An Introduction to Robert Louis Stevenson’s Novella,

Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

Providing Context for Your Reading

After Robert Louis Stevenson’s death in 1894, his friend and fellow author, Henry James,

wondered “whether Louis’s work itself doesn’t pay somewhat for

the so complete exhibition of the man and the life….The achieved legend and history that has him

for subject, has made, so to speak, light of their subjects, of their

claim to represent him.”

About the Author

• Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894) became an international literary star as a result of the popular press of the late nineteenth century.

• The Daily Mail was Britain's first daily newspaper aimed at the newly literate "lower-middle class market resulting from mass education combining a low retail price with plenty of competitions, prizes and promotional gimmicks”.

• He was a lifelong invalid (with a lung disease that was never specifically diagnosed), yet he was able to travel the world to the benefit of his stories and their vivid settings.

About the Author• Robert Louis Stevenson wrote boys’

adventures, pirate romances, horror stories, children’s poetry, and plays.

• He was an atheist (obsessed with religious questions), a workaholic, he had anti-establishment views of politics, and he lived as a Bohemian artist

• One of his most famous published works is the adventure novel, Treasure Island (1883), which began a “Romance Revival” that refocused the subject of literature on the study of character.

Characteristics of Romantic Literature

• Romanticism saw a shift from faith in reason to faith in the senses, feelings and imagination.

• A shift from interest in urban society to an interest in the rural and natural.

• A shift from concern with the scientific and mundane to interest in the mysterious and infinite.

• Mainly romantics cared about the individual, intuition, and imagination.

Early Reviews of Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr.

Hyde (1886)

• Due to the fact that Stevenson’s writing veered constantly between high literary ambition and writing in commercial forms for money, many of his critics were confused as to where to place this novella.

• Some critics saw as nothing more than a “shilling shocker” and commented “familiarity with which has bred in the minds of most readers a certain measure of contempt”.

High and Low Literature Collide and Equal Success for Stevenson• The novella was dreamt up, written, rewritten (after the

first version was burned) and published in less than ten weeks (rushed for the Christmas market), and although its place in the literary canon was debated at first, it soon became undeniable that Secret Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde quickly became a commercial success.

• 40,000 copies of the novella were sold in England in six months, and tens of thousands of copies were pirated in America.

• After Stevenson’s death, the original text was crudely stripped of its nuances and perplexities, so as readers, we have to work hard to read the original version in a proper set of contexts.

Important Background on the Novella

• The premise of the novella came to Stevenson in a dream – “All I dreamed about Dr. Jekyll was that one man was being pressed into a cabinet, when he swallowed a drug and changed into another human being. I awoke and said at once that I had found the missing link for which I had been looking so long, and before I went to sleep almost every detail of the story, as it stands, was clear to me.”

• The first version of the novella was burned, which it its very construction, begins the theme of strange doubling, a shadow twin resigned to the fire.

Important Background on the Novella

• The novella is a product of an uneasy collaboration between the waking and the dreaming self.

• The effect is that there is something very dream-like about reading the story. Descriptions have a hallucinatory quality.

• The story begins as a detective fiction, but like a dream, it gets distracted, and evolves into something more dark and unnerving (pay attention to the interesting structure of this novella as a point that deserves further analysis and discussion – the structure of the secret and how it is revealed).

Narration in the Novella• There are 3 main narrators in the text: Mr.

Utterson (the nervous lawyer), Hastie Lanyon (the materialistic medic), and Dr. Jekyll’s own account of events.

• There are other narrators who also interject in the narrative: Enfield’s story of the door (seemingly inconsequential), and the murder of Sir Danvers Carew is filtered through the newspaper reports of a maid’s eye witness account.

• The identity of the narrator is unclear in the novel’s final sentence. Pay attention to this!

Elements of Gothic Literature in the Text

• Stevenson embeds the supernatural in the everyday, a strategy often used in Victorian Gothic literature.

• Elements of Gothic Literature:- Ancient Prophesy or Omens- High Emotion- Supernatural Events- Characters in Distress- Setting as a Metaphor for Horror

The Role of The Double in the Text• Doubles are everywhere in the text: Jekyll

and Hyde are discussed by Utterson and Enfield, Utterson and Lanyon, Poole and Utterson…Consider the many characters who are doubles of one another in this story.

• The concept of the alter ego, the second self, and the supernatural evil twin are examined.• Explores the mysteries of the modern self (strangers to ourselves)

A Historical Context: Crime, Sex, Class and Urbanism in

1880’s London• Enfield’s opening story (discussing blackmail, abuse,

lynching) in the text triggers a whole set of anxieties that were occupying London opinion in the mid-1880’s.

• Blackmailers were becoming “the most infamous of criminals”

• Child prostitution and sexual violence was recently exposed as a severe problem that was only increasing in its prevalence at the time.

• Consider that Jack the Ripper (infamous serial killer) was active around the streets of London two years after Jekyll and Hyde was published (1888).

• Violent class war was a concern of many at the time.

Enjoy your reading of this wonderful novella. It is rich with

descriptive language, potent imagery, and shocking revelations

throughout. Proceed with curiosity…