Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
(Robert Louis Stevenson)

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was published in 1885. The author, Robert Louis Stevenson, was born in 1850 in Edinburgh, Scotland. His family were typical of the upper middle class of Scotland – his father’s ancestors were engineers and his mother’s were Presbyterian ministers. Stevenson was expected to continue the tradition of studying engineering or science and set out to do so, but soon turned to fiction writing and leading a rather bohemian lifestyle that included world travel, a relationship with a married woman (whom he eventually married), and living on a South Seas island. Stevenson was to die relatively young but left behind a body of work still highly regarded today.

When Stevenson wrote The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (originally published without the “The”) there was little knowledge of how personality developed. Sigmund Freud was then only in his thirties and had not yet reached the pinnacle of his achievements in the field of psychology and psychoanalysis. The rapid development of scientific and engineering advancements was changing the Victorian world on an almost daily basis – it can be safely said that the era saw more changes in a shorter time than any other time before the 19th century. One field that was developing was the study of human personality and its influences. This was coupled with the growing concern of how to treat mental illness and in fact, even defining what mental illness is.

Most Victorians were not exposures to hallucinogenic drugs – alcohol had long been used and abused in the history of humankind but drugs were a recent phenomenon. The extent of the British Empire, particularly in the East and Far East, had brought Britons into contact with substances such as opium. There was some experimentation and if not on a wide scale, it did seem to hold some fascination with people in the world of arts and literature. The combination of the interest in the mind and personality and the use of drugs proved to be fodder for the plots of numerous stories and novels. Only a couple of years after the publication of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Arthur Conan Doyle introduced one of the world’s most famous fictional detectives, Sherlock Holmes, a user of cocaine and morphine. Stevenson was not the only writer fascinated by the part drugs could play in fiction.

The Victorian world presented in The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was one that, while improvements had been made over the century, was still one of class distinction and class behavior. Professionals are respectable, competent, and hold a special status – the serving class is depicted as loyal, dedicated, but basically simple and unsophisticated. Carew, the victim of Hyde’s violence, is a Member of Parliament, and is depicted as a knighted man with the title of “Sir”. The outrage over his death would likely have been more muted had he been a less exalted member of the House of Commons. Stevenson’s novella accurately depicts a class society that by the time the novella was published had only three decades left to flourish, being greatly altered by World War I.