BBC Ian Rankin Investigates Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
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00:00I've lived in Edinburgh for most of my adult life.
00:10It's the setting for The Adventures of My Hero,
00:13detective inspector John Rebus.
00:16The city's haunted and violent past is all around you.
00:20It's impossible to escape.
00:22My books are as much about the city as they are crime stories.
00:26I'm part of a long line of Scottish writers
00:29who've written about this endlessly fascinating place.
00:32Yet for me, there's only one book that's really nailed it.
00:36And it might surprise you, because it's not even set in Edinburgh.
00:44The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is the classic Scottish novel.
00:49It's the gripping, horrifying account of a doctor
00:52who discovers a chemical which separates his evil side from his good.
00:56It's a story that really gets under your skin.
00:59I turn to it time and again, not just reading and re-reading it,
01:02but also borrowing from it for my own fiction, my own stories.
01:05But what's really interesting to me is the strange case
01:08of how its author, Robert Louis Stevenson, came to write it.
01:13The roots of this extraordinary story stretch back to Stevenson's childhood.
01:21Grave robbers, hallucinatory drugs and harlots
01:25all play their part in the disturbing tale of Henry Jekyll's double life.
01:41One of Scotland's greatest writers, Robert Louis Stevenson
01:45wrote some of the 19th century's biggest literary hits.
01:48Treasure Island, Kidnapped and The Weir of Hermiston are still widely read.
01:54But Stevenson's most successful novel was nearly never published.
01:59He suffered from tuberculosis and there were fears that he might be nearing his end.
02:04Writing Jekyll and Hyde almost killed Stevenson.
02:09When he finished the first draft, his wife Fanny was so appalled by what she read
02:14she declared that it wasn't fit to be published.
02:17So Stevenson burnt the manuscript.
02:20But Dr Jekyll and his alter ego refused to let go.
02:25When Stevenson rewrote it, the book became an instant hit.
02:30Jekyll and Hyde is almost a classic morality tale, isn't it?
02:36I mean, it's partly...
02:38And it's really talking about this upright pillar of society
02:43who's completely overtaken by the disaster of using this appalling drug.
02:50I think it's a modern myth, I think, that Stevenson's Jekyll and Hyde,
02:54they're books that are so kind of ingrained in our world picture
02:58that people sort of think that they've read them even when they haven't.
03:02It's clear that Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde hit a nerve with the public.
03:0740,000 copies sold in Britain and I think even more extraordinarily
03:13some 250,000 copies sold in the United States.
03:18To free the primitive...
03:22..savage...
03:24..murderer, Mr Hyde,
03:26in the screen's first classic portrayal of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.
03:33In Stevenson's book, the story is told by Dr Jekyll's lawyer, John Utterson.
03:40His suspicions are aroused by the brilliant scientist's decision
03:44to will all his possessions to a young man called Edward Hyde.
03:49What's the connection between the respectable Dr Jekyll and the evil Mr Hyde?
03:55How could Jekyll open his home to a man who callously assaulted a small girl
04:00and is now wanted for the murder of a distinguished MP?
04:05Utterson decides to investigate,
04:08but only uncovers the terrible truth after Dr Jekyll's mysterious death.
04:15Dr Jekyll discovered a drug that separated his good and evil sides
04:20with tragic consequences.
04:24He became hooked.
04:26Once he'd had a taste of his dark side,
04:28Jekyll began to transform into Mr Hyde, whether he wanted to or not.
04:38The story of Jekyll and Hyde still haunts me.
04:41When it was first published, there were those who said it was a monstrous book.
04:45They couldn't deal with the moral chaos at the heart of the story,
04:48that Jekyll is eventually overwhelmed by Hyde.
04:51In other words, that our evil sides may be stronger than our good ones.
04:55Moreover, Stevenson seems to imply that there are no happy endings.
05:01Why are we still fascinated by this story?
05:03And where did Henry Jekyll's double life originate?
05:12One night in September 1885,
05:15Fanny woke Stevenson, who was in the throes of a nightmare.
05:20Louie! Louie! Come on, wake up! Louie!
05:26Wake up, Louie!
05:28It's all right, it's all right.
05:31Why did you wake me? I was doing a fine ghost story.
05:35Stevenson dreamt a number of key scenes from the book.
05:38Jekyll taking the powder and the murder of an elderly gentleman.
05:45Stevenson had always suffered from nightmares.
05:48They began as a child, growing up here in Harriet Row, Edinburgh.
05:58We're coming up to the top of the house,
06:00and I'm going to show you the room which was Stevenson's room
06:03and which is now my children's bedroom.
06:06What sort of childhood did Stevenson have?
06:09Well, it is believed that he had inherited TB from his mother,
06:14and so he was a very, very sickly child
06:18and had to spend a lot of his childhood actually in bed
06:23because he was too weak and he was coughing constantly.
06:26And that's where his nanny, Alison Cummingham, known as Cummy,
06:32really began to play such a role.
06:35I think she was just one of those country girls from Fife
06:40that had grown up in that wonderful oral tradition of Scotland,
06:45and so she was full of stories,
06:47and also because she was a fired-up Free Presbyterian,
06:51she was full of...
06:53Fire and brimstone. Fire and brimstone stories.
06:56And so the fact that he wrote Jekyll and Hyde
06:59the fact that he wrote Jekyll and Hyde is so not a surprise to me.
07:15What made Cummy's bedtime stories for young Louis so terrifying
07:19was that they really happened,
07:21just outside his bedroom window on the haunted streets of Edinburgh.
07:26400 years ago, the devil and his disciples
07:29were seen as being the biggest threat to church and state,
07:33fuelling the great witch hunts of the 16th and 17th centuries.
07:37Many witches perished here in Edinburgh's grass market.
