While author Robert Louis Stevenson attributed the inspiration for his novel The Strange Case of Doc

While author Robert Louis Stevenson attributed the inspiration for his novel The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde on a dream he once had (a mode of inspiration shared by Frankenstein author Mary Shelley, Dracula author Bram Stoker and Twilight’s Stephanie Meyers), it’s also generally agreed that there was a criminal case in Stevenson’s native Edinburgh that likely influenced the story. That being the case of the Deacon William Brodie.Brodie was himself a famous and wealth man in 1780s Edinburgh, being a cabinet-maker, deacon of a trades guild (kind of an early trades union, if you weren’t familiar with the term), and an Edinburgh city councillor. Due to his position as head of the cabinet maker’s guild, he was often in charge of installing and repairing locks and security mechanisms, a skill which proved handy when he began robbing the city’s elite using wax impressions of the key’s he made for them.Turning to crime partly for the thrill, partly to cover the cost of his partying and gambling lifestyle, the fact that a fine upstanding member of the community could also be a criminal (this being a time when crime was seen as a moral failling rather than an act of desperation brought about by poverty, for example) shocked the people of 18th century Scotland.Upon the discovery of his crimes and a failed attempt to flee justice, William Brodie was hanged in 1788 in front of a crowd of 40,000 people, allegedly on a gallows of his own design. Stevenson himself actually grew up with one of Brodie’s cabinet’s in his house, and in 1880 would write a play based on his life, titled Deacon Brodie, or the Double Life. -- source link
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