Context: Victorian Duality
The Victorian Obsession with Respectability
Robert Louis Stevenson published The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde in 1886, at the height of the Victorian era. Victorian society was obsessed with respectability: gentlemen were expected to be rational, self-controlled, and morally upright in public. But beneath this polished surface, Victorian London harboured a hidden world of vice — prostitution, opium dens, gambling, and poverty. Stevenson’s novella explores this gap between public respectability and private desire.
The concept of duality was central to Victorian thought. Scientists, philosophers, and theologians all debated whether human nature was fundamentally good or evil. Stevenson dramatises this debate through Jekyll’s experiment: what if you could physically separate the two sides of your nature? The answer, the novella argues, is catastrophe — because good and evil are not separate entities but inseparable parts of the same person.
Victorian gentlemen maintained strict public respectability while often indulging private vices. Stevenson uses Jekyll’s experiment to expose this hypocrisy: Jekyll does not create evil — he releases the evil that was already inside him. Hyde is not a separate person but the part of Jekyll that society forced him to suppress. The novella argues that repression, not human nature, is the true danger.
Science and Religion
The 1880s were a period of intense conflict between science and religion. Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) had challenged the biblical creation story and implied that humans and apes share an ancestor — an idea that horrified many Victorians. Hyde’s frequent description in animalistic terms (“like a monkey,” “snarled,” “ape-like fury”) connects him to Darwin’s theory: Hyde represents the primitive, animal nature that evolution revealed beneath the civilised surface.
Victorian readers feared degeneration — the idea that civilisation could go backwards, with humans reverting to a primitive state. Hyde embodies this fear: he is smaller than Jekyll (suggesting a less evolved form), described as “troglodytic” (cave-dweller), and provokes an instinctive revulsion in everyone who sees him. Characters struggle to describe what is wrong with Hyde: Enfield says he gave “a strong feeling of deformity,” though he cannot identify any specific feature. This indefinable wrongness suggests Hyde represents something beyond physical appearance — he is the degenerate self that Victorian society desperately wanted to deny.
Jekyll’s experiment can be read as a metaphor for the danger of scientific progress without moral restraint. He uses chemistry to achieve what nature would not allow: the separation of good and evil. But the experiment goes wrong because the separation is unnatural. Stevenson warns that science, like any form of power, requires ethical boundaries.
London as a Dual City
Stevenson sets the novella in London, a city that perfectly embodies Victorian duality. The respectable streets of the West End existed alongside the poverty and crime of the East End. Jekyll’s house has two faces: a handsome front door on a respectable street and a sinister back entrance (the “door” of Chapter 1) on a rundown lane. This architectural duality mirrors Jekyll’s psychological duality — the public face and the private shame are literally two sides of the same building.
Stevenson grew up in Edinburgh, a city with a literal split personality: the respectable New Town above and the cramped, vice-ridden Old Town below. He also knew about the real-life case of Deacon Brodie, an 18th-century Edinburgh cabinetmaker who was a respectable citizen by day and a burglar by night. These biographical connections help explain why duality fascinated Stevenson: he lived in a world where the gap between public and private selves was not just a literary idea but a daily reality.
Stevenson reportedly dreamed the central scene of the novella (the transformation) and wrote the first draft in three days. His wife Fanny criticised it for being too much of an adventure story, so he burned the manuscript and rewrote it as the psychological allegory we know today.
Jekyll’s house has a respectable front entrance and a sinister back door — two faces of the same building, just as Jekyll and Hyde are two faces of the same person. This architectural symbolism runs throughout the novella: Victorian London itself has a public face of respectability and a hidden world of vice.