07:40Others were drowned in the Knorr Loch,
07:42Prince's Street Gardens as we know it today,
07:45or were hurled from hillsides to see if they could fly.
07:48One of Cummy's favourite bedtime stories
07:51was about Edinburgh's most famous warlock.
07:55Thomas Weir, along with his sister Jean,
07:58were members of one of Scotland's strictest religious sects,
08:01the Covenanters.
08:03Prayer meetings were held outdoors
08:05and the leaders wore masks to prevent being identified.
08:08Thomas and Jean seemed the holiest of holy,
08:11making great show of piety and godliness
08:14and excelling at prayer.
08:16In time, they even became the unofficial leaders of one group
08:20who called themselves the Saints.
08:23But Thomas and Jean had a secret.
08:30This is Magdalene Chapel, a Covenanter church.
08:33It was at a meeting of the Saints one spring day
08:36that Major Weir dropped his bombshell.
08:39He told his colleagues that he'd led a double life.
08:42His piety had been a facade
08:44behind which the real Major Weir
08:46had committed every carnal act imaginable.
08:49His life had been utterly depraved.
08:53When both Thomas and his sister Jean
08:55confessed to a string of sexual offences,
08:58the outraged congregation reported the pair to the authorities.
09:02They were arrested.
09:04At their interrogation, Jean sported the devil's mark
09:07in the shape of a horseshoe on her forehead.
09:10They told the horrified Lord Provost how they had met the devil
09:14and made a pact with him 20 years before.
09:17Instead of being charged with the crimes,
09:20Jean was declared insane and sentenced to hang.
09:23Weir was charged with sex offences
09:25and sentenced to be burnt at the stake.
09:28On the morning of his death,
09:30Weir was asked if he wanted to repent.
09:32His last words were,
09:46And 200 years later,
09:48Stevenson's father would tell his young son
09:50that sometimes, late at night,
09:52you could still hear the clatter of hooves
09:54and the rattle of wheels on the sets,
09:56Edinburgh's version of cobblestones,
09:58and the devil's coach,
10:00drawn by six coal-black horses with fiery eyes,
10:03would drive into town,
10:05and belated people might see the dead Major
10:07through the coach windows.
10:12It wasn't just Edinburgh characters like Major Weir
10:15who led double lives.
10:18The city itself has a split personality.
10:22Robert Louis Stevenson had grown up
10:24in a city divided between new and old.
10:28The new town was created in the late 18th century
10:31because the old town had become overcrowded and insanitary.
10:36Living cheek by jowl with the poor was so unbearable
10:39that the wealthy built themselves a new town.
10:44Bridges were built to connect the two.
10:48So that respectable citizens, like the young Stevenson,
10:51could stroll from their grand new houses
10:53to the brothels and drinking dens of the old town.
11:02Here, Stevenson himself lived a double life.
11:09Enjoying the kind of company that would have appalled
11:11his upright and God-fearing parents.
11:17I'll tell you them sometime.
11:21Good evening.
11:22Good evening.
11:23Lovely night tonight, isn't it?
11:30Stevenson was always very concerned
11:32about the amount of overcrowding in the old town.
11:35I've always liked this description that he gives
11:37of a typical old town tenement.
11:40Everywhere, a pinching narrow habit, scanty meals
11:43and an air of sluttishness and dirt.
11:46In the first room, there's a birth.
11:48In another, a death.
11:49In a third, a sordid drinking bout.
11:52And the detective and the Bible reader cross upon the stairs.
11:56High words are audible from dwelling to dwelling
11:59and children have a strange experience from the first.
12:02Only a robust soul, you would think,
12:05could grow up in such conditions without hurt.
12:09Stevenson himself, of course, never the most robust of souls.
12:16BELL TOLLS
12:33Stevenson's nurse, Cummie, told the young Louis stories
12:37about another real-life Edinburgh character,
12:39Deacon William Brodie.
12:41Brodie was a cabinetmaker. This was his workshop.
12:44He was a gentleman by day, he was a member of the town council,
12:47but he had a secret life.
12:49He was addicted to gambling and not particularly good at it.
12:52To feed his addiction, he turned to burglary,
12:55what the Scots call hame sucking.
12:59As well as the gambling debts,
13:01Brodie also had a family and two mistresses to support.
13:06His profession as cabinetmaker
13:08allowed him to enter the houses of the wealthy.
13:11He would copy the door keys of his customers
13:13while working in their homes during the day
13:16and then return at night to steal from them.
13:19One old lady recalled that the robber sported very dashing attire,
13:23a mask, a brace of pistols and a lantern.
13:27Throughout his reign, Brodie's great respectability
13:31protected him from suspicion.
13:33His last crime was an armed raid on Edinburgh's excise office.
13:37He and his accomplices were apprehended.
13:40Brodie was tried and hanged.
13:56What made this tale particularly scary for Stevenson
13:59was that as a young lad, this cabinet, made by Deacon Brodie,
14:03had sat in Stevenson's bedroom in Heriot-Rowe.
14:07Stevenson was so obsessed with Deacon Brodie
14:10that he would eventually write a play about him
14:13with his friend Henley, to whom he gave this cabinet.
14:20The dark deeds of both the cabinetmaker-turned-thief
14:24and the warlock Thomas Weir
14:26haunted Stevenson for the rest of his life.
14:32The evidence so far,
14:34a city divided between Old Town and New,
14:37the warlock Major Weir,
14:39the two-faced Deacon Brodie.
14:42But there's another clue to the origin of Jekyll and Hyde,
14:45and it lies in the title.
14:47Henry Jekyll was a doctor.
14:53Edinburgh was one of Europe's leading centres of medical study,
14:57and what fascinated Stevenson
14:59was that these pillars of respectability
15:02were also forced to lead double lives.
