Deeply immersed in the drama of Stevenson’s most celebrated novel, Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, we learn of the following encounter. The well-respected Doctor Hastie Lanyon had received a letter from his old boarding school classmate and long-time friend, Dr. Henry Jekyll, also a physician. Confused and convinced that his friend had lost his mind, Lanyon followed the letter’s bizarre instructions to break the lock on Jekyll’s laboratory door and take home a drawer filled with vials and powders. As the letter further dictated, a messenger would arrive at midnight to retrieve its contents. Warned in the note that his friend’s life depended upon his action, Lanyon loaded an old revolver as he waited. After the midnight chime, a knock came at his door. Before Lanyon stood a small man with an air so disagreeable that he felt a cold shiver run through him. The messenger was dressed in a gentleman’s fine clothes, but they were clearly too large for him, with the trouser legs rolled and the waist hanging loose at the hips. The dwarfish man was abrupt and nervous, pressing the doctor to turn over the drawer to him. Lanyon reprimanded him for his manners, but complied. The visitor proceeded to mix the chemicals and powders and then, as Lanyon himself, recounted,
He put the glass to his lips and drank at one gulp. A cry followed; he reeled, staggered, clutched at the table and held on, staring with injected eyes, gasping with open mouth, and as I looked there came, I thought, a change—he seemed to swell—his face became suddenly black and the features seemed to melt and alter—and the next moment, I had sprung to my feet and leaped back against the wall, my arm raised to shield me from that prodigy, my mind submerged in terror.
“O God!” I screamed, and “O God” again and again, for there before my eyes—pale and shaken, and half fainting, and groping before him with his hands, like a man restored from death—there stood Henry Jekyll.
This is the great “reveal” of Stevenson’s classic work. It takes place over three-quarters of the way through the story. The reader knows at this point, although Dr. Lanyon does not, that the strange visitor who appeared at his door was Edward Hyde, a “friend” of Dr. Jekyll who had engaged in acts of wanton cruelty and murder. However, there had been no prior hint that the two men are in fact the same person. Lanyon’s description of Dr. Jekyll’s transformation is one of two narratives (the other is Dr. Jekyll’s own statement) that follow the account of the attorney Gabriel John Utterson’s efforts to solve the mystery of the strange relationship between the horrible Mr. Hyde and their old friend, Dr. Jekyll.
The transformation of identity by a secret potion has become so familiar and parodied (think “The Nutty Professor” or a Bugs Bunny cartoon) that the contemporary reader can no longer imagine what sheer icy astonishment must have hit an unsuspecting audience of Stevenson’s time in response to Lanyon’s discovery. The great Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges tried to capture the reader’s surprise: “I don’t think anyone would have guessed that [Jekyll and Hyde were the same man.] Have you suspected that Sherlock Holmes was the Hound of the Baskervilles? Well, no, you haven’t … Have you ever suspected that Hamlet may be Claudius?”
As Borges suggests, this book astonished its Victorian readers. Jekyll and Hyde sold forty thousand copies in its first six months in Great Britain and another twenty thousand in the United States. The estimate of pirated copies sold without legal rights soared into a quarter of a million. These were staggering sales for the late nineteenth century. This strange tale of what Stevenson called the “gothic gnome” finally brought him the financial independence he had sought all his adult life. Although its immediate success was due to its surprising twists, in Stevenson’s personal quest for identity it served as an allegorical attack on the Calvinist/Victorian dualism and its accompanying hypocrisy that had so often frustrated him. Even more, it signaled a writer at the height of his creative powers, able to turn his personal demons into a controlled and extraordinarily crafted art. It was the triumph of his “Honor in Honesty” script as it skewered the self-deceptions of Dr. Jekyll and his old-school chums.
To trace back the genesis of this work, we need to pick up the Stevensons’ trail after their departure from Southern France. With Bluidy Jack almost a constant house guest, and rumors of an outbreak of fever carried on the Mediterranean breezes, Louis and Fanny relocated in 1884 to Bournemouth, England, a seaside town in Southwest England, roughly two hours by train from London. After a visit to London specialists, Louis had received conflicting advice that the English seaside might be a therapeutic boon; one doctor advocated for it, and the other thought it would kill him. Since Lloyd was living there at the time, studying for university exams, Stevenson went with the more benign prognosis and headed south. Staying in England and closer to Edinburgh also seemed a good idea at the time since Thomas’s health was becoming increasingly unreliable. He was showing bouts of heavier depression, not unlike the dark moods of his brother, Alan; lapses in memory and strange outbreaks of temper were also starting to surface. All of these symptoms were to escalate in the next few years, bringing another stress to Louis’s life on top of his own health concerns.
Louis and Fanny lived in a rented house for five months, but in an effort to keep them in Great Britain, and to reward Fanny for her sedulous care of their son, Thomas and Margaret provided Fanny with sufficient funds to buy a small house in Bournemouth. She chose an attractive spacious home on a hillside overlooking the sea, and they moved into their first true home in April 1884. As Stevenson wrote to his good friend Edmund Gosse just before the move, “I am now a beastly householder, but have not yet entered on my domain. When I do, the social revolution will probably cast me back upon the dung heap.”
The little quip here is very telling with regard to what this new “revolt into respectability,” as Stevenson phrased it, meant to him. Think back to the “godless” Stevenson of university days, foppish in his black velvet coat and long locks, defying his father and frequenting the pubs and brothels of Edinburgh. Or the bohemian Stevenson, carousing with his cousin, Bob, in an artist colony in France, and starting an affair with the still married Fanny. Or Stevenson taking steerage across the Atlantic and then a dusty train ride across the plains of the American frontier to reunite with her and plead his case for marriage. Now here he was, no longer a footloose artiste and adventurer, but a homeowner with a maid and gardener. As he adjusted to his new comforts, Fanny made trips to London for the purchase of antique furniture, while preparing to host his London friends for full-course meals in his well-appointed dining room.
If the bohemian side of Stevenson may have blanched at his newfound respectability, he felt equal confusion and guilt over this parental gift. Still, not earning his own way, here he was in a fine house that he had not paid for, and even taking a certain pleasure in playing the lord of the manor. His letters to his parents during this period convey this mixture of feelings: frustration with his father’s moods (“if possible let us have the light (too often clouded) of your countenance”); a continued desire to please his parents (“An illustrated Treasure Island will be out next month. I have had an early copy, and the French pictures are admirable”) and guilt over relying on them (“I am in the necessity of begging”).
