The Respectable Monster
Some monsters live in haunted houses. Others have excellent manners.
Halloween is the season when we spend money dressing up as monsters, then spend the rest of the year pretending we aren’t one.
We buy plastic skeletons. We hang fake cobwebs over perfectly respectable furniture. We tell ghost stories in the dark and then switch on every light before going upstairs.
We are very brave, provided the monster is imaginary.
Robert Louis Stevenson understood something rather inconvenient about monsters. The most frightening ones don’t always have fangs. Some have good reputations, respectable professions and very convincing explanations for everything they do.
Which brings me to Bristol, Edinburgh, and a question that has followed me through some of my favorite old streets.
What if the ghosts we should fear aren’t dead at all?
The Pubs That Claim a Pirate
Having spent my fair share of rainy Bristol evenings, I have walked the cobbles of King Street in the rain, in the dark, at the wrong end of a long week, and I have stood outside the Llandoger Trow, gazing up at its crooked, leaning, character-filled timber front, and thought: yes, that old building has a story to tell me.
The Trow likes to tell people it inspired the Admiral Benbow, the inn where the novel Treasure Island begins. So too does Hotwells’ Hole in the Wall, anchored so close to the harbor tide that you almost feel the rumble of sea barrels beneath you. Whichever pub has the better claim (and the two have been bickering over it for longer than most of us have been alive), I’ve always found Stevenson’s genius hilariously stubborn.
Walking past those ancient dockside taverns where you can practically smell centuries of questionable decisions lingering in the damp harbor air, it becomes obvious that Treasure Island wasn’t born out of high fantasy. It was born out of observing real people.
Long John Silver isn’t a terrifying literary villain because he sports a peg leg and a chatty parrot; he’s horrifying because he is undeniably charming, disarmingly polite, and genuinely fun to hang out with right up until the exact second he decides to mutiny.
He is a walking reminder of our tragic human susceptibility to a smooth talker showing us that corruption rarely shows up wearing a ominous black cape. More often than not, it buys the first round, compliments your coat, and waits for your back to turn.
I found it hard to walk those streets now without wondering how many perfectly pleasant people, with excellent hats and perfectly good reasons, sat in rooms nearby and agreed that something terrible was simply how business was done. Silver is a fiction. The politeness that covers a hard bargain is not.
The Quiet Before Edinburgh
Here is where the story changes direction, and so does the weather. Stevenson left the open sea and the rum-soaked cheerfulness and went somewhere much darker, which is to say, he went inside.
But Stevenson grew up there, in a city of two faces. Above, the handsome and orderly town of stone and good society. Below, the closes and buried vaults, steep, airless and unlit. On the Lawnmarket, a close still carries the name of Deacon William Brodie, a cabinetmaker and councillor by day, and by night a gambler and burglar who robbed the very people who trusted him. He was hanged in 1788. Stevenson never shook the idea of a man with a public face and a private one. It’s easy to see where Dr. Jekyll came from.
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I’ll say plainly that Stevenson’s Bristol link is the shakier one. The pub claims are local legend, not documented fact. His Edinburgh roots are not. He grew up there, and Brodie’s story was part of his world.
The Horror in the Mirror
Which brings us to Mr. Hyde.
If you’ve never read it, here’s the short version. Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde was published in 1886, and it’s much shorter than you’d expect, closer to a long evening’s read than a long winter’s one. It’s also set in London, not Edinburgh, though the Edinburgh of Stevenson’s youth runs through it like a watermark.
It begins with a lawyer, Mr Utterson, who is the sort of man you’d trust with your will and your secrets and not much else. He hears a disturbing story about a vicious little man named Hyde, who trampled a young girl in the street and walked on without a backward glance. Then he discovers that his old friend Dr Jekyll, a wealthy, respected physician, has rewritten his will to leave everything to this same Hyde. Utterson sets out to find out why, and the closer he gets, the less he likes the answer.
