Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Other Stories (Barnes & Noble Classi, Page 2

  Just as Mansfield’s performance blurred the boundaries between theater and real life, so, too, did Stevenson’s tale seem paradoxically to invent the figure of the modern serial killer, a male predator who lived a respectable life by day but whose respectability not only enabled, but actively produced, his violent excesses of the night. Literally dozens of films based on Stevenson’s novella were produced between 1908 and 1939—Harry M. Geduld offers an exhaustive list in The Definitive Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde Companion—and the MGM classic Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (released in 1941 and starring Spencer Tracy and Ingrid Bergman) is still well worth seeing. More easily mocked than the story of Jack the Ripper, Stevenson’s tale has generated countless parodies, from early print caricatures to such gems as the Hanna-Barbera animated short Dr. jekyll and Mr. Mouse (1947). Not that the Ripper story is altogether immune from satirization: The band members in Rob Reiner’s “mockumentary” This Is Spinal Tap (1984) conduct an earnest conversation at the end-of-tour party about “Saucy Jack,” the title song of the band’s projected rock musical about the life of Jack the Ripper.

  The murders continue to hold our imagination; most recently, best-selling crime novelist Patricia Cornwell spent a reported $6 million of her own money applying forensic techniques to the evidence in the Ripper case, a historical investigation described in her 2002 book Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Rippper—Case Closed. Likewise, the names Jekyll and Hyde have entered the language, familiar even to those who have never read Stevenson’s story: They are “used allusively,” reports the Oxford English Dictionary, “in reference to opposite sides of a person’s character or to persons or things of a dual character, alternately good and evil.” Moreover, perhaps because Stevenson anticipated aspects of the Ripper episode in his vision of the double life, the two stories are often con flated, along with a third dark episode in nineteenth-century British history, in which two Irish-born men called William Burke and William Hare killed at least fifteen people and sold their corpses to surgeon Robert Knox for dissection in his Edinburgh school of anatomy. The 1971 film Dr. jekyll and Sister Hyde merges all three stories: Using hormones obtained from cadavers in the morgue, this movie’s Dr. Jekyll inadvertently turns himself into a woman—Sister Hyde—and becomes the perpetrator of the Whitechapel murders.

  While Jekyll and Hyde shares a London setting with the Ripper murders, the Burke and Hare murders took place in Edinburgh, where Stevenson was born in 1850. Robert Louis Stevenson was the only child of Thomas and Margaret Balfour Stevenson; his father and grandfather were prominent civil engineers who built many of the lighthouses in Scotland, and there was a very general expectation that Robert would follow in their footsteps. The Edinburgh where Stevenson was raised was distinctively different from London, in both psychological and urban-planning terms. Edinburgh life was dominated by Presbyterianism, a version of Calvinism that emphasizes the natural depravity of man and the doctrine of predestination—the belief that God has foreknowledge of all events—and makes stark distinctions between sinners and those destined for salvation. It is a religion whose members tend to take material prosperity as evidence of God’s grace, and is often called characteristically bourgeois. Edinburgh’s geography features a striking division between the Old Town and the New Town, the former a picturesque but squalid slum then known for its violence and general immorality and the latter—where Stevenson was raised—a section of elegant Georgian houses built in the early years of the nineteenth century and home to many respectable professional families. Joined by the North Bridge, the two towns of Edinburgh made visible the divisions between old and new, sordid and respectable; they also symbolized for many observers the psychic contradictions of Calvinism itself.

  Stevenson suffered from poor health as a child (some of his experiences as an invalid are chronicled in A Child’s Garden of Verses [1885]), and his schooling was often interrupted as a result, but it was not until his entrance to Edinburgh University at the age of seventeen that the extent of his hostility toward his parents’ values became apparent. (There were limits to Stevenson’s rebelliousness. Despite serious differences with his father, the writer accepted substantial financial support from his parents up to the time of his father’s death.) Stevenson soon adopted a role more commonly associated with the 1970s than the 1870s, that of liberal bohemian, rejecting his parents’ religious beliefs, pursuing illicit sexual liaisons, and condemning the hypocrisy and cruelty he associated with Scottish bourgeois respectability. Rejecting engineering as a profession, Stevenson took up the study of law, though he would never practice.

