Aidan Lazarou

Edinburgh-born Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1886 classic gothic novella The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is a thrilling insight into a very dark Victorian London in which dissolute behaviour lurks beneath a contradictory covering of proper morals and respectability, letting human wickedness and evil run rife, and the conflicting powers of science and religion, both of which are very relevant to consider regarding the time at which the book is set, following Darwin’s theory of evolution, clash again and again, which is thought-provokingly explored throughout the characters of Dr. Henry Jekyll and Hastie Lanyon. The text opens with the narrator, a “lean, long, dusty and dreary, yet somewhat loveable” lawyer Gabriel Utterson, a key character with an opinion that we, as readers, follow, consider ourselves, and delve deeper into as the text develops, and whom the events of the story unfurl around. From his introduction, and on a Sunday walk with his reputable cousin Richard Enfield, we learn of a man who is “something troglodytic” and “hardly human”, with “Satan’s signature” written legibly across his face, who had “trampled calmly” over a young girl one dark night to leave her “screaming on the ground” – this is, of course, the terrible and seemingly untraceable Mr. Edward Hyde. Utterson, helped by various clues that any reader will enjoy working out alongside the lawyer, begins his hunt for the man who seems to be linked dangerously with a close friend of his, the highly-respected Dr. Henry Jekyll. Cleverly structured in style of a legal document, or a police report which reflects the nature of the story and the terrible wrongdoings that are committed throughout, Stevenson’s work expertly dabbles in elements of the crime and horror genres, and uses documents, dates, and letters, all of which are used to provide Utterson a means to discover the true connection between Jekyll and Hyde. The moment at which these are the revealed in the tense final chapters of the book (which are displayed by the means of letters), is sure to shock and enthral any reader of this gripping and twisting, yet absolutely sensational book which is well worth a read.