#Spooktober-‘Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde’ by Robert Louis Stevenson

About the book..

His innovative thriller, as shocking now as when it was first published, the Penguin Classics edition of Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Other Tales of Terror is edited with an introduction by Robert Mighall.

Published as a ‘shilling shocker’, Robert Louis Stevenson’s dark psychological fantasy gave birth to the idea of the split personality. The story of respectable Dr Jekyll’s strange association with the ‘damnable young man’ Edward Hyde; the hunt through fog-bound London for a killer; and the final revelation of Hyde’s true identity is a chilling exploration of humanity’s basest capacity for evil. The other stories in this volume also testify to Stevenson’s inventiveness within the Gothic tradition: ‘Olalla’, a tale of vampirism and tainted family blood, and ‘The Body Snatcher’, a gruesome fictionalisation of the exploits of the notorious Burke and Hare.

This edition contains a critical introduction by Robert Mighall, which discusses class, criminality and the significance of the story’s London setting. It also includes an essay on the scientific contexts of the novel and the development of the idea of the Jekyll-and-Hyde personality and is available wherever good books are sold.

A perennial classic which, in my humble opinion, completes the triumvirate of horror influences alongside ‘Dracula’ and ‘Frankenstein’, ‘Jekyll and Hyde’ will forever live on in the mind of most of us as emblematic of the battle between good and evil that rages in the heart of all human beings.

The horror exists in the way that science and religion are used as a battleground for morality-here, the way that the notion of being purely good, or purely evil, is posited as beyond a choice, it is an inherited , genetic part of our personality and therefore can be gotten rid of, is initially intriguing.

But it becomes clear that separating the two halves does not elevate goodness over evil-instead, it gives a gateway to something grotesque, and hellish, with nothing and no boundaries to stop it doing whatsoever it wishes, in the face of the morals of the time. This includes, it is suggested, neferarious practices, gambling, physical violence and even murder.

Recounted by Mr Utterson, the friend of the erstwhile Dr Jekyll who sought merely to improve the lot of men, it is a chilling and gothic story of terror, where the psychological burden of the story lays heavily across the relatively short length of 72 pages.

The choice between doing good things to balance out the bad is what we do on a daily basis, it is something wrestled with based on nature, nurture, lived experience and relative proclivities about which some can do nothing (for example, those who exhibit psychopathy and sociopathy).

The outrage with which Jekyll’s notion is met, alongside the subsequent adventures of his dark half as night falls on the streets of Edinburgh is genuinely chilling, not for the things which alter ego, Hyde, undertakes, but because of the pure potential of true evil to walk amongst us. As with other classic horror such as Dorian Gray, the notion that goodness conveys beauty and ugliness badness is taken to the next level where he , Hyde, gives off a pure scent of evil that makes others flinch away from him, the opposite of how the godly Jekyll draws those near.

The wretched sequelae of his experiments are the destruction of scientific notions, a religious experience that transcends any quantifiable understanding and , ultimately, destruction. Even all these decades later, reading it again, you are struck anew by the reflective quality of the writing, the timelessness of the tale and again, the pure horror of what lays in the soul of all of us. It’s the age old tale of just because we could, doesn’t mean we should…

The story around this novel being so terrifying that Stevenson, who wrote it in a fever of ill health, showed his wife and she demanded it be immediately destroyed it, and re-wrote again to be even more disturbing, has reached the mythical level of Stephen King’s wife, Tabby, rescuing Carrie from the dustbin.

As I read it again, so many years after first doing so, it casts a long shadow from which so many adaptations have been developed, in movies and in books. Little did Stevenson realise that when he published this novel, that it would stand as the first psychological horror novel, and that it would fascinate over a century later, the minds and hearts of so many creators of dark arts…

About the author…

Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894) was born in Edinburgh, the son of a prosperous civil engineer.

Although he began his career as an essayist and travel writer, the success of Treasure Island (1883) and Kidnapped (1886) established his reputation as a writer of tales of action and adventure.

Stevenson’s Calvinist upbringing lent him a preoccupation with predestination and a fascination with the presence of evil, themes he explored in The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), and The Master of Ballantrae (1893).

Links-https://www.bl.uk/romantics-and-victorians/articles/duality-in-robert-louis-stevensons-strange-case-of-dr-jekyll-and-mr-hyde