Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde

The subtractive test finds very little to take. Each of the eight chapters told from outside is an incident that adds one fact to a false theory: the door and the cheque suggest blackmail, the will makes Hyde an heir, the Carew murder makes him a criminal, the letter whose hand matches Jekyll’s suggests forgery, and then come Lanyon’s collapse, the face at the window, and the last night, when the theory is that Hyde has murdered Jekyll. Every false theory is required, because the book’s knowledge is that a respectable reading of a respectable man reaches every explanation but the true one. Lanyon’s narrative is required because it gives the transformation to a witness before the man explains it. What holds the axis there is the middle of the statement, where Jekyll restates his theory of the double and the episode in Regent’s Park and the letters sent from a hotel run long: a paragraph or two of moral exposition could go with the knowledge unchanged.

Score: 8.5 / 10

The disclosure can be stated and it holds. The respectable self is not deceived by its double; it makes it, for pleasure. The wish to separate good from evil in oneself is itself the pretext for license. And the divided man does not become two halves but a mixed man and a pure appetite, and the appetite grows. Jekyll puts it plainly, “I was in no sense a hypocrite; both sides of me were in dead earnest”, and the book shows that the claim is the problem. Hyde is the smaller, younger part, and he grows until Jekyll wakes to see “the hand of Edward Hyde” on the sheet. Jekyll’s guess that man is a “polity of multifarious, incongruous and independent denizens” reaches past the pair the book is famous for. What holds the axis at the bar is that the disclosure is partly delivered as essay in the statement, and that Hyde’s pleasures are never named, which keeps the condition general.

Score: 8.5 / 10

The register is dry, a lawyer’s world, and the terror comes through it in sharp, repeated strokes rather than sustained elevation. Enfield’s first story sets the pitch: the man “trampled calmly over the child’s body and left her screaming on the ground”, and “It wasn’t like a man; it was like some damned Juggernaut.” The Carew murder, seen by a maid from a moonlit window, ends in a beating “with ape-like fury”, under which the bones are heard to break. Utterson dreams of a figure without a face gliding through a city of lamps; the fog lies over Soho as a “chocolate-coloured pall”; a face at a window is seized by terror; an axe goes through a cabinet door; Lanyon cries “O God!” as the drink takes hold. These rise often and high. What holds the axis there is that the summit moments are short, and the last pages of the statement are raised more by pathos than by grandeur.

Score: 8.3 / 10

Here the book is at its height, and the myth is built, not evoked. The double was old, in Hogg, Poe, Hoffmann and Dostoevsky; Stevenson made of it a new myth whose name has passed into the language, and made it bear weight in every particular. The house with two faces, Jekyll’s fine front on the square and the blind, blistered door of the old dissecting theatre on the by-street, is the man. The key, the cheque signed in Jekyll’s name, the will that leaves all to Hyde, the two hands that are one hand with a different slope, the drug whose first impurity cannot be bought again: each is particular and each is the archetype. Utterson’s quip, “If he be Mr. Hyde, I shall be Mr. Seek”, names the game, and his “I incline to Cain’s heresy” sets the brother-murder beneath it. Fall, Faust and Cain are present, but the structure is Stevenson’s own. A tenth is held back because Hyde, the myth’s centre, is drawn by negation, “an impression of deformity without any nameable malformation”, which serves the myth and thins the particular.

Score: 9.0 / 10

The turn is real, and the risk was of a modest kind. Stevenson took the shilling shocker, a commercial form, and the double of Romantic and Gothic fiction, and joined them to the detective structure of the sensation novel and the documentary method of Wilkie Collins: a chain of incidents read by a sceptical professional, then statements left in writing. The swerve is to place a supernatural premise inside a scientific and legal frame, to give the double a mechanism and a social address, a square, Soho and a lawyer’s will, and to withhold the inside entirely until the end. What it risked was a writer of romance and boys’ adventure staking his name on a thriller. What holds the axis lowest but one is that the paths it joined were proven: the double, the confession and the documentary close had all been walked before. It is a swerve of form and placement rather than of kind, and the shilling form costs it nothing.

Score: 8.2 / 10

Change the form and the book stops knowing what it knows. The eight chapters from outside enact the knowledge that respectable society, gentlemen who keep silence and make it a rule not to ask questions, cannot see what its members are, and reads every sign as a scandal of the ordinary kind: blackmail, forgery, a disreputable heir. The two documents then move inward, from a witness who dies of what he saw to the man himself, and the last chapter enacts the dissolution of the self in its grammar. Jekyll writes of Hyde in the third person, then breaks, “He, I say”, “I cannot say, I”, and closes with the self ending as the pen is laid down: “I bring the life of that unhappy Henry Jekyll to an end.” What holds the axis there is that the form depends on a secret its own fame has spent, and that the statement explains more than the form needed it to.

