My brother and I grew up with Robert Louis Stevenson’s “A Child’s Garden of Verses,” and when we were a little older, “Kidnapped” and “Treasure Island.” I still have all three books from the 1940s and ’50s. We never read “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” nor was it read to us, but with Halloween fast approaching and that book considered by many critics to be Stevenson’s masterpiece, I thought I should.
The book was published in 1886. It sold in England for a shilling and was referred to as a “shilling shocker,” and in the U.S. as a “penny dreadful.” It was certainly shocking in its time, but not so dreadful that it didn’t sell 250,000 copies in its first five years of publication.
“Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” was conceived when Stevenson was living in the seaside town of Bournemouth in southern England, where the weather was deemed beneficial for his health. He suffered all his life with a lung disease, and he died in 1894 at the age of 44.
In Bournemouth, Stevenson became friendly with a neighbor, the Reverend Walter Jekyll, from whom he borrowed the name of his much-beleaguered character. He is said to have written his masterpiece, set in London, in a matter of three to six days. Even if we haven’t read the book, there are 120 stage and film versions that have been made of it, and we pretty much all know the story about a good man with an evil, hidden side (hence Mr. Hyde). When our narrator, Attorney Gabriel Utterson, first sees Hyde, he is shaken:
God bless me, the man seems hardly human! Something troglodytic, shall we say?… or is it the mere radiance of a foul soul that thus transpires through, and transfigures, its clay continent? The last, I think; for O my poor old Harry Jekyll, if ever I read Satan’s signature upon a face, it is on that of your new friend.
The main theme in this very slim book (75 pages) is the dual nature of humans, but there are other themes built in: Dr. Jekyll’s addiction to his animal nature, his inability to deny it, his need for more and more of the elixir that allows Hyde to come alive or for Jekyll to recover himself. He goes on the wagon for a period of time, but he falls off it, with tragic results.
In a letter to his friend Utterson, Jekyll tries to explain his dilemma:
I had not yet conquered my aversion to the dryness of a life of study. I would still be merrily disposed at times and as my pleasures were (to say the least) undignified, and I was not only well known and highly considered, but growing towards the elderly man, this incoherency of my life was daily growing more unwelcome. It was on this side that my new power tempted me until I fell in slavery.
Homosexuality may be another undercurrent, though it’s not explicit and that word is never used in the book. But the paucity of female characters in the story, the collegiality of the bachelors—our narrator Utterson and his friend and cousin Richard Enfield, “a man about town”; Sir Danvers Carew, a member of Parliament; Doctor Hastie Lanyon; and Utterson’s head clerk Mr. Guest—and the inability of Jekyll to speak of the “undignified” urges he lived with has led some critics to conclude these were, among other inclinations, “the love that dared not speak its name.”
It’s pretty amazing that a small book written more than 100 years ago (in an absurdly short time) and its characters have remained so much a part of what we know of literature and psychology. The book’s longevity may be based on its undeniable truth: that we are all made of good and bad, and our lives depend on which of those elements prevail. I highly recommend this lushly written Gothic tale. But don’t be tricked, as I was at first, into reading an “adaptation.” Look for the real thing.