  Due to a combination of wanderlust and ill health, he traveled a great deal in his twenties, visiting France and, later, Switzerland, for his lung ailments, and publishing travel narratives such as An Inland Voyage and Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes in the late 1870s. He also began during these years to make a name for himself as an essayist. In 1876 Stevenson met Fanny Van de Grift Osbourne, a married American woman ten years his senior who prompted wild extremes of love and hate, not just in Stevenson’s friends and family but in the work of subsequent critics and biographers as well. When Fanny returned to her home in California, Stevenson pursued her there, and they were married following Fanny’s divorce in 1880. Northern California was the first in a series of then-exotic locations Stevenson would describe in his writing, in an international odyssey that would end only with his death in Samoa in 1894, at the age of forty-four.

  Depending on one’s point of view, Stevenson was either immensely charismatic or maddeningly self-involved, or both; he was a close friend of many of the great literary men of his day, including Leslie Stephen, W. E. Henley, and Edmund Gosse, as well as Henry James, with whom Stevenson spent a great deal of time during the years they both lived in Bournemouth, a resort on the southern coast of England where Stevenson and his family took up residence in the hope of improving his always poor health. Bournemouth was the setting in which, following the success of Treasure Island (1883), Stevenson wrote his compelling historical novel Kidnapped (1886) , as well as Jekyll and Hyde and some of the other stories included in this collection.

  After the death of his father in May 1887, Stevenson set out for America with his mother, his wife, and his stepson, Lloyd Osbourne. He found himself a celebrity in New York, but soon headed west. It was during this period that he began writing The Master of Ballantrae, published in 1889.

  In 1888 Stevenson chartered a yacht and took off from San Francisco for the South Seas, taking in the Marquesas Islands, the Fakarava atoll, Tahiti, Honolulu, and the Gilbert Islands before coming to rest in Samoa. This trip provided the set tings for a series of stories, the most remarkable of which is “The Beach of Falesá,” which bears comparison to the best writing of Stevenson’s now far better known contemporary Joseph Conrad. The late work Stevenson produced at his house, Vailima, in Samoa includes Catriona, the 1893 sequel to Kidnapped; The Ebb-Tide (1894); and the unfinished Weir of Hermiston, published posthumously in 1896.

  Stevenson’s reputation as a writer oscillated a great deal over the century following his death (a useful summary of the critical reception is provided by Richard Dury’s Stevenson website; see “For Further Reading”). While stories such as Treasure Island, Jekyll and Hyde, Kidnapped, and Catriona continued to be popular with readers, especially younger ones, Stevenson was not particularly well regarded by the generation that followed him. His writing was attacked in the 1910s and 1920s by Frank Swinnerton, E. F. Benson, and John A. Steuart; H. L. Mencken notoriously wrote in the American Mercury (Nov. 1924) that Stevenson “wrote a great deal of third-rate stuff’ and that ”an air of triviality hangs about all his work and even at times, an air of trashiness” (p. 378) . Stevenson began to be rehabilitated by critics in the middle of the twentieth century, though his stories and novels have yet to be taken as seriously as those of his contemporaries Henry James and Joseph Conrad. Beyond the fact that much of his fiction (whether or not it was written for children) falls into the relatively low
prestige category now known as ”young adult“ literature, responses to Stevenson’s work have always been mediated in problematic ways through his biography. Friends and family members published extensive records of the man, often depicting Stevenson as a bohemian saint, and the mythologizing tendency among his contemporaries (especially family members) led to corresponding vilification by former friends and others whose stomachs were turned by the hagiographic elements of Stevenson’s reception, particularly in the years following his death. Stevenson continues to provoke both hatred and idolatry, and there are by now well over one hundred biographical books and essays on Stevenson and his circle.

