Stevenson's novella – analysed past Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough Academy)

Before analysing this classic novella, it'due south worth summarising the plot of Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) and drawing the reader's attention to its interesting narrative structure.

The story for Jekyll and Hyde famously came to Robert Louis Stevenson in a dream, and according to Stevenson'south stepson, Lloyd Osbourne, Stevenson wrote the first typhoon of the novella in but three days, before promptly throwing information technology onto the fire when his wife criticised information technology. Stevenson then rewrote information technology from scratch, taking ten days this fourth dimension, and the novella was promptly published in January 1886.

The story is function detective-story or mystery, role Gothic horror, and part scientific discipline fiction, so it's worth summarising how Stevenson fuses these different elements.

Strange Example of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde: plot summary

But anyway, on to the plot summary. We brainstorm in the first chapter, 'Story of the Door', with a conventional third-person narrator, telling us about Mr Utterson, a lawyer, and his friend and distant cousin, Mr Richard Enfield, who often potable and take walks together around London.

On one of their rambles around the city, as they pass the door to a 'sinister block of building', Enfield tells Utterson about something that he witnessed ane night concerning that door and that building: a human being and a daughter running through the street. The man promptly trampled the daughter underfoot, and and so ran off; Enfield and others so chased later the human being and detained him. To avoid a scene, the human being – who has something detestable about him – agrees to pay money to the family of the girl he trampled. To get the money, he went through the door in the sinister building and got a cheque, which he (accompanied by his captors) then went to the bank beginning matter in the morning to greenbacks.

The man who had written the cheque was a respected gentleman, leading Enfield to wonder what sort of concur this ugly trampling fiend has over such a well-regarded human. ('Black mail, I suppose,' Enfield suggests.)

In the next chapter, 'Search for Mr Hyde', Utterson goes home and has dinner, but he'southward troubled past a will he keeps in a prophylactic, for a human named Dr Henry Jekyll. The volition, which has recently been contradistinct, now states that in the event of Jekyll'south decease, a man named Mr Edward Hyde should be the sole beneficiary. This leads Utterson to doubtable that this mysterious Mr Hyde is blackmailing Dr Jekyll over something. He visits his friend Dr Lanyon, who is too a friend of Henry Jekyll's, hoping to observe out more. Lanyon tells Utterson that he and Dr Jekyll fell out some time ago, and that he'south never heard of Mr Hyde.

Utterson passes a troubled nighttime of horrific dreams, and takes to walking the streets at all hours, hoping to find some clue to the mystery of Mr Hyde. He goes to the sinister building Enfield had shown him and, after waiting outside for some time, sees a pocket-sized, plainly dressed man have out a key ready to go inside Jekyll'southward business firm. Utterson approaches him and asks to encounter his face. Hyde tells him that Jekyll is away, but gives Utterson his – Hyde'southward – address in Soho. When Utterson departs, he is troubled by the advent of Mr Hyde: there is something 'dwarfish', something most inhuman, about him.

In 'Dr Jekyll Was Quite at Ease', Utterson goes to visit Dr Jekyll and asks him near Mr Hyde. Jekyll grows pale when Hyde's name is mentioned and refuses to discuss him. He tells Utterson to get out Hyde alone.

In 'The Carew Murder Instance', the narrator relates how a maid servant witnessed the bloodcurdling murder of an MP, Sir Danvers Carew, one nighttime. Mr Hyde clubbed the elderly politician to expiry in the street, using his cane as a weapon. A letter addressed to Mr Utterson was institute on the body of the expressionless MP, who was Utterson'southward client.

The letter is brought to Utterson, who goes to identify Carew's body and and so takes the police detective to Mr Hyde'southward address, so they can apprehend the criminal. Withal, when they arrive at the Soho accost Mr Hyde gave to Utterson, they find merely an sometime maid, who tells them Hyde is not at home. They examine the house and observe it in a state of disarray.

In 'Incident of the Letter of the alphabet', Utterson visits Dr Jekyll, who has heard the news about the murder and Mr Hyde's involvement in information technology. Jekyll swears to Utterson that he is done with Hyde, and will not associate with him any more. He shows Utterson a alphabetic character he received from Hyde, telling Jekyll not to fright for his safety. Utterson tells Jekyll he thinks the doctor has had a lucky escape, and that Hyde meant to murder him.

Utterson's head clerk, Mr Invitee, notices the alphabetic character from Hyde and spots a resemblance between Jekyll's handwriting and Hyde's: they're identical, but differently sloped. This leads Utterson to believe Jekyll forged the letter from Hyde, which shocks him.

