Review by: Ahsan Nabi Khan
We all know about the Good and the Evil, yet we have never seen them in full embodiment. Here is a book visualizing the theme of human moral philosophy in the most intriguing and scientific manner, as if these two sides of the same person have come to life. A whodunit detective type, this curious piece of story tells of a weird experiment investigating into the darkness of human psychology, and its embarrassing and devastating after-effects on a very respectable, handsome and wealthy gentleman, Dr Henry Jekyll—unfortunately inflicted by his own self.
Dr Jekyll once said, reflecting on people, “All human beings…are commingled out of good and evil”. He was interested in freeing the evil part from the morality of the good one. This would mean he wanted the conscience to stop controlling the part of the self that desires to kill, loot, pollute and play havoc around the world. As a result, the person would not feel ashamed of his wrongdoings and would get rid of the crutches of morality.
These peculiar interests brought him into a strange connection with a small, deformed, abominable and dangerous man, Edward Hyde, who apparently does no work. The story develops as a sympathetic and circumspect old friend of Jekyll, Mr. Utterson, sets off to investigate the reality of this connection and the misdoings of both these starkly contradictory characters.
One night Mr. Utterson found out through his menacingly curious cousin, Richard Enfield that Hyde has trampled over a girl and on being blackmailed by Enfield he has presented a check to pay for the trouble he created. This check was drawn on the name of Dr Jekyll. Jekyll’s home also opened to a mysterious door of Mr. Hyde. The strangest of the matters between them was that Jekyll's will stated that in case of his death, Mr. Hyde will inherit all of his substantial wealth, and even stranger, in case of his disappearance for more than three months, Hyde will assume Jekyll's life without delay. Utterson derives from it that Jekyll is being blackmailed by Hyde. Later, Hyde also committed murder of Sir Danvers Carew with a cane making Mr. Utterson and the police set off for a formal investigation. They get Hyde’s apartment ransacked, search to see his face and finally get a handwriting match of a note Hyde wrote to Jekyll with Jekyll’s invitation note to his ex-friend Dr. Lanyon. To the anger of Mr. Utterson, this meant to him that his old friend Jekyll has forged a letter for a murderer.
Things go more bizarre as Dr. Lanyon, who was known for his respect for truth and had parted ways from Dr. Jekyll ten years earlier, died out of a sudden illness and left his ex-friend a letter. This letter he instructed to be read not before ten years. Jekyll himself acted further weird as he locked himself up in his basement. Only strange sounds and cries came from there and letters were given asking for a specific type of salt. A week later Mr. Utterson broke into the house to finally solve the mystery.
There with the corpse of Hyde was a letter left for Utterson to read and unlock the mystery. Dr. Lanyon’s account also lied there. It told him that the menacing criminal Hyde was an invention of the hermit-like scientist Jekyll, born out of his own body as he drank the medicine potion. His potion converted himself from Good to Evil, from Jekyll to Hyde. This shocking transformation killed Dr Lanyon as he saw it happening with his own eyes. This invention killed its own creator, when it could not be controlled from doing evil.
As Jekyll got to know that he could return back to his respectable form after drinking another potion, turning to Hyde was apparently not of any cost to him. He could explore the dark side of him without remorse from the humane side. This habitual leeway would be devastating for the others, until Jekyll found,
"I had gone to bed Henry Jekyll, I had awakened Edward Hyde."
Afraid of his permanent uncontrollable deformity and its adverse effects to his own self, he tried suppressing it for two months, only to torture his self by the growing longing. As he could not hold on, he gave Hyde another chance which Hyde availed by a brutal murder, lashing out more than he was suppressed. Jekyll swore not to let Hyde return and looked for a remedy, but all in vain. This new guest in his mental being had become an irrevocable part of him.
“I was slowly losing hold of my original and better self, and becoming incorporated with my second and worse
The body of Edward Hyde had grown in stature”.
As he once kept thinking deeply about Hyde, he turned into Hyde. An important salt needed to bring him back to Jekyll fell short. His search across London for the salt went fruitless. Every time he woke up he was the evil Hyde, and his potions became useless. Evil had completely taken over him, and he even could not save himself. Just because he gave an inch to evil, it seized a mile.
It is not difficult for us University students to relate the theme of this story to the internal conflicts of the unconscious (id) and the conscious (ego) part of mind, as presented by Sigmund Freud in The Interpretations of Dreams. Stevenson’s novels are famed for their duality of personalities as was often the case with Victorian characters of his times. Charles Darwin’s “The Origin of Species”, Richard Kraft-Ebing’s “Psychopathia Sexualis” and Freud’s “The Interpretations of Dreams” were important and influential works on Psychology, Psychoanalysis and Human Biology of the contemporary period. These scientists’ works also had an impact on Stevenson’s work. The intense urge to destroy and play with human lives in Hyde was similar to features of the Unconscious mind shown by Freud. The stern and strict moral sense of Dr Lanyon and Mr. Utterson represent the Super-Ego, and Henry Jekyll tries to understand and fulfill the urges of both the sides like the Ego. The animal instincts of Hyde also hint on the idea that the lower humans were once animals, the Darwinian Theory.
Literature also had its influences on Stevenson’s work. Jekyll and Hyde can draw parallels in E.T.A. Hoffman's “The Devil's Elixirs" , Thomas Jefferson Hogg's “The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner “, Edgar Allan Poe's "William Wilson”, and most significantly, Theophile Gautier's “Chvalier Double". Gautier's story revolves around a protagonist, Oluf, who has a dual personality which suffers a tormented life, much like Jekyll and Hyde.
Nevertheless, the most sense that can be made from these depictions is through the biographical setting of Stevenson’s home. He was exposed to two contrasting places. There was one Edinburgh in New Town with respectable, conventional, courteous and deeply religious society. The other Edinburgh was having a Bohemian culture, brothels, crookedness and dishonesty. One side of the city had high class town houses and mansions with the respectable rich of the highest expectations and living standards. The other side had slums and desperate poverty. The gap was so abysmal that some of the rich were even attracted to wander at night in the dark alleys. They indulged in gambling, prostitution, brawling, heavy drinking and opium in the poorer part of the city, and return to act like the most respectable persons in the broad daylight. Still, they could not bring together the deep contrasts that laid in their own lives, and carried a heavy burden of superficial reputation. The contradictory sides of the people’s morals was enlivened and teased apart in the story of Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
The novel tells us of how a person creates his own troubles and makes his tragic end. It shows how a person’s weaknesses betray him and how evil progresses from a fascination to a mental and physical torment, to a destruction of goodness in him, ultimately leading to his elimination. Meddling with God’s creation of Human Disposition makes one forget the golden principles of a virtuous life and leads to the darkness of uncontrollable whimsical urges. The hypocrisy, the contrast of respectable rich versus the despicable rogues and the vile acts of the seemingly virtuous people that Stevenson points out at are also found in our large cities. Hence this novel brings a very relevant picture of our artificial morality and its preferred end.
Stevenson actually first dreamt of this as a nightmare when his wife interrupted the “fine bogy-tale”. Originally it was a simple horror story, but on his wife’s suggestions, he turned it into a full-length narrative with allegorical undertones in just three days. On publication in 1887, it was acclaimed everywhere as a grand work. This was Stevenson’s first full-length narrative, the critics maintained, that had an exciting as well as a well-composed story with a strong parable.
"Nothing Mr. Stevenson has written as yet has so strongly impressed us with the versatility of his very original genius," went an anonymous review in The Times concluding that the story "should be read as finished study in the art of fantastic literature."