The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
Other Works by Robert Louis Stevenson
Novels
Treasure Island
Kidnapped
The Black Arrow
The Master of Ballantrae
The Wrong Box
Short Stories and Sketches
Travels with a Donkey
The New Arabian Nights
More New Arabian Nights
In the South Seas
Poetry
A Child’s Garden of Verses
Ballads
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Other Stories
Robert Louis Stevenson
Contents:
Introduction
Story of the Door
Search for Mr. Hyde
Dr. Jekyll was Quite at Ease
The Carew Murder Case
Incident of the Letter
Remarkable Incident of Doctor Lanyon
Incident at the Window
The Last Night
Doctor Lanyon’s Narrative
Henry Jekyll’s Full Statement of the Case
The Body-Snatcher
Markheim
The Bottle Imp
Introduction
Fiction is to grown men what play is to the child.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Much has been made, by his many biographers, of the character of Robert Louis Stevenson. The infirm, wildly dreaming youth; the Bohemian dandy who outraged Victorian England and Scotland; the Socialist; the carousing womanizer (his robust sexuality reputed to be his healthiest feature); the wanderer; the romantic exile. He said of himself, “I was made for a contest,” and he certainly embraced whatever years of life he could snatch away from death’s grasp, refusing to close himself in an ivory tower. In the end, he largely succeeded in rebuking and transcending the smallmindedness and overdetermined morality of his time.
Robert Louis Stevenson—Lou to his family and friends—was born in Edinburgh in 1850. His father, a stern Calvinist from a long line of civil engineers, his mother, a pampered Victorian wife descended from churchmen, loved and cared for their only child immensely but somehow always saw to their own needs first. They were always a demonstratively loving couple between themselves and Stevenson recalled this later saying “The child of a pair of lovers is an orphan.”
His entire childhood and most of his adult life were dominated and governed by illness. Without this fact, and the travel to more hospitable climes that it necessitated, there would be no R.L.S. as we know him. His personality and writing were molded by his continual bouts with tuberculosis, or “Bluidy Jack” as it was colorfully called at the time.
Confined as he was to the house and alone for most of his youth, his early education largely ignored, Louis would rely on his imaginings. The resulting stories were his “drug,” his “refuge,” especially when he was suffering. He started writing by dictating to his mother; his first story, when he was six years old, was “The History of Moses.” Although a quite gifted child, his formal schooling was spotty; he referred to his own education as “truant.” While at home, he would mine his father’s library “for anything really legible” but this kind of book existed only by accident amid the endless religious and scientific texts.
Even on the rare occasions when his health permitted him to attend, he was frequently taken out of school whenever his parents selfishly decided to travel. Though his education may have been truant, it was rich for all its unorthodoxy. The travels throughout Europe kept his agile mind occupied, and the various coastlines he visited turned up later in many of his works.
After his unimpeachably Presbyterian parents “Cummy,” Louis’s childhood nurse, is the one person who had the most influence on his youth. Alison Cunningham, whose ardent religious faith and hellfire-and-damnation nursery tales must bear the blame for adding to the torment of this sickly impressionable child, imparted to him an inordinate preoccupation with sin. “I remember repeatedly…waking from a dream of Hell,” he wrote later, “clinging to the horizontal bar of the bed, with my knees and chin together, my soul shaken, my body convulsed with agony.” He spoke of “the high-strung religious ectasies and terrors of his childhood,” lying awake fearing that if he fell asleep he wouldn’t be accepted at the gates of heaven and would be eternally damned. He became something of a pint-size fanatic with religion ruling his imagination, and blood-curdling tales at Cummy’s knee as his main entertainment. In spite of this, he loved her like a second mother and remained loyal to her his whole life, although eventually he did become aware that her influence hadn’t been all good. It’s not surprising in light of these beginnings that many of his stories came to him during his troubled sleep, in dreams. In “Memoirs of Himself,” Stevenson referred to “the unnatural activity” of his mind at night throughout his life. Also not surprisingly, as he got older, he trolled his uncommonly vivid dreamscape to find material for his stories.
