The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde

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The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde

• By
• Robert Louis Stevenson

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Robert Louis Stevenson All human beings are
commingled out of good and evil.

• Born 1850 in Edinburgh of Thomas Stevenson, an
  engineer who build many of our deep-sea
  lighthouses and Isabella Mary Balfour, whose
  family contained members of the legal profession
  and ministers of the Church.
• Brought up to conform to the strict Victorian
  Middle Class code of respectability
• Childhood illnesses meant most of his early years
  were spent in his bedroom at home where Nurse
  Cunningham (Cummy) laboured to teach him the
  difference between pursuing a life of good or
  evil by describing at great lengths the
  everlasting torments of hell resulting from
  selecting the evil choice unsurprisingly Robert
  suffered terrible nightmares.
• Nurse Cunningham tried to convince him there are
  but two camps in the world one perfectly pious
  and respectable, one of the perfectly profane,
  mundane and vicious. Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
  refutes this simplistic view and argues that
  there is light and dark in all of us man is
  not truly one but truly two (Jekyll)

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Life Imitates Art?

• Stevenson grew up in Edinburgh, a city with two
  faces, and although Dr Jekyll appears to be set
  in London, there are many reasons Edinburgh could
  also be viewed as an appropriate setting.
• At seventeen, whilst studying Engineering at
  University, Robert would spend a great deal of
  time in Edinburghs notorious Old Town and it has
  been argued that he, like Jekyll, was leading a
  double life respectable middle class student by
  day and debauchery by night. However, Stevenson
  witnessed enough middle class double standards
  that he was determined to avoid such hypocrisy
  and he reacted against the strict Scottish
  Presbyterian background of his upbringing.

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Other famous publications

• A Childs Garden of Verse dedicated to Nurse
  Cummy
• The Master of Ballantrae
• Kidnapped
• Treasure Island
• Catriona
• Deacon Brodie, or The Double Life - play

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Victorian Edinburgh

• Old Town
• Dirty
• Disease ridden
• Overcrowded
• Full of Poverty

• New Town
• Prosperous
• Middle class
• Clean
• Ordered

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A city with a past

• William Deacon Brodie well respected
  craftsman by day, criminal by night hanged in
  1788. In his childhood bedroom, Robert Louis had
  a cabinet made by William Brodie
• Burke and Hare, the body snatchers

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Timeline of Significant Events

• 18th century Age of Enlightenment freedom,
  democracy and reason
• 1818 Mary Shelleys Frankenstein
• 1824 James Hoggs Confessions of a Justified
  Sinner
• 1850 RLS born in Edinburgh
• 1859 Darwins On the Origin of Species
• 1872 RLS quarrels seriously with father over
  religion and morals
• 1884 RLS publishes short story The Body
  Snatcher
• 1885 French neurologist gives public display of
  hypnotism
• 1885 RLS writes Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
• 1886 Krafft-Ebings Psychopathia Sexualis, RLS
  publishes Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
• 1888 Jack the Ripper murders take place in the
  East End
• 1891 Oscar Wildes Dorian Gray
• 1901 Freuds Interpretation of Dreams

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Echoes through the Ages