The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde PDF Novel

  THE STRANGE CASE OF DR JEKYLL AND MR HYDE         was born in Edinburgh in . The son of a prosperous civil engineer, he was expected to follow the family profession but ﬁnally was allowed to study law at Edinburgh University. Stevenson reacted violently against the Presbyterian respectability of the city’s professional classes and this led to painful clashes with his parents. In his early twenties he became aﬄicted with a severe respira- tory illness from which he was to suﬀer for the rest of his life; it was at this time that he determined to become a professional writer. In  he travelled to California to marry Fanny Osbourne, an American ten years his senior. Together they continued his search for a climate kind to his fragile health, eventually settling in Samoa, where he died on  December . Stevenson began his literary career as an essayist and travel-writer, but the success of Treasure Island () and Kidnapped () established his reputation for tales of action and adventure. Kidnapped, and its sequel Catriona (), The Master of Ballantrae and stories such as ‘Thrawn Janet’ and ‘The Merry Men’ also reveal his knowledge and feeling for the Scottish cultural past. Stevenson’s Calvinistic upbringing gave him a preoccupation with pre-destination and a fascination with the pres- ence of evil. In Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde he explores the darker side of the human psyche, and the character of the Master in The Master of Ballantrae () was intended to be ‘all I know of the Devil’. During the last years of his life Stevenson’s creative range developed considerably and The Beach of Falesá brought to ﬁction the kind of scenes now associated with Conrad and Maugham. At the time of his death Robert Louis Stevenson was working on Weir of Hermiston, at once a romantic historical novel and an emotional reworking of one of Stevenson’s own most distressing experiences, the conﬂict between father and son.   completed a Ph.D. on Gothic ﬁction and Victorian medico-legal science at the University of Wales, and then spent three years as a post-doctoral fellow at Merton College, University of Oxford. In  he became the editor of Penguin Classics, and now works in London as a consultant. His publications include an edition of Oscar Wilde’s poems for Everyman Paperbacks, and a study of Victorian Gothic ﬁction for Oxford University Press (). He has also edited Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray for Penguin Classics. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.                  Edited by     PENGUIN BOOKS Published by the Penguin Group: Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England Penguin Putnam Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA Penguin Books Australia Ltd., 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell,Victoria3124, Australia Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue,Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2 Penguin Books India (P) Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi – 110 017, India Penguin Books (NZ) Ltd, Cnr Rosedale and Airborne Roads, Albany, Auckland, New Zealand Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank 2196, South Africa Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England This edition first published in Penguin Classics, 2002 First edition electronic: 2002 Introduction, ‘Diagnosing Jekyll...’ and Notes copyright © Robert Mighall, 2002 All rights reserved The moral right of the editor has been asserted Making or distributing electronic copies of this book constitutes copyright infringement and could subject the infringer to civil and/or criminal liability, where applicable. No parts of this book may be reproduced by any means without prior written permission of the publisher. UK: ISBN: 014188374X in MS Reader format ISBN: 0141883758 in Adobe eReader format US: ISBN: 0786514914 in MS Reader format ISBN: 0786514922 in Adobe eReader format   vi  vii  ix   xxxix      xliii Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde  The Body Snatcher  Olalla  A Chapter on Dreams (abridged)  Diagnosing Jekyll: the Scientiﬁc Context to Dr Jekyll’s Experiment and Mr Hyde’s Embodiment By Robert Mighall     Thanks to the British Library, the Radcliﬀe Science Library, Oxford, the London Library and to Tower Hamlets Local Studies Library. Many thanks to Neil Rennie, Matthew Sweet, James Morton and Simon Bradley for help with various queries. Thanks to Myrna Blum- berg, and to Laura Barber, my wonderful editor.   Born Robert Lewis Balfour Stevenson (he would later adopt the French form ‘Louis’) on  November , in Edinburgh. His father Thomas came from a long line of engineers (famous in Scotland for their lighthouses), and his mother Margaret Isabella Balfour was from a family of lawyers.  Moves to  Heriot Row in Edinburgh’s New Town district.  Enrols at Edinburgh University to follow in the family tradi- tion and study engineering, but soon abandons this to study law.  Passes ‘advocate’ and is called to the Scottish Bar, but never practises.  Starts publishing in magazines, his early works are mostly travel pieces drawing on his experiences in various countries. Meets Fanny Osbourne, an American of thirty-six who was separated from her husband.  An Inland Voyage published, an account of a journey by canoe in northern France.  Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes is published recounting his adventures in southern France.  Joins Fanny in California, an account of which he later pub- lished as The Amateur Emigrant ().  Marries Fanny.  Virginia Puerisque (essays) published.  New Arabian Nights, a collection of short stories published.  The Silverado Squatters published, which recounts his honeymoon in a Californian silver mine. Treasure Island, one of the most vii chronology famous children’s adventure stories, is also published, which starts to establish his reputation as a writer.  Moves to Bournemouth, to a house which they re-name ‘Skerrymore’ in honour of one of Stevenson’s ancestor’s light- houses. ‘The Body Snatcher’ published at Christmas.  Prince Otto and The Dynamiter published. ‘Olalla’ published at Christmas.  Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde published in January, originally intended for Christmas , but withdrawn owing to a rather full market. First editions of this novel retain the  date on the title page. This was the work that made Stevenson’s reputation. Kidnapped published.  The Merry Men and Other Fables published. Death of Thomas Stevenson.  The Stevensons’ ﬁrst trip to the South Seas. (The Whitechapel Murders take place in East London while a stage version of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is playing on the London stage. It is with- drawn out of public delicacy.)  The Master of Ballantrae published. The Wrong Box, written with his stepson Lloyd Osbourne, published. Settles in the Samoan Islands.  ‘The Beach of Falsea’ published.  Island Nights’ Entertainments and Catriona (the sequel to Kidnapped) published.  The Ebb-Tide published. Dies in Samoa in December of tuber- culosis.  The unﬁnished Weir of Hermiston published.  Death of Fanny Stevenson. viii  Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde () is one of the most famous works of horror ﬁction of all time. Like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein () and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (), Jekyll and Hyde, or at least a version of its central idea, resides in the collective consciousness. It has been the subject of many ﬁlms, featured in countless sketches, cartoons and parodies, and the term ‘Jekyll-and- Hyde personality’ has entered our language, describing someone who lives a double-life of outward sanctity and secret iniquity. If the popular press discovers that the latest serial killer, homicidal maniac or even petty fraudster did not spend all his daylight hours pursuing these activities, and occasionally acted like his neighbours, chances are it will suggest that X is displaying ‘Jekyll-and-Hyde’ tendencies, a useful shorthand for sensationalist reportage, and perhaps a way of making us scrutinize our neighbours more closely. It is testimony to Stevenson’s inventiveness as a writer that his creation has this independent exist- ence over a hundred years after his tale was ﬁrst published. And yet, despite this almost universal familiarity with the idea of Jekyll and Hyde, it is also true that Stevenson’s story is more known about than actually known, and that many of those who believe they know what it is about, have not actually read the hundred pages that comprise the tale. They would ﬁnd there something diﬀerent from what they imagined: a more complex, rewarding and disturbing story than the version that has been handed down in popular cultural form. Those who are about to read the Strange Case and the other tales collected here for the ﬁrst time, would do best to return to this Introduction after they have read them, as it is necessary to reveal speciﬁc plot ix introduction details for the purposes of discussion. New readers will also ﬁnd the experience more rewarding if they forget all their preconceptions, and put themselves in the position of Stevenson’s ﬁrst readers who knew nothing about ‘Jekyll and Hyde’. Christmas Crawlers Robert Louis Stevenson wrote his most famous story in October  when he was thirty-ﬁve. He was living in Bournemouth with his wife Fanny and Lloyd Osbourne, her son from an earlier marriage. Stevenson’s letters along with some observations in ‘A Chapter on Dreams’ (abridged in this volume), reveal that he was ﬁnding himself under ﬁnancial constraint at the time. He had been a professional writer since the age of twenty-one, but was still dependent on his father, a matter of some embarrassment. The tale was written for a commercial market, so that he could pay the likes of ‘Byles the butcher’.