In 'Remarkable Incident of Dr. Lanyon', we learn that Hyde has completely disappeared. Jekyll seems to take returned to normal, but then in early on January, he confines himself to his house and refuses to see anyone. Dr Hastie Lanyon, friend of both Jekyll and Utterson, reveals to Utterson that he knows something about Jekyll, only refuses to say more. He gives Utterson a letter of the alphabet – to be opened simply after Jekyll'southward disappearance or expiry – and, shortly afterward, dies of shock, subsequently receiving information relating to Jekyll.

'Incident at the Window' is a brusque chapter in which Utterson, while out for one of his Lord's day walks with Enfield, starts upwardly a conversation with Dr Jekyll at the window of his laboratory. Only Jekyll's confront is suddenly overcome with a await of abject terror, and the doctor slams the window and disappears indoors.

'The Last Dark' is the final chapter narrated by the 3rd-person narrator. Jekyll'south butler, Mr. Poole, visits Utterson and says Jekyll has secluded himself in his laboratory. Utterson and Poole get to Dr Jekyll's house, but Jekyll refuses to open up up and meet them. They break into the laboratory, where they find the still twitching trunk of Mr Hyde, wearing Jekyll's apparel, dead from credible suicide. They find a letter Jekyll wrote to Utterson.

The final two capacity are letters: the first from Dr Lanyon, the last from Dr Jekyll himself. Lanyon's alphabetic character informs Utterson that his mental and physical pass up resulted from the shock of seeing Hyde drinkable a serum and turn into Jekyll. Jekyll'south letter then explains that he had developed a gustatory modality for certain vices, and feared that he would be found out, and his reputation as a doc ruined. He plant a way to transform himself into another, unrecognisable figure, using a special tincture he prepared in his laboratory, enabling him to indulge his vices without fear of detection.

Initially, to continue Hyde in check, Jekyll controlled the transformations using the serum, but one night in August, he became Hyde involuntarily in his slumber and knew things had got out of hand.

Like an aficionado, Jekyll resolved to stop transforming himself into Mr Hyde. Nonetheless, during a moment of weakness, he relapsed, and took the serum, unleashing Hyde. Hyde was so furious at having been locked away for so long, went on his rampage and killed the MP, Danvers Carew. Horrified by what Hyde had done, Jekyll tried harder to stop the transformations from occurring, but once again, he transformed into Hyde involuntarily.

Far from his laboratory and so unable to do annihilation about it, and being hounded past the constabulary, he wrote to Lanyon in Jekyll's handwriting, asking Lanyon to bring him chemicals from his laboratory. In Lanyon's presence, Hyde mixed the chemicals and and so drank the serum, turning back into Jekyll earlier Lanyon's very eyes. The daze of the sight prompted Lanyon'due south decline which nosotros've already witnessed, culminating in his decease.

As Jekyll had to continue increasing the dose of serum to forbid himself from turning into Hyde, the stock of serum began to run out. And then, eventually, information technology ceased to work. Resigned to the fact that he will somewhen transform into Hyde permanently and exist unable to become Jekyll again, he writes this letter as his final confession, and the novella ends with him bringing the life of Jekyll to a shut: a hint that he is going to kill himself to prevent Hyde from causing whatever more impairment. This is why Utterson walked in on the twitching corpse of Mr Hyde.

This concludes a summary of the plot of Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. One of the things it's most piece of cake for modern readers to overlook is that, for Stevenson'southward original readers in 1886 (those who had avoided spoilers, in any case), the fact that Jekyll and Hyde are the same person would have been a surprise twist, one we have for granted now. And so how should be analyse this classic story of duality?

Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde: assay

Now information technology's time for some words of analysis near Robert Louis Stevenson'due south classic 1886 novella. However, perhaps 'analyses' (plural) would be more than accurate, since there never could be one monolithic meaning of a story so ripe with allegory and suggestive symbolism. Like another novella that was near-contemporary with Foreign Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, and perhaps influenced past information technology (H. M. Wells's The Fourth dimension Machine), the symbols often point in several different directions at one time.

Whatever attempt to reduce Stevenson's story of doubling to a moral fable about drugs or drinkable, or a tale about homosexuality, is destined to lose sight of the very matter which makes the novella so relevant to so many people: its multifaceted quality. So here are some (and they are only some) of the many interpretations of Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde which have been put forrad in the terminal 120 years or then.