  Stevenson’s wife, Fanny, and his stepson, Lloyd, both wrote accounts of the composition of Jekyll and Hyde that clearly reveal the tendency to mythologize. (The full narratives are given in Alanna Knight’s useful compilation The Robert Louis Stevenson Treasury, supplemented here by additional material from Ian Bell’s biography Robert Louis Stevenson: Dreams of Exile [Edinburgh: Mainstream Publishing, 1992.] Lloyd Osbourne reports, in a passage quoted only by Bell, that Stevenson “said he was working with extraordinary success on a new story that had come to him in a dream, and that he was not to be interrupted or disturbed even if the house caught fire” (p. 187). After a three-day silence, Stevenson read the story aloud to his wife and stepson. Fanny Stevenson responded to the draft with harsh criticism (the quotations here follow Knight): “He had missed the point, she said; had missed the allegory; had made it merely a story—a magnificent bit of sensationalism—when it should have been a masterpiece” (p. 49). Stevenson, in what may have been either irritation or agreement with her judgment, threw the manuscript into the fire and rewrote the story from scratch. Osbourne then observes:

  The writing of it was an astounding feat, from whatever aspect it may be regarded. Sixty-four thousand words in six days; more than ten thousand words a day. To those who know little of such things I may explain that a thousand words a day is a fair average for any writer of fiction. Anthony Trollope set himself this quota; it was Jack London’s; it is—and has been—a sort of standard of daily literary accomplishment. Stevenson multiplied it by ten; and on top of that copied out the whole in another two days, and had it in the post on the third (p. 50) .

  Fanny Stevenson’s description gives an even clearer picture of the circumstances in which the story was composed: “That an invalid in my husband’s condition of health should have been able to perform the manual labour alone ... seems incredible. He was suffering from continual haemorrhages, and was hardly allowed to speak, his conversation usually being carried on by means of a slate and pencil” (p. 50) .

  Whether Stevenson wrote in England, California, or Samoa, Scotland remained central to his fiction, not just in his great historical novels (most often set in the eighteenth-century Scotland of covenanters, clan chieftains, and Stuart loyalists), but also in jekyll and Hyde, ostensibly set in London but—as the novelist G. K. Chesterton first commented—owing a great deal to the Presbyterian Edinburgh of Stevenson’s youth. Commenting on the paradoxical attraction of Puritanism to “repellent things” (Robert Louis Stevenson, p. 50), Chesterton attributes the origin of the story of Jekyll and Hyde to Calvinism’s pathological rendering of the relationship between good and evil. He goes on to suggest “that the story of Jekyll and Hyde, which is presumably presented as happening in London, is all the time very unmistakably happening in Edinburgh,” and his evidence includes the observation that there is “something decidedly Caledonian [Scottish] about Dr. Jekyll”: “The particular tone about his respectability, and the horror of mixing his reputation with mortal frailty, belongs to the upper middle classes in solid Puritan communities” (p. 51).

  Though Jekyll and Hyde is narrated in the third person, the events recounted in the story are consistently presented from the point of view of the lawyer Mr. Utterson. As the word “utter” suggests, he will be the only character left to bear witness at the story’s conclusion, though he too is silenced by the end of the book. Utterson is a neutral or repressed character who seems to exist in symbiosis with the disreputable individuals who visit his practice; Stevenson describes him as “the last reputable acquaintance and the last good influence in the lives of downgoing men” (p. 5). Utterson is a good man, in other words, but one whose virtue is so passive as to be almost negative: “He was austere with himself; drank gin when he was alone, to mortify a taste for vintages; and though he enjoyed the theatre, had not crossed the doors of one for twenty years” (p. 5). In this Calvinistic practice of self-denial, Utterson resembles the respectable Puritans of Stevenson’s Edinburgh upbringing; he may even represent the system of repression that gives rise to a Mr. Hyde. While Utterson knows Dr. Jekyll well at the story’s outset, he is initially introduced to Hyde only by proxy, in the account of his friend and cousin Richard Enfield. As they pass “a certain sinister block of building” in a busy part of Soho, Enfield tells Utterson a curious story about the stained and blistered door by which they have paused. One night at three in the morning, Enfield had seen “ ‘a little man who was stumping along eastward . . . and a girl of maybe eight or ten who was running as hard as she was able down a cross street.’ ”