¹ It was his ﬁrst really successful work, enabling him to be ﬁnancially independent for the ﬁrst time. To ensure its success, Stevenson turned his fertile imagination to creating a ‘ﬁne bogey tale’ to satisfy a large market for such literature. Stevenson’s editor at Longmans asked him to write a ‘shilling shocker’ for Christmas , a season traditionally associated with supernatural and creepy tales. Charles Dickens’s most famous ghost story ‘A Christ- mas Carol’, was just one of many he produced in this tradition, whilst Stevenson himself wrote ‘The Body Snatcher’ and ‘Olalla’ for publication for Christmas  and . As it turned out, the Christ- mas  book market was crowded, so publication was delayed until January; but from the start the Strange Case was conceived as a ‘crawler’, a sensational tale of supernatural incident designed to produce a pleasurable chill in its readers. It is worth considering this tradition, as it helps us understand how his tale conforms to, but also departs from and innovates within, a mode upon which it would have enormous inﬂuence. Horror ﬁction really started with Horace Walpole’s Gothic novel The Castle of Otranto published on Christmas Eve . His tale of x introduction spectres, portents, family curses and bizarre supernatural occurrences was written partly as a joke, being presented as a medieval manuscript that had been ‘discovered’ by an eighteenth-century antiquarian and presented as a curiosity for a modern enlightened readership. Many were taken in by Walpole’s ruse, and many enjoyed the new experience of reading material associated with folk legends and chivalric romances in the pages of a novel, a form hitherto concerned with the modern and the everyday, the probable and the realistic. Others followed, and by the turn of the nineteenth century critics were complaining that ﬁction was inundated with stories of diabolical revenges and family curses, set in ancient castles or monasteries deep in gloomy forests, and involving proud Italian or Spanish nobles and the machinations of corrupt ecclesiastics. Most early Gothic stories, even the best by Ann Radcliﬀe, Matthew Lewis or Charles Maturin, were set in distant times, and/or (usually Catholic) countries. There was an understand- ing, held by author and reader alike, that such horrors were far removed from those who avidly consumed such ﬁctions (middle-class Protestants in London, Edinburgh or Bath), that they could only take place in ‘less civilized’ ages or places. Stevenson himself writes within this tradition in his short story ‘Olalla’, which he published a few weeks before Jekyll and Hyde. This story of atavism and a form of pathological ‘vampirism’ set in an ancient aristocratic mansion in a remote part of Spain is a typical Gothic tale. Its opening conforms to what Victor Sage has called ‘the paradigm of the horror-plot: the journey from the capital... to the provinces’.² Its long description of the journey from the city to the remote mountainous domicile creates atmosphere and builds expectations of suspense and the supernatural through a technique that would serve horror ﬁction from Ann Radcliﬀe’s Mysteries of Udolpho () to Bram Stoker’s Dracula () and beyond: ‘The country through which we went was wild and rocky, partially covered with rough woods, now of the cork-tree, and now of the great Spanish chestnut, and frequently intersected by the beds of mountain torrents...’ The narrator travels to the residencia in this remote region to recover from his war wounds, and (ironically, given the outcome) to ‘renew [his] blood’. He ﬁnds there a typically labyrinthine, xi introduction ruinous and picturesque old ediﬁce, which he compares with the ‘sleeping palace of the legend’, home to an aristocratic family as decayed as their ancestral mansion. As with Poe’s ‘House of Usher’ (), and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s House of the Seven Gables (), ‘house’ (building) is the physical expression of ‘House’ (family or lineage). Chris Baldick, in a very useful introduction to the Gothic, observes that this ‘ﬁction is characteristically obsessed with old build- ings as the sites of human decay. The Gothic castle or house is not just an old and sinister building; it is a house of degeneration, even of decomposition...’³ Geography and environment thus go beyond providing atmospheric eﬀects, and oﬀer a suitable location to explore the themes of the tale. These also conform to Gothic type according to Baldick’s deﬁnition. For, ‘typically a Gothic tale will invoke the tyranny of the past (a family curse, the survival of archaic forms of despotism and of superstition) with such weight as to stiﬂe the hopes of the present...’ (p. xix). This is the deﬁning property of the Gothic mode, which is characterized by its attitude to the past, its tyrannies, legacies and unwelcome survivals or returns. In ‘Olalla’ the unwelcome legacy takes a very precise form, and provides a modern and materialist application of this central concern. On meeting his strange hostess and her simpleton son, the narrator makes the connection between architecture and ancestry: ‘The family blood had been impoverished, perhaps by long inbreeding, which I knew to be a common error among the proud and the exclusive.’ The ancestral ‘curse’ was a staple theme of Gothic ﬁction from The Castle of Otranto onwards. But whilst Walpole depicts a supernatural mechanism avenging ancestral crime through a number of generations, Stevenson’s emphasis is biological. The burden of the past is carried in the bodies of descendants. ‘Evil’ becomes a reproductive issue, which blights the happiness of the innocent girl Olalla, compelled to renounce her romantic attachment to the gallant soldier who intrudes upon her secluded detachment from the modern world, through a fear that the hereditary taint will aﬄict their oﬀspring. Pointing to a portrait of a distant ancestor of evil reputation whom both she and her mother resemble, Olalla reasons with the besotted protagonist: xii introduction... Others, ages dead, have wooed other men with my eyes; other men have heard the pleading of the same voice that now sounds in your ears. The hands of the dead are in my bosom; they move me, they pluck me, they guide me; I am a puppet at their command; and I but reinform features and attributes that have long been laid aside from evil in the quiet of the grave. Is it me you love, friend? or the race that made me?... individual succeeds to individual, mocked with a semblance of self-control, but they are nothing. We speak of the soul, but the soul is in the race... Here Stevenson provides a modern twist to the conventional Gothic theme of aristocratic family curses and ancestral returns, adapting it to the concerns of mental pathology or what was termed ‘social hygiene’ at the time, making Olalla’s mother a biological revenant and perhaps even the ﬁrst post-Darwinian ‘vampire’.⁴ For this emphasis on lineal repetition as a form of extended generational life provides a chilling hint of the ‘vampirism’ displayed by the hostess of this remote castle. The soldier has cut himself, and seeks help from the usually lethargic mother: Her great eyes opened wide, the pupils shrank into points; a veil seemed to fall from her face, and leave it sharply expressive and yet inscrutable. And as I still stood, marvelling a little at her disturbance, she came swiftly up to me, and stooped and caught me by the hand; and the next moment my hand was at her mouth, and she had bitten me to the bone. The pang of the bite, the sudden spurting of blood, and the monstrous horror of the act, ﬂashed through me all in one, and I beat her back; and she sprang at me again and again, with bestial cries... There is no evidence beyond the superstitions of the local peasantry that the mother actually belongs to the Undead. Here, ‘vampirism’, like the suggestion of extended life through lineal repetition ﬁgured in the portrait, is largely metaphorical, supposedly a manifestation of her pathological inheritance. The ‘blood’ is impoverished, so it seeks renewal from healthy stock. In this way Stevenson cleverly adapts, and innovates within, the conventional framework of Gothic ﬁction. He uses the stock features of the mode to explore contemporary concerns and emphases, something he would take even further in the xiii introduction Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, which is also concerned with forms of atavistic return, but which dispenses altogether with the remote geographical setting of the conventional Gothic tale. However, before examining what made Jekyll and Hyde so original, it is worth brieﬂy considering one further horror story, which oﬀers a contrast to, but also anticipates aspects of, that more famous tale published two years later. Stevenson’s ‘The Body Snatcher’ () was also written for the Christmas ghost story market, and is in many ways an even more traditional example of that form. Its opening conforms to the narrative convention of grisly deeds recounted in hushed voices around the ﬁreside on a winter’s night. Fettes, the local drunk, is roused from his habitual stupor by the reference to a name he has not heard spoken for many years, but which has evidently haunted his memory in the intervening decades: ‘Fettes became instantly sober; his eyes awoke, his voice became clear, loud, and steady, his language forcible and earnest; we were all startled by this transformation, as if a man had risen from the dead.’ This analogy (which is also partly a pun) is ironic in a number of ways, for the transformation of this ‘deadbeat’ into lively sobriety is triggered by an association with exactly that: the ghostly return of a ‘long-dead and long-dissected’ corpse. This actual supernatural occurrence is saved for the chilling denouement of the story, but is pre-ﬁgured by the subject matter of the tale which Fettes relates to the anonymous narrator. This ﬁnal, literal haunting ﬁnds its metaphorical counterpart in the return of the man who was Fettes’s fellow witness to the resurrection of Gray, and the way both of them have obviously been haunted by its horrible memory ever since: ‘Fettes clutched him by the arm, and these words came in a whisper, and yet painfully distinct, ‘‘Have you seen it again?’’ ’ ‘It’ is the ghost of Gray, the man Macfarlene murdered, who returns in the place of a body the two students had disinterred from a lonely rural grave for the purposes of dissection for surgical instruction. Fettes ‘rising from the dead’ at the start, and the return of Gray at the shocking conclusion, provide literal and metaphorical frames to a narrative about the exploits of what were called ‘resurrection men’, traders in human corpses. It is in these central incidents, recalling dark deeds from the annals xiv introduction of true crime from the ‘bad old days’ of the early part of the century, that we ﬁnd preﬁgurations of the concerns which Stevenson would develop fully in Jekyll and Hyde, but in a contemporary context. ‘The Body Snatcher’ is a ﬁctionalized account of events that occurred in Edinburgh in the s, but which were still notorious in the popular imagination. Burke and Hare posed as body snatchers, supposedly supplying resurrected corpses to the anatomical schools, but turned out to be murderers, selling bodies that had never been buried. (For full details of the historical background to this tale see note  to ‘The Body Snatcher’). Robert Knox, a famous, and then infamous, surgeon whom these two supplied with ‘subjects’, was publicly implicated in this scandal and appears in the sidelines of Stevenson’s tale. His representative, the ﬁctional ‘Dr Wolfe Macfarlene’, takes a more central role, and is shown to be actually guilty of murder like the notorious grave robbers with whom he deals. Through this shift in emphasis from the avowedly criminal Burke and Hare (portrayed ﬂeetingly), to the guilty secrets of the young medical students, Stevenson appears to be more interested in exploring the theme of a double life that he would make his own in his most famous tale. For Macfarlane (and to an extent Fettes) can be considered in part ances- tors of Jekyll. The narrator describes Fettes when a student at the medical school: Cold, light, and selﬁsh in the last resort, he had that modicum of prudence, miscalled morality, which keeps a