Far from the estranged son of his university years, Louis comes across as striving to make peace with his parents. He looks for common ground with his father around the plotting of his emerging novel about the young man David Balfour and his travels through the Highlands (what would become Kidnapped). Yet he still feels the sting when his father finds scenes from his plays with Henley to be too explicit and irreligious for his tastes.
As they adjusted to their new home, he and Fanny began to socialize with the other notable figures of the community, which included Percy Shelley’s son and his wife, both rather elderly and doting on the younger writer. Even more important, the American expatriate novelist Henry James, by then already a revered figure, was a frequent visitor to their home, and a favorite armchair that he occupied on his visits became known to the household as “Henry James’s” chair. Louis and Fanny named their house “Skerryvore” after one of the fabled lighthouses built by his family’s firm, and indeed the house did serve as a kind of refuge for them both in the next three years.
Still, nothing could protect Louis from Bluidy Jack’s relentless attacks. In his first year at Bournemouth, he complained to Henley,
Do you know anyone that wants a cough: a hacking, hewing, tickling, leacherous, choking, nauseating, vomitable cough, a cough that springs like a rattle, rakes like a barrow, and deracinates the body like a shot of dynamite? (Letter 1319)
He was forced to take morphine to suppress his cough and dull its pain; this often left him in a doped state, incapable of generating coherent prose. Fanny waited on him constantly and his nights seemed endless, alternating among insomnia, coughing attacks, and sweat-drenched nightmares. His father’s decline and fear of his own death were twin worries that began to feed into his own bouts of depression and self-disgust. He would brood over how little he had accomplished, and how little time he might have left. These morbid musings were not helped by the fact that he accomplished precious little writing in this period. He continued collaboration on further unsuccessful plays with Henley and managed to produce one short story, “Markheim,” which was intended for a Christmas publication but was too short to submit. He certainly took little pride in his playwriting efforts, describing one of the plays in a letter to Henley as a “low, black dirty, blackguard, ragged piece: simply vomitable in parts.”
His fatalistic preoccupations were heightened by the sudden death in June 1885 of Fleeming Jenkin, his beloved engineering professor from the University of Edinburgh and first mentor in the secular intellectual world. He had continued to visit with the Jenkins when he returned to Edinburgh as an adult, and now tucked away in Bournemouth, Stevenson mourned the loss of this older brother/father figure. He wrote to Jenkin’s widow, Anne:
You know how much and for how long I have loved, respected, and admired him… . I never knew a better man nor one to me more lovable; we shall all feel the loss more greatly as time goes on …
My heart is sore for you. At least you know what you have been to him; how he cherished and admired you, how he was never so pleased as when he spoke of you; with what a boy’s love, up to the last he loved you. This surely is a consolation. (Letter 1445)
This letter not only conveys Stevenson’s obvious compassion but is revealing in that the highest compliment he can offer to the grieving wife is that her husband loved her with a “boy’s love.”
There are many other ways in which Stevenson’s letters from this period reveal his reverence for a boy’s world and a desire to escape the adult responsibilities he was facing. In his characteristic effort to oppose his gloom with humor and determined cheerfulness (channeling his mother’s incontrovertible optimism), his letters are often very funny with comic drawings, snatches of doggerel verse, and doodles up the sides and margins of the paper. Letters to Henley are signed with silly made-up names like “Mugrubbin Bey” or “John Higginbotham Trent” or the letter to Gosse mentioned earlier is signed “The Hermit of Skerryvore.”
Letters to Fanny during their brief absences from each other have some of his more odd and absurd terms of endearment, “Dear pig,” “Dear weird woman,” “My dear fellow.” Letters to his old friend from university days, Charles Baxter, who also served as his personal attorney, revive their tradition of taking on the fictitious roles of two old Scottish drunkards, “Johnstone and Thomson,” and are written in broad Scottish dialect (“But you and me must hae been innycent; there’s nae doubt o’ that.”). He was also not above playing adolescent pranks on Baxter, such as responding to rental property offers with pseudonyms and outrageous demands. Stevenson would write the first inquiry and ask that all subsequent responses be addressed to Baxter. Still enamored with his imaginary battles and metal soldiers, he continued to play out war games in letters with his cousin, Bob.
Despite these diversions, in September 1885, Stevenson was perpetually looking for ways to generate more income from his writing. He agreed to write a Christmas ghost story or “shilling shocker” for his publisher, Charles Longman. The year before he had published a ghoulish story, “The Body Snatcher,” for The Pall Mall Gazette about two medical students haunted by the corpse of a man they killed and sold for dissection. This story had caused a bit of a sensation in London when hawkers dressed in plaster skulls and coffin-shaped sandwich boards had paraded on the sidewalks of London as a publicity stunt to sell copies.
Embarrassed by this hack work, but nearly thirty-five years old and still not earning a reliable independent income, he had no choice but to dip his pen into the gothic well once more. He knew vaguely that he wanted to write a story about a man struggling with a double identity, but no new inspiration on this theme was coming and writer’s block still stifled him (“a long summer of uselessness and sickness,” he wrote to a friend, summing up his continued attacks of coughing, fever, headaches, nausea, and sleeplessness).
Double identity (or an awareness of two opposing selves within the same person) had become a familiar literary trope throughout the late eighteenth and into the nineteenth century. In German literature, Goethe and E. T .A. Hoffmann had called attention to doppelgangers (literally double-goers), sinister and ephemeral appearances of second selves. The Scottish writer James Hogg had published The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner in 1824, a full-length novel with shifting narrative voices that featured a murderous protagonist who appears to have a ghostly double. As the critic Karl Miller wrote in his extensive study of this literary motif, the nineteenth century “was a time when it could often be devoutly held that all things are double and there is an innate duality of man”; in contrast, he describes the twentieth century as emphasizing “infinite contradiction, a boundless empire of irony and uncertainty …” The key to Stevenson’s developing sense of psychological complexity in his identity was that he would begin with this familiar plot device of his era but end up with a story more inclined to the “irony and uncertainty” of the century still to come.
