Robert Louis Stevenson

by Claire Harman

  I was very hard up for money, and I felt that I had to do something. I thought and thought, and tried hard to find a subject to write about. At night I dreamed the story, not precisely as it is written, for of course there are always stupidities in dreams, but practically it came to me as a gift, and what makes it appear more odd is that I am quite in the habit of dreaming stories [ … ] I go on making them while I sleep quite as hard, apparently, as when I am awake. They sometimes come to me in the form of nightmares, in so far that they make me cry out aloud. But I am never deceived by them. Even when fast asleep I know that it is I who am inventing, and when I cry out it is with gratification to know that the story is so good.

  [ … ] For instance, all I dreamed about Dr Jekyll was that one man was being pressed into a cabinet, when he swallowed a drug and changed into another being. I awoke and said at once that I had found the missing link for which I had been looking so long, and before I again went to sleep almost every detail of the story, as it stands, was clear to me. Of course, writing it was another thing.11

  A few weeks after this interview, and clearly prompted by the interest journalists had shown in the dream story, Stevenson was writing ‘A Chapter on Dreams’, an essay elaborating this idea of his subconscious as a story-mill. The argument was reversed, however: he no longer said that he was ‘never deceived’ by the provenance of his dream-work, and that ‘even when fast asleep I know that it is I who am inventing’. Now, he claimed to be always deceived. He represented his subconscious as a separate and independent state, personifying its forces (plural, as against a single, conscious ‘I’) as ‘the Brownies’, spirit-like, anarchic and amoral: ‘my Brownies are somewhat fantastic, like their stories hot and hot, full of passion and the picturesque, alive with animating incident; and they have no prejudice against the supernatural’.12 This fanciful figure helped him dissociate himself from the eruption of imaginative ‘dark forces’ in The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, the literary equivalent of a dramatic and violent ‘return of the repressed’.

  The dreams Stevenson uses as examples in his essay – presented in the third person as those of an unnamed ‘dreamer’ – are ‘irresponsible inventions, told for the teller’s pleasure, with no eye to the crass public or the thwart reviewer: tales where a thread might be dropped, or one adventure quitted for another, on fancy’s least suggestion’.13 Though he depicts the artful/artist dreamer (i.e. the writer who uses dreams as source-material) as one who harnesses the power of the subconscious in order to turn ‘[the] amusement of story-telling to (what is called) account’, the power of The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde derives largely from its innovative use of the former, unimpeded, ‘irresponsible’ impulses. Clearly the process of slipping out of one mode of consciousness into another, less ‘accountable’, one was pertinent to the shaping of the Jekyll/Hyde schism.

  But the main thrust of Stevenson’s essay proposes that he can take neither credit nor responsibility for his creations; his conscious self has so little to do with it. It is a statement of what an ego-psychologist would now call the problem of self-appointment:

  For myself – what I call I, my conscious ego, the denizen of the pineal gland unless he has changed his residence since Descartes, the man with the conscience and the variable bank-account, the man with the hat and the boots, and the privilege of voting and not carrying his candidate at the general elections – I am sometimes tempted to suppose he is no story-teller at all, but a creature as matter of fact as any cheesemonger or any cheese, and a realist bemired up to the ears in actuality; so that, by that account, the whole of my published fiction should be the single-handed product of some Brownie, some Familiar, some unseen collaborator, whom I keep locked in a back garret, while I get all the praise and he but a share (which I cannot prevent him getting) of the pudding. I am an excellent advisor, something like Molière’s servant; I pull back and I cut down; and I dress the whole in the best words and sentences that I can find and make; I hold the pen, too; and I do the sitting at the table, which is about the worst of it; and when all is done, I make up the manuscript and pay for the registration; so that, on the whole, I have some claim to share, though not so largely as I do, in the profits of our common enterprise.14