man from inconvenient drunkenness or punishable theft. He coveted besides a measure of consideration from his masters and his fellow-pupils, and he had no desire to fail conspicuously in the external parts of life. Thus he made it his pleasure to gain some distinction in his studies, and day after day rendered unimpeachable service to his employer, Mr K —. For his day of work he indemniﬁed himself by nights of roaring blackguardly enjoyment; and, when the balance had been struck, the organ that he called his conscience declared itself content. Fettes is a profound ‘double-dealer’: seeking ‘consideration’ from his professional peers in the light of day, but oﬀsetting this with what would be considered the exact opposite behaviour – blackguardly enjoyment – in the hours of darkness (sounding very much like Jekyll, xv introduction who believes that he is personally absolved from all of Hyde’s crimes). This inverted logic ironically infers that his dishonourable behaviour ‘indemniﬁed’ him for his daylight industry and sobriety, achieving a form of ethical balance. But this is undermined by the knowledge that part of his ‘service’ to his employer involves supplying the corpses upon which the anatomy school depended. This detail disrupts the neat dichotomy between daylight and nocturnal behaviour, and de- cidedly tips the moral equilibrium Fettes believes he maintains. It is tipped further when he is encouraged by Macfarlane to turn a blind eye to the murder of Gray, who Fettes receives as another ‘subject’ for dissection, full-knowing its provenance. The ﬁnal return of Gray’s ghostly corpse on a body-snatching expedition ﬁnally overturns Fettes’s contrived compact with his conscience, and accounts for the ruined state he presents at the start of the tale, having abandoned all claims to respectability. Not so his fellow witness, the man who actually murdered Gray, and oﬀered him up to surgical dissection. Wolfe Macfarlane, ‘the great London Doctor’, who visits the George Inn many years after that terrible night... was richly dressed in the ﬁnest of broadcloth and the whitest of linen, with a great gold watch chain and studs and spectacles of the same precious material;... and he carried on his arm a comfortable driving-coat of fur. There was no doubt but he became his years, breathing, as he did, of wealth and consideration; and it was a surprising contrast to see our parlour sot [drunk], bald, dirty, pimpled, and robed in an old camlet cloak, confront him at the bottom of the stairs. ‘Macfarlane,’ he said, somewhat loudly, more like a herald than a friend. This contrasts the two parts of duplicitous personality – roaring black- guardly excess; and sober and respectable industry – that the narrative dissects and explores. This confrontation between the representatives of the daylight and the nocturnal hours could be seen as a preﬁguration of Jekyll seeing the features of Hyde for the ﬁrst time. For what Macfarlane beholds is his exact counterpart in the ruined features of Fettes, who acts as his suppressed conscience. The true ‘haunting’ is this bringing to account of a long-buried crime of a respectable and successful man. xvi introduction This pattern of suppressed guilt, of a double life of daylight respect- ability and nocturnal transgression, of the ‘ghost’ of old crimes over- taking their perpetrators, contained here within a fairly conventional supernatural tale, would be developed in a far more subtle and dis- turbing way in the next story Stevenson wrote for the Christmas Crawler market. Written exactly a year later, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde dispenses entirely with the distancing devices of the traditional Gothic – set ‘over there’ in southern Spain, or ‘back then’ in the near or distant past. It is set in London in the present day, and situates horror within a respectable individual, with its vision of evil reﬂecting on a much broader section of society than had perhaps been hitherto suggested in popular ﬁction. While the ‘supernatural’ element is given a degree of plausibility, coming close to the techniques of ‘Science Fiction’ in the inference that Jekyll’s experiment might be repeated if he had only supplied the formula. Finally, its narrative method of collected contemporaneous testimony gives it a greater sensational immediacy, and authenticity than the ﬁreside recollections of the traditional ghost story form. The following pages will explore what makes this story one of the most important and inﬂuential horror stories since The Castle of Otranto; starting with its narrative technique. Testimony Horror ﬁction has a tradition of narrative complexity. From Charles Robert Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer () and James Hogg’s Memoirs and Confessions of a Justiﬁed Sinner () to Dracula () the tale of terror has rarely been presented ‘straight’. Narratives often purport to be assembled from a number of discreet manuscripts, letters or testimonies, which combined provide a (more or less) coherent account of events. This technique became the trade mark of the so-called ‘Sensation’ school of ﬁction (a form of suburban Gothic) which emerged in the s when writers like Wilkie Collins constructed thrilling narratives out of letters, diaries and individual testimonies and confessions. Stevenson’s tale in part conforms to this pattern, where two of the most important revelatory chapters (the ninth and xvii introduction tenth) are discreet documents written by protagonists, while a third (the fourth) is partly presented as a newspaper report of a grisly crime. Such a technique serves the interests of veracity, as the various documents are supposedly more ‘real’ than the overtly artiﬁcial obser- vations of an omniscient narrator who has no existence within the world of the ﬁction. It serves suspense, as the individual contributors do not know the full outcome of events, delaying complete explanation until the ﬁnal pages. And it helps to heighten the emotional impact of the narration, as Dr Lanyon’s own account of the shocking spectacle of Hyde turning into Jekyll, or Jekyll’s terrors of Hyde’s usurpation of his identity are more immediate and thrilling than would be possible if they were reported second hand. The supposed veracity of the testimonies is further endorsed by the fact that they are produced by, or concern the interests of, highly reliable witnesses: two physicians and one lawyer, who use their professional expertise to investigate the mystery that confronts them. This heightens the shock when their investigations fail, but it also determines their preoccupations and expectations. Stevenson’s tale is presented as a ‘Case’, evoking the procedures of both legal and medical knowledge and testimony; but it is a strange case, its strangeness deriving from its disruption of the very expectations associated with these procedures and forms of writing. Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is constructed as a mystery in many ways resembling a detective story. Eight of its ten chapters are concerned with getting to the bottom of the mysterious circumstances surrounding Jekyll’s will, and his dealings with a most unlikely indi- vidual, Mr Edward Hyde. We should remember that until the ninth chapter, when Dr Lanyon witnesses the transformation of Hyde into his friend Jekyll, the story involves two individuals, Jekyll and Hyde. The characters within the story, and its very ﬁrst readers, believed this to be the case, and this should inﬂuence our reading, especially our understanding of the suspicions and expectations of those who investigate the mystery. Let us consider appearances, for they are all the ﬁrst readers had to go on. The respectable bachelor Dr Jekyll and the ‘damnable’ young man Edward Hyde are the most unlikely companions. When pressed by Utterson the lawyer to ‘make a clean xviii introduction breast of ’ the trouble he imagines him in, Jekyll confesses to taking ‘a great, a very great interest’ in a ‘young man’ who is not his son, and is a total stranger to his oldest friends. Hyde is allowed full range of Jekyll’s house, has his own special back door and has his cheques honoured by the older man. As Utterson declares: ‘It turns me cold to think of this creature stealing like a thief to Harry’s bedside.’ It is later learned that Hyde hangs around by the river at night, and that Jekyll has set him up with his own house in Soho, a place that appears to be appointed more for Jekyll’s own reﬁned tastes than Hyde’s. It is supposed throughout that Hyde is blackmailing Jekyll. ‘It isn’t what you fancy; it is not so bad as that,’ Jekyll assures Utterson. But what was this unspoken bad fancy tacitly understood by both Utterson and his client? These circumstances appear to be carefully plotted to point to, without actually specifying, a suspicion that some erotic attachment is at the bottom of Jekyll’s relationship with Hyde. Blackmail and homosexuality have a long history of association. According to Rictor Norton; ‘Before the passing of the  Sexual Oﬀences Act the law prohibiting homosexual intercourse was described as a ‘‘Blackmailers’ Charter’’, for very many – perhaps even ‘‘most’’ – blackmail attempts involved a threat to expose a man as a homosexual, whether or not he were in fact gay (sic).’⁵ The ‘Blackmailers’ Charter’ was the law passed in  (the year Stevenson wrote his tale), outlawing all erotic acts between males whether in public or private, and was responsible for Oscar Wilde’s imprisonment in .⁶ But even before this new legal deﬁnition of outlawed sexuality, the much older oﬀence of ‘sod- omy’ had made blackmail a highly lucrative enterprise. As Norton suggests: ‘Professional blackmail rings were... common, especially in the s–s, and gay men who blackmailed their partners were not unknown. The threat of exposure as a sodomite is the basis of more than half of the prosecutions throughout the eighteenth century...’ Oscar Wilde had himself been subject to a number of blackmail attempts, most of them by rent boys with whom he, or his lover Alfred Douglas, had consorted. Given this association it is likely that suspicions of some form of erotic connection between Dr Jekyll and Edward Hyde might have been entertained by Stevenson’s ﬁrst readers, who also wondered about Jekyll’s ‘very great interest’ in Hyde. xix introduction A suggestion of homosexuality provides a plausible hypothesis until the truth is revealed that two men are actually one.⁷ Of course, Stevenson could not describe or directly refer to what was called ‘unnatural’ and deemed unspeakable in the pages of prose ﬁction designed for a popular readership; but he could, and perhaps did, manipulate the expectations and suppositions of his readers who could not complain if their own imaginations had supplied what Stevenson had refused to actually state.