A psychoanalytic or proto-psychoanalytic analysis

In this interpretation, Jekyll is the ego and Hyde the id (in Freud'southward subsequently terminology). The ego is the self in Freud's psychoanalytic theory, while the id is the set of primal drives found in our unconscious: the urge to impale, or do inappropriate sexual things, for instance. Several of Robert Louis Stevenson's essays, such every bit 'A Chapter on Dreams' (1888), prefigure some of Freud'south later ideas; and there was increasing interest in the workings of the man listen towards the end of the nineteenth century (two leading journals in the field, Encephalon and Mind, had both been founded in the 1870s).

The psychoanalytic interpretation is a popular ane with many readers of Jekyll and Hyde, and since the novella is conspicuously about repression of some sort, one can brand a psychoanalytic interpretation – an analysis grounded in psychoanalysis, if you similar – quite convincingly. Information technology might exist significant, reading the story from a post-Freudian perspective, that Hyde is described as childlike at several points: does he embody Jekyll'due south – and, indeed, man's – deep desire to return to a time earlier responsibility and full maturity, when one was freer to human activity on impulse? Early infancy is the formative menses for much Freudian psychoanalysis. Call back the empty centre-class scenes at the beginning of the book: Utterson and Enfield on their joyless Sunday walks, for instance. Hyde attacks father-figures (Sir Danvers Carew, the MP whom he murders, is a white-haired sometime admirer), which would fall in line with Freud's concept of the Oedipus complex and Jekyll's desire to return to a time before developed life with its responsibilities and disappointments. However, one fly in the Oedipal ointment is that Hyde also attacks a immature girl – almost the complete opposite of the 'old human' or father effigy embodied past Danvers Carew.

Nevertheless, psychoanalytic readings of the novella have been popular for some time, and it's worth remembering that the idea for the book came to Stevenson in a dream. Observe, likewise, the presence of dreams and dreamlike scenes in the novel itself, such as when Jekyll remarks that he 'received Lanyon's condemnation partly in a dream; it was partly in a dream that I came home to my own house and got into bed'. For more on the psychological aspects of Stevenson's story, see his correspondence with F. W. H. Myers (in his letters) and Stevenson's account of the role dreams played in the creation of Jekyll and Hyde, encounter his 1888 essay 'A Affiliate on Dreams' (included as an appendix in the Oxford World's Classics edition: Strange Instance of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Other Tales (Oxford World's Classics) ).

An anti-alcohol morality tale?

Alternatively, a different estimation: we might analyse these dreamlike aspects of the novel in another mode and see the novel equally being about alcoholism and temperance, subjects which were being fiercely debated at the time Stevenson was writing. Here, then, the 'transforming draught' which Jekyll concocts represents alcohol, and Jekyll, upon imbibing the draught, becomes a violent, unpredictable person unknown even to himself. (This reading has been nigh thoroughly explored in Thomas Fifty. Reed's 2006 written report The Transforming Draught.) Note how oftentimes wine crops upwards in this short book: it turns upwardly first of all in the 2nd sentence of the novella, when Utterson is found sipping it, and Hyde, we learn, has a closet 'filled with wine'. Might the continual presence of wine exist a inkling that we are all Hydes waiting to happen? Note how the opening paragraph informs us that Utterson drinks gin when he is lonely.

This thesis – that the novella is about booze and temperance – is intriguing, but has been contested by critics such as Julia Reid for being too speculative and reductionist: see her review of The Transforming Draught in The Review of English Studies, 2007.

The 'drugs' estimation

Similarly, the thought that the 'draught' is a metaphor for another drug, whether opium or cocaine. Scholars are unsure equally to whether Stevenson was on drugs when he wrote the book: some accounts say Stevenson used cocaine to finish the manuscript; others say he took ergot, which is the substance from which LSD was afterwards synthesised. Some say he was too ill to be taking anything. You could buy cocaine and opium from your local chemist in 1880s London (indeed, another invention of 1886, Coca-Cola, originally contained cocaine, every bit the drink's proper noun still testifies: don't worry, it doesn't any more).

This is essentially a development of the previous estimation concerning alcohol, and arguably has like limitations in being likewise restrictive an interpretation. However, annotation the way that Jekyll, in his 'full argument' becomes reliant on the 'draught' or 'common salt' towards the stop.

