The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson

This novella starts with two men, Mr. Utterson and Mr. Enfield, going on one of their customary Sunday walks and commenting on the strange connection between a well known doctor, Dr. Jekyll, and a strange man named Mr. Hyde, a man that causes an eerie repugnance in all of those who chance to meet him. Mr. Enfield is telling his friend how he saw that man trample over a girl and leave her behind, frightened and bruised. When pressured by the girl’s family and those who watched the incident, he gave the family a check for £100. The strange thing is that the check is in the name of Dr. Jekyll. Mr. Utteron is alarmed when he hears this tale – Dr. Jekyll happens to be an old friend of his, and as a lawyer, he knows that according to his will, in the case of the doctor’s death or disappearance, this repugnant Mr. Hyde shall inherit all his property. From then on, the story narrates Mr. Utterson’s investigating just what the connection between his friend and Mr. Hyde might be.

This story is supposed to be mysterious, but, like most people, the one thing I knew when I started reading it was the twist, the solution to the mystery. It has become so engrained in our culture that it is pretty much impossible to avoid, even if one doesn’t quite know the details of the story. That was the case with me – the details actually turned out to be quite different from what I imagined, and I enjoyed the unexpected little surprises.

Reading this book felt a little like reading Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles – the stories are very different, but they have certain things in common, like for example the very atmospheric descriptions:

It was a wild, cold, unseasonable night of March, with a pale moon, lying on her back as though the wind had tilted her, and a flying wrack of the most diaphanous and lawny texture. The wind made talking difficult, and flecked the blood into the face. It seemed to have swept the streets unusually bare of passengers; besides: for Mr. Utterson thought he had never seen that part of London so deserted.

There is also the way language is used, that typical nineteenth century way that is so different from contemporary writing. And finally, there is the fact that both books contain a very dated conception of science. Having been published in 1886 and 1901, they both belong to a period in which what is and what is not science was not yet well-defined. The experiments Dr. Jekyll performs in this book are more the kind of thing one would expect from a wizard than from a scientist. It’s interesting how this book gives us a glimpse of the mindset of the period.

Another thing I find interesting about books from this period is the fact that the way the characters react to the eerie, the mysterious, the supernatural, is very different from what you find in contemporary books. These days you no longer find fictional descriptions of people dying of shock or fright, or of very physical reactions like turning completely white or having every hair in one’s body rise. These days those things are mostly common expressions that are used metaphorically, but back then they were meant literally.

I will also be reading Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein for the RIP challenge – the novel is from 1818, so it’s quite a bit earlier, but it will be interesting to see how many of these elements I also find in it.

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