In the autumn of 1885, Robert Louis Stevenson coughed blood for three weeks in a rented house in Bournemouth, kept upright on a regimen of ergotine and a coca-based tonic, and wrote the first draft of The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde in three days. His wife Fanny read it, told him it was a tract pretending to be a story, and watched him burn the manuscript in the fireplace. He rewrote it from scratch in another three days. Six total. The book that sold forty thousand copies in six months and gave English the phrase "Jekyll and Hyde" was written by a tubercular thirty-five-year-old on the most-prescribed stimulant of the decade.
Whether Stevenson was on cocaine specifically while writing is one of those questions historians of literature like to keep technically open. He denied it. His wife, his stepson, his doctor, and his pharmacist did not. What is not in dispute is the medical context. In 1885, a doctor treating a patient with severe pulmonary hemorrhages would reach for cocaine. It was the suppressant of choice for the cough, the stimulant of choice for the exhaustion, and a recently respectable substance recommended by Sigmund Freud, who had published Über Coca the previous year praising the alkaloid as a near-universal remedy. Stevenson was not breaking a rule. He was following one.
The pharmacy in 1885 was not the pharmacy now
Cocaine was isolated in 1860 by Albert Niemann, a German graduate student who died not long after of his own experimentation. By the early 1880s it was being sold over the counter in tonics, lozenges, toothache drops, and a wine called Vin Mariani that Pope Leo XIII reportedly carried in a hip flask. The American pharmacist John Pemberton was working on his own coca-and-kola formula in Atlanta in 1885 and would put it on the market the following May. He called it Coca-Cola. It appeared the same year as Jekyll and Hyde.
Doctors were enthusiastic. William Halsted, the surgeon who later founded Johns Hopkins, began experimenting with cocaine as a nerve block in 1884 and was an addict within months. Freud sent vials to his fiancée. The British Medical Journal ran approving articles. The substance was new enough that nothing had yet gone obviously wrong with it in public, and old enough that physicians were comfortable prescribing it.
This was the climate in which a respiratory invalid like Stevenson, who had been coughing blood since adolescence, would have lived inside a cloud of legitimate cocaine prescriptions for years. The biographer Frank McLynn lists ergotine, digitalis, and cocaine among the regular medications. Stevenson's letters from Bournemouth describe his energy as either nonexistent or impossibly heightened, in alternation, with nothing in between. This is also a recognisable description of what cocaine does.
The six days
The most-quoted account of the writing came from Stevenson's stepson Lloyd Osbourne, then seventeen, who lived in the house and watched the whole episode. Osbourne later wrote that Stevenson called the family upstairs to read the new manuscript aloud in his sickroom, and that the household sat through three hours of the story while Stevenson, pacing, acted out the parts. Fanny then told her husband, plainly, that he had missed the point. The story he had written was a horror story. The story he should have written, she said, was an allegory.
What happened next has been described in two ways. Stevenson's published version is that he agreed with Fanny, took the manuscript downstairs, and threw it into the fire so that he would not be tempted to revise the wrong version instead of writing the right one. Fanny's later account agrees that the fire was the destination but disagrees about whose idea it was. Osbourne wrote that his stepfather then wrote the second draft "in a fever," the dictation continuous, his pen "racing," for three more days. The fever metaphor is doing work in that sentence. So is the racing.
The result is a novella of about twenty-six thousand words, the length of a long short story, which Stevenson personally cut by several thousand more words before submitting it to Longmans, Green and Co. It was published on the ninth of January, 1886, priced at one shilling. It sold out before the end of the month.
What the text actually describes
The body of the novella is a series of testimonies. The final chapter, "Henry Jekyll's Full Statement of the Case," is the one most readers remember and the one with the chemistry. Jekyll is a respectable London physician. He has synthesised a transforming compound from "a particular salt." He drinks it. He becomes Hyde. He drinks it again. He becomes Jekyll. The first uses are exhilarating. He is younger, lighter, more agile, more sensitive to pleasure. He goes out walking at night.
The trouble starts when the transformations begin to happen without the compound. He falls asleep as Jekyll and wakes as Hyde. The dose required to reverse the change increases. He runs through his supply. He orders a new shipment of the salt from his chemist. The new salt does not work. He orders a second shipment, in larger quantity, from another supplier. That salt does not work either. He concludes, in despair, that the original batch must have contained an impurity, and that it was the impurity, not the salt, that had been driving the reaction all along. He cannot reproduce it. He runs out. As Jekyll he writes the final pages. As Hyde he ends them.
If you read this chapter as a description of a transformation potion, it reads as a transformation potion. If you read it as a description of acquiring, increasing, switching suppliers, suspecting the cut, and being unable to reproduce the effect of an early batch, it reads as something else. Nineteenth-century medical literature on cocaine dependence was being written at exactly the same time. The two descriptions overlap to the period.
The reading nobody does
Most English-speaking readers meet Jekyll and Hyde in a school edition that frames it as a Victorian morality story about the duality of man. The teacher's note in the back will mention Darwin, atavism, and the unconscious. It will not mention the chemist on Lambeth Walk where Jekyll sources his powder. The reading where Jekyll is a physician who self-medicates with a substance that is at first a tonic and at last a habit, and who finds himself unable to source a clean batch, is sitting one paragraph below the surface of the text. Stevenson did not put it there by accident. He had spent the previous decade buying medication from chemists in Davos, Edinburgh, Hyères, Saranac Lake, and Bournemouth. He knew exactly what the dialogue between the doctor, the patient, and the bottle sounded like.
Reading the novella with this in view changes the climax. The famous final scene, the locked room, the laboratory smelling of bitter almonds, the body on the floor in clothes too large for it, is not the moral failure of a divided soul. It is the inevitable last act of a substance-dependent professional who has run out of his supply and cannot get another, accurate, batch in time. Victorian literature has surprisingly many of these endings. Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone, which had appeared in 1868, turned on the laudanum the protagonist had been secretly given by his doctor. Sherlock Holmes was already on the seven percent solution by 1887. The literature was tracking the pharmacy. Stevenson was just earlier than most.
Why this matters for an English learner
Jekyll and Hyde is unusually friendly for a reader at B1. The sentences are short. The vocabulary is small, partly because Stevenson was a careful stylist and partly because he was writing fast. The legal frame of the testimonies, the lawyer Utterson, the witness statements, the formal address, all give the prose the steady cadence of a deposition. The vocabulary of the chemistry chapter is the vocabulary of a Victorian apothecary: salt, powder, draught, fume, vial, ether. A learner who can read a paragraph describing a meal can read the most-quoted English-language passage of nineteenth-century gothic fiction.
And the second reading lands differently. Once you have read the novella with the chemistry visible, the famous transformations stop being mystical and start being procedural. Jekyll measures. He weighs. He times the onset. He calibrates. He runs out. That is what makes the book scary now, in a way the morality reading no longer is.
While you're on the English gothic shelf
If Jekyll and Hyde clicks for you, the next book on the same shelf is Dracula, published in 1897, a similar epistolary structure of testimonies and letters, the same Victorian London under the same gas lamps. After Dracula, Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray is a third turn on the same theme. The three novels share a decade, a city, and a question. Stevenson asks it first.
I'm one of the makers of Storica, a daily reading club for the language you're learning. The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde sits on the English shelf at B1, adapted into short daily readings of about fifteen minutes each. The original Stevenson is on the shelf if you want it. Read fifteen minutes a day, write a short reply at the end of each reading, and you will have finished the novella in under a month.