Abstract
Beginning with a look at Stevenson’s consideration of Keats, Colman here argues that Stevenson developed a narrative approach to addictive consumption that overlapped with attitudes of earlier writers toward addiction as a condition of indolent engagement with possibility. Stevenson, however, wrote at a later stage of addiction discourse, and after writers such as Charles Dickens had created detective narratives built around addictive pursuit of the possible. Colman argues that Stevenson developed a narrative of indolent, optative movement according to the logic of addiction discourse of his age, according to which addiction was linked both to indolence and to exploratory, repetitive pursuit of some unattained possibility. Colman describes how a resulting, addictively hoped-for, optative, vicarious movement in Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde occurs in moments anticipatory of cinema.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsNotes
- 1.
An earlier version of this chapter appeared in the journal Extrapolation. See Adam Colman, “The Optative Movement of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde’s Addicts,” Extrapolation 56.2 (2015): 215–234. Material in this chapter that reproduces that article has been reproduced with permission of Liverpool University Press through PLSclear.
- 2.
Those lines in Lamia are given an indolently relaxed, dream-like context; they surround Keats’s assertion, of his mythical characters’ lives, that “[r]eal are the dreams of Gods, and smoothly pass / Their pleasures in a long immortal dream” (127–128).
- 3.
Scholars have already noted a cinematic tendency in Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (Stewart; Prawer 86–100; Annwn), and Stevenson did have a documented fascination with the projected image. He was particularly drawn to the magic lantern, the image-projector that, for instance, he brought with him in his travels in the Pacific (Colley 126).
- 4.
Saul Kripke also explains a sort of possibility similar to that pursued by Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde’s community of thirsty investigators. Kripke describes proper names as a manner of reference spoken into being by a community always engaged with the possible, writing that “proper names are rigid designators, for although the man (Nixon) might not have been the President, it is not the case that he might not have been Nixon (though he might not have been called ‘Nixon’)” (49). The rigidity of proper names and their correspondence to actuality work because those names accommodate and support an array of possibilities, even the possibility that those names might have been discarded. Utterson’s references to Hyde occur with similar regard to possibilities—Hyde may be a blackmailer, a friend of Jekyll’s, a monstrous assailant—and this possibility becomes broader when experienced through proliferating attempts at reference (gossip and dreams especially).
- 5.
This quote comes from Robert Louis Stevenson: The Complete Short Stories, ed. Ian Bell (New York: Henry Holt, 1994).
- 6.
Maudsley describes “general paralysis” whose “frequent cause” was “intemperance” (360).
- 7.
Michael Davis’s “Incongruous Compounds: Re-reading Jekyll and Hyde and Late-Victorian Psychology” examines the relevance of Sully’s work for Stevenson’s novella.
- 8.
For more on Keats’s fascination with indolence, see Willard Spiegelman’s Majestic Indolence; for a detailed account of Stevenson’s novella’s relationship with alcohol addiction, see Thomas Reed’s The Transforming Draught: Jekyll and Hyde, Robert Louis Stevenson, and the Victorian Alcohol Debate.
- 9.
See Trotter’s Dissertatio Medica Inauguralis, Quaedam De Ebrietate, eiusque Efectibus in Corpus Humanum complectens.
- 10.
Anya Taylor writes that Keats “cherishes wine’s transitory power” (169).
- 11.
It also recalls Keats’s negative capability, the state of comfortably “being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts” (Keats Letters 60).
- 12.
Helen Vendler writes that Keats’s “diction of re-creation … is a sensual diction … Its elements include, as in so many other passages we shall encounter, drowsiness, ripeness, honey, dreams” (37).
- 13.
Walter Jackson Bate has described the joining of emotion and physicality in The Stylistic Development of Keats: “there was in Keats,” he writes, “an instinctive and almost nostalgic craving for absorption and even self-annihilation in that which for him was poetical and which was on all occasions the specifically concrete” (43). Bate continues to note that “nowhere in his verse is this tendency more completely revealed than in Hyperion, in the Eve of St. Agnes, and in his odes and later sonnets” (44).
- 14.
“Over the last half of the novel,” notes Stephen Arata in Fictions of Loss in the Victorian Fin de Siècle, “Stevenson links Hyde, through a series of verbal echoes and structural rhymes, to various bourgeois ‘virtues’ and practices” (41).
- 15.
Elsewhere, Stevenson identifies one of the more striking characteristics of Keats’s vitality in an ironic perverseness that joins the low with the high. He remarks of Keats, “I have a word or two to say, about the perverted humour which reaches us from him. It is all solemnly taken; but I believe he thought to laugh, and the Hunts, Cowden Clarkes and such believed he was highly serious” (RLS Letters III.313). In other words, in Keats, he saw a kindred writer, a sick man who suffused solemn and elevated art with elements of the low, the perverse.
- 16.
Lawrence Driscoll has recently analyzed addiction in Jekyll and Hyde that opens possibilities in a more counter-cultural way—Stevenson, he writes, “has offered us an opening in the rhetoric of drugs. An opening that, on reflection, could be infinitely beneficial: drugs can offer us ‘no end of practical usefulness’” (63).