He had long been attracted to conventional double-identity themes in previous stories and plays. Besides Deacon Brodie, his play with Henley, the story “Markheim” from the previous year featured a murderer confronted by an unnamed devilish spirit who bears a strong resemblance to himself. By tempting him toward further evil and questioning his fundamental moral character, this darker self forces Markheim (a play on “marked man”) to confront his actions and find the moral courage to turn himself in. The story owed a significant debt to Edgar Alan Poe’s story William Wilson, with which Stevenson was familiar, and in certain overlapping aspects of tension and internal dialogue, with Crime and Punishment by Dostoevsky, which Stevenson had read a couple of years earlier in a French translation. Stevenson had also written a more daring double-identity story called “The Traveling Companion,” which an editor rejected as “indecent” and which he subsequently burned. He never disclosed its contents, other than to say he was unhappy with it.
With all of these literary and historical doubles percolating in his brain, he should have come easily to his greatest tale of double identity, but this was far from the case. After days of creative anguish, nothing surfaced. What happened next is emblematic of how Stevenson ultimately addressed the moments of greatest tension in his life. Severe writer’s block was pressing all the forces of depression, worry, ill health, and self-disgust to converge on his brain. He was thrust back into one of his regressive states in which his nuclear script of shame and self-condemnation could only be relieved by an escape into fantasy and dream life. And that is exactly what happened.
Hyde came to him in a nightmare. Stevenson first alluded to this vision in an 1887 interview with an American journalist and then wrote a more detailed account in an essay, “A Chapter on Dreams,” published soon after.
For two days I went about racking my brains for a plot of any sort; and on the second night I dreamed the scene at the window [possibly referring to Utterson seeing Jekyll at the window and then Jekyll’s face altering as he suddenly disappears from the window], and a scene afterwards split in two, in which Hyde, pursued for some crime, took the powder and underwent the change in the presence of his pursuers.
The dream might have continued, but Fanny heard his cries from sleep and woke him. He complained to her, “Why did you wake me? I was dreaming a fine boguey tale.” In the essay Stevenson goes on to say that the story had been given to him by his “brownies,” unconscious forces that work through his dreams to craft the plots and characters of all his stories.
With or without the assistance of these dream-weaving creatures, he then proceeded to write a first draft of the novella at a lightning pace, finishing in roughly three days. He shared it with Fanny, who urged him to revise it and deepen its allegorical elements. With melodramatic flair, Stevenson responded by throwing the first draft in the fireplace and starting from scratch. In memoirs written years later, Fanny and Lloyd each claimed that he finished the next draft in another frantic burst of a few days, working feverishly from his bed and through the night. Stevenson, however, in a letter written only two months after the story’s publication, described the full writing process as taking several weeks after destroying the original version. (I had the pleasure of holding one of the second draft pages in my white-gloved hand at the Robert Louis Stevenson Museum in St. Helena, California, and I can attest to the fact that Stevenson carefully edited it with words scratched out and replaced.)
Whatever the amount of days or weeks it took, the result was the Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Longman’s must have guessed that they had something special in their hands since they decided to bring it out in book form rather than as a magazine supplement. He finished the story in October, and they released it in January of 1886. Longman’s was right. It received favorable reviews and flew off the shelves.
Literary scholars have generated a cottage industry based on this little book of roughly sixty-two pages or 25,000 words. The Stevenson website lists literally hundreds of critical articles and chapters, and there have been two edited books of essays published about it in the last twenty-five years. It continues to receive numerous references and analyses in any volumes focused on the cultural and literary history of Victorian society. As Judith Halberstam has written about gothic horror fiction in general, “The monster’s body, indeed, is a machine that, in its Gothic mode, produces meaning and can represent any horrible trait that the reader feeds into the narrative… . Monsters are meaning-making machines.”
In the 2004 introduction to the novel as part of the Centenary Edition of Stevenson’s Collected Works, Richard Dury surveyed the various literary interpretations. These include discussions of the inherent divided nature of human personality (anticipating Freud); Victorian bourgeois hypocrisy; repressed homosexuality; addiction; oedipal patricide; evolution and the decline of the species; high art versus commercialism; anxiety about emerging medical sciences and professionalism; imperialism and racial superiority; London and/or Edinburgh as divided socioeconomic societies; Scottish Calvinist religion; and on and on.
Literary analyses have examined the role of writing, mirrors, wine, eyes, and hands in the story. Analyses of technique and style have scoured virtually every syllable of the story. Nabokov, who lectured on the story and taught it in his classes, studied the use of alliteration in key passages (his annotated copy of Jekyll and Hyde with underlined consonants resides in the New York Public Library). Other critics have looked at colloquial diction, parallelism of imagery and plotting, and shifts in narrative point of view and voice. Dury even cited critics who studied how the semicolon plays a prominent role in highlighting the story’s theme of ambiguity; it is employed to create dubious and fragmented linkages of phrases (evidently there are 203 cases of this type in the story).
My own view is that Stevenson purposely avoided linking his allegory to any specific defined evil. Rather than zero in on the exact nature of Mr. Hyde’s malfeasance, he preferred to highlight the hypocrisy of the notion that one could separate good from evil or dichotomize these fundamentally intertwined parts of human nature into discrete packages. Drawing directly on his increasingly important “Honor in Honesty” theme, Stevenson saw Jekyll and his “old boy” chums as representatives of these efforts at false sanctimony. Jekyll, as we shall see, contained the seeds of moral corruption inside himself, right from the beginning, and the idea that he could isolate his wanton impulses from the rest of his identity was a self-deceptive dream.
Stevenson himself was confronting many contradictory moral forces in these years in Bournemouth, and Jekyll and Hyde was an opportunity to explore these contradictions at the deepest emotional level. As Hilary Beattie points out in her psychoanalytic essay (probably, along with William Veeder’s analysis, the most compelling modern psychological interpretation of the novel), his father’s decline juxtaposed with the possibility of Louis’s own ascent as a writer was indeed an oedipal dilemma wrought with guilt and long suppressed resentment. In this case the bubbling up of Hyde in Stevenson’s dream reflected the resurfacing of his long-standing and conflicted murderous oedipal sentiments (the long ago letter to Colvin—“My dear friend, I am killing my father”). If this is so, then it is understandable why he might attribute the origins of this monstrous father-smiting figure to the “brownies” rather than to his own conflicted feelings. As Stevenson went on to write the story, there are certainly many images of Hyde as a wanton child, and there are explicit scenes in which he kills an elderly distinguished man (Sir Danvers Carew) and later desecrates a picture of Jekyll’s father.
