburgh’s Stevenson Club deserves special thanks for his vital help in securing permissions for this volume. With his wife Felicitas, he also hosted the Reeds several years back at 17 Heriot Row, where he shared some his vast knowledge of the writer’s city, family, and boyhood home over serial glasses of Prosecco that RLS himself would have relished.

  To Eric Kampmann at Beaufort Books I owe profound thanks for boldly and generously taking on a project that, as so often happens, was peddled at many doors before anyone really deigned to open up and chat. Megan Trank has been wonderful to work with as Beaufort’s Managing Editor—prompt, judicious, and efficient—and I could not have found a better reader than James Carpenter to help me kill the many darlings that, diverting as they were to explore, were definitely sidetracks off the mainline that the narrative needed to take.

  Finally, boundless thanks to my mother, Betsy Mook Reed. My father and sister were the other academics in the family, but it was she whose lifelong love of classic tales of adventure first introduced me to Treasure Island. I can still hear her bedtime readings in all of the requisite voices—boy, peg-legged cook, and parrot. The echoes, here, of other Stevensonian voices are undoubtedly owing to her.