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Truly Two
Catherine MacPhail explains why Robert Louis Stevenson’s Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde exert such a strong influence on her.
It all began with an April Fool on Facebook. It was at the time when books about young Sherlock Holmes, and young James Bonds were coming out, and I posted that I had been asked to write a book about young Henry Jekyll.
To my surprise, no one realised it was an April Fool. Everyone thought it was a great idea. And that is when I knew that this idea had been hiding away, inside my head, for a long time.
I love Robert Louis Stevenson, he is one of my writing heroes, and I especially love The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde and the story behind it. It came to Stevenson in a dream. He woke up and told his wife he had dreamt ‘a fine bogey tale’. I love that, ‘a fine bogey tale’, and what is Edward Hyde if he is not the bogeyman.
I discovered there were other books that came from nightmares. Bram Stoker dreamed of a vampire and he wrote Dracula. Mary Shelley had a nightmare about a man coming to life and Frankenstein was born. And even my humble self had a recurring nightmare as a child about a fetch taking over my life and from that came Another Me. I have always been fascinated by doubles.
Of course, the story is so famous, we all know the ending, but can you imagine how thrilling it must have been on first reading this book? Turning the pages, trying to figure out why a respectable doctor was giving this monstrous man the run of his house, this man who has ‘Satan’s signature on his face’? Why has Jekyll left everything to him in his will? His friends think he must be being blackmailed, but what dark history could such a respectable doctor have in his past? And then that twist of an ending when the reader finally learns the truth, that Jekyll and Hyde are one and the same. That man is not ‘truly one, but truly two’. How clever is that final chapter? The letter from Jekyll that is both a confession to a murder, the murder of Edward Hyde, and a suicide note, because in order to kill Hyde, Jekyll must kill himself.
The book came out in 1886, and was called a chiller and a shocker, and when only two years later the Jack the Ripper murders began people thought the Ripper had been inspired by this book. At the same time the play of the book was running in London and the main actor was almost arrested as the Ripper.
Stevenson’s book has inspired plays, films, television series and is as topical today as it ever was. I wanted to make my book a worthy successor. Stevenson wrote The Strange Case in three days, and I decided I would write The Evil Within in three days too, and keep as close as I could to his original word count.
I re-read the book, looking for clues about Jekyll’s youth. And there are plenty there.
‘He was wild when he was young,’ but just how wild was he?
Utterson knows that Jekyll has left everything to Hyde in his will and he wonders. ‘I thought it was madness… now I begin to fear it is disgrace.’ But what kind of disgrace?
Jekyll fears that, ‘to cast in my lot with Jekyll was to die to those appetites I had long secretly indulged….’ For how long? He must have suspected he had this evil inside him. He also says that in order to carry his head high he had ‘concealed my pleasures… and hid them with an almost morbid sense of shame.’
But this was the most telling clue for me: ‘My devil had been long caged. He came out roaring.’ How young was he when he first caged that devil?
So my story begins in Edinburgh when Henry Jekyll is fourteen. Edinburgh, a deliberate choice, because in a way, Edinburgh is also ‘truly two’. It has the wide elegant streets of the New Town with its Georgian terraces and tree lined boulevards, and the Old Town with its narrow closes and cobbled alleys and wynds, and always the Castle looming over it. The creature stalks the Old Town by night, and in the morning young Henry wakes up to nightmares he does not understand. When he learns the truth, he does his best to right a wrong, and determines to conceal forever this other part of him, conceal it so deep within him he will forget it ever existed.
I am so proud of this book, and very grateful to Barrington Stoke for giving me the chance to bring it to life. I only hope I have done justice to the wonderful original.
The Evil Within is published by Barrington Stoke, 978-1-7811-2587-8, £6.99pbk. Barrington Stoke have also published a dyslexia friendly version of The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde, using specially-designed font, increased spacing and tinted paper, 978-1-7811-2740-7, £7.99 pbk.