Beattie also makes the point that Thomas’s life, while prosperous and accomplished, included disappointment and explicit failure. He had suppressed his literary instincts as a young man and taken up the family’s work. He had lived in the shadow of his father’s and older brother’s greater engineering achievements, while his most ambitious lighthouse project in Wick had been destroyed not once, but twice, by ferocious storms. These setbacks, dating to the early 1870s, had contributed to his lifelong depressive cast and were a likely part of the explanation for his fierce disappointment in his wayward son during that same time.
Now, as Louis hovered between success and the possibility of having all his own ambitions washed away by illness and depression, he likely felt an even stronger identification with his father. Such a link at that time filled him with an equal mixture of compassion and repulsion, in Beattie’s interpretation. This twinning of both their interior and physical states led to deep unconscious fantasies of double-ness and division. Out of such psychic tension a work like Jekyll and Hyde emerged.
These oedipal and patriarchal concerns, also highlighted in Veeder’s essay, contributed to the themes and imagery of the story, but there were other factors in Stevenson’s life that weighed just as heavily on him. His letters struggle mightily and in greater length with questions about the direction his writing should take. Should he continue to pursue cash-generating popular efforts or limit his focus to high literary endeavors, as expected of him by Colvin and the London crowd? Was he indeed ready to give up his bohemian philosophy and join a society he had tagged as hypocritical and materialistic? Could he perceive himself as a competent adult despite the fact that his poor health often left him bed-ridden, exhausted, and unable to follow through on the projects he had planned? Returning to the fundamental division within himself, could he ever make peace with the sensual pleasure he took in his imaginative world without a shaming impulse soon to follow? And finally, and perhaps most critical to the story’s theme, was the division of the world, into Manichean binaries—right versus wrong, pleasure versus sin, adult versus child—all a house of cards in and of itself?
All these ambiguities in his life and sense of identity—personal, professional, moral, philosophical, and no one more than the other—were perfect conscious and unconscious fodder for a story about a failed effort to divide the self and evade the consequences of one’s impulses and desires. The question is, how exactly did Stevenson translate these psychological tensions into his imaginative art?
In what was still a literary innovation at the time (although it can be found in Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White, dating back to 1860), Stevenson provides three different narratives of the events that comprise his “strange case.” The use of contrasting voices only reinforced his theme that we approach the truth with shifting perspectives rather than through any straightforward account. A third-person narrative begins the book, focused on the bachelor, middle-aged lawyer Utterson and his gradual tracking down of the mystery involving Jekyll and Hyde. The second narrative is a letter from Dr. Lanyon, revealing Edward Hyde’s true identity and only to be read after Dr. Jekyll’s death. The final narrative is Jekyll’s confessional letter that chronicles the nature of his experiments in identity transformation and the slow ascendance of Hyde until Jekyll can no longer control the “devil child” he has unleashed.
First, the reader meets Utterson, who is described as “lean, long, dusty, dreary, and somehow lovable.” He avoids wine and the theater and reads from a volume of “dry divinity” each Sunday night after dinner before going “soberly and gratefully to bed.” Yet within this highly controlled exterior, we learn that he has a willingness to tolerate the excesses of others, while “sometimes wondering, almost with envy, at the high pressure of spirits involved in their misdeeds.” In other words, for Stevenson, he is the perfect representation of repressed Victorian sensibility—vicariously finding pleasure in the decadent follies of his peers, and even profiting in his attorney role from their foibles, but presenting to the world an abstemious front.
Utterson belongs to a circle of “old boys” who had become mates in boarding school and maintained their bonds through university and now over the span of their professional lives. They pass time together over newspapers and lunches at their club and in dinners at each other’s gracious homes. All of these men are bachelors, and the only women we meet in the tale are servants or dwellers in the neighborhoods that Hyde frequents.
Utterson walks each Sunday with his distant relation, Enfield, a “well-known man about town.” As they stroll along on a side street filled with brightly painted shops, Enfield points out a rather rundown two-story building with one barren door of blistering paint amid discolored and pocked walls. He tells Utterson that there is a “very odd story” connected to a man who has access to this building. He reviews his encounter with a horrible Mr. Hyde who had trampled a child on the sidewalk and had to be subdued and made to pay restitution.
Although he reveals nothing to Enfield, we soon learn that Utterson is indeed familiar with the name “Hyde,” and for reasons that have already been troubling him. His old friend, Henry Jekyll, a distinguished physician, had recently asked him to administer his will, which contained a strange stipulation that upon his demise or disappearance all his possessions should pass into the hands of one “Edward Hyde,” whom Jekyll described as a “friend and benefactor.” Utterson fears there may be some disgrace behind this request.
Stevenson’s withholding of the specifics of Utterson’s speculations is one of the most effective devices in this tale. Could Hyde be an illegitimate son of Jekyll? Could there be blackmail related to illegal and reputation-destroying sexual conduct (e.g., homosexual acts or trafficking with prostitutes, which had recently been declared “criminal” offenses by the August 1885 Criminal Laws Amendment Act)? Stevenson is so scrupulous about keeping the exact malfeasance indeterminate that he excised the word “criminal” from an earlier draft of the story, perhaps fearing that this would telegraph the kind of sexual conduct that had been outlawed in the recently passed act.
Whatever the exact nature of his fears, Utterson is sufficiently concerned that he rushes off to their mutual friend, Dr. Lanyon. Lanyon has no information to offer except that he had broken some years ago with Jekyll due to the latter’s interest in more unusual and “unscientific” aspects of medicine. Utterson goes to bed that night haunted by diffuse and faceless images of Hyde; he imagines him stalking the streets and even entering into the bed chambers of his friend, Jekyll, summoning him from his bed to do his bidding. Many critics have pointed to what seems a mixture of attraction and repulsion in Utterson’s nighttime fantasies, which invoke both satanic possession and seduction. Later, he is prompted by Jekyll’s seeming bondage to the evil Hyde to consider his own conscience, “Lest by chance some Jack-in-the-Box of an old iniquity should leap to light there.”
