Here comes another interesting figure and so fascinating that it inspired a well-known author, Robert Luois Stevenson for this famous novel “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde”. It has been a bit hard for me to draw a half-face, but I made it.
This kind of chatacter reminds me so much of the cleverness of a certain type of people living in a poor condition, lacking any means of surviving and so desperate to make a virtue of necessity, falling into the criminal side.
A famous italian comic actor, who defined the history of the italian cinema of the Post-WorldWar, Antonio De Curtis, in arte Totò (1898-1967), also called “The Prince of Laughter”, among his films, had, in my opinion, pictured a comical version of what I was mentioning before: in “La Banda degli Onesti” (“The Gang of the Honest People, 1956) humble people from the South of Italy decided to take over a print shop to produce forged currency. But in the end they will not be able to use and spend them because of their honesty, even if poor.
Deacon Brodie, on the other hand, will not back down like Totò also because he is not a humble person, but instead very ambitious. He is an artisan and runs a locksmith shop. Thanks to this activity, he knows what kind of keys he needs to open the right door without any lockpicking.
He was also an esteemed politician during the day, member of the Edinburgh Council.
For this reason Robert Luois Stevenson thought about the dual nature, amost bipolar of Dr. Jekyll. As him, Brodie is a respectable member of the council during the day and in the night the boss of a gang of thieves.
In this way Deacon Brodie is moved not by desperation but by greed, ambition of power and wealth.
His story is really full of events, reason why I suggest you to read the pages dedicated to him on “Ghostly tales and sinistes stories of old Edinburgh”Alan Wilson, Des Brogan and Frank McGrail, Mainstream Publishing Company (Edinburgh) Ltd, 1991, pp. 75-84.
Deacon Brodie (Part III)
