By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
Before analysing this classic novella, it’s worth summarising the plot of Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) and drawing the reader’s attention to its interesting narrative structure.
The story for Jekyll and Hyde famously came to Robert Louis Stevenson in a dream, and according to Stevenson’s stepson, Lloyd Osbourne, Stevenson wrote the first draft of the novella in just three days, before promptly throwing it onto the fire when his wife criticised it. Stevenson then rewrote it from scratch, taking ten days this time, and the novella was promptly published in January 1886.
The story is part detective-story or mystery, part Gothic horror, and part science fiction, so it’s worth summarising how Stevenson fuses these different elements.
Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde: plot summary
But anyway, on to the plot summary. We begin in the first chapter, ‘Story of the Door’, with a conventional third-person narrator, telling us about Mr Utterson, a lawyer, and his friend and distant cousin, Mr Richard Enfield, who often drink and take walks together around London.
On one of their rambles around the city, as they pass the door to a ‘sinister block of building’, Enfield tells Utterson about something that he witnessed one night concerning that door and that building: a man and a girl running through the street. The man promptly trampled the girl underfoot, and then ran off; Enfield and others then chased after the man and detained him.
To avoid a scene, the man – who has something detestable about him – agrees to pay money to the family of the girl he trampled. To get the money, he went through the door in the sinister building and got a cheque, which he (accompanied by his captors) then went to the bank first thing in the morning to cash.
The man who had written the cheque was a respected gentleman, leading Enfield to wonder what sort of hold this ugly trampling fiend has over such a well-regarded man. (‘Black mail, I suppose,’ Enfield suggests.)
In the next chapter, ‘Search for Mr Hyde’, Utterson goes home and has dinner, but he’s troubled by a will he keeps in a safe, for a man named Dr Henry Jekyll. The will, which has recently been altered, now states that in the event of Jekyll’s death, a man named Mr Edward Hyde should be the sole beneficiary.
This leads Utterson to suspect that this mysterious Mr Hyde is blackmailing Dr Jekyll over something. He visits his friend Dr Lanyon, who is also a friend of Henry Jekyll’s, hoping to find out more. Lanyon tells Utterson that he and Dr Jekyll fell out some time ago, and that he’s never heard of Mr Hyde.
Utterson passes a troubled night of horrific dreams, and takes to walking the streets at all hours, hoping to find some clue to the mystery of Mr Hyde. He goes to the sinister building Enfield had shown him and, after waiting outside for some time, sees a small, plainly dressed man take out a key ready to go inside Jekyll’s house. Utterson approaches him and asks to see his face. Hyde tells him that Jekyll is away, but gives Utterson his – Hyde’s – address in Soho. When Utterson departs, he is troubled by the appearance of Mr Hyde: there is something ‘dwarfish’, something almost inhuman, about him.
In ‘Dr Jekyll Was Quite at Ease’, Utterson goes to visit Dr Jekyll and asks him about Mr Hyde. Jekyll grows pale when Hyde’s name is mentioned and refuses to discuss him. He tells Utterson to leave Hyde alone.
In ‘The Carew Murder Case’, the narrator relates how a maid servant witnessed the appalling murder of an MP, Sir Danvers Carew, one night. Mr Hyde clubbed the elderly politician to death in the street, using his cane as a weapon. A letter addressed to Mr Utterson was found on the body of the dead MP, who was Utterson’s client.
The letter is brought to Utterson, who goes to identify Carew’s body and then takes the police detective to Mr Hyde’s address, so they can apprehend the criminal. However, when they arrive at the Soho address Mr Hyde gave to Utterson, they find only an old maid, who tells them Hyde is not at home. They examine the house and find it in a state of disarray.
In ‘Incident of the Letter’, Utterson visits Dr Jekyll, who has heard the news about the murder and Mr Hyde’s involvement in it. Jekyll swears to Utterson that he is done with Hyde, and will not associate with him any more. He shows Utterson a letter he received from Hyde, telling Jekyll not to fear for his safety. Utterson tells Jekyll he thinks the doctor has had a lucky escape, and that Hyde meant to murder him.
Utterson’s head clerk, Mr Guest, notices the letter from Hyde and spots a resemblance between Jekyll’s handwriting and Hyde’s: they’re identical, but differently sloped. This leads Utterson to believe Jekyll forged the letter from Hyde, which shocks him.
