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In the early autumn of September 1885, at a quiet house on Heriot Row in Edinburgh, a scream pierced the night and startled awake one of Victorian England’s most fragile but brilliant literary figures.

Robert Louis Stevenson, then 35 years old and gravely ill with advanced tuberculosis, jolted upright from what witnesses later described as “a violent and hallucinatory dream.

” His wife, Fanny Stevenson, rushed into the bedroom and found him thrashing in tangled sheets, gasping for breath, muttering incoherently about monstrous transformations and the shadowy duality of human nature.

“Louis, wake up! You’re having a nightmare!” she exclaimed, shaking him urgently.

Stevenson snapped his eyes open with a mixture of terror and awe.

Then, to Fanny’s astonishment, he shouted—not in fear, but in frustration.

“Why did you wake me? I was dreaming a wonderful ghost story!”

That moment, recalled in family accounts, would mark the beginning of one of the most extraordinary creative episodes in literary history—the fever-driven birth of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr.Hyde, a work that would redefine the modern horror genre.

Yet at the time, Stevenson was a man dangerously close to death, and every breath he took came at a physical cost.

Born into a prestigious family of Scottish lighthouse engineers, Stevenson had battled tuberculosis since adolescence.

By the mid-1880s, his lungs were so compromised that doctors warned even extended speech might trigger another round of internal bleeding.

His days were spent mostly bedridden, coughing blood, suffering chills, and slipping in and out of febrile states.

Medical treatment in the Victorian era offered little hope.

Physicians prescribed rest, clean air, and—most controversially—cocaine, widely marketed as a miracle drug capable of stopping pulmonary hemorrhages and boosting energy.

Whether Stevenson was using cocaine during the writing of Jekyll and Hyde remains debated among scholars, but contemporaries including family members noted that his doctors frequently prescribed whatever might ease his breathing or slow the bleeding.

Fanny, a devoted and meticulous caregiver, often scoured British medical periodicals for new treatments, many of which promoted cocaine with evangelical enthusiasm.

What is undisputed is this: immediately after the nightmare, and despite his collapsing health, Stevenson defied medical orders and began writing.

According to his stepson Lloyd Osbourne, the transformation from delirious patient to obsessive creator happened within minutes.

“He came downstairs,” Osbourne later wrote, “his face flushed with fever, and read nearly half the story to us before rushing away to write more.”

What followed became the stuff of literary legend.

Over the next three days, Stevenson wrote feverishly, producing more than 30,000 handwritten words.

He refused rest, refused food, and ignored the pleas of his family.

He wrote in bed.

He wrote slumped over a table.

He wrote while coughing blood into cloths he kept near his desk.

The story—its imagery, structure, and moral conflict—seemed to pour out of him as if dictated by some external force.

“This is the best I have ever done,” he told Fanny.

But when he handed her the completed manuscript, her reaction stunned him.

She did not simply dislike it; she believed he had misunderstood the very story he had glimpsed in his fever dream.

“This is not what it should be,” she told him.

“You have written a horror tale.

But it must be a tale of moral struggle.”

Stevenson was devastated, but he trusted her judgment.

Fanny had long been his closest editor, critic, and collaborator.

She had reshaped his drafts before; she had intervened in poorly conceived projects.

And he knew she was right.

The manuscript he had produced emphasized the grotesque transformation of a man into a monster, but it lacked the psychological depth he had described upon waking.

In an act of rare artistic ruthlessness, Stevenson gathered the three-day manuscript, walked to the fireplace, and fed the pages into the flames.

“If I do not destroy it,” he reportedly said, “I will be tempted to keep parts of it.

I must start anew.”

And so he did.

Still feverish, still bedridden, still coughing blood, he embarked on a second version.

This time, he wrote with surgical intensity, reshaping the story into the moral parable his wife had envisioned—an exploration of the duality within every human soul.

The process was more disciplined, more deliberate.

And yet, incredibly, he finished it in only six days.

Nine days in total.Two complete manuscripts

One nearly fatal illness.

And one of the most influential horror stories ever written.

When the book was published in January 1886, it became an immediate sensation.

London booksellers reported that people arrived before dawn to buy it.

Within six months, more than 40,000 copies were sold in Britain alone.

In the United States, where copyright laws offered little protection, publishers printed pirated editions that spread even faster.

Stage adaptations appeared within months, including a now-infamous performance by actor Richard Mansfield, whose chilling portrayal of Mr.

Hyde was so convincing that Londoners whispered he might secretly be Jack the Ripper, who was terrorizing the city at the same time.

The phrase “Jekyll and Hyde” quickly entered the English language, becoming shorthand for the dual nature of humanity—its capacity for both virtue and unimaginable darkness.

Stevenson, however, never fully recovered from the physical toll of his illness.

In search of warmer climates, he spent the late 1880s and early 1890s traveling across the Pacific before settling in Samoa, where he became beloved by the local community, who called him “Tusitala”—the Teller of Tales.

He built a home in the village of Vailima, continued writing novels and essays, and attempted to maintain the fragile health that remained to him.

On December 3, 1894, while working on yet another novel, Stevenson collapsed unexpectedly on the veranda of his home.

He died shortly afterward at the age of 44, likely from a cerebral hemorrhage.

The Samoans carried his body to the summit of Mount Vaea, overlooking the sea, and buried him there.

The epitaph engraved on his tomb—written by Stevenson himself—still watches over the Pacific:

“Home is the sailor, home from sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.”

Yet the book that nearly killed him—written in fever, burned in despair, rewritten in agony—would outlive him by centuries.

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr.Hyde remains one of the most enduring stories ever written, a masterpiece born from a nightmare that almost slipped away when his wife shook him awake.