I return this week to Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde for this will allow more scope to look in greater detail at Stevenson’s surprisingly modern examination of psychological elements that were better understood in the last century. One should register then that his dealing with this subject late in the 19th century seems even more remarkable.
But to return to the story itself, which in fact begins with the lawyer Utterson being told about the violence of Mr Hyde. He is astonished, for he has with him Jekyll’s will, which leaves all he possesses, in the event of his death or disappearance, to a mysterious Mr Hyde. And he is the more perplexed when he finds that Hyde has free entry into the Jekyll household, through a back door which opens into a separate section which was used as a surgery by the previous tenant, and where Jekyll has his office.
Matters reach a climax when Hyde commits murder. He then vanishes and Jekyll promises to have nothing more to do with him, but he cannot keep his promise for Hyde rears his head without the drugs.
For me, and for all readers who know the basic story, the remainder of the novel is gripping as we read of Jekyll’s desperate efforts to keep his alter ego at bay. But since the explanation was unthinkable when the novel first came out, and certainly so to Utterson, we move with him step by step, despite our own knowledge, to the discovery of the truth that he cannot at first credit. But he has to since the last section of the story is Jekyll’s own account of what had happened, when finally he had destroyed himself to stop Hyde taking him over with no hope of alleviation.
Enormously powerful stuff, on a theme later used in various ways by other artists, most notably to my mind in Alfred Hitchcock’s ‘Psycho’. And it was astonishing to think that the concept had been so vividly developed by the writer of so much that was so very different, in subject and theme and tone, and indeed in setting, for this long short story is, I think uniquely for Stevenson, set in a gloomy and oppressive London.
The two other stories in the book had a very different setting, the South Seas, but their theme was similar, in that in both of them Stevenson was looking at the propensity of both good and evil in a single individual. The shorter of them, The Beach of Falesa, is also the simpler, dealing with a single individual called Wiltshire who narrates the tale. , and the more abandoned intruders into the island whom he has to deal with.
When he arrives at the island where he is to take charge of a trading post, the captain who dropped him told him that one of his predecessors had died in despair, while another had fled. This was perhaps through fear of a competing group, led by a man called Case, who is however charming to the new arrival and fixes him up as he arrives to shack up with a girl called Uma who catches his fancy.
In the end Wiltshire, through an operation that is dramatic and full of suspense, exposes the chicanery through which Case had got the islanders under his thumb and triumphs. But more that the adventure, what is vital in this story is Stevenson’s sense of his protagonist’s moral perspective. Though as inclined as the next man to make a fast buck, he feels bound to his native wife and the children he has engendered. Towards the end of the story he reflects on what he owes them –
I don’t like to leave the kids, you see; and they’re better here than what they would be in a white man’s country, though Ben took the eldest up to Auckland, where he’s being schooled with the best. But what bothers me is the girls. They’re only half-castes, of course. I know that as well as you do, and there’s nobody thinks less of half-castes than I do; but they’re mine, and about all I’ve got. I can’t reconcile my mind to their taking up with Kanakas, and I’d like to know where I’m to find the whites?