‘Ordinary Secret Sinners’: Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886)

Abstract

This chapter focuses on Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886),¹ a ‘Christmas crawler’ produced by Robert Louis Stevenson in answer to his publisher’s request for something sensational for the 1885 Christmas literary marketplace (Stevenson, Jekyll and Hyde xvii). The novel, recounting a respectable doctor’s transformation into a hideous criminal, was published in January 1886. Early reviews were extremely positive — writing in the Saturday Review, Andrew Lang called the novel ‘excellent and horrific and captivating’; likewise, for The Times it was a ‘finished study in the art of the fantastic’ comparable to classic works such as ‘the sombre masterpieces of Poe’ (Lang, ‘Stevenson’s New Story’; ‘Strange’). Indeed, it created an immediate sensation — selling over 40,000 copies in its first few months and running to seven editions. By February 1886, just one month after publication, it had already been parodied by that up-to-the-minute cultural barometer, Punch. The magazine ran a pastiche story ‘to make your flesh creep’ featuring ‘Mr Hidanseek’, a character with ‘an acquired taste for trampling out children’s brains and hacking to death … Baronets’ (‘The Strange Case of Dr T.’). In the spring of 1887 a stage adaptation opened in Boston and New York, soon moving to London, where it ran for almost two years. By June 1889 a further 29,000 copies had been sold in the UK alone and the novel had reached a sixteenth edition.

Dr Jekyll is rather a worse kind of fellow than Mr Hyde.

Andrew Lang, ‘Modern Man: Mr R.L. Stevenson.’ Scots Observer 20 Jan. 1889: 264