15:05To find out how human beings worked,
15:08surgeons needed to cut them up,
15:10and for that they needed cadavers, and plenty of them.
15:16Anatomists realised there was only one solution, the grave.
15:20From the early 18th century,
15:22there was an explosion in body-snatching as an industry.
15:26Warring gangs would prowl cemeteries at night,
15:29much to the anger and horror of the local populace,
15:32who nicknamed them Resurrectionists.
15:35Sack him up, mate.
15:39And they took pride in their work.
15:42Real pros could dig up a body in under 15 minutes.
15:46They would dig a shaft to the head of the coffin,
15:49rip off the lid, sling a rope round the body's arms
15:52and pull it from the grave.
15:54Then they stripped the body and bundled it into a sack.
15:59A crack team would aim for around ten bodies in any one night.
16:08A single adult body could be worth as much as 15 guineas.
16:12£1,200 in today's money.
16:15You begin to see the attraction of such a grisly trade.
16:23Body-snatching was big business all over Britain.
16:26This was at a time when only the corpses of executed criminals
16:29could be used for dissection,
16:31and there weren't enough of those to go round.
16:34Graves like this one were caged
16:36to prevent the body-snatchers going about their grisly business.
16:39It was an early form of organised crime,
16:42but the Mr Biggs weren't gangsters.
16:45They were anatomists.
16:48The government tolerated grave-robbing for decades.
16:52Their bodies were in short supply
16:54and the army required skilled surgeons,
16:56so they turned a blind eye.
16:58But then two enterprising grave-robbers went too far.
17:02William Burke and William Hare
17:04opened a small boarding house in Edinburgh
17:07and started murdering their guests.
17:10They sold the fresh corpses to the College of Surgeons.
17:13The two Irishmen were eventually caught
17:16and Burke was hanged.
17:19In a gruesome irony,
17:21Burke's body was donated to Edinburgh's medical school for dissection.
17:25His death mask and the wallet made out of his skin
17:29remain on display there to this day.
17:49Stevenson was so inspired by the deeds of Burke and Hare
17:53that he wrote a precursor to Jekyll and Hyde
17:56called The Body Snatcher,
17:58in which a ruthless doctor and his young student
18:01found themselves blackmailed
18:03by their murderous supplier of illegal cadavers.
18:06Give me a hand. This is heavy.
18:09You'll find the specimen in good condition.
18:12He was as bright and lively as a thrush not a week long gone.
18:16This shady world of medical science
18:19was the perfect setting for Stevenson's tale.
18:26He was a man of great talent.
18:28He was a man of great intelligence.
18:30He was a man of great talent.
18:32He was a man of great intelligence.
18:34He was a man of great talent.
18:37I like to think that I've got a few things in common
18:40with Robert Louis Stevenson.
18:42Like me, he lived in Edinburgh and wrote about the city many times.
18:46He called it a place of mysteries,
18:48a city where it's impossible to escape the past.
18:51And yet, infuriatingly, he doesn't set Jekyll and Hyde here.
18:55He sets it in London.
19:07So why London?
19:09There was one man here who transformed body snatching
19:13into an industry, the 18th century Mr Big.
19:17John Hunter developed closer relationships with grave robbers
19:22than any other surgeon.
19:24So why did Hunter and his fellow anatomists require so many bodies?
19:29As far as I know, at that time,
19:32almost nothing was known about the anatomy of the human body
19:36and even less about the physiology.
19:39There were no microscopes,
19:41and I don't think anybody really knew how we worked at all.
19:45So he had to find out almost everything from square one.
19:50Surgical practice was based back in medieval times.
19:57Since the times of the Greeks and the Romans,
20:00it was believed that all illness
20:02stemmed from an imbalance of bodily fluids or humours.
20:06Therefore, copious and routine bloodletting
20:09was the panacea for every ill.
20:11In fact, the three most favoured Georgian remedies
20:14were purging, vomiting and bloodletting,
20:18methods that lasted well into the 19th century.
20:21John Hunter rejected the perceived medical practices of the time,
20:26so he set out to understand the human body's inner workings.
20:30What deeply concerned him was practice
20:34that had never really been scientifically considered.
20:38I think that's one of his legacies,
20:40that he did so much experimentation
20:43that he was an early real scientist.
20:47Born just outside Glasgow,
20:49John Hunter left school early to work in London
20:52as an assistant to his elder brother William,
20:54who was already an established physician.
20:57Hunter carried out his first human dissection aged 20
21:01at his brother's anatomy school here in Covent Garden,
21:04which at that time was one of London's many red-light districts.
21:09Like Dr Jekyll, there was a dark side to Hunter's work.
21:12His voracious appetite for knowledge came at a price.
21:17The anatomy school advertised a hands-on education,
21:22or to put it bluntly, a corpse for every student.
21:26This promise, however, relied on a ceaseless supply of cadavers
21:30dumped at the back door.
21:32John Hunter was tasked with finding corpses for dissection,
21:36and it was a competitive business.
21:39This is Tyburn Gallows, Marble Arch to you and me.
21:43Marble Arch to you and me.
21:45It's reckoned that over 50,000 prisoners were executed here
21:48during the six centuries in which it was London's main place of execution,
21:53and yet shortage of bodies was still acute,
21:56so much so that the anatomists had to compete
21:59for the corpses of the condemned.
22:01A typical hanging at Tyburn Tree was a grisly affair.
22:05The bodies of the condemned were bartered for in advance at Newgate Prison,
22:09so the drop of the noose was like a starting pistol,
22:12signalling the anatomists to charge forward to wrest control of the bodies.
22:16Some weren't even half dead before the fights between the surgeons
22:20and the relatives broke out.
22:22The relatives often leapt up to grab the dangling corpses' feet
22:25to shorten the slow and painful death,
22:28while hand-to-hand battles with the anatomists were a common sight.
