Did you hear the one about the tourist who walked into a pub.....
Scots and Irish pubs are a world unto themselves
They are a distinct and vibrant culture.
Strolling through a foreign neighborhood, they are beacons where you know you will find a good story.
Looking for a lunch of fish and chips we popped into Deacon Brodie's Tavern on the Royal Mile at Lawnmarket in Edinburgh...we dropped into history
Robert Louis Stevenson is memorialized on the walls of Deacon Brodie's because in turn he memorialized the Deacon.
William Brodie was a Deacon in a Guild of carpenters. He was an upstanding citizen, a member of the town council. But his nocturnal personality was something else. He was a drinker and gambler and had 5 children by two wives. He got into debt and resorted to burglary to pay off his gambling.
He was eventually caught and tried. The case was notorious in that day and 40 thousand people turned out to watch him hung in October of 1788. It is reported he was born and hung within sight of the tavern that now carries his name.
Robert Louis Stevenson was fascinated by the double life of Brodie. Stevenson's father owned furniture that had been made by Deacon Brodie. Stevenson wrote a play with another writer W.E. Henley, Deacon Brodie or The Double Life. It didn't do well. Stevenson remain fascinated and in 1866 published Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde inspired by the double life of Deacon Brodie.
Slainte!
There are more pubs ahead on this path.
See you down the trail.
I love this up close view and the details you're giving us Tom. So cool.
ReplyDeleteThanks. There's another pub visit upcoming which is incredible in another way.
DeleteI've flown over Ireland more times than I can count, never got below 30K feet. Been to England 4 times, all on business. My best memory is the one night my colleagues took me to a small village, dark and cozy, and the best lamb stew I've ever had. Good beer, too.
ReplyDeleteAmen to that. Guinness is my favorite, but it's never tasted better than in Ireland.
Deletenice travelogue, but question...
ReplyDeletehow did stephenson come to make such a giant leap from a man whose double life was nonviolent(essentially) to a fiction where the character is a murderous psychopath? brodie sounds like, at most, a dysfunctional alcoholic with addiction problems which led to desperate acts of crime. they killed him for burglary? what the hell!?
*stevenson
DeleteI wondered that as well. Creative license I suppose. Your question would be the source of a good dialectic in a pub, especially Deacon Brodie's.
DeleteI want to share this additional information about Stevenson. It comes from an Indianapolis friend and history writer.
ReplyDeleteYour visit to Deacon Brodie's Tavern and your mention of the back story to Robert Louis Stevenson's novella, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, prompts me to write to you. Are you aware that Stevenson's wife was an Indianapolis native? Born in 1840 in her family's home on Circle Street (the original name of the place we now call Monument Circle), she grew up exploring the town around her (Indianapolis was not yet a city!), attending the nearby ward schools (IPS did not yet exist), and being a member of Second Presbyterian Church (I have a copy of her baptism record, handwritten by Henry Ward Beecher).
Francis "Fanny" Vandegrift Osbourne met Robert Louis Stevenson in 1875, when she was taking art classes in France. They married in California in 1880. She was his greatest supporter, as well as his greatest critic. She took him to numerous countries in an effort to find a climate that would ease his respiratory problems. That's how they wound up in living in Samoa in his final years. After RLS's 1894 death, Fanny spent the twenty remaining years of her life making sure that all of his works were published.
Sharon