The Backstory: Gothic Horror: Giving Birth to Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
Elvis Duran and the Morning Show ON DEMAND
Elvis Duran Podcast Network and iHeartPodcasts
4.7 • 1.2K Ratings
🗓️ 9 December 2025
⏱️ 8 minutes
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Summary
A combination of fever dreams and cocaine led to one of the greatest horror stories of all time. Robert Louis Stevenson was dying of tuberculosis when he wrote “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.” He almost trashed it, but after nine days of frantic writing he had defined the gothic novel and given us a metaphor for people with split personalities: Jekyll and Hyde.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | All right, it's understandable. You want to make a buck off your talent, but at the same time, |
| 0:05.3 | you're battling an incurable illness. The doctors keep telling you to give it up and accept your |
| 0:10.5 | fate, but you're only 34 years old, and you have a story to tell that's really more than a story. |
| 0:17.3 | This allegory comes to you in a dream. You wake up and you spend three days writing it out while in and out of these fever dreams, |
| 0:25.8 | which, incidentally, have been fueled by cocaine. |
| 0:29.2 | But you push through and your story becomes one of the greatest horror classics of all time. |
| 0:35.4 | I'm Patty Steele, giving birth to Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. That's next on the |
| 0:40.9 | backstory. This is an I-Heart podcast, guaranteed human. The backstory is back. A lot of creative |
| 0:53.3 | types say getting to the finished piece, whether it's a novel, a play, a piece of music or a painting, even a podcast, is an awful lot like giving birth. There's anxiety, pain, fear, and the need to fulfill expectations. But then, ah, the finished product. Robert Louis Stevenson, an author |
| 1:14.5 | back in the 1800s, went through an incredibly painful birth process when it came to his |
| 1:20.6 | classic 1886 story, the strange case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. It was autumn of 1885, and Lewis, as he preferred to be called, suddenly woke up screaming. |
| 1:35.0 | His wife, Fanny, rushed into his bedside. |
| 1:38.3 | She was terrified. He was thrashing in the sheets. |
| 1:41.5 | His eyes were wild, and he was shouting about transformations and monsters. |
| 1:47.2 | Fanny shook him, saying, Louis, wake up, you're having a nightmare. He came too, but he was furious |
| 1:54.0 | with her. He shouted, why did you wake me? I was having a fine dream. A monster story, as he told her. But it was more than that. He'd always |
| 2:03.8 | been fascinated by the mix of good and evil that's in all of us. So Jekyll and Hyde was really a deeper |
| 2:10.6 | look at the human mind. Lewis had been sick pretty much his entire life, but he was tenacious and so anxious to get this |
| 2:19.2 | story on paper that during the long process of dying from tuberculosis, he wrote Jekyll |
| 2:25.5 | and Hyde in just three days. It was a relief to get it finished, but there was just one problem. |
| 2:32.2 | Fannie didn't like it. She felt it was a great story, but told |
| 2:35.6 | incorrectly that rather than just writing a horror story, he should take a deeper look at what |
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