A lawyer and his head clerk sit on either side of a fire on a foggy afternoon, a bottle of very old wine between them. The lawyer has a letter in his pocket signed by a murderer, and he wants an opinion without quite asking for one. The clerk, a keen student of penmanship, studies it with real pleasure. Then a servant brings in a dinner invitation from a respectable doctor, and the clerk asks to see that too. He lays the two sheets side by side. The writing, he says mildly, is the same in many points, only sloped another way. Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson has dozens of famous moments, but this quiet one, two men pretending not to understand what they have just seen, holds the whole book in miniature.
The novella, properly titled Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, with no article at the front, is now so familiar that its central fact is common knowledge. Readers who come to it fresh will know before page one that the respectable doctor and the brute are bound together. What they may not expect is how much of the story is about people refusing to put that knowledge into words.
A Face Nobody Can Describe
Every witness in the book fails at the same task. Enfield, the cheerful man about town who first tells the story of the trampled child, tries and gives up: he has never disliked a man so much and cannot name a single feature that explains why. The police want to print handbills and discover that the fugitive was never photographed, that few people knew him, and that those who did describe him differently. All anyone agrees on is a sense of deformity without a deformity.
It is a brilliant refusal. Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson keeps its villain blurred, so the horror lives in the reactions of decent men: the doctor who attends the injured girl wants to kill him, a housekeeper is visibly delighted to hear he is in trouble. Stevenson trusts the reader to supply the face, and the face supplied is always worse.
London Under a Brown Sky
The city is the second great achievement. On the morning after the murder of an elderly member of parliament, a cab crawls through Soho beneath a fog so thick it changes colour street by street, now the dark of late evening, now a lurid glow like a distant fire. Through gaps in it come a gin palace, a cheap French eating house, ragged children in doorways and women heading out for a morning glass. Then the fog closes again. It is a few sentences long, and it makes London feel like a district in a bad dream, which is precisely what the story needs.
The friendships give that city its warmth. Dr Lanyon, a hearty, red-faced physician with prematurely white hair, has fallen out with an old school friend over what he calls unscientific nonsense, and his sudden collapse later in the book is one of its most affecting turns, all the more because he is the one character who scorned the idea of transcendental medicine. Enfield, for his part, has a rule never to ask questions, because a question is like a stone sent rolling downhill. That rule is the book’s moral climate in a sentence: a society of gentlemen who would rather not know.
The best scene in Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson is built on exactly that reticence. On a Sunday stroll, the two cousins pause in a damp courtyard and call up to a half-open window, where the reclusive doctor sits taking the air like a prisoner. Mid-sentence, his smile is wiped away by something neither of them can name, the window is slammed down, and the pair walk off in total silence until they reach a busier street. Nothing is explained. It is among the most frightening half-pages in Victorian fiction.
What Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde Keeps Out of Sight
When the explanation finally arrives, in a confession written in the first person, the voice is not that of a mad scientist. It is a middle-aged professional who had always enjoyed pleasures he thought beneath his dignity and could not bear to be seen enjoying. The potion is almost incidental. What the confession describes is the logic of a habit: the relief of the first escape, the resolve to stop, two months of virtue, the slow return of craving, the lapse. Few Victorian novels catch the bargaining of compulsion this precisely, and Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson catches it in a handful of pages.
The reservations are real, though. This is a world almost without women: a sentimental maid who faints, a sly housekeeper, a knot of furious women in the street, and nobody else. Stage and film versions kept adding heroines and romance because the source offered so little. The moral scheme is also tidier than the psychology. One self is wholly evil and the other a mixture, an arrangement that suits a parable better than a person, and modern readers may find the idea of pure evil the least convincing thing on the page. And the story turns on a single coincidence, the chance that the idle cousin who witnessed the first outrage should mention it to the one lawyer in London holding the relevant papers.
None of it spoils the effect. Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson asks for one sitting, and its unease outlasts every quibble. Readers should know that it contains cruelty to a child, lethal violence and the slow ruin of a man, all handled briefly.
Where Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde Came From
Robert Louis Stevenson was born in Edinburgh in 1850 and died in Samoa in 1894, at only forty-four. As a teenager he had drafted a play about Deacon William Brodie, the eighteenth-century Edinburgh cabinet-maker and town councillor who led a second life as a burglar, and the idea of a respectable man with a hidden night self stayed with him. He returned to it for Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson in Bournemouth, in a house he called Skerryvore after a Scottish lighthouse his uncle Alan had built, where Henry James came to talk at the dinner table almost daily.
The book went on sale in New York from Charles Scribner’s Sons on 5 January 1886, four days before the London edition. It became a sensation in a surprising quarter: people who never read novels bought it, and preachers quoted it from the pulpit as a moral lesson. In time the two names in the title had passed into everyday speech for anyone with a gentle face and a cruel streak.
In Samoa, Stevenson built a house inland from Apia, took the local name Tusitala, meaning teller of tales, and kept writing until the end.
What It Leaves Behind
The pleasure of rereading the novella is noticing how often the truth is in plain sight and how carefully everyone looks away. Readers who want another Victorian whose good manners hide something unspeakable should try Victorian Psycho by Virginia Feito, a blackly comic governess novel. Those who want gaslit monsters played as adventure will enjoy Strange Beasts by Susan J. Morris, and Bram Stoker’s Dracula is the natural companion for a longer, darker October night.
Two letters on a table, the same hand at two different slants. Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson lets a clerk see the truth before anyone dares say it, and the reader is left wondering how many truths they have politely declined to read.