Jekyll and Hyde by Stevenson

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)

Tess of the D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy

 

Historical context

Victorian society at end of the 19th century in the UK continued the painful social changes involved in the gradual transition from an agricultural economy to an industrial one. It organised itself around gender and class:

The rising middle class in the form of bankers, businessmen and entrepreneurs brought new money to power the factories.  They increasing displaced the old land aristocracies which fell into a lower social class: the D'Urbervilles had become the Durbeyfields. Tess's father's fantasy of restored aristocratic lineage was that, an illusion. This portrayal was not well received by Hardy's conservative Victorian society.

Gender was based on biology. Its ideology was founded on the premise of separate spheres which divided men and women into dual entities, the more negative attributes being feminine: strong/weak, sex/reproduction, independent/dependent, public/private.

Literary context

Novels in the Victorian age tended towards a realistic depiction of contemporary social life. Thackeray described the upper-class through Becky Sharp, the social climber. Dickens focused on the under class and their exploitation. Eliot centred attention on the rising middle class. Hardy's fictional niche was the rural class. Each writer reflected on the practical problems of their chosen social environment and also offered criticism of its organisation.

Morality was another common theme in Victorian literature. It shone a light on the double standards of the day where ethical behaviour was coded, but the higher the class the more skeptically it was adhered to. The banker in Middlemarch, the mill owner in Hard Times, Ms. Sharp in Vanity Fair and the false D'Urberville in Hardy's novel were all disdainful of the accepted moral code.

Discussion

The subtitle of the novel in this month's Sitges bookclub reads: A Pure Woman. Quite on the contrary, this tale of Tess can be interpreted as the story of a fall from innocence. It is narrated through Tess's constant feeling of guilt for her rape and the birth of a baby she named Sorrow. The religious theme of blame also touches the other main characters in the book: Angel, who blames himself for deserting Tess, and Alec, who converts to Methodism to repent for the rape.

Another fall theme in the book is the loss of aristocratic lineage: the D'Urbervilles became the Durbeyfields, a descent from nobility to peasantry. Hardy gives the lie to Victorian pretensions to grandeur by exposing Alec as a fake D'Urberville and characterising Tess's peasant father as a quixotic "Sir John D'Urberville" who lives in a parallel reality.

Though the novel centres on Tess it joins other classic stories of the era by offering a realistic depiction of contemporary life. Hardy's fictional choice was the rural class, dedicated to agriculture in a country that was rapidly industrialising. His nostalgic realism captures the fading world of farming and its workers.

Nature plays a background role in Hardy's book. Many chapters set the scene through a description of the season or the weather. In this fashion the narrator primes the reader about the sentiments of the characters, which he then develops. These descriptions of nature envelop the story in a context where the rhythms of life were dictated by the seasons. This regularity was already being broken by the demanding "red tyrant", a primitive thresher that sets the pace for the farm workers. Industrialisation was changing natural time into tyrannical machine time.

Superstition pervades the tale. When no rational explanation is available, fabled interpretations take over. Tess is forced by Alec to swear on a stone that marks the spot where a man had been executed for selling his soul to the devil, a foreshadowing of Tess's condemnation. Supernatural explanations also take a sinister turn and become fate. Her destiny comes in the chapter, "Fulfilment", where the novel concludes by drawing a parallel between Tess's execution and the deterministic finale of a Greek play. However, Tess's execution is not portrayed as a dramatic climax, but more as the passing of a milkmaid. Her lifestory was an prosaic affair, and her death forms part of the "sport" of the gods. Life "went on".

(Published in the Eco de Sitges, Feb.2025)

Middlemarch by George Eliot

 

Historical background 

When Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life was published in 1891, the U.K. was in a rapid process of industrialisation. The economy base was changing from agriculture and cottage industries to urban factory manufacture. The landowners who had held all the wealth were gradually being replaced by bankers like Bulstrode and manufacturers like Mr. Vincy, whose wealth took the form of money, not land. For the next generation it became important to have a profession in order to maintain a status in this fluctuating society, especially if they had no inheritance like Lydgate, Ladislaw and Fred Vincy, since their capital was their brains.