⁸ An ‘unspeakable vice’ provides a particu- larly eﬀective sub-text for a sensational plot about secrets, where what looks like an ‘unnatural’ relationship eventually turns out to be a supernatural or preternatural one. This is an eﬀect of the framework of expectations upon which the narrative is built: the use of legal and medical procedures and forms of knowledge (which, apart from pornography, constituted almost the sole place where homosexuality was discussed in print), and their corresponding adherence to the rationalist principles which the supernatural explanation brilliantly overturns. This overturning of expectations has its greatest eﬀect in Dr Lan- yon’s Narrative, when the fantastic explanation that two people are in fact one is ﬁrst revealed. If Utterson’s investigations evoke the expectations and procedures of legal inquiry, then Lanyon’s narrative is even more self-consciously structured according to the methods of his profession. Lanyon has responded to Jekyll’s plea to assist him in an urgent matter, to collect his chemicals and to admit a stranger (Hyde) to his house late at night. When Hyde arrives, he receives him in his consulting room as if he were one of his patients, and attempts to turn Hyde into a ‘case’: as there was something abnormal and misbegotten in the very essence of the creature that now faced me – something seizing, surprising and revolting... to my interest in the man’s nature and character there was added a curiosity as to his origin, his life, his fortune and status in the world... [Therefore I] sat down myself in my customary seat and with as fair an imitation of my ordinary manner to a patient, as the lateness of the hour, the nature of my preoccupations, and the horror I had of my visitor, would suﬀer me to muster. xx introduction Lanyon’s preoccupations and procedures are characteristic of med- ical writing at the time. The origin, life, fortune and status of ‘abnor- mal’ subjects contributed important information to clinical case-studies.⁹ Lanyon believes he has an insane patient before him, ‘wrestling against the approaches of hysteria’. But before he has time to compile his notes, this monstrosity turns into his friend Henry Jekyll, a fellow member of his profession, who has, at least to appearances, impeccable ‘life, origin and status’; and yet contained within him the misbegotten, abnormal, revolting murderer, Hyde. The transforma- tion of ‘patient’ into physician; abnormal hysteric into respectable member of the middle classes; two people into one, stages a narrative and ‘epistemological’ revolution also. For as medical, legal, or rational forms of understanding collapse, the case of Jekyll and Hyde becomes the Strange Case of one of the most original horror tales ever written. The horror of my other self That Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is something more than just a shilling shocker, a creepy tale for Christmas , was noticed immediately. Reviewers stated that ‘the story has a much larger and deeper interest than that belonging to mere skilful narrative. It is a marvellous exploration into the recesses of human nature’, and referred to it as a ‘parable’ with a ‘profound allegory’, while a Christian paper stated that it was an ‘allegory based on the two-fold nature of man, a truth taught us by the Apostle Paul in Romans ’.¹⁰ Indeed, his tale provided the text for a sermon that was preached from the pulpit of St Paul’s Cathedral. Pared down to its essentials it is about the ﬁght between good and evil, duty and temptation, in the human ‘soul’: a story as old as Genesis. Jekyll considers his dilemma in these terms, referring to ‘the perennial war among my members’, and the fact that ‘the terms of this debate are as old and commonplace as man’. Stevenson’s own upbringing inculcated in him a strong sense of sin, which emerges in the moral foundation of his tale. As he wrote to Edward Purcell in February : ‘I have the old Scotch Presbyterian preoccupation with these [moral] problems... The Scotch side came xxi introduction out plain in Dr Jekyll’¹¹. However, this ‘moral’ extrapolation from his tale is one of the ﬁrst simpliﬁcations it has undergone, and needs to be put into context. When Adam and Eve clothed themselves in shame they did not immediately don frock coats and crinoline. In other words, Stevenson’s tale, despite its ‘perennial’ moral framework, is very much a product of its time, and if it is an allegory it is constructed out of historical circumstances and class relations. Edward Hyde is the embodiment of what Jekyll refers to as his ‘lower elements’, but he also makes clear that this hierarchical relationship is formed by Jekyll’s excessive conformity to the codes of respectability and public opinion. As he explains, ‘the worst of my faults was a certain impatient gaiety of disposition, such as has made the happiness of many, but such as I found it hard to reconcile with my imperious desire to carry my head high, and wear a more than commonly grave countenance before the public’. The simple opposition between good and evil breaks down at this point. He continues: ‘Many a man would have blazoned such irregularities as I was guilty of; but from the high views that I had set before me, I regarded and hid them with an almost morbid sense of shame.’ It is his overdeveloped sense of sinfulness that constructs Hyde. The more Jekyll sought to do and appear to be ‘good’, the more ‘evil’ he made Hyde. His Hyde is imaginary and potential until Jekyll discovers a potion that will embody these divisions. It is here that the moral allegory starts to wear the vestments of class and history: If each, I told myself, could but be housed in separate identities, life would be relieved of all that was unbearable; the unjust might go his way, delivered from the aspirations and remorse of his more upright twin; and the just could walk steadfastly and securely on his upward path, doing the good things in which he found his pleasure, and no longer exposed to disgrace and penitence by the hands of this extraneous evil. Jekyll appears to be observing the behaviour of two distinct individuals that happen to coexist in his consciousness. The potion makes this idea a reality. On ‘releasing’ his Hyde, Jekyll starts to characterize him, clothe him, classify him, and to moralize on him, appalled but also thrilled by his behaviour. Hyde is the bodily expression of his xxii introduction relationship to Jekyll’s more exalted principles – lower in stature and uglier in aspect than his ‘more upright twin’ Jekyll, who we are told is a ﬁne ﬁgure of a man, with a ‘handsome face’. Once his imagined divisions are externalized and made concrete, Jekyll could give his righteousness full rein: The pleasures which I made haste to seek in my disguise were, as I have said, undigniﬁed; I would scarce use a harder term. But in the hands of Edward Hyde, they soon began to turn towards the monstrous. When I would come back from these excursions, I was often plunged into a kind of wonder at my vicarious depravity... Henry Jekyll stood at times aghast before the acts of Edward Hyde; but the situation was apart from ordinary laws, and insidiously relaxed the grasp of conscience. Thus even when we are told that two people are one, Jekyll’s testimony still divides them, denying responsibility for Hyde’s actions. Such distinctions allow Henry Jekyll to act with all propriety as a member of his class, and castigate the behaviour of Hyde, his social, and what could be termed his ‘anthropological’, opposite and inferior. For Jekyll, as much as his friends, views Hyde the monstrous criminal in distinctive terms, fashioned according to the theories of crime and immorality at the time. Apes and Angels Jekyll conceives of Hyde as his ‘lower element’. Whilst this is principally a moral or even metaphysical designation, it is also strongly suggested that Hyde is also lower on the evolutionary scale (as it was perceived) than his more upright twin Henry Jekyll. Jekyll’s reference to treading the ‘upward path’ also refers to his perceived position on what was considered the ‘ladder’ of cultural and biological development. A less upright individual evokes suggestions of the simian, and Hyde is certainly that. Utterson found him both dwarﬁsh and ‘troglodytic’, whilst another remarks upon the ‘ape-like’ fury of his attack on Carew, and Jekyll himself refers to Hyde’s ‘ape-like spite’, his ‘bestial’ nature, and remarks how hairy his opposite is. This inference eventually xxiii introduction culminates in a frightening vision of primordial immorality: ‘This was the shocking thing; that the slime of the pit seemed to utter cries and voices; and that the amorphous dust gesticulated and sinned; and what was dead, and had no shape, would usurp the oﬃces of life.’ This emphasis on criminality or sinfulness being a primitive condition or impulse corresponds with that found in a number of writings from the period which employed evolutionary models to understand criminality and mental disorder. The idea of ‘reversion’, which helped explain immoral behaviour in scientiﬁc terms, also provided possibilities for Gothic representation, which could now ﬁgure unwelcome ances- tral legacies on a greatly extended scale, reaching back to the origins of human life itself. This can be seen by comparing the psychiatrist Henry Maudsley’s ‘Remarks on Crime and Criminals’ from  with Stevenson’s depiction of Jekyll and Hyde: The sense of moral relations, or so-called moral feeling... are the latest and the highest products of mental evolution; being the least stable, therefore, they are the ﬁrst to disappear in mental degeneration, which is in the literal sense an unkinding or undoing of mind; and when they are stripped oﬀ the primitive and more stable passions are exposed – naked and not ashamed, just as they were in the premoral ages of animal and human life on earth.¹² Maudsley’s reasoning sounds very like Jekyll’s, who thinks of Hyde as ‘lower’, and as the ‘animal within’ him, who allows him to ‘strip oﬀ these lendings [of moral sense] and spring headlong into the sea of liberty’. Jekyll’s potion eﬀects the ‘unkinding’ to which the psychiatrist refers; a release from the bonds of acquired civilized behaviour, and thus a return to ‘primitive’ pre-moral indulgence. When embodied, Hyde naturally resembles the simian and ‘degenerate’, hardly human form of the criminal type described by medico-legal experts. In short, Hyde is the physical expression of moral lowness according to post- Darwinian thought.¹³ (A much fuller discussion of these aspects of Stevenson’s story is oﬀered in the essay ‘Diagnosing Jekyll’ at the end of this volume.) xxiv introduction A world of ordinary secret sinners In Mr Hyde Stevenson created a new ﬁctional monster; a Franken- stein’s creature, fabricated from the beliefs of evolutionary anthropol- ogy and scientiﬁc criminology, whom he releases into contemporary London. Jekyll marvelling at the ‘monstrous’ depravity of Hyde, and the witness of the Carew murder commenting on the ‘ape-like’ fury of his assault, sound very like the classic descriptions of the atavistic criminal type; who, according to Lombroso: ‘desire[s] not only to extinguish life in the victim, but to mutilate the corpse, tear its ﬂesh and drink its blood’.