The Strange Case of Dr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson ? It is one of the descriptions, originally in a piece of literature, which has now become accepted in our vernacular. And there are many renditions of the story, The Strange Case of Dr. Hyde, and countless references to it in all aspects of life. Quite an achievement for a slim Victorian volume written by the Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson, and published in 1. But we are slightly handicapped nowadays by knowing the crux of the plot beforehand. Before this tale there seems to have been nothing similar, although there had been earlier tales in literature about doppelg. Robert Louis Stevenson had always been interested in the duality of human nature, and shown admiration for morally ambiguous heroes - or anti- heroes. But the spark which produced this novel was ignited by a dream he had had. His wife Fanny reported. I was awakened by cries of horror from Louis. Thinking he had a nightmare, I awakened him. He said angrily, 'Why did you wake me? I was dreaming a fine bogey tale.' I had awakened him at the first transformation scene. Stevenson wrote the original draft with feverish excitement, taking less than three days. He then collapsed with a haemorrhage, and his wife edited the manuscript, as was her habit. The story is that it was she who suggested to her husband that he should have written it as an allegory, rather than a story. On being left alone with his manuscript, Stevenson promptly burnt it to ashes, thus forcing himself to start again from scratch, and rewrite it in the form of an allegory. It is unclear whether this is true, or myth, since there can be no evidence of a burnt manuscript. However later biographers of Robert Louis Stevenson have claimed that he was probably on drugs such as cocaine when writing it. He was certainly ill and confined to bed at the time. The Strange Case of Dr. A short summary of Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr. This free synopsis covers all the crucial plot points of Dr. JEKYLL WAS QUITE AT EASE A fortnight later, by excellent good fortune, the doctor gave one of his pleasant dinners to some five or six old cronies, all. Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is a novella by the Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson first published in 1886. The work is commonly known today as The.
Hyde was an immediate success, and remains Stevenson's most popular work. It is only recently however that his work has been thought to deserve critical attention. The author himself took his writing lightly, shrugging his popularity off with a dismissive. Hyde was thus an unusual tale for him to write. Perhaps its popularity at the time was partly due to its high moral tone. Not only was it adapted for the stage, but was also said to be widely quoted in religious sermons. There is a lot of preamble and dissembling. Of course this must have added to the mystery. Yet since there is little mystery at all to a modern reader, it is difficult to judge. The novel starts with a London lawyer named Gabriel John Utterson who is intrigued to be told stories of his old friend, Dr. Henry Jekyll, and also about some evil crimes committed by a man called Edward Hyde. He himself witnesses Hyde going into Jekyll's house, describing Hyde as a . As the story moves on, we learn that not only is Hyde primitive, but also immoral, taking a delight in his crimes. He is not an animal, amoral and innocent, but a person Utterson sees as evil and depraved, full of rage and revelling in his vices. Yet is the morality of civilised people merely a veneer after all? The story is set very firmly in its time, when the ideas of what was decent and upright behaviour was set, not fluid. Yet even so, appearances and facades were often just an illusory surface, hiding a more sordid truth. A respectable man would sometimes prefer to look the other way and remain ignorant, . 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, the less I ask. Neither does he speak out when he thinks Dr. Jekyll might be sheltering Hyde from the police. The unwritten rule of the time, known to all respectable people, stated that one never betrayed a friend, whatever their secret. This may seem hypocrisy to modern eyes, or it may seem loyalty. As the story moves on the relationship between the two is compounded, but it is not until the final chapters, which consist of two letters to be opened in the event of a death, that the horrific story unfolds. This is a popular device of the time, but it lacks immediacy, and the story seems to finish unexpectedly, at the end of one letter, without any sort of conclusion. The descriptions however are very powerful. Then these agonies began swiftly to subside, and I came to myself as if out of a great sickness. There was something strange in my sensations, something indescribably sweet. I felt younger, lighter, happier in body; within I was conscious of a heady recklessness, a current of disordered sensual images running like a millrace in my fancy, a solution of the bonds of obligation, an unknown but innocent freedom of the soul. I knew myself, at the first breath of this new life, to be more wicked, tenfold more wicked, sold a slave to my original evil and the thought, in that moment, braced and delighted me like wine. And this again, that that insurgent horror was knit to him closer than a wife, closer than an eye; lay caged in his flesh, where he heard it mutter and felt it struggle to be born; and at every hour of weakness, and in the confidence of slumber, prevailed against him, and deposed him out of life. Jekyll could rarely bring himself to use the personal pronoun when talking about Hyde's most despicable crimes. Indeed, the character makes the same observation himself, yet at first he had talked in the first person throughout. To a modern reader then, this is a story about a split personality, or what is technically called . But Stevenson also invites us to view it as a moral tale, an allegory, questioning the abstract notions of good and evil. Do we truly have both a tendency to evil and an inclination towards virtue within our natures? If so, how do we decide which is uppermost? Can we consciously control them at all? And which, if either, might continue after death? The author poses the question, leaving it to the reader to decide, although there are hints that he views us all as having a dual nature. This has flaws of construction, but is well worth a look even so.
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