In ‘Remarkable Incident of Doctor Lanyon’, we learn that Hyde has completely disappeared. Jekyll seems to have returned to normal, but then in early January, he confines himself to his house and refuses to see anyone. Dr Hastie Lanyon, friend of both Jekyll and Utterson, reveals to Utterson that he knows something about Jekyll, but refuses to say more. He gives Utterson a letter – to be opened only after Jekyll’s disappearance or death – and, shortly after, dies of shock, after receiving information relating to Jekyll.
‘Incident at the Window’ is a short chapter in which Utterson, while out for one of his Sunday walks with Enfield, starts up a conversation with Dr Jekyll at the window of his laboratory. But Jekyll’s face is suddenly overcome with a look of abject terror, and the doctor slams the window and disappears indoors.
‘The Last Night’ is the final chapter narrated by the third-person narrator. Jekyll’s butler, Mr. Poole, visits Utterson and says Jekyll has secluded himself in his laboratory. Utterson and Poole go to Dr Jekyll’s house, but Jekyll refuses to open up and see them. They break into the laboratory, where they find the still twitching body of Mr Hyde, wearing Jekyll’s clothes, dead from apparent suicide. They find a letter Jekyll wrote to Utterson.
The final two chapters are letters: the first from Dr Lanyon, the last from Dr Jekyll himself. Lanyon’s letter informs Utterson that his mental and physical decline resulted from the shock of seeing Hyde drink a serum and turn into Jekyll. Jekyll’s letter then explains that he had developed a taste for certain vices, and feared that he would be found out, and his reputation as a doctor ruined.
He found a way to transform himself into another, unrecognisable figure, using a special tincture he prepared in his laboratory, enabling him to indulge his vices without fear of detection.
Initially, to keep Hyde in check, Jekyll controlled the transformations using the serum, but one night in August, he became Hyde involuntarily in his sleep and knew things had got out of hand.
Like an addict, Jekyll resolved to stop transforming himself into Mr Hyde. However, during a moment of weakness, he relapsed, and took the serum, unleashing Hyde. Hyde was so furious at having been locked away for so long, went on his rampage and killed the MP, Danvers Carew. Horrified by what Hyde had done, Jekyll tried harder to stop the transformations from occurring, but once again, he transformed into Hyde involuntarily.
Far from his laboratory and so unable to do anything about it, and being hounded by the police, he wrote to Lanyon in Jekyll’s handwriting, asking Lanyon to bring him chemicals from his laboratory. In Lanyon’s presence, Hyde mixed the chemicals and then drank the serum, turning back into Jekyll before Lanyon’s very eyes. The shock of the sight prompted Lanyon’s decline which we’ve already witnessed, culminating in his death.
As Jekyll had to keep increasing the dose of serum to prevent himself from turning into Hyde, the stock of serum began to run out. Then, eventually, it ceased to work. Resigned to the fact that he will eventually transform into Hyde permanently and be unable to become Jekyll again, he writes this letter as his last confession, and the novella ends with him bringing the life of Jekyll to a close: a hint that he is going to kill himself to prevent Hyde from causing any more damage. This is why Utterson walked in on the twitching corpse of Mr Hyde.
This concludes a summary of the plot of Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. One of the things it’s most easy for modern readers to overlook is that, for Stevenson’s original readers in 1886 (those who had avoided spoilers, in any case), the fact that Jekyll and Hyde are the same person would have been a surprise twist, one we take for granted now. So how should be analyse this classic story of duality?
Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde: analysis
Now it’s time for some words of analysis about Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic 1886 novella. However, perhaps ‘analyses’ (plural) would be more accurate, since there never could be one monolithic meaning of a story so ripe with allegory and suggestive symbolism. Like another novella that was near-contemporary with Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, and possibly influenced by it (H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine), the symbols often point in several different directions at once.
Any attempt to reduce Stevenson’s story of doubling to a moral fable about drugs or drink, or a tale about homosexuality, is destined to lose sight of the very thing which makes the novella so relevant to so many people: its multifaceted quality. So here are some (and they are only some) of the many interpretations of Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde which have been put forward in the last 120 years or so.