Stevenson scholar Katherine Linehan notes that the devilish figure Utterson conjures up at Jekyll’s bedside is reminiscent of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, when Victor Frankenstein wakes from a fretful sleep to find his recently created monster lifting open the curtains of his bed. Stevenson’s poem, “Northwest Passage,” from A Child’s Garden of Verses, also centers on the image of a dark figure at the bedside, a kind of evil that remains in Stevenson’s mind.
Now my little heart goes a beating like a drum
With the breath of the Bogie in my hair;
And all around the candle the crooked shadows come,
And go marching along up the stair.
The novel echoes these same childhood fears, when Stevenson writes, “The figure … haunted the lawyer all night; and if at any time he dozed over, it was but to see it glide more stealthily through sleeping houses, or move the more swiftly and still the more swiftly, even to dizziness, through wider labyrinths of the lamplighted city.”
Galvanized by this incipient horror, Utterson vows that he will track down this Mr. Hyde: “If he be Mr. Hyde, I shall be Mr. Seek.” As the critic Peter Garrett notes, “Utterson’s efforts to break the spell that has enslaved his imagination lead him to replace these repeated images with his own purposeful movement, the search for Hyde, but the project binds them together in complementary roles.” Eventually, he corners Hyde at the entrance to the same decrepit building at which Enfield met him and he is able to look at him face to face. He sees a dwarfish man, “hardly human” with the quality of a “troglodyte.”
By using this word, Stevenson was invoking the fashion of the time to think about beastliness and sin as reflective of evolutionary roots in lower animals. As many literary scholars have noted (see especially the wonderful analysis by Stephen Arata in his Fictions of Loss in the Victorian Fin de Siecle), Stevenson was aware of the uneasiness many in the British upper classes felt about the increasing decadence and degeneracy of the empire at the end of the century. He himself saw the hypocrisy, the fragile layers of respectability separating so-called gentlemen from deviant pursuits. The social scientist LeBon’s studies of brutal crowd behavior and the criminologist Lombroso’s of so-called atavistic types engendered an increasing sense that barbarians were at the gates. Yet by linking the respectable Jekyll to the troglodyte Hyde, Stevenson was highlighting the erasure of distinctions between “high” and “low” society. Utterson notes that Hyde has a key to this building in a more fashionable area, but he learns that Hyde lives in Soho, a district notorious for taverns and brothels.
Stevenson’s prose hints that Utterson’s pursuit of Hyde is not simply a righteous mission. In fact, Utterson is spurred to find Hyde by his own fascination with darker elements of human nature. William Veeder mentions the same pun that occurred to me—Utterson is indeed an “udder son” or other son—conveying respectability and restraint in contrast to the prodigal Hyde. Yet he cannot suppress, as Veeder points out, a sibling rivalry and aggressive preoccupation with his bestial “brother.”
Soon after his encounter with Hyde, Utterson dines with Jekyll and reveals his brief contact with Hyde. Jekyll reacts defensively, assuring Utterson, “… [T]he moment I choose, I can be rid of Mr. Hyde.” As they close the conversation, Jekyll emphasizes to Utterson that he has a “very great interest in that young man” and requests that Utterson would do right by Hyde if Jekyll were no longer there. In this request, we first note the fatherly feelings that Jekyll has for Hyde and the sense of responsibility he feels toward him. Given the cruelty and deformity we have already witnessed in Hyde, this paternal treatment increases the mystery and confusion about what Jekyll’s particular tie to Hyde might be.
In the next chapter, “The Carew Murder Case,” the stakes of Hyde’s depravity are raised dramatically. On a moonlit night, a maid watches a white-haired gentleman approach a smaller younger man who is walking with a heavy wooden cane. She recognizes the smaller man as a certain Mr. Hyde of somewhat disagreeable demeanor who had visited her master. A few words are exchanged between the men, and suddenly the younger man bursts into a rage and proceeds to attack and knock the other man to the ground, beating him to death with his cane. When the police arrive on the scene, they find half of the broken cane and, in the pocket of the dead man’s clothes, a letter addressed to Utterson. Utterson is led to the body by a police officer and identifies the victim as Sir Danvers Carew, a gentleman of title and means; the broken cane he recognizes, without speaking up, as a present he had given to his old friend Henry Jekyll many years before.
When Utterson leads the police to the Soho address Hyde had given him earlier, Stevenson’s imagery returns to the scripted themes of his tortured hours with Cummy. He had written about his recurrent nightmares as a child, “Disproportion and a peculiar shade of brown, something like that of sealskin, haunted me particularly during these visitations.” Now on one single page, he refers repeatedly to the same fearsome hovering brown clouds that tinged his childhood nightmares. As they move through the befogged streets of a London morning, they travel through a “chocolate-coloured pall” (a “pall” being a cover for a coffin) and behold the “glow of a rich lurid brown” in which Soho seems a district of “some city in a nightmare.” As they close in on Hyde’s home, the fog again settles upon them, as “brown as umber.” In seeking to build terror in his readers, Stevenson has employed his “Brownies” to guide him to the most primitive recesses of his own fear—“The haunted night returns again” (“Northwest Passage”).
Hyde has vanished, but they search his room and find further incriminating details. Utterson then returns to Jekyll’s home, entering the formal side of the building, and the reader sees more clearly that a courtyard connects Jekyll’s home to the building’s other entrance that Hyde has been using to gain access from the street. On this side there is an old lecture room used for dissecting and a laboratory filled with glass shelves, equipment, and hearth (in nineteenth-century parlance, “a cabinet” or office space). Utterson finds Jekyll there, pale and shaken. He swears that Hyde is gone and will appear no more. Still, further troubling incidents occur in the ensuing months, and Utterson remains in great distress and fear for his friend.
Eventually, Jekyll’s butler, Poole, seeks out Utterson at his home and begs him to come back to Jekyll’s house. They proceed to the cabinet where all week Poole has observed a figure locked inside and in great distress. It quickly comes out that he has determined that it is Edward Hyde and not Dr. Jekyll who is burrowed behind the red baize door of the cabinet, and it is Hyde’s cries of despair and weeping that he has heard over the last few days. The only communication from inside has been scrawled notes slipped under the door to be brought to the chemist requesting a certain white powder. No matter what form of mixture Poole has retrieved, it has not proven satisfactory to the desperate character inside the room.
