Jekyll and Hyde: Context

Remember: tie each point about the Victorian world back to specific moments in the novel.

Respectability, reputation and repression

• Victorian society judged a person by their public reputation, and a respectable gentleman was expected to keep any private desires or vices completely hidden. This is why Jekyll, a doctor with a name to protect, invents a second self to act them out for him.
• Protecting your image mattered so much that people led real double lives: a virtuous public face with a secret private self. The fear of this being found out runs through the book.
  • Ch 2 - Utterson dreads "the cancer of some concealed disgrace" behind Jekyll's behaviour.
  • Ch 5 - Jekyll panics about "my own character" once scandal threatens.
• Constantly bottling up those private urges is what we mean by repression. The novel suggests that the more you repress part of yourself, the more violently it escapes in the end. That is what Hyde is: the violent side of Jekyll he keeps suppressed.
• Stevenson grew up in Edinburgh fascinated by the true story of Deacon Brodie, a respected city councillor and craftsman by day who led a gang of burglars by night, a real double life.

The beast within

• Charles Darwin's theories of evolution (On the Origin of Species, 1859; The Descent of Man, 1871), which claimed humans descended from animals, deeply unsettled Victorian people.
• A fear that the primitive, violent animal might still be inside of us produced the idea of the "born criminal" (evolutionary regressive people, marked by a brutish, ape-like appearance).
• This is why Hyde is frightening: he is the animal side of man, normally inhibited by civilisation.
  • Ch 2 - Utterson senses "something troglodytic" (primitive, cave-man-like) about him.
  • Ch 4 - Hyde tramples Carew "with ape-like fury".
• Part of the horror is that nobody can say exactly what is wrong with him.
  • Ch 2 - Everyone who meets Hyde feels an "impression of deformity" they cannot name.

Science, religion and good versus evil

• By the late 1800s science was advancing fast and seemed to be taking over questions that had always belonged to religion. Many Victorians began to fear scientists were "playing God".
• Jekyll is exactly that feared scientist, using chemistry to do what religion forbids.
  • Ch 10 - His proud theory is that "man is not truly one, but truly two".
• Like Frankenstein before him, Jekyll loses control of his own creation: the transformations stop obeying him and begin happening on their own, and Hyde takes over.
• Stevenson was raised a strict Scottish Calvinist, taught from childhood that every soul is a battleground between sin and damnation on one side and salvation on the other. We see that stark good versus evil throughout.
  • Ch 10 - Jekyll calls Hyde "pure evil", and warns that trying to throw off "the doom and burthen of our life" only rebounds on him more terribly.

The Gothic and the city

• The novel is a Gothic story (a genre built on fear, mystery, the supernatural, and the uncanny). Stevenson updates it by moving the dread out of old castles and into the modern city.
• It uses the classic Gothic device of the double (a doppelganger), showing two versions of one person.
• The setting is foggy, gas-lit and maze-like London, with respectable squares sitting right beside sinister back streets: a place where a man can lead a hidden life disconnected from his daytime one.
  • Ch 4 - The Soho fog makes it look "like a district of some city in a nightmare".
• Jekyll's house itself is 1 building with 2 faces: a handsome, respectable front, but at the back:
  • Ch 1 - Hyde uses a neglected, "blistered and distained" door.