Robert Louis Stevenson's Markheim: A Detailed Summary and a Literary Analysis
- Michael Kellermeyer
- Oct 9
- 10 min read
“Markheim” stands among Stevenson’s most psychologically intricate tales, fusing the moral unease of the Victorian conscience with the atmospheric precision of a ghost story. Written in the same creative period that produced Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, it reveals Stevenson’s deep fascination with divided selves, hidden motives, and the possibility of moral regeneration.
First published in the Pall Mall Christmas “Extra”, “Markheim” was intended for a seasonal audience expecting sentiment and redemption—but Stevenson used the occasion to craft something darker and more searching: a study of guilt that feels both supernatural and profoundly human. The 1880s were a decade when questions of conscience, psychology, and faith pressed sharply upon the literary imagination. “Markheim” represents one of the great efforts from his life-long preoccupation with the tension between good and evil, and was distinctly shaped by the philosophical chaos of his strict Presbyterian upbringing and his later, skeptical wrestling with religious belief.
What choices – the story wants us to ask – make the difference between a life spiraling towards damnation and one pilgriming in the direction of salvation? That moral duality—both reverent and rebellious—runs through “Markheim.” Like much of his work, it explores what happens when the self turns inward and confronts its own corruption. The story’s setting, a lonely shop on a murky Christmas Day, becomes a symbolic space where the everyday world meets a realm of metaphysical reckoning. Its quiet domesticity conceals spiritual peril; its small human act opens into a crisis of the soul.
Stylistically, the tale shows Stevenson’s gift for moral drama compressed into a few tense hours – if Dostoevski’s Crime and Punishment, which heavily influenced it, could be thought of as a sprawling miniseries, then “Markheim” is an artsy short film. The narrative voice balances realism with suggestion: dialogue and gesture are rendered with crisp, almost theatrical clarity, yet the psychological atmosphere is thick with unseen presences. Influenced by the moral allegories of Nathaniel Hawthorne and by Stevenson’s admiration for the French moralistes, “Markheim” moves beyond the conventions of the ghost story into a meditation on motive, self-knowledge, and the nature of temptation.
It has been read variously as a Christian parable, a case study in moral psychology, and a forerunner of modernist interior narrative. Critics have long recognized “Markheim” as a transitional work in Stevenson’s career—an early articulation of the divided moral consciousness that would later dominate Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Yet unlike that later novella, “Markheim” remains intimate, almost claustrophobic, its drama confined to a single confrontation that mirrors the eternal conflict between sin and repentance. The story endures not for its incident but for its insight: its ability to render a man’s moral crisis as both a haunting and a revelation.
SUMMARY
“Markheim” opens on a gloomy Christmas Day in the dim, cluttered shop of an antique dealer. The story begins with tension as the dealer observes, “Our windfalls are of various kinds. Some customers are ignorant... Some are dishonest—and in that case I profit by my virtue.” Markheim, entering from the daylight streets, is momentarily blinded by the mixture of light and shadow. His unease grows under the dealer’s ironic scrutiny.
The dealer notes Markheim’s nervous manner and taunts him for coming on Christmas, a day when he refuses trade. “You come to me on Christmas Day… when you know that I am alone in my house.” Markheim awkwardly explains that he wants “a Christmas present for a lady,” claiming it is for a woman he hopes to marry—a “rich marriage not to be neglected.” His story is half-plausible, but the dealer clearly doubts him. The clocks tick in the heavy silence until the man reluctantly produces an item: a hand mirror.
When the dealer lifts it up, Markheim shudders. “‘A glass? For Christmas? Surely not?’” he protests. The dealer laughs at his distaste, but Markheim’s horror deepens. He exclaims that the glass is “a damned reminder of years, and sins and follies—this hand-conscience!” His tone grows wild as he accuses the dealer of having “a thought in your mind,” and demands he confess it. The dealer, alarmed but still mocking, tries to end the scene: “‘Either make your purchase or walk out of my shop.’”
At that, Markheim’s restraint collapses. When the dealer stoops to replace the mirror, Markheim springs forward, stabbing him with a long dagger. “The dealer struggled like a hen… and then tumbled on the floor in a heap.” The murder is sudden and grotesque.
Now alone, Markheim is enveloped by the eerie silence of the shop, punctuated by the ticking of “some score of small voices.” His fear of being discovered grows as the candle flickers and shadows move “like a sea.” Looking down, he finds the body “incredibly small and strangely meaner than in life.” He feels an “eloquent voice” rising from it—the certainty that it will be found, that “this dead flesh [will] lift up a cry that will ring over England.”
