Stevenson's Edinburgh 08
To find out more about the Edinburgh that RLS loved, visit the online Capital Collections exhibition - digitised photos of Edinburgh through the ages, with a special Stevenson feature. Get involved in the debate and read more about the setting of Jekyll & Hyde - Edinburgh or London?
Dundas Street & Canonmills
Stevenson was born in Howard Place, not far from the site of Canonmills Loch. In winter the ground on the site, owned by Cox’s Gymnasium, was prepared for skaters on a few inches of frozen water. Stevenson’s skating was apparently the reverse of graceful.
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Heriot Row
In the grandeur of the New Town, Stevenson spent most of his boyhood years at the family townhouse opposite Queen Street Gardens.
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Calton Hill
The scene suggests reflections on fame and on man’s injustice to the dead. You see Dugald Stewart rather more handsomely commemorated than Burns. Immediately below, in the Cannongate churchyard, lies Robert Fergusson, Burns’ master in his art, who died insane while yet a stripling… (RLS)
Calton Hill was one of Stevenson’s favourite viewpoints in Edinburgh, remarkable for its eclectic assortment of architecture and its dramatic perspectives. Although he was not always full of praise for the former (the Nelson Monument he thought ranks among the vilest of men’s handiworks) he was certainly taken with the latter: of all places for a view, this Calton Hill is perhaps the best.
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The Mound
In this one valley, where the life of the town goes most busily forward, there may be seen, shown one above and behind another by the accidents of the ground, buildings in almost every style upon the globe. (RLS)
Built from rubble scoured from the drained Nor’ Loch, the Mound straddles the valley separating the Old and New Towns. From here the distinctive characters of the two areas lie in contrast, often alluded to as an urban ‘split personality’ which may have sown the seed of the idea for Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde.
I suspect that it was originally out of this chasm of ugly division that there rose that two-headed monster, the mystery of Jekyll and Hyde. There is indeed one peculiarity about that grim grotesque which I have never seen noted anywhere […] it seems to me that the story of Jekyll and Hyde, which is presumably presented as happening in London, is all the time very unmistakably happening in Edinburgh. (GK Chesterton on Jekyll & Hyde)
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Advocate’s Close
The closes of the Old Town fascinated Stevenson, and in a pub on Advocate’s Close he founded a secret society. The motto? ‘Disregard everything our parents ever taught us.’
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St Giles Cathedral
Stevenson died of a brain haemorrhage in 1894 at his home is Samoa. He was 44 years old. On the outer west wall of the south aisle of St Giles’ is a plaque in his memory, commissioned by his wife and friends.
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Tolbooth and Parliament Square
This was the site of the Tolbooth, the Heart of Midlothian, a place old in story and namefather to a noble book. The walls are now down in the dust; there is no more squalor carceris for merry debtors; no more cage for the old, acknowledged prison-breaker; but the sun and wind play freely over the foundations of the jail. (RLS)
Brass plates on the cobbles around the Heart trace the walls of the Tolbooth, which once stood on the spot. Used variously as a council chamber, tax office, law court and squalid prison, it was finally torn down in 1817. To the south is the old Parliament Hall, hidden behind its 18th century classical façade, and since the Union of 1707 part of the law courts. Stevenson, who trained as a lawyer, knew it well.
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Parliament House
The Advocate’s Library connects through closed up passageways below ground level to the National Library of Scotland on George IV Bridge.
Beneath Parliament Hall you descend one stone stair after another, and wander, by the flicker of a match, in a labyrinth of stone cellars […] and you strike upon a room, not empty like the rest, but crowded with productions from bygone criminal cases: a grim lumber: lethal weapons, poisoned organs in a jar, a door with a shot hole through the panel, behind which a man fell dead. I cannot fancy why they should preserve them, save against the Judgement Day. (RLS)
Stevenson, who trained as a lawyer, used the Advocate’s Library for research, and the same books he used are now cared for by the National Library.
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Brodie’s Close
…it was far on in the small hours by the Tron bell; when suddenly there came a creak, a jar, a faint light […] and there, by the glimmer of a thieves’ lantern, was his good friend the Deacon in a mask. (RLS)
It is often suggested that the famous Edinburgh criminal Deacon Brodie provided inspiration for Jekyll and Hyde: a respectable cabinet maker and highly regarded Edinburgh citizen by day, a dissolute and sinister criminal by night. Brodie’s penchant for fast living caused him to run up significant debts which he thought to pay off with the proceeds of his burglaries. Certainly his story was well known to Stevenson, who even owned a cabinet made by Brodie.
But still, by the mind’s eye, he may be seen, a man harassed below a mountain of duplicity, slinking from a magistrate’s supper room to a thieves’ ken, and pickeering among the closes by the flicker of a dark lamp. (RLS)
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Greyfriars
We Scotch stand, to my fancy, highest among nations in the matter of grimly illustrating death. We seem to love for their own sake the emblems of time and the great change […] the emblematic horrors, the figures rising headless from the grave, and all the traditional ingenuities in which it pleased our fathers to set forth their sorrow for the dead and their sense of earthly mutability. (RLS)
Greyfriars was the first church to be built in Edinburgh after the Reformation, on the site of an old Franciscan friary. The church has a bloody history: the Covenant was signed here in 1638, heralding fifty years of religious strife and it was used as a barracks by Oliver Cromwell during his invasion of Scotland. The churchyard contains both the monument to the many covenanters who died for their religious convictions and the tomb of George Mackenzie, the Lord Advocate responsible for putting many of them to death.
illustrations © cam kennedy 2007, reproduced by kind permission of waverley books ltd