Fearing the murder of Dr. Jekyll, the two demand entry. Hearing the tortured voice of Hyde cry, “Utterson … for God’s sake, have mercy!,” they break down the door and discover Hyde’s body writhing on the floor in the last throes of cyanide poisoning. Despite their search, there is no sign of Jekyll, only an envelope containing three enclosures. The first is Jekyll’s will, now modified to leave all his effects to Utterson; the second is a brief note from Jekyll explaining that he is now likely to be gone for good and that it is time to read Dr. Lanyon’s letter; the third is a packet of paper, which turns out to be a statement written by Jekyll. Utterson tells Poole that he will go home to read the two remaining documents and then return to summon the police. This ends the first narrative. Stevenson once again taps the allegorical elements of his tale when he makes Utterson, the “other son,” the heir of Dr. Jekyll. Clearly, all of us inherit Jekyll’s human dilemma of the mixed elements that dwell within; none of us escapes his legacy.
This fast-paced mystery with Utterson in the role of “Mr. Seek” has now led the reader to the revelation of Dr. Jekyll’s secret through the letter left by Dr. Lanyon. Once we absorb this shock, we then come to the final narrative, “Henry Jekyll’s Statement of the Case.” Jekyll begins his account in a straightforward biographical manner, describing himself as a youth of many positive virtues and talents, but with a less upright inclination to pleasure and sensuality. He comments that he found it hard to reconcile this hedonism with “my imperious desire to carry my head high.” He wore an “uncommonly grave countenance before the public,” while secretly “already committed to a profound duplicity of life.” Stevenson allows Jekyll to present his case with some righteous justification. Jekyll points out that it was “the exacting nature of my aspirations” rather than any “particular degradation in his faults” that made a “deeper trench than in the majority of men” between the “provinces of good and ill which divide and compound man’s dual nature.”
The depiction of the extremity of the two natures in the same man summons up Stevenson’s encounters with the religious visions of Cummy; he returns to his early days where he would “lie awake to weep for Jesus,” while fearing that he would “slip … into eternal ruin.” Knowing this torture firsthand, he creates the vision in Jekyll that he can divide these halves of himself, that he can uncouple good from evil—split the two—and allow each to pursue a separate existence.
… the unjust might go his way, delivered from his aspirations and remorse of his more upright twin; and the just could walk steadfastly and securely on his upward path, doing the good things in which he found his pleasure, and no longer exposed to disgrace and penitence by the hands of this extraneous evil.
Having used his studies of “transcendental medicine” to craft a formula that will affect the transformation he desires, Jekyll describes the first emergence of Mr. Hyde:
There was something strange in my sensations, something indescribably new and, from its very novelty, incredible sweet. I felt younger, lighter, happier in body; within I was conscious of a heady recklessness, a current of disordered sensual images running like a mill race in my fancy, a solution of the bonds of obligation, an unknown but not an innocent freedom of the soul.
He finds this sensation of pure evil, as delightful as “wine” and in the rapture of his new freedom realizes he has physically shrunk. Jekyll reasons the smaller stature of the evil alter ego must be due to its entrapment by the more cultivated good self—it had been suppressed for many years by the moral confines of the proper Dr. Jekyll. Now freed, this “gothic gnome” could pursue the full development of his evil potential. Yet within Stevenson’s own elemental script, he was once more acknowledging the inhibited child’s secret fetishism of sin.
The creation of Hyde, surfacing first in his inchoate dream, was a channeling of the tantalus of sin that was the flipside of Cummy’s Manichean teachings. In envisioning the devil-child Hyde, Stevenson was portraying how intoxicating it could be to give in to the darker elements hovering on the border of any presumed piety. He also describes the transformation as stirring “sensual images running like a mill race.” For Stevenson, the mill race serves as a symbol, not only of sensuality, but of unbridled imagination and creative power, just as it did in his poem “Keepsake Mill” (see my earlier chapter on “A Child’s Garden of Verses”).
Stevenson is again playing with notions of good and evil and challenging their conventional division. If Jekyll is the good side and Hyde, the evil, then shouldn’t Jekyll’s consciousness be repulsed by the sight of deformed and dissolute Hyde? And yet, when he gazes upon Hyde’s form in the mirror for the first time, he was conscious of “no repugnance, rather of a leap of welcome. This, too, was myself.” In fact, he allows us to see how enabling Hyde’s freedom to sin seduces Jekyll. Passing through middle age and still averse to the “dryness of a life of study,” Jekyll soon took increasing opportunities to “profit by the strange immunities of my position.” Hyde was equipped and ready to “like a schoolboy, strip off these lendings, and spring headlong into the sea of liberty.” Notice once again the image of a “schoolboy” free to indulge his wishes. Stevenson wants us to see the energy and dynamism that freedom unbridled by any compunction can bring to life. We can hate it for its cruelty but admire it for its power. It is not that the “good Dr. Jekyll” is seduced by the evil Hyde; rather the will to uninhibited freedom was always a part of Jekyll that he treasured but could not accept. What is the proper pirate to do if he cannot acknowledge the pirate side of his own inherent nature?
And critically, there’s not just one object floating on this “sea of liberty”—not just one target for our desires. Stevenson’s refusal to enumerate the specific acts of sensuality and depravity works at multiple levels. Certainly, he did not want to run afoul of the publishers to whom he had promised to supply a Christmas tale. Boundaries of decorum would restrain the spelling out of certain “crimes” that were illegal and left unspoken. Just as importantly, Stevenson did not believe that sexual behavior was by any means inherently immoral or evil. He wrote to an American journalist, John Paul Bocock, after hearing about the dramatization of the story, which introduced romantic elements and explicit themes of sexual passion:
The Hypocrite [Jekyll] let out the beast Hyde—who is no more sexual than another, but who is the essence of cruelty and malice, and selfishness and cowardice and these are the diabolic in man—not this poor wish to have a woman that they make such a cry about. I know … that bad and good, even to our human eyes, has no more connection with what is called dissipation than it has with flying kites. But the sexual field and the business field are perhaps the two best fitted for the display of cruelty and cowardice and selfishness. This is what people see; and these they confound. (Letter 1939)
Hyde’s bestiality is the elemental egocentrism of the amoral child, not the focused lustful urges of a sexualized being. Stevenson is urging us to see the rampant tantrum of the will, not its particular objects. We all possess it, and we all give into it, at times. Our problem, as he understood it, is that we are not honest about the inherent mixture of vice and virtue within all of us. As literary critic Irving Saposnik wrote about Stevenson’s conception of Jekyll:
Having recognized his duality, he attempts to isolate two selves into individual beings and to allow each to go his separate way. Mere disguise is never sufficient for his ambition; and his failure goes beyond hypocrisy, a violation of the physical and metaphysical foundations of human existence. Henry Jekyll is a complex example of his age of anxiety: woefully weighed down by self-deception, cruelly a slave to his own weakness, sadly a disciple of a severe discipline, his is a voice of “De Profundis,” a cry of Victorian man from the depth of his self-imposed underground. (Saposnik, in Geduld, 1983)
In Stevenson’s continual return to imagery from his highly charged and morally ambivalent childhood, this message comes across more clearly than any of the many interpretive readings that project themes of promiscuity, homosexuality, addiction, class, commercialism, evolutionary degeneration, and so forth on to the story.
