Each book includes educational tools alongside the text, enabling students and readers alike to gain a deeper and more developed understanding of the writer and their work.
Stark, skillfully woven, this fascinating novel explores the curious turnings of human character through the strange case of Dr.
Jekyll, a kindly scientist who by night takes on his stunted evil self, Mr. Published in , Jekyll and Hyde was an instant success and brought Stevenson his first taste of fame. Though sometimes dismissed as a mere mystery story, the book has evoked much literary admirations. Each book includes discussion questions that help clarify and reinforce major themes and reading recommendations for further research. Read with confidence.
Robert Louis Stevenson was born on November 13, He spent his childhood in Edinburgh, Scotland, but traveled widely in the United States and throughout the South Seas. The author of many novels, including The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Character Analysis Dr. Henry Harry Jekyll. A prominent, popular London scientist, who is well known for his dinner parties, Jekyll is a large, handsome man of perhaps fifty.
Jekyll is a kind and respected English doctor who has repressed evil urges inside of him. In an attempt to hide this, he develops a type of serum that he believes will effectively mask his dark side.
Instead, Jekyll transforms into Edward Hyde, the physical and mental manifestation of his evil personality. Jekyll has developed a potion that allows him to transform himself into Hyde and back again.
When he runs out of the potion, he is trapped in his Hyde form and commits suicide. Jekyll hated Hyde because of his pure evil and his power over him. He also had the feeling of horror that Hyde would probably do more horrible things, and that is when he thought of a way that can stop Hyde — committing suicide.
Jekyll has spent most of his life trying to be good and doing good things. Because of that, Hyde is smaller and younger than Jekyll. Although Mr Hyde is invariably depicted as a huge monster, in the original book he is described as being slightly smaller physically than Dr. Jekyll, since the evil part of his personality was the lesser part. He is violent and commits terrible crimes — the trampling of an innocent young girl and the murder of Carew. He brutally murders an innocent man, without provocation, and apparently without reason.
It seems that Hyde kills Sir Danvers Carew simply to demonstrate his power and to release his evil. He wrote a play about a notorious instance in Edinburgh — that of a respectable deacon of a church known for his good works who lived a secret life as a gambler, carouser, and bank robber until captured and hanged in The London literary society of the s and s had a number of men leading scandalous double lives, the most famous being Oscar Wilde, who was eventually arrested and imprisoned in Some suspected that the murderer of the six prostitutes was a doctor conducting perverse acts of revenge.
Was Stevenson offering an allegory of the dangers of attempting to separate the good and evil aspects of the soul? Actor Richard Mansfield in the stage adaptation of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde , performed a year after the publication of the novel. The Illustrated Police News was a weekly tabloid newspaper published between and ; its front page carried illustrations of the most sensational crimes of the immediate period.
In the s and s, French doctors had used the somewhat doubtful device of hypnosis to discover that the same mind could, in some rare cases, seem to split into separate memory chains, or even identities. Over years of study, her doctor claimed that he had switched the places of these personalities. This was not a moral matter, a separation of good and evil: it was merely a question of the curious mental dissociation of different personality traits. It is a strikingly modern conception of the mind.
L C Bruce relates the case study of a patient suffering from dual personality disorder, one personality speaking English and behaving well, the other speaking Welsh and being disruptive. He is a specialist in Late Victorian literature, Gothic and Science fiction literature and film, and the history of the supernatural. The text in this article is available under the Creative Commons License. Curator Greg Buzwell considers duality in Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde , exploring how the novel engages with contemporary debates about evolution, degeneration, consciousness, homosexuality and criminal psychology.
What does it mean to say a text is Gothic? Professor John Bowen considers some of the best-known Gothic novels of the late 18th and 19th centuries, exploring the features they have in common, including marginal places, transitional time periods and the use of fear and manipulation. The unidentified killer known as Jack the Ripper murdered a series of women in the Whitechapel area of London during Judith Flanders explores how the excitement and fear surrounding the mysterious murderer made its way into late-Victorian literature.
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