Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Other Stories (Barnes & Noble Classi

by Robert Louis Stevenson

  This presumably sexual indulgence initiates the inadvertent transformation into Hyde. Sitting on a bench in Regent’s Park, Jekyll is overcome with nausea and comes to himself in the person of Hyde. His difficulty now is to retrieve the drug that will help him to his original self. Remembering “that of my original character, one part remained to me: I could write my own hand” (p. 74) , Jekyll resolves to write to Lanyon. Yet though he obtains the drug (at the expense of Lanyon’s friendship), the remedy is only partial. The change now comes on him again: “from that day forth it seemed only by a great effort as of gymnastics, and only under the immediate stimulation of the drug, that I was able to wear the countenance of Jekyll” (p. 76).

  The two selves are bound together in a terrible pact. Hyde hates Jekyll as a patricidal son hates his father, even as the fear of being hanged for murder prompts him “to commit temporary suicide”: “Hence the ape-like tricks that he would play me, scrawling in my own hand blasphemies on the pages of my books, burning the letters and destroying the portrait of my father” (p. 77). Yet here, too, Hyde seems to be doing nothing more than acting out Jekyll’s own fantasies: defacing the pious books that Jekyll doesn’t dare to reject, destroying the portrait of a father for whom Jekyll himself surely has painfully mixed feelings. This precarious state of affairs is brought to a halt by the failure of the supply of the salt needed for the transformation. “I am now persuaded that my first supply was impure,” Jekyll writes, “and that it was that unknown impurity which lent efficacy to the draught” (p. 78): an ironic twist, given the centrality of a mistaken idea of purity to Jekyll’s initial fall from grace.

  The other stories in this volume address themes similar to those of jekyll and Hyde across a wide range of times and places. In “A Lodging for the Night” (1877), Stevenson depicts a senseless murder and the failure to profit from it—either literally or morally-in fifteenth-century France. The protago nist of the story is the poet Francis Villon, also treated in Stevenson’s essay “François Villon, Student, Poet, and House-breaker” (in Familiar Studies of Men and Books, 1882), a disreputable and impoverished student in fifteenth-century Paris who led a life both criminal and literary. Stevenson seems to identify strongly with Villon, and the story shows some ambivalence toward Villon’s failure to be persuaded by his noble host to reconsider his definitions of terms like honor, theft, good, and evil.

  “The Suicide Club” (1878) will remind many readers of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories, the first of which, A Study in Scarlet (1887), was published almost a decade later than Stevenson’s story. They share not just a common milieu but an interest in exploring the anomie of urban modernity. Sherlock Holmes relies on cocaine to stimulate his jaded intellect and the detection of crime to remedy his terminal boredom, while the Ruritanian Prince Florizel and his sidekick join the Suicide Club out of a similar lack of conviction as to the interest and value of ordinary life. The prince is named after a character in Shakespeare’s comedy The Winter’s Tale, but his nationality is that of an imaginary central European kingdom beloved in the popular fiction of the day and most famously associated with Anthony Hope’s novel The Prisoner of Zenda, published years after Stevenson’s story in 1894.

  “Thrawn Janet” (1881) is one of Stevenson’s best-known stories, written in a Scots dialect that looks impenetrable at first glance but quickly comes clear to the reader. Scots was the language spoken in Lowland Scotland following the Norman Conquest; it bears a close relation to English, of which it is now usually considered a dialect. The reader who has difficulty following the details of the story may consult Mairi Robinson, ed., The Concise Scots Dictionary (Aberdeen University Press, 1985) or Douglas Kynoch’s more recent Scottish (Doric)-English, English-Scottish (Doric) Concise Dictionary (Hippocrene Books, 1998). The Stevenson legend says that the writer’s childhood nurse Cummy first told him this story of an encounter with the devil, and that his language mimics her vernacular ; the story’s supernatural elements are a familiar part of Scottish fiction and folklore.