- 17.
A parallel between reading and drug addiction was often invoked by Victorians. In The Reading Lesson, Patrick Brantlinger describes a related rise of the view of widely accessible literary entertainment as poison, as a powerful bad habit.
- 18.
A useful summary about the connection Walter Benjamin notes between the figure of the flâneur, addictive enjoyment, and Freudian psychology can be found in The Art of Taking a Walk by Anke Gleber (50). See, too Walter Benjamin’s “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire.”
- 19.
Stevenson never diagnoses his characters as alcoholic, even if his novella suggests Victorian discourse on alcoholism. Nabokov recognized Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde as a text structured by a more enjoyably drunken approach to mystery. As he observes, “There is a delightful winey taste about this book; in fact, a good deal of old mellow wine is drunk in the story” (180). Stevenson himself, in an optimistic moment, had said, “Happiness is a matter of bottled stout” (qtd. Reed 53).
- 20.
Wandering could also become a salutary replacement for alcoholism, if the effect could be separated from the cause; Peter Bailey has noted how reformers had contended that public walking could become a form of “rational” or healthier “recreation” (53).
- 21.
For discussions of Keats’s relationship to history and class see: the essays by Hartman, McGann, and Fry in Romantic Poetry: Recent Revisionary Criticism; Jeffrey Cox’s Poetry and Politics in the Cockney School: Keats, Shelley, Hunt and their Circle; and Marjorie Levinson’s Keats’s Life of Allegory: The Origins of a Style. For Stevenson’s relationship to class, see especially Arata’s Fictions of Loss in the Victorian Fin de Siècle.
- 22.
Habitual pursuit of otherness brings these addicts together. In Inventing the Addict, Susan Zieger describes Jekyll and Hyde as Stevenson’s attempt to use classifications including addiction “in order to make a case against them. By doing so, he hoped to preserve a mode of homosocial conviviality, signaled by the loosening pleasure of alcohol” (194–195). See also Gwen Hyman’s Making a Man: Gentlemanly Appetites in the Nineteenth-Century British Novel for more on the relationship between Victorian masculinity and consumption.
- 23.
Peter Ackroyd observes a similar blurring of physical specificity in the novel, calling Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde the “greatest novel of London fog … in which the fable of changing identities and secret lives takes place within the medium of the city’s ‘shifting insubstantial mists’” (Ackroyd 430).
- 24.
Peter Brooks notes of nineteenth-century fiction that it is “as if the underworld of the transgressive and dangerous social elements were the last fund of ‘narratable’ material in an increasingly bland social and literary system” (Brooks 85).
Bibliography
Ackroyd, Peter. 2001. London: A Biography. New York: Doubleday.
Annwn, David. 2010. ‘The Gnome’s Lighted Scrolls’: Consumerism and Pre-Cinematic Visual Technologies in The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Journal of Stevenson Studies 7: 9–32.
Arata, Stephen. 1996. Fictions of Loss in the Victorian Fin de Siècle. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Armstrong, Nancy. 1999. Fiction in the Age of Photography: The Legacy of British Realism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Bailey, Peter. 1987. Leisure and Class in Victorian England: Rational Recreation and the Contest for Control, 1830–1885. New York: Methuen.
Bate, W. Jackson. 1962. The Stylistic Development of Keats. New York: The Humanities Press.
Benjamin, Walter. 1969. On Some Motifs in Baudelaire. In Illuminations, 155–200. Trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken Books.
Brantlinger, Patrick. 1998. The Reading Lesson: The Threat of Mass Literacy in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Brooks, Peter. 1984. Reading for Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative. New York: Knopf.
Brown, John. 1795. The Elements of Medicine. Vol. 1. London: Johnson.
Colley, Ann C. 2004. Robert Louis Stevenson and the Colonial Imagination. Burlington: Ashgate.
Colman, Adam. 2015. The Optative Movement of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde’s Addicts. Extrapolation 56 (2): 215–234.
Cox, Jeffrey N. 1998. Poetry and Politics in the Cockney School: Keats, Shelley, Hunt and Their Circle. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Davis, Michael. 2006. Incongruous Compounds: Re-reading Jekyll and Hyde and Late-Victorian Psychology. Journal of Victorian Culture 11 (2): 207–225.
Certeau, Michel de. 1984. The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steven Rendall. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Driscoll, Lawrence. 2000. Reconsidering Drugs: Mapping Victorian and Modern Drug Discourses. New York: Palgrave.
Engels, Friedrich. 2005. The Condition of the Working Class in England. New York: Penguin.
Fry, Paul H. 1993. History, Existence, and ‘To Autumn’. In Romantic Poetry: Recent Revisionary Criticism, ed. Karl Kroeber and Gene W. Ruoff, 465–472. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.
Gleber, Anke. 1999. The Art of Taking a Walk: Flanerie, Literature, and Film in Weimar Culture. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Greenaway, John. 2003. Drink and British Politics Since 1830: A Study in Policy-Making. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Harrison, Brian. 1971. Drink and the Victorians: The Temperance Question in England 1815–1872. London: Faber and Faber.
