Context: Victorian Duality
The Victorian World of Jekyll and Hyde
Robert Louis Stevenson published The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde in 1886, during the height of the Victorian era. The novella was an immediate sensation — 40,000 copies sold in the first six months. It struck a nerve because it exposed something Victorians desperately wanted to hide: the idea that respectable, civilised people harboured dark and violent desires beneath the surface.
Victorian society placed enormous value on respectability. A gentleman was expected to be rational, moral, restrained, and publicly virtuous. Yet behind the polished facades of London’s townhouses, many wealthy men led secret double lives — visiting opium dens, engaging in illicit relationships, and indulging desires they publicly condemned. Stevenson’s novella tore away this mask of respectability and forced his readers to confront their own hypocrisy.
Victorian gentlemen were expected to suppress all immoral urges. Jekyll creates Hyde not because he is unusually evil, but because the pressure to appear respectable is unbearable. Stevenson suggests that all humans have a dual nature — the Victorians simply refused to admit it.
Repression and the Double Life
The theme of repression runs through every page of the novella. Jekyll confesses in his final statement that he “learned to recognise the thorough and primitive duality of man.” He understood that every person contains both good and evil impulses. The problem was not the impulses themselves, but Victorian society’s insistence that they did not exist.
Jekyll’s transformation is not about gaining new evil qualities — it is about releasing desires he already possessed. He admits: “the moment I choose, I can be rid of Mr Hyde.” This early confidence reveals his fatal flaw: the belief that he can control the darkness within. Stevenson uses Jekyll’s gradual loss of control to warn that repression is not a solution — it only makes the eventual release of those desires more violent and destructive.
Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859, just twenty-seven years before Stevenson’s novella. Darwin’s theory of evolution argued that humans had evolved from more primitive creatures. This horrified many Victorians because it suggested that beneath the veneer of civilisation, humans were still animals — capable of savage, instinctive violence. Hyde is repeatedly described in animalistic terms: he has “ape-like fury,” Utterson calls him “troglodytic,” and witnesses describe something inhuman about his appearance. Stevenson draws on evolutionary anxiety to suggest that Hyde represents the primitive, pre-civilised self that lurks within every person.
The science versus religion debate was at its height. Many Victorians feared that if Darwin was right and humans were merely evolved animals, then morality itself had no divine foundation. Jekyll’s experiment — using science to separate good from evil — reflects this anxiety. His failure suggests that good and evil cannot be neatly divided, and that attempting to do so through science leads to catastrophe.
The Gothic Genre
Stevenson’s novella belongs to the Gothic tradition. Gothic literature explored the dark side of human nature, featuring supernatural events, psychological terror, and settings that reflected inner turmoil. Earlier Gothic works like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) shared similar concerns about science overreaching its limits and the beast within humanity; later Gothic novels like Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) developed these themes further still.
Victorian Gothic moved the horror from remote castles into the heart of London. Stevenson’s fog-choked streets, sinister doorways, and respectable houses hiding terrible secrets reflect the idea that evil is not somewhere far away — it lives next door. The novella’s famous description, “The fog still slept on the wing above the drowned city,” turns London itself into a Gothic landscape where nothing is quite what it seems.
Victorian Gothic fiction brought horror into everyday urban settings. Stevenson uses London’s fog, gas-lit streets, and locked doors to create a world where respectability and monstrosity exist side by side. The Gothic setting mirrors the novella’s central theme: that darkness hides within the familiar.
Urban London and Social Division
The London of Jekyll and Hyde is a city of sharp contrasts. Wealthy areas like Cavendish Square sit close to dangerous, poverty-stricken slums like Soho. Jekyll’s grand house has a front entrance on a respectable street and a back entrance through a sinister, blistered door in a dingy lane. This physical layout mirrors the novella’s central metaphor: the respectable exterior and the hidden, shameful interior.
Stevenson grew up in Edinburgh, a city famously divided between the respectable New Town and the crime-ridden Old Town. He was the son of a devoutly religious lighthouse engineer but rebelled against his upbringing, exploring Edinburgh’s seedy underworld as a young man. He was also influenced by the real case of Deacon Brodie — an eighteenth-century Edinburgh cabinet-maker who was a respected citizen by day and a burglar by night. Brodie was eventually caught and hanged. Stevenson had a cabinet made by Brodie in his childhood bedroom, and later wrote a play about him. The duality of Jekyll and Hyde has its roots in Stevenson’s own city and personal experience.
The Edexcel Exam: What You Need to Know
For the Edexcel 19th-century novel question you answer two parts on Jekyll and Hyde. Part (a) prints an extract of about 400 words and is worth 20 marks for close analysis of Stevenson’s language, form and structure (AO2). Part (b) is worth 20 marks and asks you to explore a theme, character or idea across the whole novella, judged on your argument and your use of quotations (AO1). This is a closed book exam, so you must memorise key quotations. Context is not separately assessed, but strong responses weave contextual understanding into their analysis naturally.