  “The Body Snatcher” (1884) looks back to an Edinburgh in which Burke and Hare have not yet been exposed and charged with murdering vagrants to sell their corpses to surgeons for dissection. Like ”A Lodging for the Night,” “The Body-Snatcher” is interested in questions about choice and individual morality. It also includes a supernatural twist. Finally, “Markheim” (1885) most explicitly foreshadows the themes of Jekyll and Hyde. Given the choice to turn away from the path of evil, Markheim (who has murdered a pawnbroker on Christmas Day) comes to an unexpected decision, under the influence of a character who has been variously identified by critics as a devil, an angel, or a projection of Markheim’s own inner self. Together with Jekyll and Hyde, these stories show Stevenson’s power and range as a writer of short fiction in English.

  jenny Davidson is an assistant professor of eighteenth-century literature and culture in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. Her novel Heredity was published by Soft Skull Press in 2003, and her book Hypocrisy and the Politics of Politeness: Manners and Morals from Locke to Austen will be published by Cambridge University Press in 2004- She has also published articles on Jonathan Swift’s servant problem (Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture) and on the pros and cons of politeness according to William Godwin, Edmund Burke, and Mary Wollstonecraft (Studies in Romanticism) ; articles on Jane Austen and Maria Edgeworth are forthcoming in Eighteenth-Century Fiction and Eighteenth-Century Women.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I would like to thank Melanie Micir for help with the foot notes, Emily Wilson for lending her expertise in classical languages, and Nico Muhly for conversation about Jack the Ripper. Thanks, too, to George Stade and to Jeffrey Broesche at Fine Creative Media. I owe my initial knowledge of Stevenson to my Scottish grandfather, Thomas Davidson, who sent me multiple copies of Kidnapped and Treasure Island as Christmas presents and encouraged me to read widely in nineteenth-century Scottish literature; this edition is dedicated to his memory, with love and gratitude.

  The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

  STORY OF THE DOOR

  Mr. Utterson the lawyer was a man of a rugged countenance that was never lighted by a smile; cold, scanty and embarrassed in discourse; backward in sentiment; lean, long, dusty, dreary and yet somehow lovable. At friendly meetings, and when the wine was to his taste, something eminently human beaconed from his eye; something indeed which never found its way into his talk, but which spoke not only in these silent symbols of the after-dinner face, but more often and loudly in the acts of his life. He was austere with himself; drank gin when he was alone, to mortify a taste for vintages; and though he enjoyed the theatre, had not crossed the doors of one for twenty years. But he had an approved tolerance for others; sometimes wondering, almost with envy, at the high pressure of spirits involved in their misdeeds ; and in any extremity inclined to help rather than to reprove. “I incline to Cain’s heresy,” he used to say quaintly: “I let my brother go to the devil in his own way.”a In this character, it was frequently his fortune to be the last reputable acquaintance and the last good influence in the lives of downgoing men. And to such as these, so long as they came about his chambers, he never marked a shade of change in his demeanour.

  No doubt the feat was easy to Mr. Utterson; for he was undemonstrative at the best, and even his friendship seemed to be founded in a similar catholicity of good-nature. It is the mark of a modest man to accept his friendly circle ready-made from the hands of opportunity; and that was the lawyer’s way. His friends were those of his own blood or those whom he had known the longest; his affections, like ivy, were the growth of time, they implied no aptness in the object. Hence, no doubt, the bond that united him to Mr. Richard Enfield, his distant kinsman, the well-known man about town. It was a nut to crack for many, what these two could see in each other, or what subject they could find in common. It was reported by those who encountered them in their Sunday walks, that they said nothi
ng, looked singularly dull, and would hail with obvious relief the appearance of a friend. For all that, the two men put the greatest store by these excursions, counted them the chief jewel of each week, and not only set aside occasions of pleasure, but even resisted the calls of business, that they might enjoy them uninterrupted.