Taken back to his child state of invalidism, returning to the brown-hued nightmares of his child bed, suffocated like a “weevil in a biscuit” in the bourgeois respectability of his Skerryvore home, Stevenson’s creative imagination found a direct line to the fundamental fears and desires of his boyhood self. His ability to convert this remembered state of being, as much sensations and feelings as articulated thoughts, into the persona of Hyde, helps to account for the enduring power of his novella. He found in the return of his own infant terror (and forbidden pleasures) a gothic gnome that could terrify and tantalize his readers.
Returning to the final sections of Jekyll’s narrative, we learn how he begins to lose control of his transformations to Hyde and swears off any further experiments.
… I preferred the elderly and discontented doctor, surrounded by friends and cherishing honest hopes; and bade a resolute farewell to the liberty, the comparative youth, the light step, leaping pulses, and secret pleasures, that I had enjoyed in the disguise of Hyde.
Two months of piety pass, but Jekyll relents and drinks the elixir to become Mr. Hyde again. Hyde’s return brings an intensified wave of evil and that very night he murders Sir Danvers Carew. We see once more how the language Stevenson chooses to describe the crime parallels his own childhood pleasure in sin, followed immediately by his sorrowful repentance. “I struck in no more reasonable spirit than that in which a sick child may break a plaything.” The spirit of hell had awoken inside him and “With a transport of glee, I mauled the unresisting body, tasting delight from every blow.” Yet when Henry Jekyll regains his body, his remorse is overwhelming and he falls to his knees and lifts his clasped hands to God. Here again is Stevenson’s description of his own nightmarish repentances from his childhood:
I remember repeatedly … waking from a dream of Hell, clinging to the horizontal bar of the bed, with my knees and chin together, my soul shaken, my body convulsed with agony … I piped and sniveled over the Bible with an earnestness that had been talked into me.
As Jekyll kneels, he sees his life in its entirety and returns to “days of childhood, when I had walked with my father’s hand, and through the self-denying toils of my professional life.” Compare this image of seeking out the comfort of his father’s rectitude to another passage from Stevenson’s memoir:
I suffered at other times, from the most hideous nightmares, which would wake me screaming and in the extremest frenzy of terror. On such occasions, none could pacify my nerves, but my good father, who would rise from his own bed and sit by mine.
In the novel’s prose, we see how Stevenson plays subtly with the image of the loving father juxtaposed with the “self-denying” expectations that fathers can bring, and, as we well know, Thomas Stevenson brought to his son’s life.
At the same time, Stevenson continues to track the same problem of how the commitment to the “good” can easily turn to sanctimoniousness. When does Jekyll take his final irrevocable turn and find that Hyde emerges without need of the potion?
… [A]nd then I smiled, comparing myself with other men, comparing my active good will with the lazy cruelty of their neglect. And at the very moment of that vainglorious thought, a qualm came over me, a horrid nausea and the most deadly shuddering. These passed away and left me faint; and then as in its turn the faintness subsided, I began to be aware of a change in the temper of my thoughts, a greater boldness, a contempt of danger, a solution of the bonds of obligation. I looked down; my clothes hung formlessly on my shrunken limbs; the hand that lay on my knee was corded and hairy. I was once more Edward Hyde.
Jekyll loses the battle to Hyde on the grounds of vainglorious righteousness rather than to an overabundance of lascivious thoughts. In the classic pattern of reaction formation (the translation of a forbidden impulse into its opposite response), the return of the repressed emerges at the apex of denial. The narration itself slowly devolves into full-blown identity confusion. Although Jekyll’s confession started in a conventional first-person form, he shifts at times to talking about “Hyde” and “Jekyll” in the third person. Now in the next paragraphs, he confuses all perspectives and mixes each identity into the other:
… where Jekyll might have succumbed, Hyde rose to the importance of the moment. My drugs were in one of the presses of the cabinet; how was I to reach them?
Who is trying to reach the drugs? Presumably, there is still some aspect of Jekyll inside of Hyde that aims to undo the transformation. Yet how could this be if Hyde is “pure evil?” Stevenson uses the narrative here to show how divisions of good and bad are not psychologically possible—or as the critic G. K. Chesterton wrote,
From time to time those anonymous authorities in the newspapers, who dismiss Stevenson with such languid grace, will say that there is something quite cheap and obvious about the idea that one man is really two men and can be divided into the evil and the good. Unfortunately for them, that does not happen to be the idea. The real stab of the story is not in the discovery that the one man is two men; but in the discovery that the two men are one man. (Chesterton 1928)
The confusion of pronouns and names by the end of Jekyll’s confession makes this readily apparent—the two identities are bound together in a cacophony of goals and desires all within one person. Yet Jekyll continues to cling to the illusion of separation. As he described himself, trapped in Hyde’s form, forging the letter to Lanyon and working toward his retransformation to Jekyll, he abjures the use of the first-person pronoun:
He, I say—I cannot say I. That child of Hell had nothing human; nothing lived in him but fear and hatred.
What lives in him, of course, is still Jekyll, and it is toward regaining his Jekyll form that all his energy is now devoted. But despite his manipulation of Lanyon toward this end, the success is short lived and soon he cannot stop the continued reversion back to Hyde.
