Context: Victorian Duality
Stevenson and Victorian Duality
Robert Louis Stevenson published The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde in 1886, during a period of intense anxiety about the duality of human nature. Victorian society demanded absolute respectability from its professional classes. Doctors, lawyers, and gentlemen were expected to be morally upright in every aspect of their lives. But beneath this polished surface, London harboured a dark underworld of vice, crime, and moral transgression.
Stevenson understood this hypocrisy firsthand. He grew up in respectable Edinburgh society but was drawn to the city’s seedy Old Town. His novella asks a question that terrified Victorians: what if every respectable man contains a hidden self, capable of terrible things? Dr Jekyll is the answer — a “large, well-made, smooth-faced man of fifty” who conceals desires he cannot reconcile with his public reputation.
Victorian society demanded absolute respectability from professional men. Stevenson uses Jekyll’s dual identity to expose the hypocrisy of this demand: the more rigidly society enforces moral perfection, the more violently the repressed self erupts. Hyde is not a separate person — he is Jekyll’s hidden desires given physical form.
The Gothic Tradition
Stevenson writes within the Gothic tradition, which uses horror and the supernatural to explore psychological and social fears. Gothic fiction features doubles, secrets, transgression, and the return of the repressed. Jekyll and Hyde combines all of these: Jekyll is both protagonist and antagonist; the secret of his double life drives the plot; his experiments transgress the boundaries of science and morality.
The novella also draws on the doppelgänger tradition — the idea that every person has a shadow-self. Hyde is Jekyll’s doppelgänger: smaller, younger, and purely evil because he represents only the repressed desires that Jekyll has spent his life concealing. Stevenson takes the Gothic convention and gives it a scientific framework: Jekyll does not summon a demon but creates Hyde through chemistry.
Stevenson was fascinated by the real-life 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 kept a cabinet made by Brodie in his bedroom as a child, and the story haunted him. Brodie proved that the respectable surface could conceal a criminal interior — the central idea of Jekyll and Hyde.
Victorian Science and Morality
The 1880s were a period of rapid scientific advancement that unsettled religious certainties. Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) had suggested that humans evolved from animals, raising the terrifying possibility that our ‘civilised’ behaviour was merely a thin veneer over animal instincts. Stevenson taps directly into this anxiety: Hyde is described in animalistic terms — “like a monkey,” with “ape-like fury” — suggesting he represents the primitive creature beneath the civilised gentleman.
Jekyll’s experiment also raises questions about the ethics of transgressive science. He attempts to separate the good and evil in human nature through chemistry — an act of hubris that echoes Frankenstein. Like Shelley’s Victor, Jekyll discovers that the attempt to transcend natural limits leads to destruction. The potion does not purify Jekyll; it unleashes his worst impulses without restraint.
Hyde is repeatedly described in animalistic and evolutionary terms: ‘like a monkey,’ ‘ape-like fury,’ ‘hardly human.’ This connects to post-Darwinian anxiety that civilisation is a thin veneer. Jekyll’s experiment is transgressive science: attempting to separate good from evil, he instead unleashes the primitive self.
The Novella’s Structure
Stevenson structures the novella as a mystery. We see Hyde through multiple perspectives before we understand his connection to Jekyll. Utterson the lawyer investigates; Enfield witnesses Hyde’s violence; Lanyon sees the transformation and dies from shock. The truth is withheld until the final two chapters: Lanyon’s narrative and Jekyll’s full statement. This structure mirrors the theme of concealment: just as Jekyll hides Hyde from society, Stevenson hides the truth from the reader.
The multiple narrators also mean that no single perspective is complete. Utterson sees only surfaces. Lanyon sees the scientific horror. Jekyll’s statement provides the interior truth. Stevenson suggests that identity is never fully knowable — we only ever see partial views of other people, and even of ourselves.
Stevenson’s London is both realistic and symbolic. The fog, darkness, and labyrinthine streets create a Gothic atmosphere, but they also represent the moral confusion of a city where respectable facades conceal hidden vices. Jekyll’s house has two faces: the respectable front on the square and the sinister back door on the by-street through which Hyde enters and exits. The house is Jekyll’s duality made architectural.