¹⁴ But Stevenson’s tale is actually more complex and disturbing than that, for he used this picture of criminal mon- strosity to reﬂect on that which had actually deﬁned it: the world of respectable physicians and legislators. Hyde is within Jekyll, and per- haps within others too. Stevenson’s story strips away all the distancing devices of the traditional Gothic, locating the horror of atavistic returns in central London, in the present and in the body and mind of a representative of the professional classes. It is this world that his tale reﬂects on and probes with its central concern with respectability and its discontents. Jekyll attempts to make an absolute division between the respectable and the disreputable, the righteous and the libertine, the social and the sensual/sexual. But he fails. Ostensibly because of a mistake with his chemicals; but the experiment also fails because the divisions Jekyll imagines and attempts to solidify were impossible to sustain. It is not only the chemicals that are ‘impure’, the diﬀerences he considers to be absolute are also decidedly mixed and confused. Jekyll claims that he is ‘a composite’, like ‘all human beings, as we meet them... commingled out of good and evil’; whereas ‘Edward Hyde, alone, in the ranks of mankind, was pure evil.’ And yet Hyde appears to have some elements of Jekyll in him. Jekyll’s original plan is that Hyde would act as an ‘alibi’. Like a contract killer or ‘bravo’ he would conduct the business Jekyll was ashamed of, and if there were any reprisals, Jekyll would not be implicated: xxv introduction Let me but escape into my laboratory door, give me but a second or two to mix and swallow the draught... and whatever he had done, Edward Hyde would pass away like the stain of breath upon a mirror; and there in his stead, quietly at home, trimming the midnight lamp in his study, a man who could aﬀord to laugh at suspicion, would be Henry Jekyll. If Jekyll ‘hired’ Hyde for this peace of mind and security, then he was short changed. For if Hyde is pure evil, and Jekyll believed he could laugh at suspicion, Hyde himself does not share this view. Indeed, the very ﬁrst words we hear him speak, recounted by Enﬁeld in his anecdote about Hyde trampling on the child, show Hyde acting in a very Jekyll-like way. As Enﬁeld recalls:... and there was the man in the middle, with a kind of black, sneering coolness – frightened too, I could see that – but carrying it oﬀ, sir, really like Satan. ‘If you choose to make capital out of this accident,’ said he, ‘I am naturally helpless. No gentleman but wishes to avoid a scene,’ says he. ‘Name your ﬁgure.’ Hyde’s ‘Satanic’ sneering scarcely disguises an overriding concern with his reputation. Would Satan truly attempt to convince the wit- nesses that the incident with the child was an ‘accident’? Why should he care what they think if he was pure evil? Hyde appears to be performing no useful function here. For he costs Jekyll a hundred pounds (a very considerable sum at the time), and the necessity of drawing the cheque which implicates his own name in the business, the very thing he wished to avoid. Enﬁeld told Hyde: ‘If he had any friends of credit... he should lose them’ unless he pays up. But it is Jekyll’s ‘credit’ (meaning reputation) that he should preserve here by not drawing on his funds. Far from laughing at suspicion, Jekyll’s ‘bravo’ leads him into an inquiry that eventually spells his ruin. On hearing this anecdote, Utterson, already unhappy about the will, resolves to discover what hold Hyde has over Jekyll. Indeed, the will that alerted Utterson’s suspicions in the ﬁrst place also contributes to the failure of Jekyll’s plans. Jekyll draws up a will ‘so that if anything befell me in the person of Dr Jekyll, I could enter on that of Edward Hyde without pecuniary loss’. It is signiﬁcant that xxvi introduction Jekyll uses the ﬁrst person when he refers to Hyde continuing without pecuniary loss. Jekyll wishes to enjoy all the comforts and privileges of the position he has gained in the world as himself, even if he has to do so in the person of Hyde, supposedly pure evil and disassociated from, and indiﬀerent to, the interests of Jekyll. By drawing up a will Jekyll clings to the ﬁnancial support systems and observes the sanctioned procedures of the class whose moral codes and values he attempts to escape with his experiment. This wanting to have it both ways, renouncing and preserving bourgeois values, is in eﬀect a hypocritical continuation of the duplicity Jekyll originally sought to evade, and entangles him in the very network of secret sins and their reprisals that he attempted to escape. Jekyll is never really free as Hyde because Hyde is never really free of Jekyll and all he represents.¹⁵ In short, perhaps the strangest (and certainly the most disturbing) thing about the case of Jekyll and Hyde, is that it turns out not to be so strange at all. Appearances would suggest that if we read the confessions of others in his circle we would appreciate how ordinary his case is. Secrets everywhere Following the Carew murder Jekyll renounces Hyde, and attempts to settle back into a life of respectability once more. After a while the temptations return and he becomes an ‘ordinary secret sinner’ again, without the help of Hyde. This phrase captures something that is glimpsed repeatedly in the narrative: that the ‘ordinary’ condition of his society is for individuals to sin in secret, but also to hold, hide or attempt to discover or reveal secrets. There are a good many secrets that are never revealed. Enﬁeld (a well-known man about town) returns home from ‘some place at the end of the world, about three o’clock of a black winter morning’, but neglects to mention exactly where or what he was doing. Both he and Utterson have a policy that ‘the more it looks like Queer Street, the less I ask’. Enﬁeld predicts what happens when this rule is broken: ‘You start a question, and it’s like starting a stone. You sit quietly on the top of a hill; and away the stone goes, starting others; and presently some bland old bird (the last xxvii introduction you would have thought of ) is knocked on the head in his own back garden, and the family have to change their name.’ One such ‘bland old bird’ might be the elderly MP Sir Danvers Carew, whose death down by the river late at night is rather suspicious. The maid: became aware of an aged and beautiful gentleman with white hair, drawing near along the lane; and advancing to meet him, another and very small gentleman, to whom at ﬁrst she paid less attention. When they had come within speech... the older man bowed and accosted the other with a very pretty manner of politeness. It did not seem as if the subject of his address were of great importance; indeed, from his pointing, it sometimes appeared as if he were only inquiring his way; but the moon shone on his face as he spoke... [and] it seemed to breathe such an innocent and old-world kindness of disposition, yet with something high too, as of a well-founded self-content. [my italics] If we look at what the maid says we ﬁnd that it is qualiﬁed and highly speculative. Why mention that he seemed innocent? And what is he doing ‘accosting’ young men in a ‘pretty’ manner down by the river late at night? Surely when directions are asked it is the knowledgeable addressee who does the pointing. When the police oﬃcer learns that the victim of this crime is Sir Danvers Carew, his response: ‘ ‘‘Good God, sir!’ exclaimed the oﬃcer, ‘is it possible?’’ ’ appears somewhat excessive. Why is he so amazed? What are the circumstances that trouble him about the identity of such a victim in such a crime – ‘some bland old bird (the last you would have thought of )’ as Enﬁeld puts it? What was in the letter he was carrying addressed to Utterson, seeking his professional help? We will never know. But are we right to be so suspicions?¹⁶ According to the text we are. We are actively encouraged to imagine secrets where there might be none, and be suspicious perhaps without cause. Stevenson’s story actively demonstrates that you can never trust appearances. xxviii introduction Seek and hide This lack of trust also aﬀects our belief in the testimony of others, and undermines our faith in the veracity of what we read. From the very ﬁrst page we are introduced to a world governed by public opinion, and by a fear of revelation and blackmail. In fact, it could be argued that the real ‘monster’ in Jekyll and Hyde is opinion. It casts an ominous shadow across the entire narrative and is responsible for stunted lives, and two, or even three deaths. The fear of exposure is so powerful it even scares Hyde, who pays a hundred pounds to keep a good name he doesn’t even have. Enﬁeld and the doctor blackmail Hyde: ‘killing being out of the question, we did the next best. We told the man we could and would make such a scandal out of this, as should make his name stink from one end of London to the other.’¹⁷ When Hyde produces the cheque in another’s name Enﬁeld assumes Hyde is blackmailing Jekyll; on hearing this Utterson resolves to have a go himself and see what Hyde has to hide. They are all motivated by the need to maintain appearances and to protect the system that works on ‘credit’, however bankrupt this appears to be. It is this that encourages Utterson to turn amateur detective and investigate the mystery of Jekyll and Hyde. However, whilst most detectives investigate secrets in order to solve crimes and bring the details to light, Utterson is driven by the opposite motives.¹⁸ He is a questor who doesn’t actually want to know, whose ruling passion is to preserve his friend from scandal, to save his ‘credit’. If he can ﬁnd out what Hyde’s secrets are he can trade them for Jekyll’s being forgotten. Or so he thinks. When Hyde commits a murder Utterson accompanies the police oﬃcer, whose job it is to make a thorough investigation and publicize all facts if necessary. Utterson assists the investigation, but only up to a point. He technically obstructs the course of justice, for he fails to mention someone who is intimately connected with the murderer, and has supposedly received a communication from him subsequent to the crime. Indeed, the murder weapon actually belongs to Jekyll, having been given to him many years before by Utterson. Jekyll confesses to Utterson that he is only ‘thinking of [his] own character, which this xxix introduction hateful business has rather exposed’. His friend shares this concern; fearing that ‘the good name of [ Jekyll] should be sucked down in the eddy of a scandal’. To the very end this is his objective. When all is lost, Hyde is dead, Jekyll has been murdered, or has disappeared, Utterson still hopes that ‘we may at least save his credit’. Even Lanyon, who has been killed by the shock of Jekyll’s ‘moral turpitude’, puts restrictions on his disclosures, stipulating that if Utterson predeceases him the document which we eventually read should be ‘destroyed unread’. How near we came to not having the full facts of the case, from Lanyon or from Jekyll. As the latter observes in his ﬁnal paragraph: ‘if my narrative has hitherto escaped destruction, it has been by a combination of great prudence and great good luck’. But do we have the full facts? Lanyon recalls ‘What [ Jekyll] told me in the next hour, I cannot bring my mind to set on paper.’ We have no way of knowing whether this actually corresponds with Jekyll’s ﬁnal confession. And even this encourages doubt. For if Utterson has spent the whole time attempting to hide or withhold information – ‘can we venture to declare this suicide? O, we must be careful. I foresee that we may yet involve your master in some dire catastrophe’ – why does he release these documents? Can we be sure they are presented unaltered or unedited? There appears to be a conﬂict of interests between content and form. The narrative attempts full revelation, the agents of its publication concealment. At the core of the text are silences, evasions, suppressions. Stevenson’s tale is eﬀective as horror ﬁction because it creates more questions than it answers. As a result it lives and grows in the imaginations of those who read and reread it over a hundred years after Dr Jekyll ﬁrst concocted his potion. Unreal City Stevenson’s tale put the modern city, and speciﬁcally London, ﬁrmly on the map of Gothic horror. In this it had an immediate inﬂuence on writers like Oscar Wilde, Arthur Conan Doyle and Arthur Machen, and is perhaps largely responsible for creating the late-Victorian xxx introduction London of our cinematic imaginations; a foggy, gaslit labyrinth where Mr Hyde easily metamorphoses into Jack the Ripper, and Sherlock Holmes hails a hansom in pursuit of them both. There had been examples of ‘Urban Gothic’ ﬁction earlier in the century, when writers like Charles Dickens and the popular novelist G. W. M. Reynolds depicted scenes of crime and horror in the rookeries of outcast London in narratives as sprawling and labyrinthine as the districts which they haunt.¹⁹ However, Stevenson’s hundred pages, which draw on the imagery of these earlier writers, convey in a more intense and succinct form a cityscape transformed by what could be termed the psychologi- cal focus of the narrative. He was perhaps the ﬁrst ‘psychogeographer’, laying the foundations of an imaginative topography that would be explored by writers from Arthur Machen to Iain Sinclair. Consider Stevenson’s representation of a speciﬁc London locale, Soho: It was by this time about nine in the morning, and the ﬁrst fog of the season. A great chocolate-coloured pall lowered over heaven, but the wind was continually charging and routing these assembled vapours; so that as the cab crawled from street to street, Mr Utterson beheld a marvellous number of degrees and hues of twilight... The dismal quarter of Soho seen under these changing glimpses, with its muddy ways, and slatternly passengers, and its lamps, which had never been extinguished or had been kindled afresh to combat this mournful reinvasion of darkness, seemed, in the lawyer’s eyes, like a district of some city in a nightmare. The thoughts on his mind, besides, were of the gloomiest dye... As the cab drew up before the address indicated, the fog lifted a little and showed him a dingy street, a gin palace, a low French eating house, a shop for the retail of penny numbers and twopenny salads, many ragged children huddled in the doorways, and many women of many diﬀerent nationalities passing out, key in hand, to have a morning glass; and the next moment the fog settled down again on that part, as brown as umber, and cut him oﬀ from his blackguardly surroundings. This was the home of Henry Jekyll’s favourite; of a man who was heir to a quarter of a million sterling. This passage (in both senses), invites comparison with the famous opening of Charles Dickens’s consummate Urban Gothic novel, Bleak House (), where the whole of London is enveloped in fog, mud and xxxi introduction mire. But whilst Dickens uses fog to comment on the obfuscation of political and legal procedure (a reﬂection of the muddled state of Britain at the time), Stevenson’s use of a similar setting can be charac- terized as more directly ‘psychological’. And whilst Dickens’s descrip- tion manages to convey a recognizable and identiﬁable London ﬂoating in his sea of fog, Stevenson’s cityscape is conspicuous for its unreality. It is truly a district from a ‘nightmare’, no more real than the city ﬁgured in Utterson’s earlier dream of a lamplit labyrinth crawling with murderous Hydes. The use of ‘pall’ to describe the fog manages to suggest both a theatrical scene, the lowering of a stage curtain, and (with its funeral associations) the metaphysical implication that ‘heaven’ and its inﬂuences are being blotted out as they descend into an infernal region. The descent into this abyss is for Utterson a confrontation with the heart of darkness that we later learn resides within Jekyll himself. For him location reinforces the supposed dichot- omy between the ‘blackguardly’ Hyde, and the prosperous and respectable Jekyll; but in truth it provides an allegorical reﬂection of Jekyll’s true relationship with Hyde. Soho was an enclave of poverty and criminality (which was by then principally associated with the East End), residing within the more salubrious Western end of London. It thus provides a suitable location for Hyde’s dwelling, but also a geographical expression of the Hyde within Jekyll. This ‘allegorical’ approach to London geography is typical of a text that speciﬁes very few identiﬁable locations, and is reinforced by the description of Jekyll’s own house: Round the corner from the bystreet, there was a square of ancient, handsome houses, now for the most part decayed from their high estate and let in ﬂats and chambers to all sorts and conditions of men: map-engravers, architects, shady lawyers and the agents of obscure enterprises. One house, however, second from the corner, was still occupied entire... [and] wore a great air of wealth and comfort... In other words, this is the architectural equivalent of Jekyll’s character and relationship with his fellow men. The other houses are fragmented, openly proclaiming that they are made up of many parts, and many conditions. Jekyll’s, however, must ‘wear’ (with an emphasis on seem- xxxii introduction ing and disguise) a great air of integrity as well as respectability. But, as we know, Jekyll has his back door, tucked away in obscurity and seemingly unconnected with his ‘stately’ oﬃcial residence. Hyde’s special door is the architectural equivalent of Jekyll’s condition: he can only preserve his house ‘entire’ on the square because he has Hyde, his backdoor man, to do his dirty work for him. So landscape is transformed, serving allegorical and psychological more than strictly geographical purposes, and creating an Urban Gothic stageset for late-Victorian horror. The return of Mr Hyde Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde was an enormous success for Stevenson. It sold , copies in six months in Britain alone, and appears to have been read by everyone including the prime minister and Queen Victoria herself. It struck a chord with the late-Victorian public, and very soon entered the collective imagination. Punch par- odied it, preachers pontiﬁcated on it, and Oscar Wilde has Vivian in ‘The Decay of Lying’ () recount an anecdote about an unfortunate individual who happens to be called Mr Hyde ﬁnding himself repro- ducing all the incidents of the ﬁrst chapter of Stevenson’s tale. This Hyde is horriﬁed at what is happening, takes to his heels, and ﬁnally ﬁnds refuge from the child’s family in a doctor’s surgery: ‘the name on the brass door-plate of the surgery caught his eye. It was ‘‘Jekyll’’. At least it should have been.’²⁰ Stevenson’s tale was also very inﬂuential on writers of imaginative and supernatural ﬁction. Wilde’s own novel The Picture of Dorian Gray (–) bears some points of resemblance. Also set in a foggy London, with excursions into low-life neighbourhoods, it too is about appearances and reputations, and involves an individual who lives a double life of outward purity and secret corruption. As Jekyll uses the ugly deformed Hyde as his body double, so Dorian Gray has a magic portrait that bears all the consequences of a sinful life. As Stevenson refused to specify what Jekyll’s or Hyde’s ‘monstrous’ crimes were, so Wilde keeps Dorian’s sins similarly vague, allowing him to be xxxiii introduction surrounded by ‘hideous’ rumours that are never fully disclosed. Wilde describes a similar world of secrets, rumours and speculations: Curious stories became current about him... It was rumoured that he had been seen brawling with foreign sailors in a low den in the distant parts of Whitechapel... His extraordinary absences became notorious, and, when he used to reappear again in society, men would whisper to each other in corners, or pass him with a sneer, or look at him with cold searching eyes, as though they were determined to discover his secret.²¹ As a character tells Dorian, ‘Every gentleman is interested in his reputation’ (p. ), a circumstance that necessitates the supernatural stratagems employed by both Wilde’s and Stevenson’s characters. But perhaps the main thing that both stories have in common, and where Stevenson’s inﬂuence on horror ﬁction can be felt most, is the focus on the body and brain of the individual as the location for horror. Jekyll’s metamorphosis into the grotesque, misshapen Hyde (who bears the physical ‘stamp’ of his evil impulses) ﬁnds its counterpart in the description of Dorian’s portrait: ‘Through some strange quick- ening of inner life the leprosies of sin were slowly eating the thing away. The rotting of a corpse in a watery grave was not so fearful’ (p. ). If the ﬁrst generation of Gothic novelists located ﬁctional terror in the forests and castles of Italy and Spain, then the tradition that developed after Stevenson betrayed a distinct physiological inter- est, demonstrating that the body and mind of individuals could provide horrors of their own, the site for unwelcome legacies and returns. Bram Stoker’s ﬁve-hundred-year-old Count Dracula is, like Hyde, partly an atavistic ‘criminal type’, conspicuous for his grotesque fea- tures, who is also glimpsed through the collected testimonies of the lawyers and physicians who track him down. H. G. Wells’s Doctor Moreau conducts experiments in accelerated evolution, attempting to extract the man out of beasts as Jekyll had released the beast out of a man (The Island of Doctor Moreau ()). Arthur Machen’s The Great God Pan () and The Three Impostors (), involve strange experiments, and fragmented testimonies recalling hideous bodily transformations, unspeakable sins and indescribable individuals. Jekyll, a pioneer in ‘transcendental medicine’, had prophesied that ‘Others will follow, xxxiv introduction others will outstrip me on the same lines.’ This turns out to be true, for Machen’s own Dr Raymond in The Great God Pan, also described as a practitioner in ‘transcendental medicine’, uses surgery on a certain group of nerve-cells in the brain to explore ‘the unknowable gulf that yawns profound between two worlds, the world of matter and the world of spirit’,²² and releases from these experiments primitive horrors far exceeding Stevenson’s in their grotesque hyperbole. After Stevenson, horror ﬁction repeatedly explored these worlds, devising fanciful, but still plausible, pseudo-scientiﬁc theories about the horrors that lurked within seemingly ordinary individuals, in their bodies, brains or memories. This domain has proven to be extremely fertile; from H. P. Lovecraft to Psycho, Nightmare on Elm Street and The Silence of the Lambs, versions of Mr Hyde have leaped forth from the pages and screens of the horror industry. Notes . Stevenson, letter to F. W. H. Myers,  March , in Collected Letters, vol. , edited by Bradford A. Booth and Ernest Mehew (), p. . Byles stands for a generic creditor, and was not actually the name of his butcher. . Victor Sage, Horror Fiction in the Protestant Tradition (), p. . . Baldick, ‘Introduction’ to The Oxford Book of Gothic Tales (), p. xx. . She is ‘atavistic’ in as far as her character and condition appear to derive from her distant ancestors (atavus means ancestor), and therefore like a vampire she, or her ancestors, has lived and died many times. There is an echo here of Walter Pater’s famous description of Da Vinci’s ‘La Gioconda’ (known as the Mona Lisa), which oﬀered a template for prose stylists and a model for femmes fatales at the end of the nineteenth century: ‘She is older than the rocks among which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave; and been a diver in deep seas, and keeps their fallen day about her... ; and as Leda, was the mother of Helen of Troy, and, as Saint Anne, the mother of Mary; and all this has been xxxv introduction to her but as the sound of lyres and ﬂutes, and lives only in the delicacy with which it has moulded the changing lineaments, and tinged the eyelids and the hands’, Pater, from Studies in the History of the Renaissance (). Bram Stoker would make an explicit connection between the extended life of the supernatural vampire (a Victorian embellishment of the folkloric original who had only lasted a few days in his or her Undead state) and the theory of biological atavism when he suggests that Count Dracula might be considered analogous to Lombroso’s atavistic criminal types. On Stoker’s possible debt to Stevenson’s tale see the Notes to ‘Olalla’. . Rictor Norton, ‘A (longish) pre-Victorian digression on blackmail’, posted to the Victoria Web (http://www.listserv.indiana.edu) (March ). . This statute was an amendment to an Act ‘to make further provision for the Protection of Women and Girls, the suppression of brothels and other purposes’. The principal aim of the Act was to protect young girls from the exploitation of brothel-keepers who ran a trade in virgins, by raising the age of consent from thirteen to sixteen years. Section II, however, dealt with intimate acts between male persons, a more precise and comprehensive legal proscription of homosexual activities than had hitherto been implemented. The Act outlawed any and all ‘acts of gross indecency with another male person’, whether in public or in private, and carried a maximum penalty of two years imprisonment with hard labour, Wilde’s own sentence. . For a more detailed discussion of the aura of homosexuality that pervades Stevenson’s tale see William Veeder, ‘Children of the Night: Stevenson and Patriarchy’, in Hirsch and Veeder (), pp. –. . A comment by Gerard Manley Hopkins shows that Stevenson’s ‘coded’ or suggestive plotting had some success; as he observes to Robert Bridges: ‘The trampling scene is perhaps a convention: he was talking of something unsuitable for ﬁction’, reproduced in Robert Louis Stevenson: The Critical Heritage, edited by Paul Maixner (), p. . . The following opening to one of Kraﬀt-Ebing’s cases (of sadism) is typical in this respect: ‘Case . Mr. X., aged ; father syphilitic, died of paretic dementia; mother hysterical and neurasthenic. He is a weak individual, constitutionally neuropathic, and presents several xxxvi introduction anatomical signs of degeneration’, Psychopathia Sexualis (; ), . Hyde’s own case, if it were written up, might very well resemble this, demonstrating ‘the connection between lust and cruelty’. Hyde the sadist is discussed in ‘Diagnosing Jekyll’ in the present volume. . Maixner (), pp. , , . . Booth and Mehew (), pp. –. On Stevenson’s religious upbringing see J. C. Furnas’s biography, Voyage to Windward: The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson (), pp. –. For its inﬂuence on Jekyll and Hyde and the anecdote about the sermon, see Christopher Frayling, Nightmare: The Birth of Horror (), pp. –. . Henry Maudsley, ‘Remarks on Crime and Criminals’, Journal of Mental Science (), pp. , . . That Stevenson subscribed to evolutionary tenets, and that these contributed to his depiction of Jekyll’s relation to Hyde is suggested by an essay he published in  called ‘The Manse’. Here he wonders whether it is ‘more strange, that I should carry about with me some ﬁbres of my minister-grandfather; or that in him, as he sat there in his cool study, grave, reverend, contented gentleman, there was an aboriginal frisking of the blood that was not his; tree-top memories, like undeveloped negatives, lay dormant in his mind; tree-top instincts awoke and were trod down; and Probably Arboreal [Darwin’s term for humankind’s ape ancestor] (scarce to be distinguished from a monkey) gambolled and chattered in the brain of the old divine’, Memoirs and Portraits, in vol. IX, Works, edited by Andrew Lang (), p. . Jekyll is another such ‘grave’ gentleman, who lets his ape out. . In Gina Lombroso-Ferrero, Criminal Man According to the Classiﬁ- cations of Cesare Lombroso (), p. xxv. . A similar emphasis is found in one of the most original readings of Jekyll and Hyde for a good many years, Stephen Arata’s chapter on Stevenson in Fictions of Loss in the Victorian ‘Fin de Siècle’ (). His excellent close reading of the text suggests that Hyde is educated into bourgeois codes through the course of the narrative, growing into Jekyll’s respectable clothes as he overcomes his personality. . One of Stevenson’s ﬁrst readers also found these circumstances suspicious or puzzling. Frederick W. H. Myers, who sent him a long list of queries and ways in which Stevenson could improve the tale xxxvii introduction (none of which he carried out), pointed out the ‘Ambiguity as to house where maid was. Was it in Westminster? How did Baronet need to ask way to post so close to Parliament or to his own house? If house in a low district how did Baronet come there?’, in Maixner (), p. . . Following the Carew murder we learn that it does: ‘tales came out of the man’s cruelty, at once so callous and violent, of his vile life, of his strange associates, of the hatred that seemed to have surrounded his career’. . On the forms and motivations of blackmail narratives see Alex- ander Welsh’s excellent introductory chapters to George Eliot and Black- mail (). . Dickens’s ‘Urban Gothic’ episodes can be found principally in Oliver Twist, Bleak House, and parts of Little Dorrit and Our Mutual Friend. G. W. M. Reynolds’s Mysteries of London, and its sequel Mysteries of the Court of London (–) were extremely popular series depicting a city as mysterious and terrifying as any forest or mountain of the earlier Gothic mode. . Oscar Wilde, ‘The Decay of Lying’, in The Soul of Man Under Socialism and Other Critical Writings, edited by Linda Dowling (Penguin, Harmondsworth, ), p. . . Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, edited by Robert Mighall (Penguin, Harmondsworth, ), p. . . Arthur Machen, The Great God Pan (; ), p. . xxxviii   Works The Annotated Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, edited by Richard Dury (Guerini, Milan, ) ‘A Chapter on Dreams’, Scribner’s Magazine ( January ) ‘The Manse’, in Works, IX edited by Andrew Lang (Chatto & Windus, London, ) Biography and letters Aldington, Richard, Portrait of a Rebel: The Life and Works of Robert Louis Stevenson (Evans, London, ) Balfour, Graham, The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson, sixth edn (Methuen, London, ) Booth, Bradford A., and Mehew, Ernest (eds.), The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson, vol.  (Yale University Press, New Haven and London, ) Furnas, J. C., Voyage to Windward: The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson (Faber and Faber, London, ) Criticism Arata, Stephen D., Fictions of Loss in the Victorian ‘Fin de Siècle’ (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, ) xxxix further reading Baldick, Chris, In Frankenstein’s Shadow: Myth, Monstrosity and Nineteenth- Century Writing (Oxford University Press, Oxford, ) Block, Ed, Jnr, ‘James Sully, Evolutionary Psychology, and Late Vic- torian Gothic Fiction’, Victorian Studies,  (), pp. –. Dury, Richard, ‘Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde: Textual Variants’, Notes and Queries (Dec. ), vol. , pp. – Eigner, Edwin, Robert Louis Stevenson and the Romantic Tradition (Princeton University Press, Princeton NJ, ) Frayling, Christopher, Nightmare: The Birth of Horror (BBC Books, London, ) Heath, Stephen, ‘Psychopathia Sexualis: Stevenson’s Strange Case’, Critical Quarterly,  (), pp. – Hirsch, Gordon and Veeder, William, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde After One Hundred Years (Chicago University Press, Chicago, ) Maixner, Paul, Robert Louis Stevenson: The Critical Heritage (Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, ) Swearingen, Roger G., The Prose Writings of Robert Louis Stevenson: A Guide (Macmillan, Basingstoke, ) Background Bailey, Brian, The Resurrection Men: A History of the Trade in Corpses (Macmillan & Co., London, ) Baldick, Chris (ed.), The Oxford Book of Gothic Tales (Oxford University Press, Oxford, ) Byron, Glennis and Punter, David, Spectral Readings: Towards a Gothic Geography (Macmillan, Basingstoke, ) Cameron, Deborah, and Frazer, Elizabeth, The Lust to Kill: A Feminist Investigation of Sexual Murder (New York University Press, New York, ) Doyle, Arthur Conan, The Hound of the Baskervilles, edited by Chris- topher Frayling (Penguin, Harmondsworth, ) Evans, Stewart P. and Skinner, Keith, The Ultimate Jack the Ripper Sourcebook: An Illustrated Encyclopaedia (Constable & Robinson, London, ) xl further reading Galton, Francis, Inquiries into Human Faculty, nd edn (Dent, London, ) Huysmans, Joris Karl, Against Nature, translated by Robert Baldick (; Penguin, Harmondsworth, ) Kraﬀt-Ebing, Richard Von, Psychopathia Sexualis. With Especial Reference to the Antipathic Sexual Instinct: A Medico-Legal Study, st English edn (; F. A. Davis and Co., Philadelphia, ) Lombroso-Ferrero, Gina, Criminal Man According to the Classiﬁcation of Cesare Lombroso (G. P. Putnams’ Sons, New York, ) Machen, Arthur, The Great God Pan (; Creation Press, London, ) Maudsley, Henry, Responsibility in Mental Disease (Henry S. King, London, ) — Body and Mind: An Inquiry into Their Connection and Mutual Inﬂuence, Specially in Reference to Mental Disorders... nd edn (Macmillan & Co., London, ) — ‘Remarks on Crime and Criminals’, Journal of Mental Science,  (), pp. – — Pathology of Mind, rd edn (Macmillan & Co., London, ) McIntosh, W. C., On Morbid Impulse ( J. E. Adland, London, ) Mighall, Robert, A Geography of Victorian Gothic Fiction: Mapping History’s Nightmares (Oxford University Press, Oxford, ) Myers, Fredrick W. H., ‘Multiplex Personality’, Nineteenth Century,  () Nisbet, J. F., Marriage and Heredity: A View of Psychological Evolution (Ward & Downey, London, ) Otis, Laura, Organic Memory: History and the Body in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries (Nebraska University Press, Lincoln, ) Prichard, James Cowles, A Treatise on Insanity and Other Disorders Aﬀecting the Mind (Sherwood & Piper, London, ) Rae, Isobel, Knox the Anatomist (Oliver & Boyd, London and Edinburgh, ) Ribot, Theodule, Diseases of Memory: An Essay in Positive Psychology (Kegan Paul, Trench & Co., London, ) Richardson, Ruth, Death, Disease and the Destitute (Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, ) xli further reading Rumbelow, Donald, The Complete Jack the Ripper (Penguin, Harmonds- worth, ) Sage, Victor, Horror Fiction in the Protestant Tradition (Macmillan, Basing- stoke, ) Spitzka, Edward Charles, ‘Cases of Masturbation (Masturbatic Insanity)’, Journal of Mental Science,  (), pp. – — ‘The Whitechapel Murders: Their Medico-Legal and Historical Aspects’, Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease,  (), pp. – Stoker, Bram, Dracula, edited by Maurice Hindle (; Penguin, Harmondsworth, ) Tissot, Samuel, A Treatise on the Diseases Produced by Onanism (; Collins & Hannay, New York, ) Tomaslli, Sylvia, and Porter, Roy (eds.), Rape (Basil Blackwell, Oxford, ) Tuke, Daniel Hack, ‘Case of Moral Insanity, or Congenital Moral Defect. With Commentary’, Journal of Mental Science,  (), pp. – Welsh, Alexander, George Eliot and Blackmail (Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA, ) Wilde, Oscar, The Picture of Dorian Gray, edited by Robert Mighall (Penguin, Harmondsworth, ) — The Soul of Man Under Socialism and Other Critical Writings, edited by Linda Dowling (Penguin, Harmondsworth, ) xlii      The text of Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (as it was ﬁrst entitled) reproduced here is based upon the ﬁrst edition published by Long- mans, Green and Co. on  January ; the US edition was published on  January by Scribners’ Sons from the Longmans’ plates. There are many accounts of the conception and revision of this tale, and the history of its composition has attained something of a mythical status. I will not comment on it here, but direct interested readers to Stevenson’s own account of the conception of his story ‘A Chapter on Dreams’ (abridged in this volume). A full account of the various revisions Stevenson made to the texts, based upon the known surviving fragments of earlier drafts, and transcriptions of those drafts is very usefully provided by William Veeder in Gordon Hirsch and William Veeder (eds.), Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde After One Hundred Years (), pp. –. Richard Dury supplements this with his ‘Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde: Textual Variants’, in Notes and Queries,  (), pp. – . Christopher Frayling oﬀers a very useful, balanced and sceptical overview of the various accounts of the tale’s composition in his chapter on Stevenson in Nightmare: The Birth of Horror (), pp. –. I have retained Stevenson’s varying uses of Dr and Doctor but, to conform to Penguin house style, I have silently modernized a few spellings. ‘The Body Snatcher’ was published as a ‘Christmas Extra’ of the Pall Mall Gazette for , and is reproduced here from that version. ‘Olalla’ ﬁrst appeared in the Court and Society Review for Christmas , and was written while Stevenson was working on the proofs of Jekyll and Hyde. It was later reproduced in The Merry Men and Other Tales and Fables (Chatto & Windus, London, ), upon which the current text is based. xliii            ¹ It’s ill to loose the bands that God decreed to bind; Still will we be the children of the heather and the wind. Far away from home, O it’s still for you and me That the broom is blowing bonnie in the north countrie. Contents                                            ’    ’       Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde     Mr Utterson the lawyer was a man of a rugged countenance, that was never lighted by a smile; cold, scanty and embarrassed in discourse; backward in sentiment; lean, long, dusty, dreary and yet somehow lovable. At friendly meetings, and when the wine was to his taste, something eminently human beaconed from his eye; something indeed which never found its way into his talk, but which spoke not only in these silent symbols of the after-dinner face, but more often and loudly in the acts of his life. He was austere with himself; drank gin when he was alone, to mortify a taste for vintages; and though he enjoyed the theatre, had not crossed the doors of one for twenty years. But he had an approved tolerance for others; sometimes wondering, almost with envy, at the high pressure of spirits involved in their misdeeds; and in any extremity inclined to help rather than to reprove. ‘I incline to Cain’s heresy,’¹ he used to say quaintly: ‘I let my brother go to the devil in his own way.’ In this character, it was frequently his fortune to be the last reputable acquaintance and the last good inﬂuence in the lives of down-going men. And to such as these, so long as they came about his chambers, he never marked a shade of change in his demeanour. No doubt the feat was easy to Mr Utterson; for he was undemonstra- tive at the best, and even his friendships seemed to be founded in a similar catholicity of good-nature. It is the mark of a modest man to accept his friendly circle ready-made from the hands of opportunity; and that was the lawyer’s way. His friends were those of his own blood  dr jekyll and mr hyde or those whom he had known the longest; his aﬀections, like ivy, were the growth of time, they implied no aptness in the object. Hence, no doubt, the bond that united him to Mr Richard Enﬁeld, his distant kinsman, the well-known man about town. It was a nut to crack for many, what these two could see in each other or what subject they could ﬁnd in common.² It was reported by those who encountered them in their Sunday walks, that they said nothing, looked singularly dull, and would hail with obvious relief the appearance of a friend. For all that, the two men put the greatest store by these excursions, counted them the chief jewel of each week, and not only set aside occasions of pleasure, but even resisted the calls of business, that they might enjoy them uninterrupted. It chanced on one of these rambles that their way led them down a bystreet in a busy quarter of London. The street was small and what is called quiet, but it drove a thriving trade on the weekdays. The inhabitants were all doing well, it seemed, and all emulously hoping to do better still, and laying out the surplus of their gains in coquetry; so that the shop fronts stood along that thoroughfare with an air of invitation, like rows of smiling saleswomen. Even on Sunday, when it veiled its more ﬂorid charms and lay comparatively empty of passage, the street shone out in contrast to its dingy neighbourhood, like a ﬁre in a forest; and with its freshly painted shutters, well-polished brasses, and general cleanliness and gaiety of note, instantly caught and pleased the eye of the passenger. Two doors from one corner, on the left hand going east, the line was broken by the entry of a court; and just at that point, a certain sinister block of building thrust forward its gable on the street. It was two storeys high; showed no window, nothing but a door on the lower storey and a blind forehead of discoloured wall on the upper; and bore in every feature, the marks of prolonged and sordid negligence. The door which was equipped with neither bell nor knocker, was blistered and distained. Tramps slouched into the recess and struck matches on the panels; children kept shop upon the steps; the school- boy had tried his knife on the mouldings; and for close on a generation, no one had appeared to drive away these random visitors or to repair their ravages.  story of the door Mr Enﬁeld and the lawyer were on the other side of the bystreet; but when they came abreast of the entry, the former lifted up his cane and pointed. ‘Did you ever remark that door?’ he asked; and when his companion had replied in the aﬃrmative, ‘it is connected in my mind,’ added he, ‘with a very odd story.’ ‘Indeed?’ said Mr Utterson, with a slight change of voice, ‘and what was that?’ ‘Well, it was this way,’ returned Mr Enﬁeld: ‘I was coming home from some place at the end of the world, about three o’clock of a black winter morning, and my way lay through a part of town where there was literally nothing to be seen but lamps. Street after street, and all the folks asleep – street after street, all lighted up as if for a procession and all as empty as a church – till at last I got into that state of mind when a man listens and listens and begins to long for the sight of a policeman. All at once, I saw two ﬁgures: one a little man who was stumping along eastward at a good walk, and the other a girl of maybe eight or ten who was running as hard as she was able down a cross street. Well, sir, the two ran into one another naturally enough at the corner; and then came the horrible part of the thing; for the man trampled calmly over the child’s body and left her screaming on the ground. It sounds nothing to hear, but it was hellish to see. It wasn’t like a man; it was like some damned Juggernaut.³ I gave a view halloa, took to my heels, collared my gentleman, and brought him back to where there was already quite a group about the screaming child. He was perfectly cool and made no resistance, but gave me one look, so ugly that it brought out the sweat on me like running. The people who had turned out were the girl’s own family; and pretty soon, the doctor, for whom she had been sent, put in his appearance. Well, the child was not much the worse, more frightened, according to the Sawbones;⁴ and there you might have supposed would be an end to it. But there was one curious circumstance. I had taken a loathing to my gentleman at ﬁrst sight. So had the child’s family, which was only natural. But the doctor’s case was what struck me. He was the usual cut and dry apothecary, of no particular age and colour, with a strong Edinburgh accent, and about as emotional as a bagpipe. Well, sir, he was like the  dr jekyll and mr hyde rest of us; every time he looked at my prisoner, I saw that Sawbones turn sick and white with the desire to kill him. I knew what was in his mind, just as he knew what was in mine; and killing being out of the question, we did the next best. We told the man we could and would make such a scandal out of this, as should make his name stink from one end of London to the other. If he had any friends or any credit, we undertook that he should lose them. And all the time, as we were pitching it in red hot, we were keeping the women oﬀ him as best we could, for they were as wild as harpies.⁵ I never saw a c

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