A psychoanalytic or proto-psychoanalytic analysis
In this interpretation, Jekyll is the ego and Hyde the id (in Freud’s later terminology). The ego is the self in Freud’s psychoanalytic theory, while the id is the set of primal drives found in our unconscious: the urge to kill, or do inappropriate sexual things, for instance. Several of Robert Louis Stevenson’s essays, such as ‘A Chapter on Dreams’ (1888), prefigure some of Freud’s later ideas; and there was increasing interest in the workings of the human mind towards the end of the nineteenth century (two leading journals in the field, Brain and Mind, had both been founded in the 1870s).
The psychoanalytic interpretation is a popular one with many readers of Jekyll and Hyde, and since the novella is clearly about repression of some sort, one can make a psychoanalytic interpretation – an analysis grounded in psychoanalysis, if you like – quite convincingly. It might be significant, reading the story from a post-Freudian perspective, that Hyde is described as childlike at several points: does he embody Jekyll’s – and, indeed, man’s – deep desire to return to a time before responsibility and full maturity, when one was freer to act on impulse? Early infancy is the formative period for much Freudian psychoanalysis.
Recall the empty middle-class scenes at the beginning of the book: Utterson and Enfield on their joyless Sunday walks, for instance. Hyde attacks father-figures (Sir Danvers Carew, the MP whom he murders, is a white-haired old gentleman), which would fall in line with Freud’s concept of the Oedipus complex and Jekyll’s desire to return to a time before adult life with its responsibilities and disappointments.
However, one fly in the Oedipal ointment is that Hyde also attacks a young girl – almost the complete opposite of the ‘old man’ or father figure embodied by Danvers Carew.
Nevertheless, psychoanalytic readings of the novella have been popular for some time, and it’s worth remembering that the idea for the book came to Stevenson in a dream. Observe, also, the presence of dreams and dreamlike scenes in the novel itself, such as when Jekyll remarks that he ‘received Lanyon’s condemnation partly in a dream; it was partly in a dream that I came home to my own house and got into bed’.
For more on the psychological aspects of Stevenson’s story, see his correspondence with F. W. H. Myers (in his letters) and Stevenson’s account of the role dreams played in the creation of Jekyll and Hyde, see his 1888 essay ‘A Chapter on Dreams’ (included as an appendix in the Oxford World’s Classics edition: Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Other Tales (Oxford World’s Classics)
An anti-alcohol morality tale?
Alternatively, a different interpretation: we might analyse these dreamlike aspects of the novel in another way and see the novel as being about alcoholism and temperance, subjects which were being fiercely debated at the time Stevenson was writing. Here, then, the ‘transforming draught’ which Jekyll concocts represents alcohol, and Jekyll, upon imbibing the draught, becomes a violent, unpredictable person unknown even to himself. (This reading has been most thoroughly explored in Thomas L. Reed’s 2006 study The Transforming Draught.)
Note how often wine crops up in this short book: it turns up first of all in the second sentence of the novella, when Utterson is found sipping it, and Hyde, we learn, has a closet ‘filled with wine’. Might the continual presence of wine be a clue that we are all Hydes waiting to happen? Note how the opening paragraph informs us that Utterson drinks gin when he is alone.
This thesis – that the novella is about alcohol and temperance – is intriguing, but has been contested by critics such as Julia Reid for being too speculative and reductionist: see her review of The Transforming Draught in The Review of English Studies, 2007.
The ‘drugs’ interpretation
Similarly, the idea that the ‘draught’ is a metaphor for some other drug, whether opium or cocaine. Scholars are unsure as to whether Stevenson was on drugs when he wrote the book: some accounts say Stevenson used cocaine to finish the manuscript; others say he took ergot, which is the substance from which LSD was later synthesised. Some say he was too sick to be taking anything.
You could purchase cocaine and opium from your local chemist in 1880s London (indeed, another invention of 1886, Coca-Cola, originally contained cocaine, as the drink’s name still testifies: don’t worry, it doesn’t any more).
This is essentially a development of the previous interpretation concerning alcohol, and arguably has similar limitations in being too restrictive an interpretation. However, note the way that Jekyll, in his ‘full statement’ becomes reliant on the ‘draught’ or ‘salt’ towards the end.
