Bedridden in Bournemouth in the mid-1880s, coughing blood and dosed with ergotine, Robert Louis Stevenson woke screaming from a nightmare and scolded his wife Fanny for interrupting a fine bogey tale. That dream became Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. This episode maps the crucible behind the book: the Edinburgh legend of Deacon William Brodie, respected cabinetmaker by day and burglar by night, and Stevenson’s friend Eugene Chantrelle, the French teacher executed in 1878 for poisoning his wife, whose trial Stevenson attended in person.

The conversation follows the frenzied three-to-six-day first draft, Fanny’s critique that it was a cheap thriller rather than a moral allegory, and the manuscript Stevenson burned before rewriting from scratch. It then reads the finished novella through the divided geography of Edinburgh, the anxieties of the Labouchere Amendment era, the mechanics of addiction, Victorian dread of Darwinian degeneration, and a pre-Freudian model of the psyche, before ending with Richard Mansfield’s 1888 London stage production shut down amid public suspicion that the actor himself was Jack the Ripper.

• Deacon Brodie’s wax key impressions and the play Stevenson wrote about him
• Chantrelle’s opium-laced toasted cheese and the lesson that evil wears a tailored suit
• Why Fanny’s criticism sent the first manuscript into the fire
• Hyde as repressed desire, chemical dependency and evolutionary throwback
• The shilling shocker that sold tens of thousands and filled church sermons