A religious assay

Religious interpretations of Jekyll and Hyde have also proved popular: encounter the references to Hyde equally a 'devil' and a 'child of Hell', but also the numerous Biblical allusions (and here the Luckhurst edition, Strange Example of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Other Tales (Oxford World's Classics) , is peculiarly useful). James Hogg'due south The Individual Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner north/east (Oxford World's Classics) (1824) is an important forerunner to Stevenson'southward volume in this regard. Hogg'due south book is told by a man who thinks he can become away with committing atrocious crimes (crimes which he attributes to his double or alter ego!) considering he has been pre-selected for salvation (which is the Calvinist doctrine in which Stevenson himself was brought up).

Equally such, the story has firsthand links with the story Stevenson would write 60 years afterward. Stevenson was an atheist who managed to escape the constrictive religion of his parents, but he remained haunted by Calvinistic doctrines for the rest of his life, and much of his work can be seen as an try to grapple with these issues which had affected and afflicted him and so much as a child.

The sexuality interpretation

Some critics have interpreted Jekyll and Hyde in light of tardily nineteenth-century attitudes to sexuality: notation the near total absenteeism of women from the story, barring the odd maid and 'sometime hag', and that hapless girl trampled underfoot by Hyde. Some critics have suggested that the idea of bribery for homosexual acts lurks behind the story, and the novella itself mentions this when Enfield tells Utterson that he refers to the house of Mr Hyde equally 'Black Post House' as a outcome of the girl-trampling scene in the street. Elaine Showalter has called the book 'a fable of fin-de-siecle homosexual panic, the discovery and resistance of the homosexual self' in which 'Jekyll'due south apparent infatuation with Hyde reflects the late nineteenth-century upper-middle-grade eroticisation of working-class men equally the ideal homosexual objects'. (See Showalter'south Sexual Chaos: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siecle .)

As such, the novella becomes an allegory for the double life lived past many homosexual Victorian men, who had to hide (or Hyde) their illicit liaisons from their friends and families. The poet Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote to his friend Robert Bridges that the daughter-trampling incident early on in the narrative was 'perhaps a convention: he was thinking of something unsuitable for fiction'. Some have interpreted this statement – by Hopkins, himself a repressed homosexual – equally a reference to homosexual activeness in late Victorian London. Consider in this connection the fact that Hyde enters Jekyll'south business firm through the 'back style' – even, at one indicate 'the back passage'. 1885, the yr Stevenson wrote the volume, was the yr of the Criminal Law Amendment Act (unremarkably known as the Labouchere Amendment), which criminalised acts of 'gross indecency' between men (this was the act which, ten years afterward, would put Oscar Wilde in gaol).

Nonetheless, we should be wary of reading the text as about 'homosexual panic', since, as Harry Cocks points out, homosexuality was ofttimes 'named openly, publicly and repeatedly' in nineteenth-century criminal courts. But then could fiction for a mass audience as readily proper name such things?

A Darwinian analysis

Charles Darwin's book On the Origin of Species, which laid out the theory of development by natural selection, had been published in 1859, when Stevenson was still a child. In this reading, Hyde represents the key, animal origin of modern, civilised homo. Consider here the repeated uses of the give-and-take 'apelike' in relation to Hyde, suggesting he is an atavistic throwback to an earlier, more primitive species of man than Man sapiens. This reading incorporates theories of something called 'devolution', an idea (now discredited) which suggested that life forms could actually evolve backwards into more than primitive forms.

This is also linked with late Victorian fears concerning degeneration and decadence among the human being race. Is Jekyll's argument that he 'bore the stamp, of lower elements in my soul' an allusion to Charles Darwin's famous phrase from the end of The Descent of Human being (1871), 'man […] bears […] the indelible stamp of his lowly origin'? In his story 'Olalla', another tale of the double which Stevenson published in 1885, he writes: 'Man has risen; if he has sprung from the brutes he tin can descend to the same level again'.

This Darwinian analysis of Jekyll and Hyde could incorporate elements of the sexual which the previous interpretation likewise touches upon, but would view the novel as a portrayal of human's – and we mean specifically human being'south here – repression of the darker, violent, primitive side of his nature associated with rape, pillage, conquest, and murder.

This looks back to a psychoanalytic reading, with the 'id' being the home of primal sexual desire and lust. The girl-tramping scene may take on another significance here: it'due south a 'girl' rather than a boy considering it symbolises Hyde'due south animalistic desire to conquer and brutalise someone of the opposite, not the same, sex. There accept been many critical readings of the novella in relation to sex and sexuality, only it'south important to betoken out that Stevenson denied that the novella was nearly sexuality (see below).

A written report in hypocrisy?