22:31The crowd loved it.
22:33And in the middle of the fray stood John Hunter.
22:38But even Tyburn's crop of victims wasn't enough.
22:42The school was a demanding taskmaster,
22:44requiring not just random corpses,
22:47but foetuses, babies and pregnant women.
22:50No wonder John Hunter became the grave robber's favourite client.
22:56Back in the dissecting room,
22:58Hunter set out to create his own map of the human interior
23:02and then translate his research into the practice of surgery.
23:07During the 12 winters John spent in Covent Garden,
23:10he was said to have dissected more than 2,000 human bodies.
23:15How he got through 2,000 bodies, I just don't know.
23:18But he knew that to get a full understanding,
23:22you had to do an awful lot more than observe,
23:25that you actually had to handle the material,
23:28get your hands dirty, I suppose is what we would say these days,
23:31and he was prepared to do that.
23:33Like Dr Jekyll,
23:35Hunter put all this research to practical use by treating patients.
23:40Now, cast your mind back to the old famous anatomist John Hunter.
23:45Still studied by medical students today,
23:48one of Hunter's new developments was the treatment of aneurysms.
23:52The main artery going to the leg is called the popliteal artery
23:56and it lies here behind the knee joint.
24:00If you bend the knee like that,
24:02what on earth is going to happen to the popliteal artery?
24:05Famously, a coachman came to see Hunter one day
24:08with an aneurysm at the back of his knee.
24:10The popliteal artery, the one at the back of the knee,
24:14had been pressed upon over and over again
24:16by the high boots worn by the coachman.
24:19That had weakened the wall of the artery,
24:22so it had actually dilated.
24:24So where you expect a straight tubular artery,
24:27it gets a bulge in it, which is the aneurysm.
24:30That disturbs the blood flow,
24:32which leads to clots forming within the aneurysm, within the artery,
24:37so you obstruct the flow to the leg beyond where the artery is.
24:42There is the artery that is the continuation in the leg
24:47of the popliteal artery.
24:49Most surgeons would have amputated,
24:52but Hunter found a way of saving the leg.
24:55Hunter realised that all you need do was come above the aneurysm
24:59and tie off the artery,
25:01so a much, much smaller, less invasive operation,
25:04and the blood found the collateral route.
25:07What Hunter had discovered was that when the main artery is blocked,
25:11the blood will find an alternative route
25:13through other blood vessels to the rest of the leg below the knee.
25:17And there's the popliteal artery.
25:19Now, that's probably below the point at which Hunter actually tied it off.
25:24After 12 years of research,
25:26Hunter decided to quit the anatomy school in Covent Garden
25:29to build up his own reputation.
25:31But he didn't set up shop as a doctor.
25:34He decided to have a go at dentistry.
25:38Although sugar imports from the West Indies
25:40led to a huge increase in diseased teeth,
25:43most surgeons looked down on dentistry as far beneath their status.
25:48Consequently, most dental work was left to a motley collection of opportunists,
25:53from barbers to blacksmiths.
25:57The methods were barbarous and sheer torture.
26:01Hunter was sure he could do better
26:03by putting into practice the knowledge he'd acquired
26:06from studying the skulls and teeth of countless dead bodies.
26:11It was a way of finally making some money
26:13and also continuing his research.
26:16Well, one of the things he was interested in was dental practice,
26:20and in particular one of the things that dentists in London
26:22were doing in the middle of the 18th century,
26:24which was transplanting teeth, which sounds utterly bizarre today.
26:28And yet it was quite common.
26:30You'd take a tooth out of a donor who was paid for selling their teeth
26:34and you'd implant them into the mouths of rich women
26:37who were scared that their loss of their teeth
26:40would detract from their beauty.
26:42Did it work? Well, Hunter wasn't entirely sure,
26:44but he carried out experiments.
26:46He knew you could take the spur from a cockerel's leg
26:49and graft it onto the cockerel's head, which you can see there.
26:52And so he tried transplanting human teeth into the heads of cockerels.
26:57And you can see there one of his experiments to try and prove
27:00or establish whether these grafts would actually take root and grow.
27:04And it formed part of a whole series of transplantation experiments
27:08that John Hunter did, transplanting spurs, transplanting teeth,
27:12transplanting the testicles out of cockerels into chickens,
27:16giving them male characteristics,
27:18something John Hunter said was the most spectacularly useless experiment
27:22anyone had ever devised.
27:24But fascinating nonetheless. Absolutely.
27:26It showed the range of his interest.
27:33Hunter's huge collection of specimens, amassed over years of research,
27:37is now housed in a London museum named after him, the Hunterian.
27:43Like Dr Jekyll in his quest to push scientific boundaries,
27:47Hunter was completely driven.
27:49I mean, he sounds to me like he was an obsessive.
27:52Well, I'm not sure about obsessive, but he was certainly...
27:54I mean, judging by the collection that he amassed.
27:56He was driven to investigate everything.
27:59So if you look around his museum, you know,
28:01his thousands of preparations,
28:03you can see there's bits of an octopus, bits of a sheep,
28:07a section through an elephant's trunk,
28:10bits of dogfish, hyenas, bits of a centipede up there,
28:14an amazing collection of electric fish down here.
28:17John Hunter worked with a natural philosopher called John Walsh,
28:20dissecting electric eels and electric rays
28:23to try and see whether their electricity was a natural phenomenon.
28:34Hunter's obsession with cutting up everything and anything
28:38he could lay his hands on
28:40gave him the skills that earned his infamous nickname,
28:44The Knife Man.
28:46So I've got an example here which shows
28:48just what a skilful surgeon John Hunter was,
28:52and it's this remarkable tumour.
28:54And you can see there's a drawing of the patient there,
28:57this man called John Burley,
28:59who was treated by Hunter at St George's Hospital in the 1780s.
