Historical background
Victorian ethics, which were contradictory to the point of hypocrisy, featured a code of repressive sexual morality, leading to double standards. Society believed it had a duty to improve the lot of the poor and sinful. However, the professional police force was a Victorian innovation and the workhouses and debtors' prisons were also well-known institutions, while prostitution was rife.
A decade and a half before Stevenson published his horror story, Darwin had produced The Descent of Man. The idea that humans were the descendants of apes made an impact on a traditional society whose biblical story said that Adam and Eve had been created as different from and superior to other animals. Readers saw these animal traits in Hyde's troglodytic nature.
Literary background
The horror story has its roots in the Gothic novel dating back to before the Romantic period when Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein and continued into the late 19th. century through Bram Stoker's Dracula, E.A. Poe's short stories. Dostoyevsky’s novels The Double (1846) and Crime and Punishment (1866) also dealt with the doppelganger theme. In Jekyll and Hyde Stevenson used the gothic theme to build suspense and mystery in his novel.
Walter Scott's recurrent theme of a divided Scotland led to a fictional tradition which includes Stevenson, Neil Munro, Crockett, Buchan, Violet Jacob, and Naomi Mitchison. In Stevenson's novel this national theme of conflict was represented in an individual, the divided self as the Scottish psychiatrist, Laing, called it.
Stevenson had written the play Deacon Brodie, or the Double Life about an Edinburgh cabinetmaker and locksmith who, by night, used his lock-picking skills to rob the homes of the rich. The author's parents owned a cabinet built by Brodie whose tale was told in the house. This may have inspired the Jekyll and Hyde story.
(Published in the Eco de Sitges, Mar.2025)