The clocks strike three, and Markheim’s panic mounts. Every noise—his own footsteps, the ticking of clocks, the rustle of rain outside—seems an accusation. He imagines the neighbours listening, the “mother still with raised finger,” families silenced by suspicion. He moves softly, then too boldly, and swings between stealth and frantic movement. Shadows seem alive, and soon he is convinced he is not alone. Though he knows the servant has gone “sweet-hearting,” he senses footsteps in the empty house—“a faceless thing, and yet had eyes to see with… the image of the dead dealer, reinspired with cunning and hatred.”
When a jovial man bangs on the door, calling out to the dealer, Markheim freezes “smitten into ice.” But the man soon leaves, and Markheim, desperate, turns to rob the body. The dead dealer now looks like “a suit half-stuffed with bran,” but when Markheim touches him, revulsion floods his body. His mind flashes back to childhood memories of a fair-day where he saw gruesome crime illustrations—“Brownrigg with her apprentice; the Mannings with their murdered guest…”—and he feels “a breath of nausea.” Yet, strikingly, he feels no remorse. He reflects coldly that “the same heart which had shuddered before the painted effigies of crime, looked on its reality unmoved.”
Still he forces himself upstairs, clutching the dealer’s keys. The sound of rain fills the house, “like some dripping cavern.” As he climbs, footsteps seem to retreat before him and follow behind; mirrors and armour glimmer in the dimness. Terror grows that nature itself might betray him—“the solid walls might become transparent… the planks might yield under his foot like quicksands.” Yet about God, he is strangely calm: “It was there, and not among men, that he felt sure of justice.”
Reaching the drawing-room, Markheim begins rifling a cabinet for money. For a while, he finds peace. Outside, children sing a Christmas hymn—“How stately, how comfortable was the melody!”—and he pictures “church-going children and the pealing of the high organ.” This moment of reverie ends abruptly when a footstep mounts the stair, and a hand turns the knob.
A mysterious visitor enters—smiling, polite, unnervingly familiar: Markheim's very doppelganger. His face wavers, “like the idols in the wavering candlelight.” Markheim senses that this being “was not of the earth and not of God.” Yet the stranger speaks casually: “You are looking for the money, I believe?” He warns that the maid is returning and will soon arrive. When Markheim demands, “What are you?—the devil?” the visitor answers ambiguously: “What I may be cannot affect the service I propose to render you.”
What follows is a psychological duel. The stranger claims to know Markheim “to the soul.” Markheim protests passionately: “My life is but a travesty and slander on myself… evil is hateful to me… I am the unwilling sinner!” He argues that men are dragged by circumstance, “like one whom bravos have seized and muffled in a cloak.” But the visitor is unmoved; he insists only on the practical matter—that time runs out and the gallows approaches. He offers help “for a Christmas gift,” saying he will show Markheim where the money lies.
Markheim refuses: “If I were dying of thirst, and it was your hand that put the pitcher to my lips, I should find the courage to refuse.” The visitor replies that he does not object to a “deathbed repentance,” since such things serve his ends by keeping others complacent. He mocks humanity’s hypocrisy—men who “sin, and sin, and sin, and at the last sneak into heaven.”
Markheim’s indignation grows. “Do you think I have no more generous aspirations?” he cries. He insists he loves all that is good, that “pity is no stranger to my thoughts… I love honest laughter.” Yet the visitor reminds him of his steady moral decline: “Fifteen years ago you would have started at a theft. Three years back you would have blenched at the name of murder.” When asked whether in any respect he has become more self-critical, Markheim admits despairingly, “In none! I have gone down in all.”
The visitor concludes: “Content yourself with what you are, for you will never change; and the words of your part on this stage are irrevocably written down.”
At that, Markheim’s resistance shifts. “It is true… I have in some degree complied with evil,” he admits. Yet when the visitor offers again to reveal the money, Markheim asks instead: “And grace?” The being replies coldly, “Have you not tried it?… Did I not see you on the platform of revival meetings… your voice the loudest in the hymn?”
The doorbell rings—the maid’s return. The visitor urges quick action: “Your master, you must say, is ill… let her in… and the same dexterity that rid you of the dealer will relieve you of this last danger.”
But Markheim has reached his revelation. “If I be condemned to evil acts, there is still one door of freedom open—I can cease from action… Though I be, as you say truly, at the beck of every small temptation, I can yet, by one decisive gesture, place myself beyond the reach of all.” His hatred of evil, he claims, gives him courage.
