Robert Louis Stevenson at 176: The Man Who Wrote the Darkness Within Us
\n\nEvery psychological thriller on today’s bestseller tables owes a quiet debt to a sickly Scotsman who dreamt up a monster. Robert Louis Stevenson, born in Edinburgh on 13 November 1850, gave us the most famous split self in literature. More than a century before unreliable narrators became a publishing trend, he understood that the most frightening stranger is the one living inside us.
\n\n'Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde' appeared in January 1886. Stevenson was then living in Bournemouth, often bedridden with lung trouble, and he later credited the central scenes to a dream. In his essay “A Chapter on Dreams”, he described the “Brownies” of his sleeping mind. They handed him the transformation scene that his waking mind had struggled to find. The short novel was an immediate sensation, and its title became shorthand for a divided nature almost overnight.
\n\nStevenson did not invent duality from nothing. He grew up in a city that lived it. The respectable New Town stood above the crowded closes of the Old Town. Edinburgh still told stories of Deacon William Brodie, a cabinetmaker and town councillor by day…
Original source: https://www.timesnownews.com/lifestyle