In these last pages of the story, we see the domination of Hyde over Jekyll. He begins to use Jekyll’s body simply to hide from his potential captors and to humiliate him, writing blasphemies in Jekyll’s religious books and slashing a portrait of Jekyll’s father. Jekyll feels he is bound to this ungodly creation, born of the “slime of the pit” and yet “knit to him closer than a wife, closer than an eye; … caged in his flesh.” Here Stevenson’s choice of language again displays childhood preoccupations; he had called Cummy his “second mother, first wife.” No bond could be more intimate, and yet it is also a cage where “insurgent horror” wreaks havoc.
Even in the face of this horror, Jekyll cannot let go of a certain loving sentiment toward Hyde, nor can he bring himself to sever their warped connection.
I, who sicken and freeze at the mere thought of him, when I recall the abjection and passion of this attachment, and when I know how he fears my power to cut him off by suicide, I find it in my heart to pity him.
Jekyll’s confession comes to an end as he describes how his desperate efforts to recreate the correct formula have been thwarted by his inability to resupply his original salt ingredient. Ironically, the original batch had contained an impurity, which gave it his alchemical power. The subsequent pure salts he has collected have all failed the test.
As Jekyll finishes his statement, he foresees the image of Hyde locked within the cabinet, cowering in fear of the gallows, choosing between his capture and death by his own hand. And as Jekyll contemplates the fate of this other self, he brings “the life of that unhappy Henry Jekyll to an end.”
In a letter to Gosse, written on the eve of publication of Jekyll and Hyde in the first days of January 1886, Stevenson lays out the complicated moral struggles that are a vital subtext of the novel. Contained within the pages of this soul-searching letter are the essential elements of the nuclear script formed in his childhood—his desire to engage in pleasure, his self-loathing for this indulgence, his subsequent efforts to justify his pleasure seeking by questioning the hypocrisy of his Calvinist upbringing, and then his reversal back to a reverence for a life of mature honor and moral decency. Back and forth he bounced between these moral highs and lows—always returning to what he called in a letter to J. A. Symonds, “that damned old business of the war in the members,” alluding to a biblical passage from James 4:1–2: “From whence come wars and fightings among you? Come they not hence, even of your lusts that war in your members? Ye lust, and have not: ye kill, and desire to have, and cannot obtain: ye fight and war, yet ye have not, because ye ask not.”
Stevenson was a true Victorian in one sense—absorbed by the clichéd battle between “good” and “evil”—but also an emerging modernist in seeing the limitations and confusions inherent in any moral dichotomy. Cummy had taught him both to pray and to dream—to see the hellfire of devilish temptation and the allure of a “fine boguey tale.” Now as a writer reaching the apex of his craft, he turned this gyre of moral ambiguity into his finest writing. All of these shifting alliances come pouring out in his candid letter to Gosse:
As for the art that we profess and try to practise, I have never been able to see why its professors should be respected… . We were full of the pride of life, and chose, like prostitutes, to live by pleasure. We should be paid, if we give the pleasure we pretend to give; but why should we be honoured? We are whores, some of us pretty whores, some of us not, but all whores: whores of the mind, selling to the public the amusements of our fireside as the whore sells the pleasures of her bed. (Letter 1510)
In these sentences we see the fundamental ambivalence Stevenson could never shake about his chosen craft. Ever aware of his family’s practical and primary role in securing the safety of the Scottish seas (he even wrote a history of their labors shortly before his death), he is still working through the shame he feels for his focus on boyish “pleasure” rather than “constructive” labors.
Not surprisingly, he follows these self-abnegating declarations with an exploration of how one might find honor and fulfillment in life. In contemplating again the recent loss of his dear Professor Jenkin, whose heart was “pure gold,” he rejects the notion of an afterlife in which they might meet again. Instead, in the mold of Jenkin, he declares:
[We] were put here to do what service we can, for honour and not for hire; the sods cover us, and the worm that never dies, the conscience, sleeps well at last; these are the wages, besides what we receive so lavishly day by day; and they are enough for a man who knows his own frailty and sees all things in the proportion of reality. (Letter 1510)
So within the same letter, we first find Stevenson questioning the honor of his profession as a writer, and then a few paragraphs later declaring that we were put on earth to find honor through service, noting that the worm of conscience, which burrows deep into our brains with its questions about integrity and moral purpose, only rests at death. Similar to his contemporary Mark Twain, who wrote, “I have noticed my conscience for many years and it is more trouble and bother to me than anything else I started with,” Stevenson could not deny an internalized moral imperative, but he saw it as linked to one’s daily conduct rather than any transcendent promise. Honor comes in taking the true “proportion of reality,” a reality that includes a hefty dose of human frailty. The solution to the nuclear script of his childhood, “Escape from Shame”—the torturing push-me pull-you of pleasure and propriety—was the counteracting commitment to his script of “Honor in Honesty,” which was to accept the inherent contradictions of our human nature and strive in this confusion of moral certainties to act with responsibility and integrity.
In Jekyll and Hyde Stevenson produced an allegory that has indeed been a “meaning-making machine” for over 125 years. It continues to pull for deconstructive analyses that reveal submerged truths about cultural values, repressed desires, and sociocultural divisions. However, from the standpoint of the clinical psychologist and psychobiographer, it speaks pointedly and clearly to the long-standing psychological conflicts of its author. A sickly child with a fervent imagination, raised by a religious governess with a penchant for tales of highwaymen and body snatchers, he early on intermingled good and evil, alternately desiring and repudiating each. Often confined to bed, both as a child and adult, he found an outlet in romances of pirates, rebels, and robbers. Loving his parents’ attentive care, but constricted by their adherence to family tradition and Edinburgh bourgeois society, he discerned both honor and hypocrisy in the professional path they expected him to follow. Often feeling a Scottish outsider in London literary circles, he clung to the bawdy world of “Long John” Henley, while still aspiring to the sophistication of Colvin and Gosse. Debating with Henry James about the inherent value of art and its need to rise above the press of social realism, he also mocked himself as the “King of the Penny Dreadfuls.” Self-consciously aware of his own contradictions, sometimes loathing and sometimes accepting himself for his ambivalence and complexity, his little book expressed the raw imagery and anguish of his quest to navigate his moral conflicts. While seeking to avoid the linkage of his allegory to any specific set of sins, he sought to confront the hypocrisy of dividing good from evil and to convey the more honest and humble truth about the confusion that exists among these two aspects of our nature. And as we can tell from the long life his book has lived, this is a confusion shared by many a reader.