The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde By Robert Louis Stevenson Dangerously evil, horribly deformed and lacking in a medical degree Mr Edward Hyde leaps from the body of respectable Dr Henry Jekyll, brought forth by a potion of tainted powders. Hyde’s evil is writ on his person, Jekyll’s decency announced by his grand London townhouse and sober companions, yet they are each a part of the same whole, ‘closer than a wife, closer than an eye’. We can no longer read Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde in the state of excitement described by a contemporary reviewer in The Times as, ‘passing from surprise to surprise in a curiosity that keeps growing, because it is never satisfied.1’ Morally opposed, mortally linked, the inspiration for movies, ballets, plays, operas, cartoons and sculptures, their names have been given to moody workmates and mild mannered killers. It’s difficult for the modern reader to remember that the nature of the bond between the good doctor and his alter ego isn’t revealed until the second last chapter of the book. So is there any point in reading the novel at all? Oh yes, most definitely. The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde transcends the clichés of bone-grinding grimaces and bubbling test tubes, which despite encapsulating the popular image of the book constitute the weakest components of its plot. The business with the powders is, as Henry James put it, ‘too explicit and explanatory’2 The genesis of Stevenson’s shilling shocker is the stuff of literary legend. Like those other monstrous gothic tales The Castle of Otranto, Frankenstein and Dracula the central vision of the novel came to its author in a dream. Stevenson’s wife, Fanny Osbourne recalls, 1 Robert Louis Stevenson The Critical Heritage, Ed. Paul Maixner, Routledge, Keegan and Paul (1981) P. 2 The House of Fiction, Henry James, Greenwood Press (1957) P.136 Louise Welsh 1 The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde ‘In the small hours of one morning I was wakened by cries of horror from him. I, thinking he had a nightmare, wakened him. He said, angrily, ‘Why did you wake me? I was dreaming a fine bogie tale’. Stevenson takes up the story in his essay, ‘A Chapter on Dreams’: ‘I dreamed the scene at the window and a scene afterward split in two, in which Hyde, pursued for some crime, took the powder and underwent the change in the presence of his pursuers. All the rest was made awake and conscious.’3 But Fanny claims that when Stevenson presented her with the finished work she was disappointed, protesting that he’d missed the allegorical potential of the tale, ‘he had Jekyll bad all through and working on the Hyde change only for disguise’. Stevenson’s stepson Lloyd Osbourne makes his own contribution to the creation myth recounting that his stepfather responded to the criticisms by flinging the manuscript on the fire. ‘Imagine my feelings – my mother’s feelings – as we saw it blazing up; as we saw those precious pages wrinkling and blackening and turning into flame.’ Satisfying as it is, this flaming passion is open to dispute and Lloyd’s subsequent account of a three-day feverish rewrite ‘sixty four thousand words in six days’ (presumably on the seventh day Stevenson rested) is contradicted by the author’s letters, which indicate a six-week period of editing. The Times reviewer conjectured, ‘Either the story was a flash of intuitive psychological research, dashed off in a burst of inspiration or else it is the product of the most elaborate forethought, fitting together all the parts of an intricate and inscrutable puzzle.’4 Robert Louise Stevenson ‘A Chapter on Dreams’ P.160, in The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Other Tales, Ed. Roger Luckhurst, Oxford (2006) 4 Unsigned reviewer in The Times, 25th January 1886, reproduced inRobert Louis Stevenson The Critical Heritage, Paul Maixner (1981) P.205 3 Louise Welsh 2 The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde The answer is of course that it was both. The themes for Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde had been cumulating within Stevenson since he was a boy and their realisation in this short novel was a result of experience, hard crafting and repeated failure. Robert Louis (pronounced Lewis) Stevenson was born in 1850 in Edinburgh into a family of lighthouse builders and engineers. Conscious of duty, god fearing, hard working, inclined to moroseness, his father Thomas Stevenson could well serve as a model for Jekyll’s lawyer Mr Utterson, who ‘was austere with himself; drank gin when he was alone to mortify his taste for vintage; and though he enjoyed the theatre had not crossed the doors of one for twenty years.’5 Calvinism with its suspicion of pleasure was a dominating influence in young Louis’ life. His nurse Alison Cunningham, was a strict Presbyterianism whose conviction in hellfire (and in the efficacy of strong coffee as a sleeping draught) enlivened her young charge’s dreams. ‘Cummie’ disapproved of plays and novels, but had a talent for storytelling and fired the sickly child’s imagination with tales of Covenanting and righteousness. Later Stevenson was to agree with a reviewer who had described his ethics as a hindrance to fiction, ‘the categorical imperative is always with me, but utters dark oracles. This is a ground almost of pity. The Scotch side came out plain in Dr Jekyll.’6 Stevenson may not have been able to throw off his Calvinist upbringing, but he did, at least in his youth, have a good bash at it. At seventeen he began studying the family profession at Edinburgh University, but it was the ‘other’ Edinburgh, the city of dark wynds and late night howffs, rather than the rigours of engineering that drew him. An early poem sums up his youthful allegiances. 5 The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Robert Louis Stevenson, Ed Katherine Linehan, Norton Critical Edition (2003) p.7 6 Ernest Mehew (Ed) Selected Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson, Yale University Press (1997) P.309 Louise Welsh 3 The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde Oh fine, religious, decent folk In virtues flaunting gold and scarlet, I sneer between two puffs of smoke, Give me the publican and the harlot. Stevenson’s exuberant bohemianism became more than a rebellion against Calvinism. Stultifying though the religion of his forebears was it was more than the letter of it that he gibed at. He was revolted by the hypocrisy of Victorian society. Dr Jekyll acknowledges that many ‘a man would have blazened such irregularities as I was guilty of’. It is not the potion that opens the door to Hyde but the doctor’s, ‘imperious desire to hold my head high, and wear a more than commonly grave countenance before the public.’ As academic Robert Mighall points out it is Jekyll’s, ‘overdeveloped sense of sinfulness that constructs Hyde.’7 Hypocrisy runs through the book and it is not only Jekyll who is concerned with appearances. The supposedly amoral Hyde is blackmailed into compensating the family of a child he attacks and when the doctor is implicated in a murder committed by his alter ego, the respectable Mr Utterson conceals incriminating evidence from the police. The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde was one of the first gothic novels located in a contemporary setting and it is intimately concerned with the failings of its own age. The antics of Jekyll and Hyde fitted the times so well that when Jack the Ripper started his bloody campaign a stage version of the book had to be closed in order to protect the actors. Inevitably critics mused on what vice inspired Jekyll to create Hyde to sin for him in proxy. A queer reading of the text is tempting. Stevenson’s awkwardness in drawing female characters could be responsible for their absence in Jekyll and Hyde, 7 Robert Louis Stevenson The Critical Heritage, Ed. Paul Maixner, Routledge, Keegan and Paul (1981) P. xxii Louise Welsh 4 The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde after all they barely feature in Treasure Island and Kidnapped. Henry James considered that the ‘gruesome tone of the tale is . . .deepened by their absence’. And it is true that the entirely male society of the novel, where women are not only (with the exception of a briefly mentioned maid) never present, but never discussed, adds to the skewed, dreamlike atmosphere of the book. But it isn’t merely a desire for glamour that has led mainstream screen adaptations to give Dr Jekyll a female love interest. Their absence adds to the ambiguity surrounding his debauching. It seems likely some contemporary readers, unaware of the denouement, initially suspected Jekyll and Hyde of being sexually involved. Jekyll tells Utterson ‘I sincerely take a great, a very great interest in that young man’. ‘I thought it madness,’ muses the lawyer, ‘and now I begin to fear it is disgrace.’ It turns me cold’, he says, ‘to think of this creature stealing like a thief to Harry’s bedside’. Hyde’s greatest outrage comes when he meets elderly Sir Danvers Carew walking down by the river late at night. The old man approaches him ‘with a very pretty manner of politeness’. The witness doesn’t hear what Sir Danvers says, but Hyde responds furiously, clubbing the old man to death. We might easily be reading of a homophobic murder. It is probable that Stevenson was aware that some of his readers would incline towards a gay subplot; indeed he might have intentionally led them in this direction. But he refused to give a name to Jekyll’s sin, writing in defiance of an early stage adaptation, ‘There is no harm in a voluptuary; and none . . . in what prurient fools call ‘immorality’. The harm was in Jekyll, because he was a hypocrite . . . The Hypocrite let out the beast in Hyde – who is no more sexual than another, but who is the essence Louise Welsh 5 The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde of cruelty and malice, and selfishness and cowardice, and these are the diabolic in man’ It is foolish to trust an author’s pronouncements on their work. A queer reading works. Gothic is a genre where monsters stand in for ‘others’ of all variety and it is difficult to think of a bigger outsider than Hyde. But by refusing to make Jekyll’s vice explicit Stevenson succeeds where he doesn’t in the means of transformation. Like the best monsters the doctor’s sin is all the better for not being seen. Stevenson writes, ‘I had long been trying to write a story on this subject, to find a body, a vehicle for that strong sense of man’s double being which must at times come in upon and overwhelm the mind of every thinking creature’. The converted anatomy theatre in which Dr Jekyll works, the sly back entrance into the building, whose facade is the model of respectability, are both present in the short story, ‘The Body Snatchers’. Partly inspired by Williams Burke and Hare who provided a regular supply of exceedingly fresh cadavers to one of the leading anatomists of 1820’s Edinburgh, Dr Robert Knox. We never meet Knox, but he’s the motor behind the outrages and his surface of propriety is mirrored in his assistant Fettes who decides he can collude in the acquisition of corpses while keeping his own morality intact. The result is of course, awful. Other tales explore the attraction and personification of evil. In ‘Markheim’ a young man commits murder and is then overcome by horror, which is relieved when he gives into the embrace of the devil and in ‘Thrawn Janet’ a book-educated minister is forced to accept the supernatural presence of the devil as an actuality. But perhaps it is Stevenson’s interest in Deacon Brodie, a respectable Edinburgh burgess by day, thief by night that best expresses his quest for Dr Jekyll Louise Welsh 6 The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Mr Hyde. History made folklore; Deacon Brodie was the first customer of the very guillotine that he’d introduced into the city – though legend says he cleverly cheated death. As a boy Stevenson was told that a chest in his childhood home had belonged to the double dealer and he was to spend years collaborating with W.E Henley on a play about the deacon. Successful in the art of travel writing, poetry, novels and essays, theatre is the one literary discipline in which Louis didn’t shine. Brodie is simply bad, removing all tension from the tale. By acknowledging as Jekyll does that, ‘man is not truly one but truly two’, Stevenson arrived at a more complex, ultimately successful rendering of the theme. Dr Jekyll attempts to fling his sin into another body, but the cynicism of this act engenders evil. If badness lingers in Jekyll is it possible that there is a little goodness in Hyde? Poole the butler says that once he heard Hyde, ‘Weeping like a woman or a lost soul . . . I came away with that upon my heart and I could have wept too.’8 Stevenson also has sympathy for the devil, and this is part of what makes The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde such an exciting an unexpected read, even for those who think they know the story already. 8 J & H, P.38 Louise Welsh 7 The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde Louise Welsh 8 The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde