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
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‘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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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