Pedestrians walk in hunched obscurity behind upturned coat collars and thick woollen scarves. I’m in Edinburgh’s Old Town, a
location quaint in the daytime, gothically uneasy at night, so I am not intending to hang around in the dark for long. I have an interesting trip across town to make: from Castlehill, down steep North Bank Street and across Princes Street Gardens, then up into the New Town, along George Street, down Castle Street and finally left into Young Street to the Oxford Bar. It’s a twisting and turning, down
and up walk, but at least it keeps the circulation going in the cold!
The Oxford Bar was the now famous pub of fictional Detective Inspector John Rebus, and where I was to interview his creator, one of Scotland’s most famous modern-day writers, Ian Rankin. But we weren’t just interested in talking about John Rebus, we wanted to discuss another subject of common interest: the writing – and
burning
– of the original manuscript of Robert Louis Stevenson’s masterpiece
Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
.
The book is of interest for many different reasons. One thing we both agree on is the idea that the original manuscript was set in Edinburgh, not London (the main location in the published book). But there was something else that fascinated me: perhaps the original manuscript of Jekyll
and Hyde alluded to something Stevenson himself saw, heard –
witnessed
– when he walked around Edinburgh’s Old Town during his university days, or rather, nights. At that time Stevenson was known as ‘the man in the velvet jacket’ by certain women of the night and, to my mind, it was quite possible that the burning of the original manuscript of Jekyll and Hyde was for a more sinister reason than
Louis’s wife claiming that he missed his own story’s allegory.
Could the original story have implicated Stevenson in a real-life murder case, which has been shrouded in secrecy since Victorian times? Hm, yes, one’s imagination can easily run away with itself, so lots to talk about, and I need the level head of Ian Rankin to put me straight on such matters.
As I walk through the Edinburgh streets,
a description of London from Jekyll and Hyde comes to me and I marvel at how perfect the description is of Edinburgh all these years later,
‘Round the corner from the by-street there was a square of ancient, handsome houses, now for the most part decayed from their high estate, and it into flats and chambers to all sorts and conditions of men: map engravers, architects, shady lawyers, and agents
of obscure enterprises.’
I ponder the
‘agents of obscure enterprise’
. As a young writer Stevenson co-wrote a play entitled
Deacon Brodie
. Brodie was a gentleman cabinet-maker by day but had a much darker side to him at night… there was certainly so much hiding in Stevenson’s story.
It is suggested that Stevenson based Jekyll and Hyde upon Brodie’s dual personality, perhaps a natural progression
of his original play? Well I, and possibly Rankin, believe just a little more.
‘One house… second from the corner, was still occupied… and at the door of this, which wore a great air of wealth and comfort, though it was now plunged in darkness except for the fan-light, Mr Utterson stopped and knocked. A well dressed elderly servant opened the door.’
To this day, Edinburgh’s Old Town is a mixture
of wealth and poverty: a rickety old vinyl music shop stood derelict, while in the flat above it a large chandelier lit the room and ostensibly the street below. Maybe one of gangster ‘Big Ger’ Cafferty’s highly paid cronies owned the flat, I muse to myself.
I cross Princes Street Gardens, glancing across at Waverley station as I do so.
‘… for a moment, the fog would be quite broken up, and a
haggard shaft of daylight would glance in between the swirling wreaths… which had never been extinguished or had been kindled afresh to combat this mournful reinvasion of darkness… like a district of some city in a nightmare.’
I make my way across to the New Town. Fellow pedestrians pass, to and fro, keeping their personal affairs hidden deep inside their thick winter coats. That is Edinburgh
for you, private – shy – feelings locked away; but there is nothing wrong with that. I kind of envy it.
A coldness, like the faint touch of light rain, chills my bones as I make my way across Princes Street, up into George Street and onwards to the Oxford Bar, a stone’s throw away from Stevenson’s former house at Heriot Row.
As I draw up
‘…before the address indicated, the fog lifted a little
and showed… a dingy street, a gin palace, a low French eating-house, a shop for the retail of penny numbers and two penny salads, many ragged children huddled in the doorways, and many women of many nationalities passing out, key in hand… to have a glass; and the next moment the fog settled down again upon that part, as brown as umber, and cut him off from his black surroundings. This was the home
of Henry Jekyll’s favourite…’
I walk through the pub door and instantly find myself at the bar. Ian Rankin turns round and smiles. ‘Hi there,’ he says. We shake hands. He is a nice guy: he buys me a drink! We go through to the back room, sit down and start our conversation:
Does Edinburgh have a dual personality?’ I ask.
‘Yes,’ Rankin begins. ‘Up until the 18th century it was a very democratic
city. The rich and the poor lived cheek-by-jowl in the Old Town, which is quite a narrow area. The rich folk got fed up with this and built the New Town, which at that time was separated from the Old Town by Nor’ Loch, which is now Princes Street Gardens. There was a physical barrier between rich and poor and that was the beginning of the Jekyll and Hyde side of the city. It was a city that had
a public face and a private vice.’
‘You’re attracted to the dark side of the city’s past, aren’t you?’ I venture.
‘I’m always attracted to the dark side,’ Rankin says, sipping his pint of 80 shillings. ‘That’s the way my mind works. I love all that dark stuff about Edinburgh and I could see it in the contemporary city as well. And when I was a student I would get up and walk into the middle
of town, where all the libraries and the university were, and I would see the tourist Edinburgh and then in the night I would go back to the housing scheme where I lived.
‘The first couple of books in the series were about that side of Edinburgh. It was a bit like throwing a stone in a pond and watching the ripples spread. I thought that crime novels were a good way of talking about modern Scotland,
so I started to talk about its industry, its politics, the bigotry – the religious divide – and each book tries to add a little piece of the jigsaw to that, as well as adding a little bit more of the jigsaw to – what is to me – the intriguing character of John Rebus.’
‘So the books are as much about Edinburgh as John Rebus?’
‘I started the Rebus books to try and make sense of Edinburgh and I’m
still trying to make sense of it! And I can see to an outsider coming in how the city appears to be a very cold place – psychologically cold, spiritually cold. It’s very hard to try and get to know people. They’re very standoffish, very shy. It’s a very difficult city to get inside of. There are monuments everywhere, some to great writers, which I found very stifling when I first started out, because
I was always under their shadow.’
‘You mean the shadow of great writers from Edinburgh’s past?’
‘Yes. I couldn’t escape from them. When you arrive in Edinburgh, you arrive at Waverley station, named after the Scott novel. Then in Princes Street Gardens there’s this massive monument and statue of Scott. You go into the Jekyll and Hyde pub: you go past the statue of Sherlock Holmes because Sir
Arthur Conan Doyle was Scottish too. You’ve always got these guys there, looking over your shoulder. It felt to me that everything that could be written about Edinburgh had already been written. That there was nothing left to say.
‘And then along came
Trainspotting
. And the importance of that novel was that it showed a wider public that there was more to Edinburgh than just the past. Suddenly
Edinburgh didn’t have to be all statues, monuments, all twee, tartan, shortbread and bagpipes. And instead of talking about the castle and the rest of it you could talk about the poverty and unemployment, the various schemes there were to help people – the drug problems. The things that were in the town but not in that central part of it; suddenly the wider city was noticed. So the things the tourist
doesn’t see when they come to Edinburgh were considered. And that’s the thing about Edinburgh; it tries to hide its true nature from you. Even during the Festival you’re not going to get a taste of the real city.’
‘Is there one book that sums up Edinburgh?’ I ask, fishing for Jekyll and Hyde.
‘There isn’t one book that sums up Edinburgh, no. You would probably have to read
Trainspotting, The
Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
and
The Heart of Midlothian
by Sir Walter Scott. But if you want to get inside the psychology of Edinburgh, you have to go to a book that is not set there:
Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
, which is actually set in London but is really about Edinburgh.’
Ah, yes. This is my cue. ‘The skyline in Stevenson’s story is the Edinburgh skyline, not the Victorian London
skyline.’
‘Almost the cobblestoned streets, the back streets, the Scotch mist and everything else, yes, I agree. Also Jekyll is a Scottish name. There are a lot of people in Scotland called Jekyll.’
