Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
Robert Louis Stevenson (1886)
“A Victorian lawyer investigates his friend's disturbing new associate — and unravels the most famous split personality in literature.”
Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde— Historical Context & Author Background
Author: Robert Louis Stevenson · Published 1886· Era: Victorian·96 pages
Themes explored: duality, morality, repression, science, identity, hypocrisy, victorian-society, evil
About Robert Louis Stevenson
Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894) was a Scottish writer of chronic ill health who spent much of his adult life searching for climates that agreed with his lungs. He was a deeply moral man in an era of enormous hypocrisy — raised in Calvinist Edinburgh, trained as a lawyer (though he never practiced), chronically drawn between his proper upbringing and his bohemian instincts. The idea for Jekyll and Hyde came to him in a dream in 1885; his wife Fanny woke him from a nightmare and he was furious at being disturbed — he said he had been dreaming 'a fine bogey tale.' He wrote the first draft in three to six days. Fanny read it and said it was only a horror story; he burned the draft and rewrote it with the allegorical dimension explicit. Published in January 1886, it sold 40,000 copies in six months in Britain alone.
Life → Text Connections
How Robert Louis Stevenson's real experiences shaped specific elements of Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.
Stevenson's Calvinist Edinburgh upbringing enforced strict moral codes and fierce suppression of anything considered sinful
Jekyll's fundamental duality — the sense of a 'garrison' self and a forbidden other-self — reflects the specific moral architecture of Victorian Scottish Protestantism
The repression Jekyll describes is not generic Victorian propriety but something with a specific theological history: the Calvinist doctrine that human nature is fundamentally depraved, requiring constant suppression.
Stevenson was trained as a lawyer and spent time in legal circles before becoming a writer
Utterson the solicitor is the novel's moral anchor — the professional class as the last line of reasonable inquiry
Stevenson understood from the inside how professional men used formal vocabulary and social codes to manage — and conceal — moral complexity. Utterson is not a caricature but a portrait.
Stevenson spent much of his life as an invalid — confined, limited, dependent on others — and wrote about freedom and wildness with intense longing
Hyde's initial appeal to Jekyll — 'younger, lighter, happier in body' — is the fantasy of a man whose body had always been a prison
The Hyde transformation is not just moral but physical liberation. Stevenson understood bodily confinement in a way that colors the freedom Hyde represents.
Stevenson knew Deacon Brodie, an Edinburgh cabinetmaker by day and burglar by night (later the inspiration for a play Stevenson co-wrote), who was a local legend of double life
The specific Edinburgh model of respectable-man-with-secret-life is the direct historical prototype for Jekyll
Jekyll is not an abstraction. He has a specific local genealogy in a real person whose double life was part of Edinburgh cultural memory.
Historical Era
Victorian Britain — 1886, late Victoria, height of empire and bourgeois respectability
How the Era Shapes the Book
Jekyll and Hyde is a Victorian anxiety machine. Darwin had placed evolution's mechanism inside every human body; the civilized man now knew he contained the brute. Atavism — the fear that individuals or groups could revert to primitive types — was a genuine scientific concept in 1886. London's social geography put vice and respectability in adjacent streets. The professional class maintained its status through reputation management, not moral virtue. All of these pressures converge in the Jekyll/Hyde scenario, which is why the novella felt immediately true rather than merely fantastical when it was published.
Why Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde Matters Historically
Published January 1886, it sold 40,000 copies in six months in Britain and 250,000 in the United States within the first year. It was immediately adapted for the stage and became one of the defining cultural texts of late Victorian anxieties about human nature. It gave English the phrase 'Jekyll and Hyde' — now used universally to describe any person with a dramatically split public and private self. The novella is the origin point of the split-personality figure in popular culture.
- First major literary work to use a chemical compound as the mechanism of psychological transformation — anticipating 20th-century psychopharmacology
- Established the 'double' (Doppelgänger) theme as a central preoccupation of English-language Gothic literature
- One of the first works of literary mystery structured around the disclosure of information through posthumous documents rather than direct investigation
- Pioneered the multiple-narrator structure that Stoker would develop in Dracula (1897)
Not formally banned, but subject to significant moral panic on publication — some clergymen preached sermons against it as a corrupting influence. American piracy of the text was so extensive that Stevenson received almost no American royalties despite its enormous US sales.