What does Jekyll and Hyde represent?

The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde represents the Victorian belief that human character is divided between a respectable public self and a dangerous private self -- and the terror of what happens when that division breaks down.

Robert Louis Stevenson published The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde in 1886. It was an immediate commercial and cultural success, going through multiple printings in its first year. Stevenson said the idea came to him in a dream. The story he developed from it has become one of the most enduring myths of the modern era, referenced so widely that "Jekyll and Hyde" has entered common speech as a description of any person with dramatically split public and private behaviour.

What does the division of Jekyll and Hyde represent?#

At its most direct level, the story represents the Victorian doctrine of respectability and its costs. Dr Jekyll is everything a Victorian professional man should be: educated, generous, charitable, well-regarded. He is also a man with desires and impulses that his public position requires him to suppress completely.

Hyde is what those suppressed desires look like when they are given form and freedom. He is described physically in terms of deformity and "moral degeneration" -- Victorian readers would have recognised the connection to then-current pseudoscientific theories about criminality and biological degeneracy. Hyde is not merely naughty. He is the externally visible form of everything Victorian society classified as fundamentally incompatible with civilised life.

Stevenson's argument is that this suppression is the problem, not the solution. Jekyll's experiment does not control his hidden self. It gives it independent existence and autonomous desire. The suppressed self grows stronger, not weaker, through the act of periodic release.

What does Jekyll and Hyde represent about class?#

Hyde moves through a London of clubs, back streets, and night -- the geography of the city that exists alongside respectable London but is kept carefully separate from it. His violence is directed at the powerful (he beats Sir Danvers Carew, a Member of Parliament, to death) and his pleasures are associated with the lower city. The division between Jekyll and Hyde maps onto the class geography of Victorian London in ways that were fully legible to the novel's first readers.

Jekyll can access both worlds. He can be the respectable doctor and he can be Hyde, who exists in the other city. This double access is exactly what his class and professional position allows -- and what Stevenson is using the fantastical premise to make visible. Many wealthy Victorian men had access to a second, hidden life that their position protected.

What does the London fog mean in the novel?#

Stevenson uses the fog as Conrad would use it a decade later in Heart of Darkness: as a symbol of moral obscurity, of the hidden life that exists alongside the visible one. The London of Jekyll and Hyde is a city that conceals as much as it reveals. Hyde can move through it because the fog gives cover. Respectability requires exactly this kind of cover to function.

What does the ending represent?#

Jekyll's full statement, contained in the final chapter, is the novel's most sustained psychological document. He explains that he always knew he had a dual nature, that the pleasures he had to suppress were not exceptional -- they were ordinary desires that his position required him to pretend he did not have. The experiment gave those desires a body. The body became autonomous. He lost control of which self he was.

The ending -- Hyde dead on the floor, Jekyll's letter the only explanation, no witness -- preserves the respectability that Jekyll spent his life protecting, posthumously. The secret dies with him. Utterson burns the documents. Victorian society's appetite for concealment is satisfied even in catastrophe.

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Further reading#

For another Victorian novel that uses a hidden self as its central device, what Dorian Gray's portrait represents covers Wilde's version of the same anxiety, published five years later.

For other gothic novels of the same period available free on Foxing, the best gothic novels in the public domain includes Stevenson alongside Stoker, Shelley, and the Brontes.

The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is in the Foxing catalog, free.

Sources#

• Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Longmans, Green and Co., 1886
• William Veeder and Gordon Hirsch, eds., Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde After One Hundred Years, University of Chicago Press, 1988
• Stephen Heath, "Psychopathia Sexualis: Stevenson's Strange Case," Critical Quarterly, 1986