  “ ‘Well, sir,’ ” Enfield continues, ” ‘the two ran into one another naturally enough at the corner; and then came the horrible part of the thing; for the man trampled calmly over the child’s body and left her screaming on the ground. It sounds nothing to hear, but it was hellish to see. It wasn’t like a man; it was like some damned Juggernaut’ ” (p. 7). Enfield confesses that he had “ ‘taken a loathing to my gentleman at first sight,’ ” and that the no-nonsense doctor who arrives to care for the child is similarly moved: “ ’Every time he looked at my prisoner, I saw that Sawbones turn sick and white with desire to kill him’ ” (p. 8). Having tracked down the offender, Enfield and the doctor “ ‘screwed him up to a hundred pounds for the child’s family’ ”: In a strange reversal of roles, it is not Hyde but the two respectable professional men who practice a form of blackmail. The villain then lets himself in through the door to the house and emerges shortly afterward with “ ‘ten pounds in gold and a cheque for the balance on Coutts’s [a highly respectable London bank], drawn payable to bearer and signed with a name that I can’t mention, though it’s one of the points of my story, but it was a name at least very well known and often printed’ ” (pp. 8-9). Though Enfield suspects the check must be a forgery, he discovers at the bank that it is quite genuine. “ ‘Yes, it’s a bad story,’ ” he tells Utterson in conclusion:

  “For my man was a fellow that nobody could have to do with, a really damnable man; and the person that drew the cheque is the very pink of the proprieties, celebrated too, and (what makes it worse) one of your fellows who do what they call good. Black mail, I suppose; an honest man paying through the nose for some of the capers of his youth” (p. 9).

  Enfield’s account raises a number of questions that will become increasingly relevant as the story develops. In addition to that strange displacement whereby Hyde—himself accused of blackmail and all manner of other crimes—actually prompts Enfield and the doctor to blackmail him, there is something very odd about the offense described in this scene. As chilling as the description of Hyde running down the child may be, the narrative does not accuse him of the more obvious offense that a man might inflict on an eight or ten-year-old girl in a London slum. Though social reformers during this period often expressed concern about the prevalence of sexual contact between children and adults (and of child prostitution) in London’s poorest neighborhoods, Hyde’s is not an explicitly sexual offense, and Stevenson seems to have gone to some trouble to exclude sex from his story. In part this was due to his acute sense of what the market would bear—Ste—venson had no desire to write a story that would be considered obscene or inappropriate for young readers. But the exclusion of sex (though it is implied that Jekyll’s early sexual transgressions are the seed of the later split in his personality) may also be mot
ivated by Stevenson’s somewhat polemical desire to decouple sex and sin in the face of respectable society’s determination to make the two synonymous. Stevenson explores this theme in a letter of November 1887 to American journalist John Paul Bocock, who had seen Mansfield’s theatrical production and expressed curiosity as to whether Hyde was really meant to be younger than Jekyll:

  You are right as to Mansfield: Hyde was the younger of the two. He was not good looking however; and not, Great Gods! a mere voluptuary. There is no harm in a voluptuary; and none, with my hand on my heart and in the sight of God, none—no harm whatever—in what prurient fools call “immorality.” The harm was in Jekyll, 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 Hyde—who is no more sexual than another, but who is the essence of cruelty and malice, and selfishness and cowardice: and these are the diabolic in man—not this poor wish to have a woman, that they make such a cry about. I know, and I dare to say, you know as well as I, that bad and good, even to our human eyes, has no more connection with what is called dissipation than it has with flying kites. But the sexual field and the business field are perhaps the two best fitted for the display of cruelty and cowardice and selfishness (Mehew, ed., Selected Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson, p. 352).