“If you wish to know an era,” wrote sci-fi seer William Gibson, “study its most lucid nightmares. In the mirror of our darkest fears, much will be revealed.”
The Victorian era had a divided personality. On the one hand, the children of Empire celebrated industry and scientific discovery; on the other, they were fixated upon the occult and madness and death. Both obsessions found expression in some of the most enduring literary nightmares ever put to paper. Give the zoetrope a spin and watch a procession of nineteenth-century horror icons lurch past: Dracula, Carmilla and the Vampyr, Dr. Frankenstein and his creation, the mysterious Dorian Grey, the hound of the Baskervilles… Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. These characters haunt us still, revealing something powerful about the fears of their age—and our own.
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In Dracula’s day, London was rife with syphilis. Both Bram Stoker and Oscar Wilde died of it. There can’t be any doubt that knowledge of the disease informed their work. One didn’t need to meet a Transylvanian Count to experience a longing for and guilt about one’s sexual desires, to discover oneself being eaten alive by illness, or enduring a living death. Both Drac and Grey embodied this Victorian duality: desire and fear; sexuality and guilt; bedsheets and the funeral shroud. It does not surprise me that stories of vampirism—of seduction and sickness—found new relevancy in the works of Anne Rice, a century later, in the 1980s, an era of AIDS and anxiety. For as long as the carnal goes hand-in-hand with fears of bodily corruption, the Count will count.
In Frankenstein, Mary Shelley examined another schism in the Victorian soul: the tension between scientific progress and spiritual fears. At the time she composed the story (in a blind rush of just a few days, much as The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was written), a Scottish chemist was hooking the decapitated heads of cows up to batteries to make them blink and wag their tongues. Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel would soon draw back the curtain on the relentless machinery of evolution. The more science explained, the larger the God-sized hole became in the nineteenth-century imagination. God said let there be light: without him, things were looking pretty dark. It seemed at any moment science might pull a Prometheus and steal the final miracle, the creation of life itself, from religion. Frankenstein raised justifiable fears about the godless race of scientifically engineered children that might be borne… and what they might do to their reckless and arrogant parents. In every passing decade since Shelley’s day, these fears have only intensified, finding expression again and again, from Metropolis (1927) to Ex Machina (2014). Indeed, in the era of the always listening Alexa and slightly sinister Siri, we have more reason than ever to worry about losing our spot on the top rung of the evolution’s ladder.
And while we’re talking about technological nightmares, let’s not forget War of the Worlds, a biting commentary on colonialism that put England on the receiving end of invasion: the British brought to their knees by the more scientifically advanced race, indifferent to the suffering of the “primitives” to whom they so efficiently lay waste. The double-edged nature of power gained through scientific engineering—a power anyone could wield—was not lost on the Victorians. Here in the twenty-first century, our souring American empire finds itself nervously returning to visions of its own half-deserved annihilation at the hands of THEM. See Independence Day, Signs, and, er, Steven Spielberg’s adaptation of War of the Worlds for further details. Nothing holds such power to terrify as a guilty conscience.
Which brings us naturally ‘round to The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, the most lucid of all these particularly lucid nightmares—the one that has most fully retained its power to shock. The novel runs unstoppably forward, like Hyde himself, tramping over a child and leaving her broken and screaming behind him. Robert Louis Stevenson was leaner and meaner than Stoker, more psychologically adroit than Shelley, and an altogether more suspenseful storyteller than Wells. But where Stevenson’s contemporaries explored specific tensions within the Victorian psyche, Jekyll and Hyde captures the heart of it, and pinned the split personality of the era to the page. As Dr. Jekyll describes it himself:
“Though so profound a double-dealer, I was in no sense a hypocrite; both sides of me were in dead earnest; I was no more myself when I laid aside restraint and plunged in shame, than when I laboured, in the eye of day, at the furtherance of knowledge or the relief of sorrow and suffering.”
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Jekyll has, since his youth, indulged a secret compulsion for vice. Stevenson leaves the sin off-screen, declines to name and shame. That’s just one elegant move in a swift, masterfully played game. It allows the reader to personalize Jekyll’s wickedness, make it their own—to transfer their own worst impulses to the doctor. It also frees the author to focus on the psychological effects of addiction and compulsion… that particular mix of self-loathing and helplessness with which many of us are all-too familiar. It doesn’t matter how much good Jekyll does in his professional and public life. It’ll never be enough to make up for the things he thinks, the things he wants, the things he does when his self-control collapses. The part of him driven to abase himself almost feels like a different person, a half-human creature with whom the man of science and good works is forced to share a body.