As he speaks, “the features of the visitor began to undergo a wonderful and lovely change”—his face brightens and dissolves. Markheim opens the door and descends calmly, thinking of his life as “ugly and strenuous like a dream, random as chance-medley—a scene of defeat.” He looks at the dead dealer, and when the bell rings again, he opens the door to the maid.
With quiet resolution and a polite, contented smile, he tells her: “You had better go for the police… I have killed your master.”
ANALYSIS
“Markheim” is justifiably described as a precursor to Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, the crown jewel of Stevenson’s speculative canon. Yet pedigree alone does not make the grandsire a royal favorite. Much as Dickens’s “The Goblins Who Stole a Sexton” is regarded as the prototype for A Christmas Carol—featuring a miserly misanthrope chastened by spectral visitations on Christmas Eve—so too has “Markheim” been treated as an embryonic form of Jekyll.
But Stevenson’s story bears a far more delicate relationship to its successor. It is not a rough sketch but a self-contained moral parable, somber and compassionate, with a protagonist who, though deeply flawed, remains recognizably human. The tale is darkly luminous, moral rather than moralizing, and structured as a drama of conscience—a Christmas story stripped of sentimentality and suffused instead with psychological dread and spiritual urgency.
The story’s atmosphere recalls Stevenson’s own divided nature: a man of the pulpit and the tavern, raised under the austere glare of Scottish Presbyterianism yet perpetually drawn to the shadowy regions of human motive. Its setting—a dusty curio shop at twilight on Christmas Day—functions as both a literal and symbolic space: a marketplace of moral exchange where material greed confronts eternal consequence.
Like Hawthorne’s “The Minister’s Black Veil” or Balzac’s “Melmoth Reconciled,” “Markheim” uses the supernatural as a mirror of the inner life rather than an external horror. The strange visitor who enters midway through the tale—neither ghost nor man nor devil—becomes a figure of ambiguous agency. He may be tempter or redeemer, fiend or conscience, but his real nature lies in his rhetorical power: he argues not to damn the protagonist but to force him toward recognition of the self.
II.
Indeed, there is good reason to question the motives of this otherworldly doppelgänger. Like Mephistopheles in Faust, he presses his prey to embrace self-preservation and sensual ease at the cost of the soul, yet his language is curiously double-edged, his persuasion tinged with sympathy.
Many readers have seen in him the personification of Markheim’s conscience—a manifestation of the divided self that Stevenson would soon explore more overtly in Jekyll. Modern psychology, speaking centuries later, might call this reaction formation: a defensive inversion in which the conscience cloaks its moral impulses in a form the ego can tolerate. The idea that the “Devil” could be a mask worn by the Super-Ego anticipates the Freudian theatre of repression that later writers such as Conrad and James would inherit.
III.
This interior battle connects “Markheim” to Poe’s “William Wilson,” where a man is haunted by his moral double and, in destroying it, destroys himself. Yet Stevenson’s approach is gentler, more redemptive. His protagonist’s confrontation leads not to annihilation but to comprehension. If the visitor is indeed a minister of repentance rather than perdition, his role is that of the divine messenger disguised as demon—a figure as old as Job’s accuser or Bunyan’s Apollyon.
Through him, Stevenson dramatizes the paradox of moral awakening: that the road to salvation often begins in terror.
Seen in this light, “Markheim” functions as a spiritual and psychological bridge between Stevenson’s early moral allegories and his later Gothic masterpieces. It offers a path of redemption conspicuously absent in “The Body Snatcher” or Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, where guilt culminates in ruin. Both Jekyll and Fettes are destroyed because they mistake self-interest for moral courage; the spirit may have been willing, but the flesh proves too weak.
Markheim, however, is capable of self-denial. His sins are ordinary—rooted in pride, fear, and poverty—and thus redeemable. As a poor man accustomed to deprivation, he understands the moral economy of sacrifice. In his final act of refusal—his conscious decision not to preserve his life at any cost—he achieves what Jekyll and Fettes never can: integrity. Ultimately, “Markheim” stands as one of Stevenson’s most concentrated moral studies, balancing Gothic symbolism with theological resonance. It is a story not of supernatural punishment but of spiritual possibility.
Beneath its eerie atmosphere lies a distinctly Victorian anxiety about free will, moral responsibility, and the hope of grace. In the end, Stevenson allows his protagonist a victory that eludes most of his darker creations: the triumph of the self made whole, even at the price of the body’s destruction. For a writer so preoccupied with divided selves and hidden guilt, “Markheim” represents a rare glimpse of reconciliation—a reminder that, even in the murk of sin and shadow, the light of conscience may still find its way through.