A religious analysis
Religious interpretations of Jekyll and Hyde have also proved popular: see the references to Hyde as a ‘devil’ and a ‘child of Hell’, but also the numerous Biblical allusions (and here the Luckhurst edition, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Other Tales (Oxford World’s Classics)
James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner n/e (Oxford World’s Classics)
As such, the story has immediate links with the story Stevenson would write sixty years later. Stevenson was an atheist who managed to escape the constrictive religion of his parents, but he remained haunted by Calvinistic doctrines for the rest of his life, and much of his work can be seen as an attempt to grapple with these issues which had affected and afflicted him so much as a child.
The sexuality interpretation
Some critics have interpreted Jekyll and Hyde in light of late nineteenth-century attitudes to sexuality: note the almost total absence of women from the story, barring the odd maid and ‘old hag’, and that hapless girl trampled underfoot by Hyde. Some critics have suggested that the idea of blackmail for homosexual acts lurks behind the story, and the novella itself mentions this when Enfield tells Utterson that he refers to the house of Mr Hyde as ‘Black Mail House’ as a consequence of the girl-trampling scene in the street.
Elaine Showalter has called the book ‘a fable of fin-de-siecle homosexual panic, the discovery and resistance of the homosexual self’ in which ‘Jekyll’s apparent infatuation with Hyde reflects the late nineteenth-century upper-middle-class eroticisation of working-class men as the ideal homosexual objects’. (See Showalter’s Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siecle
As such, the novella becomes an allegory for the double life lived by many homosexual Victorian men, who had to hide (or Hyde) their illicit liaisons from their friends and families. The poet Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote to his friend Robert Bridges that the girl-trampling incident early on in the narrative was ‘perhaps a convention: he was thinking of something unsuitable for fiction’. Some have interpreted this statement – by Hopkins, himself a repressed homosexual – as a reference to homosexual activity in late Victorian London.
Consider in this connection the fact that Hyde enters Jekyll’s house through the ‘back way’ – even, at one point ‘the back passage’. 1885, the year Stevenson wrote the book, was the year of the Criminal Law Amendment Act (commonly known as the Labouchere Amendment), which criminalised acts of ‘gross indecency’ between men (this was the act which, ten years later, would put Oscar Wilde in gaol).
However, we should be wary of reading the text as about ‘homosexual panic’, since, as Harry Cocks points out, homosexuality was frequently ‘named openly, publicly and repeatedly’ in nineteenth-century criminal courts. But then could fiction for a mass audience as readily name such things?
A Darwinian analysis
Charles Darwin’s book On the Origin of Species, which laid out the theory of evolution by natural selection, had been published in 1859, when Stevenson was still a child. In this reading, Hyde represents the primal, animal origin of modern, civilised man. Consider here the repeated uses of the word ‘apelike’ in relation to Hyde, suggesting he is an atavistic throwback to an earlier, more primitive species of man than Homo sapiens. This reading incorporates theories of something called ‘devolution’, an idea (now discredited) which suggested that life forms could actually evolve backwards into more primitive forms.
This is also linked with late Victorian fears concerning degeneration and decadence among the human race. Is Jekyll’s statement that he ‘bore the stamp, of lower elements in my soul’ an allusion to Charles Darwin’s famous phrase from the end of The Descent of Man (1871), ‘man […] bears […] the indelible stamp of his lowly origin’? In his story ‘Olalla’, another tale of the double which Stevenson published in 1885, he writes: ‘Man has risen; if he has sprung from the brutes he can descend to the same level again’.
This Darwinian analysis of Jekyll and Hyde could incorporate elements of the sexual which the previous interpretation also touches upon, but would view the novel as a portrayal of man’s – and we mean specifically man’s here – repression of the darker, violent, primitive side of his nature associated with rape, pillage, conquest, and murder.
This looks back to a psychoanalytic reading, with the ‘id’ being the home of primal sexual desire and lust. The girl-tramping scene may take on another significance here: it’s a ‘girl’ rather than a boy because it symbolises Hyde’s animalistic desire to conquer and brutalise someone of the opposite, not the same, sex. There have been many critical readings of the novella in relation to sex and sexuality, but it’s important to point out that Stevenson denied that the novella was about sexuality (see below).
A study in hypocrisy?