  It chanced on one of these rambles that their way led them down a by-street in a busy quarter of London. The street was small and what is called quiet, but it drove a thriving trade on the weekdays. The inhabitants were all doing well, it seemed, and all emulously hoping to do better still, and laying out the surplus of their grains in coquetry; so that the shop fronts stood along that thoroughfare with an air of invitation, like rows of smiling saleswomen. Even on Sunday, when it veiled its more florid charms and lay comparatively empty of passage, the street shone out in contrast to its dingy neighbourhood, like a fire in a forest; and with its freshly painted shutters, well-polished brasses, and general cleanliness and gaiety of note, instantly caught and pleased the eye of the passenger.

  Two doors from one corner, on the left hand going east, the line was broken by the entry of a court; and just at that point, a certain sinister block of building thrust forward its gable on the street. It was two storeys high; showed no window, nothing but a door on the lower storey and a blind forehead of discoloured wall on the upper; and bore in every feature, the marks of prolonged and sordid negligence. The door, which was equipped with neither bell nor knocker, was blistered and distained. Tramps slouched into the recess and struck matches on the panels; children kept shop upon the steps; the schoolboy had tried his knife on the mouldings; and for close on a generation, no one had appeared to drive away these random visitors or to repair their ravages.

  Mr. Enfield and the lawyer were on the other side of the by-street; but when they came abreast of the entry, the former lifted up his cane and pointed.

  “Did you ever remark that door?” he asked; and when his companion had replied in the affirmative, “It is connected in my mind,” added he, “with a very odd story.”

  “Indeed?” said Mr. Utterson, with a slight change of voice, “and what was that?”

  “Well, it was this way,” returned Mr. Enfield: “I was coming home from some place at the end of the world, about three o‘clock of a black winter morning, and my way lay through a part of town where there was literally nothing to be seen but lamps. Street after street, and all the folks asleep-street after street, all lighted up as if for a procession and all as empty as a church—till at last I got into that state of mind when a man listens and listens and begins to long for the sight of a policeman. All at once, I saw two figures: one a little man who was stumping along eastward at a good walk, and the other a girl of maybe eight or ten who was running as hard as she was able down a cross street. Well, sir, the two ran into one another naturally enough at the corner; and then came the horrible part of the thing; for the man trampled calmly over the child’s body and left her screaming on the ground. It sounds nothing to hear, but it was hellish to see. It wasn’t like a man; it was like some damned Juggernaut.b I gave a view halloa, took to my heels, collared my gentleman, and brought him back to where there was already quite a group about the screaming child. He was perfectly cool and made no resistance, but gave me one look, so ugly that it brought out the sweat on me like running. The people who had turned out were the girl’s own family; and pretty soon, the doctor, for whom she had been sent, put in his appearance. Well, the child was not much the worse, more frightened, according to the Sawbones;c and there you might have supposed would be an end to it. But there was one curious circumstance. I had taken a loathing to my gentleman at first sight. So had the child’s family, which was only natural. But the doctor’s case was what struck me. He was the usual cut and dry apothecary, of no particular age and colour, with a strong Edinburgh accent, and about as emotional as a bagpipe. Well, sir, he was like the rest of us; every time he looked at my prisoner, I saw that Sawbones turn sick and white with desire to kill him. I knew what was in his mind, just as he knew what was in mine; and killing being out of the question, we did the next best. We told the man we could and would make such a scandal out of this, as should make his name stink from one end of London to the other. If he had any friends or any credit, we undertook that he should lose them. And all the time, as we were pitching it in red hot, we were keeping the women off him as best we could, for they were as wild as harpies. I never saw a circle of such hateful faces; and there was the man in the middle, with a kind of black, sneering coolness—fright—ened too, I could see that—but carrying it off, sir, really like Satan. ‘If you choose to make capital out of this accident,’ said he, ‘I am naturally helpless. No gentleman but wishes to avoid a scene,’ says he. ‘Name your figure.’ Well, we screwed him up to a hundred pounds for the child’s family; he would have clearly liked to stick out; but there was something about the lot of us that meant mischief, and at last he struck. The next thing was to get the money; and where do you think he carried us but to that place with the door?—whipped out a key, went in, and presently came back with the matter of ten pounds in gold and a cheque for the balance on Coutts‘s,d drawn payable to bearer and signed with a name that I can’t mention, though it’s one of the points of my story, but it was a name at least very well known and often printed. The figure was stiff; but the signature was good for more than that, if it was only genuine. I took the liberty of pointing out to my gentleman that the whole business looked apocryphal, and that a man does not, in real life, walk into a cellar door at four in the morning and come out with another man’s cheque for close upon a hundred pounds. But he was quite easy and sneering. ‘Set your mind at rest,’ says he, ‘I will stay with you till the banks open and cash the cheque myself.’ So we all set off, the doctor, and the child’s father, and our friend and myself, and passed the rest of the night in my chambers; and next day, when we had breakfasted, went in a body to the bank. I gave in the cheque myself, and said I had every reason to believe it was a forgery. Not a bit of it. The cheque was genuine.

