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ClassicsOnline Home » STEVENSON, R.L.: Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (The) (Abridged)
Robert Louis Stevenson
The Strange Case of
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
Robert Louis Stevenson was born in Edinburgh in 1850 into a
family of civil engineers. From an early age he fought with authority. As a
young man he was expected to join the family business, but after many bitter
battles, he was finally allowed to study law at Edinburgh University. There, he
reacted strongly against the Calvinist tone of the city’s middle classes, which
he found restricting and hypocritical; this view helped to fuel even further
the conflict with his family. Stevenson suffered from ill health for most of
his life, which forced him to spend long periods abroad and he finally settled
in Samoa, where he died on December 3, 1894.
The main details of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr.
Hyde came to Stevenson in a dream when he was living in Bournemouth. It took
him just three days to complete the story’s first draft. His wife, Fanny,
complained that it seemed too much like a horror story and that something more
profound might be expressed through such a strong idea. So the first draft went
into the fire and Stevenson tried once more to produce what was to become one
of the most daring and enduring accounts of the human psyche.
Longmans, the original publisher of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
decided not to bring the book out in serial form as was the norm, but rather to
issue it in two different editions, one at the price and in the format of a
“shilling shocker” and the other in a more traditional cloth binding. From the
beginning, the dual nature of the novel itself — part sensational horror story,
part complex literary masterpiece — was recognized and capitalized on. The work
became a huge international bestseller and the issues raised in it became the
subject of countless sermons and articles. The book was particularly successful
in America where, by the turn of the century, it had sold over half a million
(Interestingly, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
was published in 1886: two years before the serial killings of Jack the Ripper.
Jack the Ripper’s apparent surgical skill in dissecting his victims’ bodies
suggests that he too was a doctor: a traditionally decent and reliable member
of society. The fictional Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde provided a way of
comprehending these murders at a time when there were no real comparable
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is set in the
respectable quarters of late Victorian London. The main characters are all
successful, professional, middle-aged men and into this solid context of
bourgeois life and values, Stevenson introduces the concept of pure evil. The
story, however, does not stop with the idea of one man’s divided soul; it seems
in fact to suggest a much wider circle of potential collapse. All the
characters are suffering from a kind of airless imprisonment. They are all
bachelors, all struggling to maintain respectability, but at the same time
indulging themselves with copious quantities of fine wine. The constantly
encroaching fog underlines the pervading atmosphere of gloom, which engulfs all
the characters, not just Jekyll. No matter how hard these men try to preserve
their virtue and self-control, they are in fact teetering on the brink of
chaos, personified of course by Mr. Hyde.
Given Stevenson’s belief in passion and spontaneity and the
stultifying Victorian context in which he lived, it is clear that this story is
a warning of the dangers of repression: that it can drive the psyche into a
moral vacuum and extremes of perversion and violence. This of course is a
theme, which has underpinned psychoanalytical thinking throughout the 20th
century, and may indeed be one of the many reasons for the enduring popularity
of the story.
Notes by Heather Godwin
John Sessions, a highly versatile actor and comedian, is
well known for his comic work in films such as My Night with Reg, In the Bleak
Midwinter and The Pope Must Die, and the television shows Whose Line Is It
Anyway?, The New Statesman, and Spitting Image.
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