Or perhaps not: perhaps there is something in the idea that hypocrisy is the novella’s theme, as Stevenson himself suggested in a letter of November 1887 to John Paul Bocock, editor of the New York Sun: ‘The harm was in Jekyll,’ Stevenson wrote, ‘because he was a hypocrite – not because he was fond of women; he says so himself; but people are so filled full of folly and inverted lust, that they can think of nothing but sexuality. The Hypocrite let out the beast’.
This analysis of Jekyll and Hyde sees the two sides to Jekyll’s personality as a portrayal of the dualistic nature of Victorian society, where you must be respectable and civilised on the outside, while all the time harbouring an inward lust, violence, and desire which you have to bring under control.
This was a popular theme for many late nineteenth-century writers – witness not only Oscar Wilde’s 1891 novel The Picture of Dorian Gray but also the double lives of Jack and Algernon in Wilde’s comedy of manners, The Importance of Being Earnest (1895). This is a more open-ended interpretation, and the novella does appear to be about repression of some sort.
In this respect, this interpretation is similar to the psychoanalytic reading proposed above, but it also tallies with Stevenson’s own assertion that the story is about hypocrisy. Everyone in this book is masking their private thoughts or desires from others.
Note how even the police officer, Inspector Newcomen, when he learns of the murder of the MP, goes from being horrified one moment to excited the next, as ‘the next moment his eye lighted up with professional ambition’. He can barely contain his glee. The maid who answers the door at Hyde’s rooms has ‘an evil face, smoothed by hypocrisy; but her manners were excellent’.
From these clues, we can also posit a reading of the novel which sees it as about the class structure of late nineteenth-century Britain, where Jekyll represents the comfortable middle class and Hyde is the repressed – or, indeed, oppressed – working-class figure. Note here, however, how Hyde is repeatedly described as a ‘gentleman’ by those who see him, and that he attacks Danvers Carew with a ‘cane’, rather than, say, a club (though it is reported, tellingly, that he ‘clubbed’ Carew to death with it).
A scientific interpretation
The reference to the evil maid with excellent manners places Jekyll’s own duality at the extreme end of a continuum, where everyone is putting on a respectable and acceptable mask which hides or conceals the evil truth lurking behind it. So we might see Jekyll’s scientific experiment as merely a physical embodiment of what everyone does.
This leads some critics to ask, then, whether the novella about the misuse of science. Or is the ‘tincture’ merely a scientific, chemical composition because a magical draught or elixir would be unbelievable to an 1880s reader? Arthur Machen, an author who was much influenced by Stevenson and especially by Jekyll and Hyde, made this point in a letter of 1894, when he grumbled:
In these days the supernatural per se is entirely incredible; to believe, we must link our wonders to some scientific or pseudo-scientific fact, or basis, or method. Thus we do not believe in ‘ghosts’ but in telepathy, not in ‘witch-craft’ but in hypnotism. If Mr Stevenson had written his great masterpiece about 1590-1650, Dr Jekyll would have made a compact with the devil. In 1886 Dr Jekyll sends to the Bond Street chemists for some rare drugs.
This is worth pondering: the use of the ‘draught’ lends the story an air of scientific authenticity, which makes the story a form of science fiction rather than fantasy: the tincture which Jekyll drinks is not magical, merely a chemical potion of some vaguely defined sort. But to say that the story is actually about the dangers of misusing science could be a leap too far.
We run the risk of confusing the numerous film adaptations of the book with the book itself: we immediately picture wild-haired soot-faced scientists causing explosions and mixing up potions in a dark laboratory, but in fact this is not really what the story is about, merely the means through which the real meat of the story – the transformation of Jekyll into Hyde – is effected. It’s only once this split has been achieved that the real story, about the dark side of man’s nature which he represses, comes to light. (Compare Frankenstein here.)
All of these interpretations of Jekyll and Hyde can be – and have been – proposed, but it’s worth bearing in mind that the popularity of Stevenson’s tale may lie in the very polyvalent and ambiguous nature of the text, the fact that it exists as a symbol without a key, a riddle without a definitive answer.
The author of this article, Dr Oliver Tearle, is a literary critic and lecturer in English at Loughborough University. He is the author of, among others, The Secret Library: A Book-Lovers’ Journey Through Curiosities of History
