Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde

Plot summary

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Key Characters

Character profiles

Dr Jekyll

A respected doctor and friend of both Lanyon, a fellow physician, and Utterson, a lawyer. Jekyll is a seemingly prosperous man, well established in the community, and known for his decency and charitable works. Since his youth, however, he has secretly engaged in unspecified corrupt behavior. Jekyll finds this dark side a burden and undertakes experiments intended to separate his good and evil selves from one another. Through these experiments, he brings Mr. Hyde into being, finding a way to transform himself in such a way that he fully becomes his darker half.

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Mr Hyde

A strange,ugly man who looks faintly pre-human. Hyde is violent and cruel, and everyone who sees him describes him as ugly and deformed—yet no one can say exactly why. Language itself seems to fail around Hyde: he is not a creature who belongs to the rational world, the world of conscious articulation or logical grammar. Hyde is Jekyll’s dark side, released from the bonds of conscience and loosed into the world by a mysterious potion.

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Mr Gabriel Utterson

A well respected and upstanding lawyer, wellthought of in the London community. Utterson is reserved, dignified, and perhaps even lacking somewhat in imagination, but he does seem to possess aa lot of curiosity about the more sordid side of life. His logic, however, makes him ill equipped to deal with the supernatural nature of the Jekyll-Hyde connection. While not a man of science, Utterson resembles his friend Dr. Lanyon—and perhaps Victorian society at large—in his devotion to reasonable explanations and his denial of the supernatural.

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Dr. Hastie Lanyon

A reputable London doctor and, along with Utterson, formerly one of Jekyll’s closest friends. As a symbol of rationalism, materialism, and skepticism, Lanyon serves a foil (a character whose attitudes or emotions contrast with, and thereby illuminate, those of another character) for Jekyll, who embraces mysticism. His death represents the more general victory of supernaturalism over materialism in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

Sir Danvers Carew

A well-liked old nobleman, a member of Parliament, and a client of Utterson. He is murdered by Hyde.

Mr. Enfield

A distant cousin and lifelong friend of Mr. Utterson. Like Utterson, Enfield is reserved, formal, and scornful of gossip; indeed, the two men often walk together for long stretches without saying a word to one another.

Context

Context record sheet

The Gothic

This was a very popular type of literature in the Victorian era. It played upon the fears of the supernatural that people had and aimed to scare them with what the novels contained. Gothic fiction was very popular and includes ideas and sybols such as the following:

Extreme psychological horror - not jumpscares!
Darkness
Madness
Candles
Nightmares
Dopplegangers (duality)
Nature - often storms and fog
'The sublime' - the idea that changing your perspective changes your ideas (see http://victorianminds.qwriting.qc.cuny.edu/reading/a-sublime-feeling-by-sunjida-ema/do/ for more)
Mystery and suspence
Death
The supernatual

The Supernatural

'Supernatural' meant many things in the nineteenth century. The term was often used to explain 'unexplained' phenomena. The belief that the dead can communicate with the living, was one such popular trend. Supernatural events such as table-rapping, automatic writing and full-body materialisation of spirits were often reported, feedingthe belief that there was something other than human life.

This interest in the supernatural might seem at odds with the increase of scientific and technological knowledge, but many argue they were intimately connected. In the 19th century, people were more able to communicate with far away places. The telegraph allowed messages to be tapped out in code over long distances and the ability to communicate first with other cities, then countries, eventually to transmit messages across the Atlantic, was brilliant and terrifying. The interest in Gothic fiction also fed this idea that there might be something else out there.

Scientific progress

In 1859, when Stevenson was nine years old, Charles Darwin published The Origin of Species. This book became famous for introducing the Theory of Evolution to the public. Many people saw it as an attack on religion, because the book made it impossible to believe that God created the world in seven days.

Darwin put forward the theory that all life, including humans, has evolved from more primitive forms.

The book's release came at a time when many people saw science and a belief in religion and the supernatural as being at odds with each another. A lot felt they had to choose between the two. And many believed that science had become dangerous and was meddling in matters which only God had control over. This is what Jekyll does in the novel.

Crime in Victorian London

While the general pattern of crime was one of decline, there were occasional panics and scares generated by particularly appalling offences. In the 1850s and early 1860s there were panics about street robbery, known then as 'garrotting'. A press campaign against garrotters in 1862 developed following the robbery of an MP on his way home from a late-night sitting of parliament; and while the number of 'garrotte' robberies was tiny, the press created sensations out of minor incidents. Parliament responded with laws which meant that offenders should be flogged as well as imprisoned.

Violence, especially violence with a sexual motive, sold newspapers.

The murders of Jack the Ripper in the autumn of 1888 were confined to a small area of London's East End, but similarly provoked a nation-wide panic whipped up by press sensationalism. Jack the Ripper's identity was never revealed, but it was hinted at that he was a man with a good reputation to uphold, rather than a common criminal. There were suspicions he could have been a doctor, or even related to the royal family!

There were also concerns about 'the dangerous classes' who were thought to lurk in the slums waiting for the opportunity for disorder and plunder

Victorian society

The Victorian era, named for Queen Victoria, who ruled England for most of the nineteenth century, was a time of huge technological progress. By the end of the century, however, many people were beginning to call into question the value placed on progress and civilization that had been so important in the era.

The class system was still very much in place and this influenced behaviour at this time. Men and women were expected to act within strict boundaries and were looked down upon if then did not conform. See 'Victorian Gentleman' for a development of this idea.

Jekyll and Hyde also links to the Victorian fascination with the less developed savage cultures that they saw around the world. They saw these as completely alien to their own society and therefore they were terrified but also intrigued by them. Hyde represents this terrifying 'other'.

The Victorian Gentleman

The idea of the Victorian Gentleman was not one that was just about social class. There was also a moral aspect that a person had to have to be considered a gentleman. These ideas were based upon the chivalry that knights had to show to others many years previously.

Reputation played a large role in this. You had to behave in a certain way to be seen as a gentleman and therules that society had were nonnegotioable. If you broke the rules then you were exiled from society. Jekyll felt so repressed by this idea in society that he had to become Hyde in order to feel like he could escape them.

Psychology

At the time the novel was written, audiences were very interested in the internal workings of the human mind. They wanted tobe able to understand human actions and consciouness in a way that had never been done before. Stevenson plays on this and draws on Richard Krafft-Ebing's (1886) Psychopathia Sexualis to show the readers the dangers of repression and a split mind.

The duality of man is shown to be something that all people have according to Jekyll - he just managed to unleash his. Even London itself is shown to have a dual personality, with repectable streets being very close toareas of crime and disrepute.

We can also read Jekyll and Hyde through Freud's ideas of the 'Structure theory' where he discusses the interaction of the id (insticts), ego (balancing force), and superego (morals) that happen within each person.

Religion

The Victorian age was the time when religion affected the behaviour of ordinary people – yet, at the same time, the first seeds of doubt were sown. Most people went to the Church of England, although there were some Catholics, and increasing numbers of Nonconformists. Nonconformists are Protestants who do not worship at the Church of England – for instance Quakers and Methodists. Most people still followed some form of Christianity, as this was what society was based on. Depsite this, religious beliefs were beginning to be overtaken by scientific advancements. This meant that Victorian citizens often saw a contrast between their relgious beliefs and the facts that science was providing. For some people this meant that they saw science as a dangerous and unholy practice - almost as if people were trying to disprove God and his work.