29:03And he had this tremendous tumour, this benign salivary adenoma,
29:07so it wasn't a malignant tumour, it was just vast.
29:09And John Hunter removed it.
29:11An operation that took about 25 minutes.
29:14John Burley had no...
29:15It weighed over 4kg.
29:17Yeah. I mean, these are two parts of the same tumour.
29:20There are other bits that we haven't displayed.
29:22So it was massive.
29:23And judging by the picture, John Burley made a very good recovery.
29:26The scar was minimal at the end of the operation.
29:28I mean, I think a modern-day surgeon would be proud of that piece of work.
29:31I think so.
29:32I think that's why John Hunter is regarded as the founder of scientific surgery.
29:35He did set a benchmark for other surgeons,
29:37both at the same time and in following generations.
29:40Fantastic. Fantastic.
29:44Hunter soon became one of London's most sought-after doctors
29:48and was appointed Surgeon Extraordinary to King George III.
30:00Despite his fame and respectability,
30:02Hunter still demanded a constant supply of cadavers
30:05for his growing anatomy collection and teaching.
30:10Naturally, Hunter's new home in Leicester Square
30:13was purpose-built for a surgeon's double life.
30:28In the story, Stevenson describes Dr Jekyll
30:31as having bought his house from the heirs of a celebrated surgeon.
30:35That surgeon, according to writer Wendy Moore, was John Hunter.
30:41So where are we now, Wendy?
30:43Well, this is the south-east corner of Leicester Square.
30:46This is where John Hunter's house would have stood.
30:50It was second from the end,
30:53which is just as in the Jekyll and Hyde story, in fact.
30:56What would the house have been like then?
30:58John Hunter actually bought the house in 1783
31:02and it was an elegant four-storey townhouse
31:05in one of London's most prestigious squares.
31:08But he not only bought this house, he actually bought the house behind it,
31:12which was in what's now Charing Cross Road,
31:15and the land in between the two.
31:19Having the two houses meant that Hunter could build
31:22an anatomy theatre in the space in between.
31:25This allowed him to keep his family and business life apart.
31:31So where are we now, Wendy?
31:33Well, this is Charing Cross Road,
31:35which is, as you can hear, very busy at the moment.
31:37In John Hunter's day, it was Castle Street,
31:40which was a quiet back street at the back of Leicester Square.
31:44So this is the back door?
31:46This would have been number 13, Castle Street,
31:48which was the back of John Hunter's house,
31:50where the bodies would have been delivered in hampers every night.
31:54This would have been the old dissecting room door
31:57from which Hyde is supposed to have emerged.
31:59In the book, Stevenson gives a detailed description
32:02of the layout of Dr Jekyll's home.
32:05It's identical to John Hunter's.
32:07This was a ground plan of the house,
32:10which was actually drawn by John Hunter's last assistant.
32:13So luckily we know exactly what the house was like in his day.
32:18Hunter's home was in fact two houses.
32:21One fronted Leicester Square,
32:23the other backed onto Castle Street,
32:25today Charing Cross Road.
32:28Hunter built a huge two-storey structure
32:31that bridged the two houses
32:33in order to house a lecture theatre, a grand parlour
32:36and, of course, his treasured anatomy collection.
32:40A journey through the house would take you from the elegant front door
32:44through the lobby where patients waited to see the great man.
32:49A corridor led to Hunter's study and bedroom,
32:52where he would take a customary nap at 4pm each day.
32:56Reaching the back door of the first house,
32:58guests crossed the yard under a covered walkway
33:01which took them to a grand reception room
33:04and then into a spacious amphitheatre
33:06where Hunter delivered his lectures and demonstrated dissections.
33:11Behind the lecture hall was another yard
33:14that led to the dingy 13 Castle Street.
33:18Here was Hunter's dissecting room
33:21and home to four or five unfortunate students
33:24who ate, lived and slept among corpses
33:27in various states of decomposition.
33:31In the story, Dr Jekyll turns this room into his laboratory.
33:36Finally, exiting by the plain street door,
33:39just as Mr Hyde would do,
33:41visitors emerged into the grimy thoroughfare of Castle Street.
33:47In a way, the house was this architectural solution
33:50so that he could keep these two worlds separate.
33:53So he had his wealthy patients who he dealt with
33:56and they came to the front door
33:58and the kind of seamy, sinister side of his life
34:01was kept behind at the back door, kind of discreetly.
34:05In a letter home, one of Hunter's students wrote a description
34:08of his first impressions of life in the Castle Street premises.
34:13There was a dead carcass just at this moment rumbling up the stairs
34:17and the resurrection men swearing most terribly.
34:20I am informed this will be the case most mornings
34:23about four o'clock throughout the winter.
34:25There is something horrible in it at first,
34:28but I have now become reconciled.
34:32And even when he died,
34:34he'd asked that his own body would be dissected.
34:36So his own body was brought to that back door
34:39and taken to the dissecting room
34:41and his own students dissected his body when he died.
34:43Good grief.
34:48One of the things I could never understand when I first read Jekyll and Hyde
34:51was why Stevenson had moved the action from Edinburgh to London
34:55and, of course, this is perfect.
34:58You must have thought, not only is Hunter a perfect character,
35:02but the house is perfect for his needs as well.
35:05Yes, and I think in those days most people would have known
35:08and realised that it did refer to John Hunter and John Hunter's house
35:11because he was really an icon in Victorian age.
35:15As well as real-life characters from Edinburgh's dark past,
35:19we now have the reason for locating the story in London
35:23and even the inspiration for Dr Jekyll.
35:27But the actual writing of Jekyll and Hyde
35:30was almost as dramatic as the tale itself.
35:34Stevenson was dangerously ill
35:37and just two weeks before he began the book,
35:40Stevenson almost died from bleeding of the lungs.
