Markheim, Jekyll And The Merry Men

Shorter Scottish Fiction

Shorter Scottish Fiction. Introduced by Roderick Watson. Ever since its first appearance in 1886, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde has proved itself to be a tale of undiminished power for readers all over the world. It remains one of the great masterpieces of psychological fiction and yet it is not alone in Stevenson’s work, for he had explored similar themes in several other stories too, all inextricably linked with his native country. This collection makes a strong case for the essentially Scottish origins of Stevenson’s best short fiction, derived as it is from Calvinism’s feeling for the immanence of evil, and driven by a sense of man’s darker, divided self which goes back to Hogg’s Justified Sinner. Thus it is that the story of the respectable Dr Jekyll, even in a London setting, has links that stretch back to the narrow wynds of Edinburgh and the bleak moors and shores of the North. In this company stories of possession, doubleness and terror such as ‘The Merry Men’, ‘The Body Snatcher’, ‘Markheim’, ‘Thrawn Janet’ and others, reveal more clearly than ever their Scottish roots, and that fascination with the uncanny which brought the creator of Mr Hyde screamingly awake one winter’s night over a hundred years ago.