Context
Robert Louis Stevenson, one of
the masters of the Victorian
adventure story, was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, on November 13, 1850.
He was a sickly child, and respiratory troubles plagued him throughout
his life. As a young man, he traveled through Europe, leading a bohemian
lifestyle and penning his first two books, both travel narratives.
In 1876, he met a married woman, Fanny Van
de Grift Osbourne, and fell in love with her. Mrs. Osbourne eventually divorced
her husband, and she and Stevenson were married.
Stevenson returned to London with his bride and wrote
prolifically over the next decade, in spite of his terrible health.
He won widespread admiration with Treasure Island, written
in 1883, and followed it with Kidnapped in 1886;
both were adventure stories, the former a pirate tale set on the
high seas and the latter a historical novel set in Stevenson's native
Scotland. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, which Stevenson
described as a “fine bogey tale,” also came out in 1886.
It met with tremendous success, selling 40,000 copies
in six months and ensuring Stevenson's fame as a writer.
In its narrative of a respectable doctor who transforms
himself into a savage murderer, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde tapped
directly into the anxieties of Stevenson's age. The Victorian era,
named for Queen Victoria, who ruled England for most of the nineteenth
century, was a time of unprecedented technological progress and
an age in which European nations carved up the world with their
empires. By the end of the century, however, many people were beginning
to call into question the ideals of progress and civilization that
had defined the era, and a growing sense of pessimism and decline
pervaded artistic circles. Many felt that the end of the century
was also witnessing a twilight of Western culture.
With the notion of a single body containing both the erudite
Dr. Jekyll and the depraved Mr. Hyde, Stevenson's novel imagines
an inextricable link between civilization and savagery, good and
evil. Jekyll's attraction to the freedom from restraint that Hyde
enjoys mirrors Victorian England's secret attraction to allegedly
savage non-Western cultures, even as Europe claimed superiority
over them. This attraction also informs such books as Joseph Conrad's Heart
of Darkness. For, as the Western world came in contact
with other peoples and ways of life, it found aspects of these cultures within
itself, and both desired and feared to indulge them. These aspects
included open sensuality, physicality, and other so-called irrational
tendencies. Even as Victorian England sought to assert its civilization
over and against these instinctual sides of life, it found them
secretly fascinating. Indeed, society's repression of its darker side
only increased the fascination. As a product of this society, Dr. Jekyll
and Mr. Hyde manifests this fascination; yet, as a work
of art, it also questions this interest.
By the late 1880s, Stevenson had
become one of the leading lights of English literature. But even
after garnering fame, he led a somewhat troubled life. He traveled
often, seeking to find a climate more amenable to the tuberculosis
that haunted his later days. Eventually he settled in Samoa, and
there Stevenson died suddenly in 1894, at
the age of forty-four.