  The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, the story which had sparked these odd protestations of innocence or irresponsibility, was the product, Stevenson reveals, of years worrying at the same theme: ‘I had long been trying to write a story on this subject, to find a body, a vehicle, for that strong sense of man’s double being which must at times come in upon and overwhelm the mind of every thinking creature.’15 Stevenson’s interest in the subconscious shaped both the use he made of his dreams (putting them ‘to (what is called) account’) and their preoccupations with the divided self, of which Jekyll and Hyde can be seen as the most cogent and ‘analytical’ instance. Jekyll’s ‘Strange Case’ inevitably suggests to the modern mind the case-studies of Sigmund Freud, though Stevenson’s very public display of his own ‘dream-work’ predates the birth of Freudian psychoanalysis by several years. The two men were possibly reading the same scientific literature, though, for Fanny’s subscription to the Lancet put her and Louis in touch with the latest research into hysteria and ‘moral insanity’ which was being undertaken by Freud’s teacher Jean-Martin Charcot at the Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris.* Fanny later claimed that her husband had got the germ of the Jekyll and Hyde story from ‘a paper he had read in a French scientific journal on subconsciousness’.16 Stevenson spoke of having read an article on the case of ‘Louis V’ – a young Frenchman who suffered dramatic personality changes after severe shock – but said it was sent him by F.H.W. Myers after the publication of Jekyll and Hyde. ‘Louis V’; ‘Louis S’: they both sound like patients of Dr Freud, whose own publication of ‘strange cases’, beginning in the 1880s, was to change so radically the understanding of identity and revolutionise the ways in which readers read and writers write. Coming in just before this wholesale professionalisation of psychology, Stevenson’s story is not just full of latent meanings, but heaving with blatant ones too.

  The story is now so embedded in popular culture that it hardly exists as a work of literature. Everyone knows what ‘Jekyll-and-Hyde’ signifies: there is little motivation to read the book. Indeed, reading the book spoils ‘the story’, which we all know is about an over-vaunting scientist whose experiments in the chemical induction of personality-change unleash an increasingly bestial alter-ego who eventually destroys him. Not surprisingly, coming from an author who had virtually been adopted into the Shelley family, the story’s themes are strongly reminiscent of Frankenstein and the Prometheus myth; there were also, as critics were ready to point out, clear echoes of Poe’s artful doppelgänger story ‘William Wilson’ and James Hogg’s Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, with its overlapping third- and first-person narratives and its linking of the murderous, self-licensed Robert Colwan to his demonic alter-ego, Gil-Martin. But the dissimilarities between Poe and Hogg and Stevenson are revealing, too, as one reviewer of Jekyll and Hyde suggested:

  The double personality does not in [Stevenson’s] romance take the form of a personified conscience, the doppel ganger of the sinner, a ‘double’ like his own double which Goethe is fabled to have seen. No; the ‘separable self’ in this ‘strange case’ [ … ], with its unlikeness to its master, with its hideous caprices, and appalling vitality, and terrible power of growth and increase, is, to our thinking, a notion as novel as it is terrific. We would welcome a spectre, a ghoul, or even a vampire gladly, rather than meet Mr Edward Hyde.17

  The believability of the story, its familiar, smog-filled urban setting (purportedly London, but with a strong flavour of Old Town Edinburgh) and its cast of solid Victorian professional men, ‘intelligent, reputable [ … ] all good judges of wine’, made the gothic elements more striking. Dr Jekyll is a prosperous, philanthropic, ‘smooth-faced’ middle-aged man, his friend Utterson is a lawyer, Lanyon an
other doctor and Utterson’s godson Enfield a man-about-town. The introduction of young, classless and criminal-looking Edward Hyde into this society shatters its gentlemen’s-club cosiness, and Jekyll’s friends can only account for the doctor’s choice of ‘protégé’ in terms of a hidden vice and possible black-mailing.

