Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Robert Louis Stevenson
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the fact that Markheim’s visitor seems to have supernatural powers (he foresees the return of the maid) he seems resolutely tied, with ‘his strange air of the commonplace’ to the material world. In his eyes petty failings and grand crimes ‘differ not by the thickness of a nail’, for death ends all, and ‘when life is done my interest falls.’
This is a very materialistic devil, who favours death-bed repentances because they encourage others to sin and hope for forgiveness, when (in his eyes at least) nothing but what happens in this world is truly real. Here Stevenson’s roots in the dualistic tendencies of Scottish Calvinism seem to have led him to propose that the world belongs to the devil. (Technically this is akin to the Cathar heresy, but we shouldn’t forget that the visitor may turn out to be the devil anyway.) Indeed, the visitor goes on to argue very like a perversely inverted Calvinist, when he suggests that ‘the bad man is dear to me, not the bad act …’ Only Markheim’s surrender at the end can refute this reversed theology, whereupon the visitor’s features ‘brightened and softened with a tender triumph’, and we begin to wonder if the daemon was not an angel after all.
Yet, as was the case with Dostoevsky’s writing, the devil may still have the best tunes in a Stevenson story, for the imagery of Markheim’s disturbance is so much more memorable than the tale’s moral denouement manages to be. The images and symbols of disturbance start with the amorphousness of the fog in the streets outside, and go on to the little mirror, that ‘hand-conscience’ which Markheim cannot bear to look into, even before his sense of self is still further destablised by the murder he commits:
In many rich mirrors, some of home design, some from Venice or Amsterdam, he saw his face repeated and repeated, as it were an army of spies; his own eyes met and detected him …
In later passages, Markheim fears the ‘besieging army’ of people in the street, just as he fears other mens’ ‘observing eyes’, as if ‘the solid walls might become transparent and reveal his doing like those of bees in a glass hive; the stout planks might yield under his foot like quicksands and detain him in their clutch.’ Such a ‘wilful illegality of nature’ seems possible in his morbid and excited state, and indeed the same disturbance animates the inanimate world itself, from the dead dealer, that ‘bundle of old clothes, and pool of blood’ which begins to find ‘eloquent voices’, to the ‘many tongues’ of the striking clocks in that ‘dumb chamber’.
Vision and speech are at the heart of individual identity and social intercourse, but they are little comfort to Markheim, for everywhere he turns he can find only visions of himself as a spy, or of others ‘overlooking, while the inanimate world rings with voices of accusation. Of course these fears, like the ’visitor’ he meets, are only ‘a shadow of himself, rather as the black man was for old Darnaway. Yet ‘Markheim’, like ‘The Merry Men’, suggests a greater than merely personal disturbance at the heart of being, for an imagery of the sea, that symbol of universal unrest in the latter story, invades ‘Markheim’ too. In the first instance this is clearly part of the protagonist’s own hyper-excited state:
… the whole room was filled with noiseless bustle and kept heaving like a sea … the faces of the portraits and the china gods changing and wavering like images in water.
Identity crumbles at such moments, as when the murderer is terrorised by a knock at the shop door and feels himself to be ‘sunk beneath seas of silence; and his name, which would once have caught his notice above the howling of a storm, had become an empty sound.’ Yet this is no more than he has felt about life all along, and as Markheim tries to make conversation with the dealer in the opening pages it is difficult not to recognise a more universal insight in his remarks:
‘It is very pleasant to stand here talking; and life is so short and insecure that I would not hurry away from any pleasure – no not even from so mild a one as this. We should rather cling, cling to what little we can get, like a man at a cliffs edge. Every second is a cliff, if you think upon it – a cliff a mile high – high enough, if we fall, to dash us out of every feature of humanity.’
—Every second is a cliff, indeed, and the dealer’s shop is full of clocks whose eloquent voices remind him that time ‘which had closed for the victim, had become instant and momentous for the slayer’. He shuns mirrors after such a fall because humanity has indeed been dashed from his own features, and his life passes ‘soberly before him … ugly and strenuous like a dream, random as chance-medley – a scene of defeat.’ By comparison, death seems like ‘a quiet haven for his bark’ and he welcomes it ‘with something like a smile’.
Fog and the terrors of unstable identity reappear in Stevenson’s most famous story of doubleness and dissolution, compounded by a sense, too, of the protagonist’s loneliness in a maze of respectable streets and squares and noisome wynds and hidden entrances. Set in London as it undoubtedly is, our last tale could not be more clearly marked than it is by the Calvinist forces and the narrow Edinburgh vennels of Stevenson’s upbringing.
‘Conceived, written, re-written, re-re-written, and printed inside ten weeks’, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde was produced in ‘white-hot haste’ in the early winter of 1885. Pressed for money and ideas with equal urgency, Stevenson seems to have made the imaginative breakthrough by means of a screaming nightmare from which his wife awoke him. He wrote the dream down straight away, as a ‘fine bogey tale’ in which the identity of Hyde served simply as a disguise behind which Jekyll could sally forth to commit crimes. This draft was destroyed, however, when Stevenson, prompted by his wife, began to realise that his subject had a much richer symbolic dimension to offer. Despite the ill health which tied him ‘between bed and parlour’ in his house at Bournemouth, the ‘chronic sickist’ immediately poured all his energies into a second version of the story.
The rewritten tale gave him what he had long been moving towards, namely, ‘a body, a vehicle for that strong sense of man’s double being, which must at times come in upon and overwhelm the mind of every thinking creature’. This fascination was already present in ‘Thrawn Janet’, ‘The Merry Men’ and ‘Markheim’, nor should we forget the play about the secret life of the notorious Deacon Brodie which Stevenson and W. E. Henley had drafted together in the late 1870s. With Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, however, the author’s interest in man’s double being become completely explicit, and it was to be further developed in the tension between Alan Breck and David Balfour in Kidnapped (published six months later), and again in the deadly enmity between the two Dune brothers in The Master of Ballantrae, which appeared in 1889.
Intended as a paper-bound ‘shilling shocker’ for the Christmas market, the little book was held back by Longman’s for a month because the bookstalls were already replete with seasonal issues. So it was January 1886 before the Strange Case was first heard of in the streets of London and New York – where it had been published by Scribner’s four days earlier. After a slow start – its cheap paper covers did not commend it – the work came to the attention of critics in the quality press, who declared themselves to be ‘strongly impressed’ by its ‘very original genius’ and a ‘faultlessly ingenious construction’. Other readers responded to what they took to be the tale’s moral force, and before long it was being cited as a parable from pulpits throughout the country – a more than ironic fate, surely, since it was Dr Jekyll’s mistaken notion of Godliness which led to his dangerous experiments in the first place. Within six months over 40,000 copies were sold in Great Britain alone, while the story was parodied in Punch and quickly adapted for the stage on both sides of the Atlantic.
What Stevenson called his ‘Gothic gnome’ has led a hardy life ever since, and to this day many people know it mainly from its cruder versions on film, while ‘Jekyll and Hyde’ has passed into common speech, even among those who have never heard of its author. The end result of such success is that few of us can experience the text as its first readers must have done, and we may never be able to recapture the original thrill of horror and discovery when Jekyll’s dual identity is finally revealed. Yet it is a story of considerable power and subtlety, and one that touches the very core of its author’s insight: ‘the gnome is interesting’, he wrote, ‘and he came out of a deep mine, where he guards the fountain of tears’.
Nineteenth-century