The 1830 July revolution in France and the overthrow of the king, Charles X, influenced risings in Belgium, Poland, Italy and Germany. The effect in the U.K. was the Reform Act of 1832. Middlemarch takes place between 1829 and 1832, during the struggle for political reform, which ended in the passage of the First Reform Bill in June 1832. Just as the middle class became economically powerful its interest in political power grew. Landowners had dominated Parliament through the system of 'rotten boroughs' whereby parliamentary seats were bought and sold among wealthy aristocrats. The cities were controlled by the middle class, but they were very much unrepresented in this arrangement. They launched a campaign to change the electoral system. The Reform Bill passed in the Commons, by one vote, yet the Lords threw the bill out. The Middlemarch narrative ends here, but a few weeks later the Bill passed, narrowly avoiding a rebellion.

Literary background 

Middlemarch forms part of the mid-19th. century movement of realism. Balzac in France had previously written a history of his countrymen in La Comédie Humaine. Dumas, fils, had published his romantic novel La Dame aux Camélias in 1848. Flaubert's Madame Bovary (1857) is considered a criticism of romanticism in favour of realism, as it plots the tragic results in the life of the romantic protagonist.

Episodios nacionales by Pérez Galdós were a series of historical novels outlining the major events in Spanish history. The first novel, Trafalgar (1873), was based on eyewitness accounts of the battle, such as the cabin boy's, the main character of the novel, who had been on board the Santísima Trinidad ship at Trafalgar. Leopoldo Alas (Clarin) published socially critical pamphlets known as paliques (“chitchat”), and his masterpiece, La Regenta (1884–85), is often compared to Madame Bovary for its criticism of social mores in Oviedo.

In the U.S., realist writers included Samuel Clemens (the pen name of Mark Twain), who authored the picaresque novel Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), and displayed realism in its colloquial American speech. US realist fiction includes Stephen Crane's battlefield novel, The Red Badge of Courage, set in the Civil War, which was published in 1895.

In the Bookclub session we will focus on the text.

Mind map of characters in Middlemarch:

Discussion

In the February Sitges bookclub session we discussed Middlemarch by George Eliot, the pen name of Mary Ann Evans. 

The period covered by the novel is a flashback to the years between 1829 and 1832. It is one of accelerated political and economic change. The U.K. was in a rapid process of industrialisation and the new middle class pushed for political change in the Reform Bill of 1832. The economy base was changing from agriculture and cottage industries to urban factory manufacture. The landowners who held all the wealth were gradually replaced by bankers like Bulstrode and manufacturers like Mr. Vincy. Their wealth took the form of money, not land. For the next generation it also became important to have a profession in order to maintain a status in this fluctuating society, especially if they had no inheritance like Lydgate, Ladislaw and Fred Vincy. Their capital was their brains.

The title refers to a fictitious small town and the subtitle clears up any doubts: A Study of Provincial Life. Unlike novels of the previous century whose main character was an individual, like Crusoe or Tom Jones, Eliot chose to focus on the web of relationships which bound her individuals. Other contemporary writers also chose society as their topic, not individuals, like Dickens, who portrayed the life of the social underdogs, or Thackeray, whose characters were of aristocratic families, or social climbers. However, Eliot centred her descriptions on another class, the bourgeoisie: bankers, manufacturers and landowners. It's not an epic story of someone like Teresa de Avila, whom Eliot refers to in her Preface, but of those remembered in the last lines of the book: "who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs." It's an account of the rise of the Victorian middle class.

Eliot weaves her narrative of relationships around two main characters, Dorothea and Ladislaw, whose parallel stories help to clear a path through the intricate maze of connections among the characters. Similarly to Thackeray, the authoress identifies them in families that are then intertwined. The different relationships are built up through bourgeois interests: love, money and trade. Each family has a representative of one of the themes, which are replicated in each household. Love is often unrequited, money has to be earned and trade is sometimes unsuccessful. This is not the painless story of Victorian progress, but an empathetic view of vicissitudes in a changing society. Virginia Woolf notably described Middlemarch as "one of the few English novels written for grown-up people.". It is indeed fictional realism, penned both with sympathy and incisiveness.

(Published in the Eco de Sitges, Jan.2025)