Today is Robert Louis Stevenson’s birthday. Or would have
been if he’d made it to 164; you know what I mean.
Except for those with a special interest, Stevenson is now
mostly remembered for ‘Treasure Island’ and ‘The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and
Mr Hyde’. Treasure hidden in deep, dark, damp and smelly caves, powerful people
who seem frightfully nice and good but are really utterly evil (and
vice-versa), the child who proves to be the most powerful of all — as good art
always does, Stevenson’s work moves us by its half-hidden appeal to our secret
hopes and fears: things that only began, slowly, to be talked of explicitly
after about 1900, the year Freud’s ‘Traumdeutung’ was published.
There have been several films of ‘Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde’.
Most are made unwatchable by Hollywood crassness; the best is the one in which
Spencer Tracy does some disturbing on-camera transformations between the
boringly nice Jekyll and the interestingly wicked Hyde.
Like many an intelligent Scot — and Stevenson was as Scots
as single malt — he was happiest as far away as possible from his birthplace:
he lived — and died — in Samoa. Here he is where he longed to be, albeit with
his family:
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