‘But what about the legend of the original manuscript of the novel being thrown on the fire by Stevenson? Do you think the original burnt story was set in Edinburgh and Fanny – Stevenson’s wife –
told him not to do that…’
‘… because he’d never be able to go back there? Absolutely. Not that he ever did go back, of course …
Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
is the most important Scottish novel of all time. It’s the one that Scottish writers keep coming back to time and time again. And the two halves of the character – Jekyll and Hyde – to me, when I live here, sum it all up. It’s the
haves and have-nots. On the surface it appears very gentle and historical and cultured but under the surface there are all these seething frustrations and anger.’
‘That’s very interesting. I’ve never seen it as an angry novel.’
‘Yes, the darker instincts are there. And physically the novel summed up the Old Town and the New Town. The New Town was built for all the rich people to live, because
the Old Town was where all the poor people lived. So physically and psychologically, you have it all there. And it still existed in the 1980s when I wrote the first Rebus book. I actually thought that I would re-write Jekyll and Hyde as a cop novel, which is what I did with
Knots and Crosses.
And nobody got it. Nobody understood what I was trying to do. So I re-wrote the book again and that became
Hide and Seek
, the second Rebus novel. I used ‘Hide’ in the title and quoted from Stevenson’s book throughout but still nobody got it! My Rebus books have always been about me trying to make sense of Edinburgh and the first two books was the beginning of that through the most significant book about the city.’
‘I did notice that you used many of the same surnames from Jekyll and Hyde in
Hide and
Seek
, such as Poole, Enfield, Carew, Edward and Hyde, oh yes, and Utterson. I can appreciate the depth of the influence.’ (I also noted that the model made of the Wolfman (the serial killer) in
Tooth and Nail
was not dissimilar to the ape-like Hyde of actor Fredric March (
Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
, 1932) and the Hyde depicted in the famous 1930s Bodley Head illustrated edition of
Jekyll and Hyde
;
so maybe another Jekyll and Hyde influence there for Rankin, albeit in a film-related sense…)
A famous quote from Stevenson’s novel come to my mind:
‘“If he be Mr Hyde,” he had thought, “I shall be Mr Seek.”’
Surely this was Rebus searching for the child-killer that hid in shadows? Yes, the killer is playing hide and seek. A children’s game and, apparently, one of Stevenson’s youth-time favourites.
It was therefore intriguing to seek the devilish Mr Hyde within Stevenson’s story. There was something covert, something that truly hid inside the story, something that Louis wanted to exorcise. His wife was afraid of this exorcism, hence the explanation of the burning of the original manuscript! But wait a moment, weren’t important papers – letters – burnt towards the end of
Jekyll and Hyde
?
‘On the hearth there lay a pile of grey ashes, as though many papers had been burned.’
Was this an admission, by Stevenson, of the burning of the original manuscript?
‘Fanny didn’t like the original version,’ Rankin says. ‘She maybe found it too grotesque, or too melodramatic. Did he burn it? I’d like to think he hid it, and it’s waiting to be found. But he was in such a state, he probably did
set fire to it.’
I don’t think that Rankin is reading as much between the lines as I am, but there are secrets about Jekyll and Hyde that we could never expose; just like Edinburgh itself.
Rankin broke through my thought processes. ‘You see, when Rebus was young he would have been told about Deacon Brodie. He was one of the main influences of the novel. Brodie by day was a member of the establishment
but at night was a robber and mugger and was eventually hanged on a gibbet that he had helped to make because he was also a craftsman.
‘The first couple of books in the Rebus series were exploring that side of Edinburgh. But then I took it further because I realised that the crime novel was a great way of talking about Scotland, about its politics (
Let It Bleed
), its oil industry (
Black and Blue
), its religious divide. So each book is a little bit of the wider jigsaw, as well as a further exploration into this intriguing character that is John Rebus.’
‘You mention that your first two Rebus books were about the Jekyll and Hyde aspects of Edinburgh, but were they also about the Jekyll and Hyde aspects of Rebus?’
‘Rebus was 40 years old in the first book and I had to give him a past. He
had been married, with a kid and also he had been very close to someone else in the past. It was a Jekyll and Hyde type of thing, because the Hyde character was a person who was almost like a brother to him, but he – Hyde – grew up to hate Rebus and try to kill him.’ ‘So the whole of the first book was very consciously based upon Jekyll and Hyde?’