The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, written by Robert Louis Stevenson and published in January of 1886, sold 40,000 copies in six months in Britain. Stevenson said later that its plot was revealed to him in a dream. The mystery of Jekyll and Hyde is gradually revealed through the narratives of Mr Enfield, Mr Utterson, Dr Lanyon, and Jekyll’s butler Poole. Utterson, Jekyll’s lawyer, discovers that the nasty Mr. Edward Hyde is the heir of Dr. Jekyll’s fortune. Hyde is suspected of a murder. Utterson and Poole break into Jekyll’s laboratory and find the lifeless Hyde. Two documents explain the mystery: Jekyll’s old friend, the late Dr. Lanyon, tells that Jekyll and Hyde are the same person. In his own account Jekyll tells that to separate the good and evil aspects of his nature, he invented a transforming drug. His evil self takes the form of the repulsive Mr Hyde. Jekyll’s supplies of drugs run out and he finds himself slipping involuntarily into being Hyde. Jekyll kills himself, but the last words of the confession are written by his alter ego: “Here then, as I lay down the pen and proceed to seal up my confession, I bring the life of that unhappy Dr. Jekyll to an end.” The story has been considered an criticism of Victorian double morality, but it can be read as a comment on Charles Darwin’s book The Origin of Species – Dr. Jekyll turns in his experiment the evolution backwards and reveals the primitive background of a cultured human being. Henry James admired Stevenson’s “genuine feeling for the perpetual moral question, a fresh sense of the difficulty of being good and the brutishness of being bad”. (‘Robert Louis Stevenson’ by Henry James in Century Magazine 35, April 1888) Modern readers have set the story against Freudian sexual theories and the split in man’s psyche between ego and instinct, although the “split” takes the form of a physical change, rather than inner dissociation. Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde has become an icon of popular culture and adapted for the screen over 20 times. The story of double personality and metamorphosis appealed strongly to Victorian readers. The novel was partly based on Stevenson’s and W.E. Henley’s play Deacon Brodia (1880), where an Edinburgh councilor is publicly respectable person but privately a thief and rakehell. The basic theme of true identity have attracted such writers as Mary Shelley (Frankenstein, 1818), Hans Christian Andersen (The Ugly Duckling, 1845), Fyodor Dostoyevsky (Crime and Punishment, 1866), Bram Stoker (Dracula, 1897), Franz Kafka (Metamorphosis, 1915)
(Courtesy of Read Print)
The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde begins in podcast the week of March 31, 2008.
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April 3rd, 2008 at 8:57 pm
[...] Books Audio has begun podcasting The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. I am sure I am not alone in not having read the story even though I am familiar with the [...]
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