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Dr. Jekyll, Mr. Hyde, and the Stevenson Cottage Museum


When the Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson arrived in New York City in September of 1887, seeking a better climate for pulmonary illness, he didn’t know he was a global celebrity. Following the publication of Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde a year earlier, America was awash with pirated editions of his books. That week an unauthorized stage adaptation of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was premiering at Madison Square Theatre. Written by Thomas Russell Sullivan, the play starred the famous actor-producer Richard Mansfield, who graciously (and unusually) paid Stevenson royalties even though American law didn’t protect foreign copyrights.


On doctor’s orders, Stevenson left the city and went to the Adirondack mountains of upstate New York, where Dr. Edward Trudeau, founder of the American Lung Association, was researching and treating tuberculosis. Stevenson spent six months in a cottage in Saranac Lake, where he wrote much of the novel The Master of Ballantrae and some personal essays, considered his best work by many literary critics then and now. A lucrative publishing contract and relative improvement in his health allowed him to cruise the Pacific and ultimately relocate to Samoa.


In one of the essays written at the Cottage “A Chapter on Dreams,” Stevenson recounts his childhood night terrors and his more narrative, literary dreams in adulthood as the “Brownies” or fairies of his creative unconscious invented stories while he slept. Mirroring Jekyll and Hyde, Stevenson’s vivid dreaming created a “double life—one of the day, one of the night.”  


In his previous residence in Bournemouth, England, he was too sick to leave the house for nearly three years. Illness, stress, and medicinal drugs likely all contributed to an especially vivid nightmare that alarmed Stevenson’s wife, Fanny, with his “cries of horror.” When she tried to calm him, Stevenson protested, “Why did you wake me? I was dreaming a fine bogey tale.” One burned draft and six weeks of feverish writing later, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was finished. You can read Stevenson’s essay on the nightmare origins of his classic Gothic thriller here:




Two decades after his death, the newly established Stevenson Society of America preserved the author’s residence in Saranac Lake and opened it to the public in 1915, making it the world’s first dedicated Stevenson site. Despite its rich history and unmatched collection of artifacts, the Robert Louis Stevenson Cottage Museum is in urgent need of help to secure its future. Following a thorough, on-site assessment by a team of preservation experts awarded through a competitive federal grant, the new board is raising funds to preserve the museum’s future, beginning with essential building repairs. The museum is also fundraising for a professional curator after one family has volunteered as resident caretakers for 70 years and three generations.


Though based in Saranac Lake, the new board is committed to re-establishing the national and international reach of the Stevenson Society of America. As one of our founders said, “Stevenson’s genius was so universal, his philosophy so boundless, that no one country can claim him, he belongs to the world.”


To learn more about this extraordinary museum and donate online, visit our website. Also, follow us on Facebook,  Twitter, and Instagram.


Trenton B. Olsen, PhD is an associate professor of English at BYU-Idaho, editor of The Complete Personal Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson: Expanded Second Edition, president of the Stevenson Society of America, and volunteer director of the Robert Louis Stevenson Cottage Museum.

 

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