Score: 8.5 / 10

The evidence of return is long and varied. The book has been read as a moral fable and as a temperance tract, the potion as drink or drug; as a study of degeneration and atavism in the decade of Lombroso; as a fable of class, the gentleman’s house against the Soho rooms; and, since the late twentieth century, as a book of a closed world of bachelors whose secret is never named. Nabokov lectured on it and read it as a work of style; the lecture is printed in his Lectures on Literature. Each reading finds support in particulars: the absence of women, the “Black Mail House”, the cheque, the pleasures that are never named. It yields on return formally as well, in the play of the hand, the door and the key. What holds the axis there is length, and the closing explanation, which settles more than a deeper book would leave settled.

Score: 8.4 / 10

The field is the prose fiction of nineteenth-century English. The intrinsic force is moderate to high: the book did not reorganise the novel, but it made the double the property of the modern popular imagination and gave psychology a name before psychology had one. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) takes up the respectable face and the secret life; the scientist who transgresses becomes a line in later science fiction and horror; the split self of the horror film runs from the silent versions through Rouben Mamoulian’s film of 1931 and after; the later literary double in English, Conrad’s “The Secret Sharer” (1910) among it, stands in the line, though no direct debt can be stated; and the title is used in English of anyone with two natures. Delayed and diffuse reach is credited and discounted. What holds the axis at the bar is that much of the reach is presence in the culture rather than redirection of literature.

Score: 8.5 / 10

A hundred and forty years are weighed as such. The text survives whole, in the author’s own edition, with no question of recension and nothing lost. The presence is among the widest of any English book of its century: in print without a break since 1886, taught in schools and universities, translated widely, adapted for the stage, film, radio and comics in every generation, from a stage version of 1887 onward, and its title a common phrase; fame is presence, not proof. That would carry the axis higher still. What holds it at its figure is a charge on form: the book’s defining form is a withheld secret, and its fame has made the secret known before the first page is turned, so that the mystery its first readers read is now read only as irony. The form is legible; one of its effects has not survived its own success.

Score: 9.1 / 10

Stevenson’s command of the English sentence is exact and economical, and the making bears weight in the opening chapters above all. The portrait of Utterson that opens the book, “lean, long, dusty, dreary and yet somehow lovable”, sets a voice of dry, comic precision that carries horror without raising its pitch. The setting is drawn in few strokes: the by-street with its bright shopfronts, the sinister block with its blistered door, the fog over Soho. Dialogue is spare and characterising, in Poole the butler and in Mr Guest the clerk. The two documents are differentiated: Lanyon’s dry and appalled, Jekyll’s elaborate, self-justifying and in its last pages broken. The cost is in the statement, where the periodic, moralising prose runs to abstraction and to the stresses of a Victorian confession; it is fitting to Jekyll, and it still thins the texture. The making stands high, below the summit.

Score: 8.7 / 10

One law governs the whole: every element is doubled into a face and a back door. The house, the hand, the will, the name, the two doctors, Lanyon’s science against Jekyll’s, and even Utterson’s own self-denial and his tolerance of men in decline obey it. Take the two most distant parts, the dry comedy of the first chapter and the anguished confession of the last. They obey the same law, since the confession explains the comedy’s outward signs one by one, and Utterson’s reserve is the respectable silence the confession indicts. The chemical premise is held to its rules, and the end follows from a rule set early: the impure salt that cannot be bought again. What holds the axis there is range. Narrowness is not coherence: the field is a single milieu, and the law covers it whole but covers no wide field.

Score: 8.6 / 10

Judged as a novella, which the form bounds, and not punished beyond what it holds. The orders held are consciousness and its division, above all; the professions of law, medicine and science and the codes of gentlemen; the city as a moral geography, the square and Soho, the front and the back; the law and the police in a murder case; and religion and morality, as Cain, God and damnation in Jekyll’s own terms. They are joined by one structure, which is achievement, not listing. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent or only glimpsed: the family, since every man in the book is a bachelor; women and love, since no woman has a name of consequence; labour beyond the servants; the state beyond a murdered Member of Parliament; history; and the natural order. The book holds one class in one city over about a year.

Score: 7.2 / 10