  “Tut-tut,” said Mr. Utterson.

  “I see you feel as I do,” said Mr. Enfield. “Yes, it’s a bad story. For my man was a fellow that nobody could have to do with, a really damnable man; and the person that drew the cheque is the very pink of the proprieties, celebrated too, and (what makes it worse) one of your fellows who do what they call good. Black mail, I suppose; an honest man paying through the nose for some of the capers of his youth. Black Mail House is what I call the place with the door, in consequence. Though even that, you know, is far from explaining all,” he added, and with the words fell into a vein of musing.

  From this he was recalled by Mr. Utterson asking rather suddenly: “And you don’t know if the drawer of the cheque lives there?”

  “A likely place, isn’t it?” returned Mr. Enfield. “But I happento have noticed his address; he lives in some square or other.”

  “And you never asked about the—place with the door?” said Mr. Utterson.

  “No, sir: I had a delicacy,” was the reply. “I feel very strongly about putting questions; it partakes too much of the style of the day of judgment. You start a question, and it’s like starting a stone. You sit quietly on the top of a hill; and away the stone goes, starting others; and presently some bland old bird (the last you would have thought of) is knocked on the head in his own back garden and the family have to change their name. No sir, I make it a rule of mine: the more it looks like Queer Street,e the less I ask.”

  “A very good rule, too,” said the lawyer. “But I have studied the place for myself,” continued Mr. Enfield. “It seems scarcely a house. There is no other door, and nobody goes in or out of that one but, once in a great while, the gentleman of my adventure. There are three windows looking on the court on the first floor; none below; the windows are always shut but they’re clean. And then there is a chimney which is generally smoking; so somebody must live there. And yet it’s not so sure; for the buildings are
so packed together about the court, that it’s hard to say where one ends and another begins.”

  The pair walked on again for a while in silence; and then “Enfield,” said Mr. Utterson, “that’s a good rule of yours.”

  “Yes, I think it is,” returned Enfield.

  “But for all that,” continued the lawyer, “there’s one point I want to ask: I want to ask the name of that man who walked over the child.”

  “Well,” said Mr. Enfield, “I can’t see what harm it would do. It was a man of the name of Hyde.”

  “Hm,” said Mr. Utterson. “What sort of a man is he to see?”

  “He is not easy to describe. There is something wrong with his appearance; something displeasing, something down-right detestable. I never saw a man I so disliked, and yet I scarce know why. He must be deformed somewhere; he gives a strong feeling of deformity, although I couldn’t specify the point. He’s an extraordinary looking man, and yet I really can name nothing out of the way. No, sir; I can make no hand of it; I can’t describe him. And it’s not want of memory; for I declare I can see him this moment.”

  Mr. Utterson again walked some way in silence and obviously under a weight of consideration. “You are sure he used a key?” he inquired at last.

  “My dear sir ...” began Enfield, surprised out of himself.

  “Yes, I know,” said Utterson; “I know it must seem strange. The fact is, if I do not ask you the name of the other party, it is because I know it already. You see, Richard, your tale has gone home. If you have been inexact in any point, you had better correct it.”