35:43As a last resort, the doctor prescribed a drug called ergotine,
35:47which had terrifying side effects.
35:50Ergotine is an interesting plant extract.
35:53It's an extract of ergot, which is a fungus,
35:57the travisseps fungus, which grows on rye.
36:00And that's been known since the Middle Ages.
36:02It was known that, for example, people who ate the infected rye
36:05used to jump around in spasm and have hallucinations.
36:09It turns out that ergot constricts blood vessels and prevents bleeding,
36:13so it has a medicinal use for Stevenson
36:15because this is one of the drugs by which he can control
36:18the very severe bleeding from his lungs.
36:20Doctor!
36:23Let's get him into the bed, Mr Stevenson.
36:28Not only did ergotine make Stevenson's imagination more vivid,
36:32it also hammered home the idea
36:35that drugs can change an individual's personality.
36:38All right?
36:41As well as taking an hallucinatory drug,
36:43he continued to suffer from appalling fevers.
36:46No wonder Stevenson's nightmares were so vivid.
36:49Louis, come on, wake up!
36:51Louis!
36:54Wake up, Louis!
36:56It's all right, it's all right.
36:59Why did you wake me? I was doing a fine ghost story.
37:02A ghost story? You're dreaming a story?
37:04I'm sorry.
37:06He takes the powder.
37:08He takes the powder.
37:09What are you talking about?
37:13Stevenson dreamt two scenes from the book that night.
37:16Dr Jekyll taking a drug and Hyde's murder of an elderly gentleman.
37:32His use of dreams as a direct inspiration to storytelling
37:35is unique to Robert Louis Stevenson among writers.
37:38He called his dreams brownies,
37:40underground creatures who forge stories instead of metal.
37:43He even credits them with half his life's work.
37:54After this particular dream,
37:56Stevenson wrote in a kind of white heat for three days and nights,
38:00some say without rest.
38:03I don't know how much you know about how the story came to Stevenson
38:06or that Stevenson relied a lot on what he called his brownies,
38:09which are dreams, basically.
38:11He really thought that he could get an idea for a story,
38:15go to sleep on it, as it were,
38:17and wake up and the story would be structured for him
38:19by his subconscious or by his brownies.
38:22Is there any credence to that?
38:24Can writers work that way?
38:27I'm very interested in the idea that Stevenson thought
38:30that he'd get structure in his dream life,
38:32that he would have this series of ideas, impressions, sensations,
38:36and that at the moment of waking
38:38he'd suddenly be able to impose a narrative structure on them.
38:41Then I believe it completely.
38:43I mean, I...
38:45I get very excited by dream.
38:47I love dream.
38:49Quite a lot of these post-it notes have dreams written on them.
38:52I don't believe in the value of dream
38:55to refresh the creative imagination.
38:58I've been known to leave voice-activated tape recorders on in the room
39:02when I'm asleep in order to capture any night-time emissions.
39:07Any success?
39:09Yes, yes, yes, all sorts of stuff.
39:12Quite a few of my novels have relied
39:14on absolutely decanted dream sequences in that way, yeah.
39:18God knows.
39:20When Stevenson read aloud the completed story,
39:23there was an extraordinary reaction from his wife Fanny.
39:26Here, then, as I lay down the pen
39:28and proceed to seal up my confession,
39:31I bring the life of that unhappy Henry Jekyll to an end.
39:37It's interesting.
39:40Unusual.
39:42Oh, it's well written.
39:47But...
39:51I think you missed the point.
39:57Missed the point?
39:59Yes.
40:01Fanny attacked the tale,
40:03arguing that Louis had written little more than a cheap horror story.
40:06Would it not be so much more?
40:08Whereas here was an opportunity to write something more profound,
40:11a story with a moral centre.
40:14Well, Louis, all I am saying
40:17is that this could have been a masterpiece.
40:22God, it tires me to argue like this.
40:26According to Fanny,
40:28Stevenson eventually admitted that she was right.
40:33He summoned her back
40:35and pointed to a pile of ashes in the fire.
40:39Stevenson had burnt the manuscript
40:42and immediately set about rewriting the novel.
40:45What have you done?
40:49This account of the argument is actually Fanny's, not Stevenson's,
40:53but I'm not sure I believe her.
40:56Stevenson thought this was the best thing he'd ever done.
40:59I wouldn't burn my work just because my wife criticised it.
41:04So what was in the manuscript
41:06that persuaded Stevenson to destroy it in such a violent way?
41:11The very fact that Stevenson woke up and said,
41:14this is my dream and I now will write this novel based on it,
41:18I think is important in suggesting that it's a text
41:21that's deeply interested in the unconscious.
41:25The idea that the unconscious self
41:28would take over the civilised conscious self
41:31is really something that's crucial to Freudian thinking about the self,
41:36that the self exists in a kind of constant tension
41:40with a secret unconscious self.
41:43All of this is in Stevenson way before Freud
41:47puts anything down on paper about the unconscious self.
41:59When Jekyll consumes the potion,
42:01what emerges is not a fairytale monster,
42:04but Jekyll's secret self.
42:08Or was it Stevenson's?
42:10Was this what concerned Fanny so much?
42:14This is a guy that knew about passion
42:17and knew about the idea of responding to kind of deep passions.
42:22And, you know, let's call a spade a spade
42:24in a way that perhaps Stevenson couldn't.
42:26Sexual passion.
42:28I think that this was a man who was sexy
42:31and was sensual, quite clearly.
42:35Stevenson, remember, had a past.
42:40He'd misspent youth in Edinburgh's old town.
42:43You don't care who sees you, do you, Velvetcoat?
42:45So what are you writing about?
42:48Well, it's a secret.
42:50It's all about the secret streets of Edinburgh.