Every addict knows the fantasy, too, of getting rid of “the other guy.” Of somehow tearing out the most hateful parts of oneself, finally escaping those thoughts, those impulses. The Doctor, though, has the science to make such a longing a reality, and concocts a foaming technicolor brew to free himself of his perverse second self (science has always been easier in horror stories).
The plans of mice and men, though, right? The doctor succeeds in condensing his unacceptable traits into a new, other self, the weirdly loathsome and unsettling Edward Hyde. But Jekyll himself remains frustratingly impure, a weak tea of aspirations, desires, and guilts. And it turns out only one of them can exist at a time—the doctor’s science is not advanced enough to make two men out of one, but only to make one man into two (to paraphrase G.K. Chesterton).
For a while our antihero can kid himself that he’s improved his lot. When his desire to do dirty overcomes him, he can slam a shot of his toxic bubbly, and allow his alter ego to party hearty. All the fun, none of the culpability. He quickly discovers, too, that Hyde can do so much worse, with so much less regret. He’s only too happy to enact what Jekyll might only have dared fantasize. As his wickedness mounts, so too does his dominance over Jekyll, and when, in due course, the doctor begins to transform without sipping his science milkshake, we are both sickened, and completely unsurprised.
More than any writer before him, Stevenson expertly maps the psychology of the addict, the sense of being two-in-one, the best of the self gradually worn down by the worst. Each defeat strengthens the other guy ever more and we know where it’s all headed almost from the first. The Doctor was lost from the outset, when he turned to chemistry, not to cure himself of his darkest impulses, or to atone for them, but to set them free.
And as Stevenson maps the mind of the addict, Leslie Klinger thoroughly and decisively maps Stevenson’s art. In a sense, reading this annotated edition is not unlike watching a very old and lovely film that has been cunningly restored. The colors scream; the sound booms; everything has been heightened by Leslie Klinger’s surgically precise observations. For readers new to the story, Klinger’s notes make a lost age as accessible as the world outside the window. Those who know the story well will be stunned at how much more was waiting to be discovered, as Klinger carefully peels back the surface of the prose to show the ingenious workings of the dreadful machine beneath. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde ticks along with the relentless forward motion of a timebomb, and Leslie Klinger knows how all the gears fit together. There is no better way to read this story than with him as your guide.
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The battle between personal mastery and the loss of control was a primary Victorian dichotomy… but seems even more relevant to the here and now. One can uncage their own personal Hyde so easily these days. Online forums make it simple for an outwardly decent man to take on a new, monstrous persona, to trample unlucky bystanders in a torrent of anonymous threats and taunts. Jekyll used a shimmering sci-fi Kool-Aid to transform… but the shift to a desperate, helpless addict is as easily managed with a cheap bottle of Oxycontin. Grab a tiki torch and march—a crowd of fellow chanting Hydes offers a safe space in which to hate. Compulsive, conspiratorial, paranoid, strung-out, overspent and heavily armed twenty-first-century America is unusually well-disposed to connect with Stevenson’s portrait of one man’s ideals being eaten alive by his darkest impulses. Edward Hyde is too strong—too full of fury and hunger—to belong to any one time, to be the nightmare of any one age. Even more than his grotesque contemporaries (Drac, Frank, et al.) he’s ripped free from the era in which he first stomped onto the stage (over that small, sobbing child), ditching the particular for the universal. Addiction, shame, and violent need don’t belong to a moment in history, but to human nature entire.
We are all a collection of different, competing selves. An individual personality is like a melody that can be played in many keys, as well as off-key, off-tempo, with unsettling distortions and shocking reverberations. One learns to recognize them all as part of the same song. They are, after all, a single composition, describing a single soul. Live long enough and it is possible to see and accept (if not make peace with) the one-in-many… to glimpse the worst parts of oneself and nod in recognition rather than recoil in fear. As Jekyll himself remarks, in his final confession:
When I looked upon that ugly idol in the glass, I was conscious of no repugnance, rather a leap of welcome. This, too, was myself.
From The New Annotated Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, edited with a foreword and notes by Leslie S. Klinger. Used with permission of The Mysterious Press. Copyright © 2022 by Joe Hill.
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