Or perhaps not: perhaps there is something in the idea that hypocrisy is the novella's theme, as Stevenson himself suggested in a letter of the alphabet of November 1887 to John Paul Bocock, editor of the New York Dominicus: 'The impairment was in Jekyll,' Stevenson wrote, 'because he was a hypocrite – not because he was addicted of women; he says so himself; simply people are so filled full of folly and inverted lust, that they can think of nothing but sexuality. The Hypocrite let out the beast'. This assay of Jekyll and Hyde sees the ii sides to Jekyll's personality as a portrayal of the dualistic nature of Victorian order, where you must be respectable and civilised on the outside, while all the fourth dimension harbouring an inward lust, violence, and desire which you have to bring under control.

This was a popular theme for many tardily nineteenth-century writers – witness not only Oscar Wilde's 1891 novel The Picture of Dorian Gray only likewise the double lives of Jack and Algernon in Wilde's comedy of manners, The Importance of Being Earnest (1895). This is a more open up-concluded interpretation, and the novella does appear to exist about repression of some sort.

In this respect, this interpretation is similar to the psychoanalytic reading proposed above, but it also tallies with Stevenson's own assertion that the story is about hypocrisy. Everyone in this book is masking their private thoughts or desires from others. Note how fifty-fifty the constabulary officeholder, Inspector Newcomen, when he learns of the murder of the MP, goes from beingness horrified one moment to excited the next, equally 'the next moment his eye lighted upwards with professional ambition'. He tin can barely comprise his glee. The maid who answers the door at Hyde's rooms has 'an evil face, smoothed by hypocrisy; only her manners were excellent'.

From these clues, we can as well posit a reading of the novel which sees it as almost the course construction of late nineteenth-century Britain, where Jekyll represents the comfortable middle class and Hyde is the repressed – or, indeed, oppressed – working-class figure. Annotation hither, all the same, how Hyde is repeatedly described every bit a 'gentleman' past those who see him, and that he attacks Danvers Carew with a 'cane', rather than, say, a guild (though information technology is reported, tellingly, that he 'clubbed' Carew to death with it).

A scientific estimation

The reference to the evil maid with fantabulous manners places Jekyll's ain duality at the extreme cease of a continuum, where everyone is putting on a respectable and acceptable mask which hides or conceals the evil truth lurking behind it. And then we might see Jekyll's scientific experiment as merely a concrete apotheosis of what anybody does.

This leads some critics to ask, then, whether the novella nearly the misuse of science. Or is the 'tincture' merely a scientific, chemical limerick considering a magical draught or elixir would be unbelievable to an 1880s reader? Arthur Machen, an author who was much influenced past Stevenson and especially past Jekyll and Hyde, made this point in a letter of the alphabet of 1894, when he grumbled:

In these days the supernatural per se is entirely incredible; to believe, we must link our wonders to some scientific or pseudo-scientific fact, or ground, or method. Thus nosotros do non believe in 'ghosts' just in telepathy, not in 'witch-arts and crafts' but in hypnotism. If Mr Stevenson had written his slap-up masterpiece almost 1590-1650, Dr Jekyll would have made a compact with the devil. In 1886 Dr Jekyll sends to the Bond Street chemists for some rare drugs.

This is worth pondering: the utilise of the 'draught' lends the story an air of scientific authenticity, which makes the story a grade of science fiction rather than fantasy: the tincture which Jekyll drinks is non magical, merely a chemic potion of some vaguely divers sort. Merely to say that the story is actually nearly the dangers of misusing scientific discipline could exist a leap too far.

We run the adventure of confusing the numerous picture adaptations of the book with the volume itself: nosotros immediately flick wild-haired soot-faced scientists causing explosions and mixing up potions in a dark laboratory, simply in fact this is not really what the story is about, merely the ways through which the real meat of the story – the transformation of Jekyll into Hyde – is effected. Information technology's merely once this split up has been achieved that the real story, nearly the dark side of man's nature which he represses, comes to low-cal. (Compare Frankenstein here.)

All of these interpretations of Jekyll and Hyde can be – and accept been – proposed, only information technology'southward worth bearing in mind that the popularity of Stevenson's tale may prevarication in the very polyvalent and cryptic nature of the text, the fact that it exists as a symbol without a key, a riddle without a definitive reply.

The author of this article, Dr Oliver Tearle, is a literary critic and lecturer in English at Loughborough University. He is the writer of, amid others, The Secret Library: A Book-Lovers' Journey Through Curiosities of History and The Dandy State of war, The Waste State and the Modernist Long Poem.