42:52Right about me.
42:54That would do half a page, right about these!
42:57I used to have my headquarters in an old public house
43:00frequented by the lowest order of prostitutes.
43:03Throbney whores.
43:04They used to go and write.
43:07I saw a good deal of the girls.
43:09They were really singularly decent creatures,
43:11not a bit worse than anybody else.
43:14The fact of the matter was that, you know,
43:16for young men of Stevenson's stamp,
43:18there was really no halfway house.
43:20You know, if you wanted any kind of direct experience
43:23of your sexual nature before you were married
43:26and arguably even afterwards,
43:28then that's where you found yourself.
43:30You found yourself consorting with prostitutes.
43:32And the division between, as it were,
43:34the kind of world of the old town
43:36and where he went adventuring
43:38and the world of the new town was great and absolute.
43:42You know, never the twain shall meet.
43:44So perhaps that's what Fanny did see in the original text
43:48of Jekyll and Hyde,
43:51sort of an open door into that other world.
43:56One of Stevenson's earlier works, The Travelling Companion,
43:59was a book about prostitutes,
44:01which Fanny had deemed too indecent.
44:04It was never published.
44:07From some of Stevenson's letters to friends,
44:09it's clear that the first draft of Jekyll and Hyde
44:12was much more explicit about the nature of Hyde's crimes.
44:16His vices are described in sexual terms
44:19as soulless and degrading
44:21and criminal in the sight of the law
44:24and abhorrent in themselves.
44:26If this is what upset Fanny,
44:28then perhaps their argument went something like this.
44:31That unhappy Henley Jekyll to an end.
44:37Well, that's interesting.
44:42Unusual.
44:45Oh, it's well written.
44:48But I think you've made it too explicit.
44:51Explicit?
44:52Yes.
44:53Too explicit?
44:54It is the work of a genius, but it's obscene.
44:57Obscene?
44:58Yes, obscene.
44:59Fanny, the French get away with it, why can't I?
45:01That will never be published.
45:04Stevenson was principally known as a writer of children's books.
45:08Treasure Island was doing very well in the shops.
45:11And I think Fanny was panicked by the sexual content
45:15and feared for their reputation,
45:17so she persuaded her husband to rewrite it.
45:20Jekyll and Hyde hit a nerve with the public.
45:23An astonishing three-quarters of a million copies
45:26were sold in the United States alone,
45:28making Stevenson the best-selling author of his time.
45:32A sort of Jekyll and Hyde frenzy followed.
45:35There were several stage adaptations
45:37and it became a popular subject for some of the first silent movies.
45:43But Fanny's censorship backfired.
45:48The general public thought that Hyde was a sexual monster,
45:52even if Stevenson didn't spell it out.
46:03Taking out the offending material and glossing over Hyde's evil deeds
46:08meant that people could read anything they liked into the story,
46:12possibly more explicit than what Stevenson had taken out,
46:16particularly when his readership comprised sexually repressed Victorians.
46:21This is one of the 19th century's most shocking and talked-about books.
46:26It's called Psychopathia Sexualis.
46:29It was published in 1876, ten years before Jekyll and Hyde.
46:33Its author, the German psychiatrist Kraft Ebbing,
46:36was one of the first writers to discuss what he called deviant sexual desire.
46:41Homosexuality, sadism, masochism, fetishism.
46:45Terms that are still in use today.
46:47He argues that morality is a constant struggle
46:50between convention and our most basic desires.
46:54Given the impact of the book,
46:56Stevenson must have been aware of Kraft Ebbing's central message,
47:00that repressing sexual temptation can be a dangerous thing.
47:05This idea of repression is at the heart of Jekyll and Hyde.
47:09I think what Stevenson is saying here is,
47:12in the figure of Jekyll and Hyde, that repression can be very dangerous.
47:17It's not the fact that he has a dual personality that is Jekyll's problem,
47:23it's the fact that he tries to repress the savage part of it.
47:27Jekyll and Hyde represents not just the dangers of pursuing a double life,
47:33but its appeal.
47:35Hyde gets to go out more.
47:37Jekyll's life doesn't seem very appealing.
47:41His male bachelor friends are really pills, actually.
47:46Imagine a night on the town with Mr Utterson.
47:50It doesn't sound that interesting.
47:55The various stage and screen adaptations
47:57make a significant change to Dr Jekyll's bachelor world.
48:01He falls in love with a woman.
48:08But in the book, there are no female characters.
48:11The main cast is a small and intimate group of single, upper-class men.
48:18And it is these men who relate the story of Jekyll and Hyde
48:22through a series of eyewitness accounts.
48:24They must, however, be treated as unreliable witnesses.
48:27They don't tell us the whole story of Jekyll's private life.
48:31Why? Because they're terrified he might be blackmailed.
48:34So what exactly was the nature of Dr Henry Jekyll's forbidden desires?
48:48Jekyll's forbidden desires are significantly left inexplicit, unsaid.
48:54We can't be quite sure, but readers are very right, I think,
48:59to suggest that they may have a sexual character.
49:03There's considerable fear on the part of Jekyll's friends
49:08that he is going to do something or reveal something
49:12that will implicate them.
49:17In the decade of Jekyll and Hyde's publication,
49:20there was a rash of sexual scandals.
49:22Perhaps the most famous was the discovery of a male brothel
49:26in London's Cleveland Street,
49:28where working-class boys were exploited by upper-class men.
49:32Press exposés of such scandals led to dramatic changes in the law.
49:37The most famous of these scandals
49:39led to dramatic changes in the law.
49:41The most important of these was the La Bouchère Amendment.
49:46It raised the age of consent from 13 to 16,
49:49which was an important aspect of the law.
49:52But it also, for the first time, outlawed homosexual acts
49:56between men, both in a public and a private setting.
50:02And it was enormous in its impact.
50:04It stayed on the books until the 1960s, actually,
50:08and really led to, initially, Oscar Wilde being prosecuted
50:14under what the La Bouchère Law called acts of gross indecency.
50:19So five months before Stevenson writes Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde,
50:25the law is passed.
50:27In January 1885, the law goes into effect,
50:31and in that same month, Jekyll Hyde is published.
50:35So the dates are really pretty extraordinary.
50:38So extraordinary, in fact, that Victorian readers would have been left
50:41in no doubt about the motive for Hyde's brutal murder of Sir Danvers Carew.
50:47I think the Carew murder case is the crucial scene in Stevenson's novel.
50:52It's, after all, the only crime that Hyde commits,
50:55which we more or less get to see.
50:58A maidservant, living alone in a house, had gone upstairs to bed.
51:02She sat down upon her box and fell into a dream of musing.
51:09And as she so sat, she became aware of an aged, beautiful gentleman
51:14with white hair, drawing near along the lane,
51:17and advancing to meet him, another very small gentleman.
51:22When they had come within speech, the older man bowed
51:25and accosted the other with a very pretty manner of politeness.
51:30Danvers Carew is immediately presented to us
51:34as a kind of effeminate, aristocratic male,
51:37who is, in Stevenson's words, someone who will accost Hyde.
51:42So there's quite a set-up there for a pick-up-gone...
51:46a sense of the scene as a pick-up-gone wrong.
51:49Presently, her eye wandered to the other,
51:52and she was surprised to recognise in him a certain Mr Hyde.
51:56He had in his hand a heavy cane, but he answered never a word
52:00and seemed to listen with an ill-contained impatience.
52:03And then, all of a sudden, he broke out in a great flame of anger
52:07and clubbed him to the earth.
52:09With ape-like fury, he was trampling his victim underfoot
52:12and hailing down a storm of blows,
52:14under which the bones were audibly shattered.
52:17It's a crucial scene, not only in suggesting the dangers
52:22that Hyde presents to a civilised world,
52:26but also the dangers when this new kind of sexuality
52:31is expressed in a public space.
52:34There lay his victim in the middle of the lane,
52:37and the stick with which the deed had been done
52:40had broken in the middle under the stress of this insensate cruelty.
52:44A purse and gold watch were found upon the victim,
52:48but no cards or papers, except a sealed and stamped envelope,
52:52which he had been probably carrying to the post
52:55and which bore the name and address of Mr Utterson.
53:02A description of repressed homosexuality in Victorian times
53:07is just one of many readings of the book.
53:10By leaving the nature of Dr Jekyll's forbidden desires
53:13to his reader's imagination,
53:15they could read any crimes they liked into the story.
53:18Stevenson had created the classic prototype
53:21of the respectable citizen turned criminal.
53:25Two years after its publication,
53:27it was thought that even Jack the Ripper
53:29led a double life.
53:31For a while, the police believed him
53:33to be a middle-class doctor from London's West End
53:36who attacked women in the East End.
53:39The tabloids claimed that the Ripper was copying Mr Hyde.
53:43The murders seemed so closely connected
53:46that a staged version of Jekyll and Hyde
53:48was removed from the Lyceum Theatre
53:50as a gesture to public feeling.
53:54Jekyll and Hyde no longer inspire such drama
53:57and Hyde no longer inspires such dramatic public reaction.
54:01But over a century later, it lives on
54:03and has entered the language as the best description
54:06of someone who has a dual personality.
54:11Psychiatrists and academics have had a failed day
54:14uncovering layers of possible meaning
54:16in Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde,
54:19and yet its potency, its almost sexual potency,
54:22remains undiminished.
54:24We understand Dr Jekyll's struggle
54:27because, to a greater or lesser extent,
54:30we all lead double lives,
54:32outwardly respectable social creatures
54:35like Deacon Brodie, Major Weir, John Hunter,
54:39but each of us concealing another inner world
54:42of secret thoughts, deeds, actions.
54:48When I was a student studying Scottish literature,
54:51I realised that this story is more than a crude fairy tale
54:54about good versus evil.
54:56Edward Hyde is not a monster,
54:58but the part of Dr Jekyll that has been liberated
55:01from society's constraints.
55:03And that's an intriguing notion
55:05to someone who wants to become a writer.
55:12There's an Edward Hyde in all writers.
55:14Strong characters consume us.
55:16In the 1980s, I was living in this street in Edinburgh as a student.
55:20I decided I wanted to try and update the story of Jekyll and Hyde.
55:24I'd have a character who was a cop called Rebus,
55:27and it would be a doppelganger, someone from his past
55:30who'd been very close to him at one point
55:32and was now out to destroy him.
55:34I decided that Rebus would live opposite me,
55:37in that flat just up there.
55:43When my first Rebus book was published,
55:45I found to my astonishment
55:47that everyone said I'd written a crime novel.
55:51Nobody guessed I was trying to follow in the footsteps
55:54of a novelist like Stevenson.
55:56Inspector Rebus has now spent two decades inside my head.
56:00Like Stevenson's Edward Hyde,
56:02Rebus is my own kind of doppelganger.
56:05He's allowed to have adventures which are close to me.
56:08He can transgress, break taboos,
56:11step out of line, be the maverick I never was and never will be.
56:16So I owe a great debt to Robert Louis Stevenson
56:19and to the city of his birth.
56:22In a way, they both changed my life.
56:25Without Edinburgh's split nature,
56:27Stevenson might never have dreamt up Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.
56:31And without Jekyll and Hyde,
56:33I might never have come up with my own alter ego,
56:36Detective Inspector John Rebus.
56:46From Ian Rankin's best-selling books
56:49comes the TV adaptation of Rebus.
56:52Watch the new series now on BBC iPlayer.