  The story is laid out like a dossier of witness statements, with three overlapping narratives. The first is a detective story (a term not yet in use, but which this book helped form), detailing Utterson’s growing suspicions about Hyde, his puzzling over the nature of the Jekyll/Hyde relationship, his urging on of the police in the search for Carew’s murderer and his lone pursuit of the investigation once the police have given up. When Utterson is called in by the servants to break down Jekyll’s laboratory door with an axe and discovers not his friend, as anticipated, but Hyde, writhing in his death agonies after taking poison, the story looks as if it is over, but there are more puzzles, notably Jekyll’s will, and a note that suggests he is still alive, not lying murdered somewhere by his psychopathic companion.

  The second and third sections consist of two documents found in the laboratory. One is a letter by Lanyon telling for the first time of Jekyll’s self-experimentations with ‘powders’ and how Lanyon once agreed to supply some of them to a friend of Jekyll, hitherto unknown to him. The reader recognises the description of Hyde immediately, but it is only now, well over halfway through the book, that Stevenson reveals the identity of the two characters.

  [Hyde] put the glass to his lips, and drank at one gulp. A cry followed; he reeled, staggered, clutched at the table and held on, staring with injected eyes, gasping with open mouth; and as I looked there came, I thought, a change – he seemed to swell – his face became suddenly black, and the features seemed to melt and alter – and the next moment I had sprung to my feet and leaped back against the wall, my arm raised to shield me from that prodigy, my mind submerged in terror.

  ‘O God!’ I screamed, and ‘O God!’ again and again; for there before my eyes, pale and shaken, and half fainting, and groping before him with his hands, like a man restored from death – there stood Henry Jekyll!18

  Here, with its gestures and speeches straight out of ‘melo’, Jekyll and Hyde turns instantly into psychological horror. The last document, a long suicide note, lets us read in Jekyll’s own words the exact nature of his experimentations and their consequences. Jekyll is smoothly articulate, even poetical, as he relates how the misdeeds of his youth led him to concealment and ‘a profound duplicity of life’. Something of that duplicity is evident even at this confessional moment, for Jekyll’s ‘statement’ is, unsurprisingly, a highly subjective piece of self-justification. The vague ‘irregularities’ which he admits to are placed in the context of such ‘high views’ as to render them more an indicator of his super-fine sensibilities than objectively or inherently bad. Jekyll seems to be preparing his audience (Utterson) for an aspirational reading of his self-experimentations, a Promethean interpretation, with himself cast as the doomed romantic striver-after-knowledge.

  I thus drew steadily nearer to that truth, by whose partial discovery I have been doomed to such a dreadful shipwreck: that man is not truly one, but truly two. [ … ] It was on the moral side, and in my own person, that I learned to recognise the thorough and primitive duality of man; I saw that, of the two natures that contended in the field of my consciousness, even if I could rightly be said to be either, it was only because I was radically both.19

  There follows Jekyll’s description of the first mixing and taking of ‘the powders’ and the subsequent transformation into Hyde, an insistently physical piece of writing:

  The most racking pains succeeded: a grinding in the bones, deadly nausea, and a horror of the spirit that cannot be exceeded at the hour of birth or death. Then these agonies began swiftly to subside, and I came to myself as if out of a great sickness. There was something strange in my sensations, something indescribably new, and from its very novelty, indescribably sweet. I felt younger, lighter, happier in body; within I was conscious of a heady recklessness, a current of disordered sensual images running like a mill race in my fancy, a solution of the bonds of obligation, an unknown but not an innocent freedom of the soul.20

  The person who emerges from this quasi-sexual, chemically-induced convulsion is Edward Hyde. When he creeps out from the laboratory, situated symbolically at the back of Jekyll’s house and opening onto a different street, he is able for the first time to see himself in a mirror. Not only is he smaller than Jekyll, but, in a highly inventive detail, he is also thinner and younger, being young and undeveloped in vice: ‘I was conscious of no repugnance, rather of a leap of welcome,’ he says. ‘This, too, was myself.’ Much of the book’s fascination can be summed up in that simple statement, so evocative of Whitman’s similarly shocking and liberating ‘I contain multitudes’. The meaning was perhaps too clear for comfort. Of Stevenson’s friends, Henry James complained of the book’s sensationalism, Myers sent a long list of possible revisions and refinements, and Symonds wrote, ‘It is indeed a dreadful book, most dreadful because of a certain moral callousness, a want of sympathy, a shutting out of hope. [ … ] Most of us at some epoch of our lives have been upon the verge of developing a Mr Hyde.’21