Hyde, it turns out, is not just a bad man. He is capable of anything. When he beats a distinguished gentleman to death in the street, the whole city starts looking for him, and Jekyll swears that Hyde is gone for good. But Jekyll begins to look ill, then frightened, and then he shuts himself away in his laboratory and won’t come out. Eventually the truth emerges, in a long confession left behind in writing: Jekyll and Hyde are the same man. Jekyll had created a potion that let him separate off the part of himself he wasn’t proud of, and for a while he enjoyed the freedom. Then the change began happening without the potion, and Hyde grew stronger every time he was let out.
(Spoilers ahead, but the book is nearly 140 years old, so I think we’re all adults here.) In the end, Jekyll can no longer control the transformations, and his supply of the original ingredient runs dry. When Utterson and Jekyll’s butler finally break down the laboratory door, they find the body of Hyde on the floor, dressed in Jekyll’s clothes. One man has gone, and the other can never come back.
And that’s the whole of it: a respectable gentleman, a locked door, a pale little stranger, and a question that has followed readers around ever since. How much of what we call ourselves is simply what we’ve agreed to show?
Hyde isn’t a monster in the usual sense. He isn’t a demon, he isn’t undead, and he isn’t the result of a curse or a bite or a bad night under the wrong moon. Stevenson took great care over this. Hyde is a man, or something a man could become, produced by a mixture and a decision. The decision matters far more than the mixture.
Dr. Jekyll is a good man by every public measure. He’s respected, charitable, careful and sincerely fond of his friends. He’s also bored by his own good behaviour, and quietly drawn to the pleasures he’s been too proud to admit he wants. His great discovery isn’t wickedness. It’s an exemption, a way to do what he privately wants and leave the consequences to someone else. He drinks, and he becomes a man with no conscience at all.
And that’s what makes Hyde so hard to read. He isn’t clever, glamorous or dramatic. He’s small, pale and strangely difficult to describe, and people who meet him feel a sudden revulsion they can’t account for. What he is, simply, is appetite without a brake. He knocks down a child in the street and walks on over her, calm as a man crossing a puddle. There’s no scheme and no grand motive. There’s just the want, and no small voice in him to say: wait.
That small voice is the part we take for granted. It’s what makes you go back with the wallet you found, or lets you stop before you say the cruel true thing at dinner. We don’t notice it because it works so quietly. Stevenson’s genius was to imagine someone who lost it, and then to show that the person who lost it was still, horribly, a person. Hyde doesn’t come from somewhere else. He comes from inside the good doctor, and the doctor knows it.
What chills me most is the moment Jekyll realises Hyde has started to appear without the potion. He comes up on his own now, at his own times, like damp through a wall. Every indulgence has made the next one easier, and every excuse has made the next excuse easier still. Nobody wakes up one morning and decides to become Hyde. It happens in small, reasonable steps, each one a little defensible, which is exactly why it’s so hard to stop.
Why Old Cities Keep Us Honest
Walking through old, stone-paved cities keeps these fables uncomfortably grounded. When you cut through a damp alleyway at dusk and hear your own boots echo on ancient cobbles, you aren’t watching for a spectre to pop out of a wall. You’re walking through the footprint of human nature, where real, flawed people made catastrophic choices and left very real messes behind, usually in very good hats.
Every October, the internet asks me to be afraid of the wrong things. Vampires, for a start. I’ve never met one, and I’ve lived in Bristol, where the nightlife is famously unpredictable. Werewolves depend on a full moon and a shirt that survives the transformation. Ghosts have a certain professionalism, but they mostly stand in corridors looking sad, which describes someone staring at the phone screen, looking intensely mournful and deeply unhinged.
Silver and Hyde are harder, because neither is over there. One engages us with polished diplomacy, while the other quietly rationalizes self-interest. The darkest alleys in the world aren’t in haunted houses or forgotten ruins. They’re in the ordinary human heart when it decides to rationalise its own darkness.
Yet in Treasure Island Stevenson leaves a door open for mercy. John Silver slips away at the end with a little treasure and a lot of luck, and Jim never quite stops being fond of him. It unsettles people. I think it’s meant to remind us that even a clever wrongdoer is still a person, still within reach of forgiveness, which makes the rest of us responsible for what we do with our fear.
The scariest door in any story isn’t the one in front of us. It’s the one inside us. We must mind who we let out.
Bye.