Hartman, Geoffrey H. 1993. Poem and Ideology: A Study of Keats’s ‘To Autumn’. In Romantic Poetry: Recent Revisionary Criticism, ed. Karl Kroeber and Gene W. Ruoff, 421–438. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.
Hintikka, Jaakko. 1962. Knowledge and Belief: An Introduction to the Logic of the Two Notions. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Hyman, Gwen. 2009. Making a Man: Gentlemanly Appetites in the Nineteenth-Century British Novel. Athens: University of Ohio Press.
Jones, John. 1700. The Mysteries of Opium Reveal’d. London: Richard Smith.
Keats, John. 1988. The Complete Poems, ed. John Barnard. New York: Penguin.
———. 2002. Selected Letters of John Keats, ed. Grant F. Scott. Cambridge, MA: Harvard.
Kripke, Saul. 1980. Naming and Necessity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Levinson, Marjorie. 1988. Keats’s Life of Allegory: The Origins of a Style. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Mansel, Henry. 1863. Sensation Novels. Quarterly Review 113: 482–514.
Maudsley, Henry. 1872. The Physiology and Pathology of the Mind. New York: D. Appleton.
Mayhew, Henry. 1985. London Labour and the London Poor. New York: Penguin.
McCarthy, John, and Peter Wright. 2004. Technology as Experience. Cambridge: MIT Press.
McGann, Jerome. 1993. Keats and the Historical Method in Literary Criticism. In Romantic Poetry: Recent Revisionary Criticism, ed. Karl Kroeber and Gene W. Ruoff, 439–464. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.
Mighall, Robert. 1999. A Geography of Victorian Gothic Fiction: Mapping History’s Nightmares. New York: Oxford University Press.
Mitchell, Robert. 2013. Experimental Life: Vitalism in Romantic Science and Literature. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Morison, Alexander. 1840. The Physiognomy of Mental Diseases. London: Longman.
Nabokov, Vladimir. 1980. Lectures on Literature, ed. Fredson Bowers. New York: Harcourt.
Prawer, S.S. 1980. Caligari’s Children: The Film as Tale of Terror. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Reed, Thomas. 2006. The Transforming Draught: Jekyll and Hyde, Robert Louis Stevenson, and the Victorian Alcohol Debate. Jefferson: McFarland.
Rush, Benjamin. 1811. The Drunkard’s Emblem; or, an Inquiry into the Effects of Ardent Spirits upon the Human Body and Mind. With an Account of the Means of Preventing, and of the Remedies for Curing Them. Winchester: Printed by Jonathan Foster.
Small, Helen. 1998. Love’s Madness: Medicine, the Novel, and Female Insanity, 1800–1865. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Spiegelman, Willard. 1995. Majestic Indolence: English Romantic Poetry and the Work of Art. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Stevenson, Robert Louis. 1994. Robert Louis Stevenson: The Complete Short Stories, ed. Ian Bell. New York: Henry Holt.
———. 1995. The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson, ed. Bradford Booth and Ernest Mehew. New Haven: Yale University Press.
———. 2002. The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, ed. Robert Mighall. New York: Penguin.
Stewart, Garrett. Curtain Up on Victorian Popular Cinema; Or, The Critical Theater of the Animatograph. In BRANCH: Britain, Representation and Nineteenth-Century History, ed. Dino Franco Felluga. Extension of Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net. http://www.branchcollective.org/?ps_articles=garrett-stewart-curtain-up-on-victorian-popular-cinema-or-the-critical-theater-of-the-animatograph. Web.
Sully, James. 1880. Sensation and Intuition: Studies in Psychology and Aesthetics. London: C. Kegan Paul.
Taylor, Anya. 1999. Bacchus in Romantic England: Writers and Drink, 1780–1830. New York: St. Martin’s Press.
Trotter, Thomas. 1788. Dissertatio Medica Inauguralis, Quaedam De Ebrietate, Eiusque Efectibus in Corpus Humanum Complectens. Edinburgh: Balfour and Smellie.
Vendler, Helen. 1983. The Odes of John Keats. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Waterhouse, Benjamin. 1805. Cautions to Young Persons Concerning Health in a Public Lecture Delivered at the Close of the Medical Course in a Chapel at Cambridge Nov. 20. 1804; Containing the General Doctrine of Chronic Diseases; Shewing the Evil Tendency of the Use of Tobacco upon Young Persons; More Especially the Pernicious Effects of Smoking Cigarrs; with Observations on the Use of Ardent and Vinous Spirits in General. Cambridge: University Press by W. Hilliard.
Zieger, Susan. 2008. Inventing the Addict: Drugs, Race, and Sexuality in Nineteenth-Century British and American Literature. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2019 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Colman, A. (2019). Optative Movement and Drink in Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. In: Drugs and the Addiction Aesthetic in Nineteenth-Century Literature. Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01590-9_6
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01590-9_6
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-01589-3
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-01590-9
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)