  Symonds may have been voicing here a worry similar to that of Jekyll’s bachelor friends in the story itself: that a comfortable, if hypocritical, status quo was being threatened with exposure. Certainly the Strange Case is full of latent sexual meanings, and its huge cultural impact derived in part from its frank acknowledgement that there was plenty in late-Victorian life which Victorian fiction could not, or refused to, deal with. In his defence of the story in a letter to Robert Bridges in 1886, the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins expressed the shrewd opinion that the scene in Jekyll and Hyde where Hyde tramples over the little girl in the street ‘is perhaps a convention: [Stevenson] was thinking of something unsuitable for fiction’.22

  Many – indeed, most – modern critics have interpreted the novel as a psycho-sexual allegory. Elaine Showalter has called it ‘a fable of fin-de-siècle 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’;23 Wayne Koestenbaum has written that Jekyll and Hyde ‘defines queerness as the horror that comes from not being able to explain away an uncanny doubleness’;24 and Karl Miller, in his Doubles: Studies in Literary History, has identified Stevenson as the leading figure in the ‘School of Duality’ that ‘framed a dialect, and a dialectic, for the love that dared not speak its name – for the vexed question of homosexuality and bisexuality’.25 These opinions obviously pick up on Stevenson’s own ‘doubleness’, his confusion and disruption of what was expected from an effeminate-looking man, but there was an assumption at the time of its first publication that the story dealt with unspeakably shameful heterosexual practices, the scope of which was being made public for the first time that year by Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s groundbreaking work on deviant sexuality, Psychopathia Sexualis. The film versions of Jekyll and Hyde abound in added prostitutes to accommodate this interpretation (of course there are no prostitutes in the book itself), and to reflect the historical fact that only two years after the story began to cause a sensation among the reading public on both sides of the Atlantic, the savage Whitechapel murders of ‘Jack the Ripper’ also began (targeting ‘fallen’ women and characterised by evisceration, thereby suggesting the work of a psychopathic moralist with a medical/anatomical background). The novel has thereby become co-opted into the (highly mythologised) real-life Whitechapel story, which, like the mystery of Jekyll, has never been satisfactorily resolved. At the time of the murders, the connection with Stevenson’s book seemed so close that a stage version of Jekyll and Hyde was taken off at the Lyceum as a gesture to public feeling: ‘There is no taste in London just now for horrors on the stage. There is quite s
ufficient to make us shudder out of doors.’26

  Jekyll and Hyde is about the secrets which respectability hides, and the pleasures of that deception, so it is appropriate enough that Stevenson leaves the nature of Jekyll’s sins (not Hyde’s) unspecified. The fragments of early draft that survive show the author muting significantly the story’s sexual content: ‘disgraceful pleasures’ in the draft becomes the euphemism ‘certain appetites’, and Jekyll no longer confesses to ‘a career of cruel, soulless and degrading vice’ and vices that were ‘at once criminal in the sight of the law and abhorrent in themselves’.27 ‘Criminal’ certainly indicates that Stevenson meant ‘homosexual’, but it would be entirely in keeping with his views on sexual tolerance that he removed this term in order not to link any specific sexual behaviour with the psychopathic Hyde mind-set. The resulting implication that the ‘certain appetites’ hinted at were to do with masturbation or illicit heterosexual sex were also not what the author intended, as is evident from his response to an early stage version of the story, which made Hyde into a ‘voluptuary’:

  [Hyde] was not good-looking [ … ] 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.28