While at school, Louis singlehandedly edited a schoolboy magazine called The Sunbeam, which he subtitled “an illustrated Miscellany of Fact, Fiction, and Fun.” By his teens, he was attempting novels on beloved Scottish subjects. He was, from the beginning, an able and instinctive linguist, but honing his art was still a lengthy process.
At this point, his writing was precocious but often treacly or contrived. His father’s judgments and strictures hampered him for many years. His mature writing style continued to emerge, with flashes of brilliance and daring in his early stories, until finally, real literary success gave him the liberty to follow his own instincts without constraint. Louis’s ability to buck his father’s belief that writing shouldn’t be frivolous or “too entertaining” (as well as the Victorians’ expectation that their fiction be uplifting at all times) had not yet been accomplished at this early date.
Louis had been spared many of the pressures and responsibilities of maturing because of his father’s prolonged financial support and, of course, his illness. Still, the depth that his experiences had given him started to show up in the themes of the essays he wrote throughout his twenties. He continued for financial reasons to write essays and magazine articles his entire life, but by his mid-twenties he was turning his hand to fiction. His first published story, “A Lodging for the Night,” a taut, suspenseful dark tale portrays the poet François Villon and takes place during the Middle Ages, a period considerably more brutal than his own. He later retracted his sentiments toward his subject, feeling that he’d been too judgmental and harsh. Perhaps this lesson stayed with him, because thereafter he always wrote with increased “moral” distance. Soon, “The Suicide Club,” and “The Rajah’s Diamonds” were garnering him some fame and establishing him, so he was dubbed by a friend, as “the Great Exhilarator.” His “blood-curdling humour” as one critic defined his tone, had started to bring him the tremendous popularity he was to enjoy during his lifetime.
“I was dreaming a fine bogey tale,” Stevenson reproached his wife, who awakened him one night in response to his cries. This nightmare was the inception of “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.” The next three days he wrote non-stop. When he read the story aloud to his wife and stepson as was his habit, his wife said she felt he had entirely missed the point and message of his own creation. Angered at first, he quickly came to believe she was right. He threw the manuscript in the fireplace and started over again. The result is an overtly allegorical novella, technically masterful and considered by most to be the peak of Stevenson’s storytelling.
The portrait of a scientist exploring man’s perfectability, defying God and trying to create (or redefine) life has now become familiar terrain in fiction. Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s Frankenstein and H.P. Lovecraft’s Herbert West—Reanimator use this same theme which provides modern readers with a neat but manageable thrill. During the Victorian era, however, Stevenson dealt a genuine shock to his readers, producing real moral consternation and even turmoil in them. Henry James, a friend and great admirer of Stevenson’s, was moved to ask, “Is “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde’ a work of high philosophic intention, or simply the most ingenious and irresponsible of fictions?” Another friend, A.J. Symonds wrote his reaction to R.L.S., “You see I am trembling under the magician’s wand of your fancy, rebelling against it with the scorn of a soul that hates to be contaminated with the mere picture of victorious evil. Our only chance it seems to me [is] to maintain, against all appearances, that evil can never in no way be victorious.” This is exactly the sort of hidebound hypocrisy so potently illustrated in Stevenson’s story.
Dr. Henry Jekyll himself is, at first glance, the ideal Victorian man. He is an admirable member of society, a doctor, a scientist, a humanitarian. But that period was a time of social and religious upheaval and reassessment. In response to these tremors, good and evil were even more starchily defined, everything was seen in black and white. Behavior, which became the ultimate yardstick, was deemed either decent and tolerable or not. Jekyll’s story, his struggle with his own hidden evil self, truly captures and expresses the duality of the Victorian age. Without much scientific detail or verisimilitude, through the ingestion of a concoction of powders, tincture, and salt, Jekyll releases the character who resides in him—the thoroughly wicked Mr. Hyde. Jekyll may then, via Mr. Hyde, enact all the diabolical desires he otherwise suppresses. G.K. Chesterton wrote “The real stab of the story is not the discovery that one man is two men; but in the discovery that the two men are one man.”