Strange Case of Stevenson and Unseen Collaborators: “A Chapter on Dreams” as a Textual Double of Jekyll and Hyde

Robert Louis Stevenson’s essay “A Chapter on Dreams” is his most prominent discussion of how his 1886 novella, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, came into being. This article situates the essay in the history of the literary autocommentary, analyses its relationship to Jekyll and Hyde as one of doubling, and reads it as a contribution to authorship theory. Unlike the dark, fractured doppelganger in Jekyll and Hyde, Stevenson’s reflections on authorship in “A Chapter on Dreams” invoke the Scottish Brownies—as a humorous and invisible version of the Gothic double— to playfully illuminate the sometimes happy, sometimes haunting multiplication of selves in the process of literary composition.