Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Other Tales of Terror

Read this as a kid, great to read again! ( )

I loved this book. It's shorter than I expected but it's up there with the likes of Bram Stoker and Mary Shelley as one of the best horror tales of all time. The character of Edward Hyde has been so perfectly constructed in this thriller, you'll have to remind yourself it's fiction. ( )

A Victorian novel, both of its time and ground breaking - a gothic tale set in a London contemporary to the author.
It touches on a range of taboo issues, from sexuality, to the link between class and morals and by extension eugenics.
The introduction and background essay by Mighall are insightful and give the modern reader a sense of the impact this book had at the time of writing.
I did find it slightly distasteful that the updstanding Dr Jekyll is perceived as the moral opposite of the base Hyde character - described as "pure evil". ( )

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde: And Other Tales of Terror
by Robert Louis Stevenson
Penguin Classics (2003), Paperback, 224 pages

‘I can’t describe him. And it’s not want of memory; for I declare I can see him this moment.’ (p.10)

Robert Mighall, editor of this edition of The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, writes that the statement of Dr Jekyll (last chapter of the book) is the best known part of the story written by Robert Louis Stevenson. Mighall advises to read the book completely: “They would find there something different from what they imagined: a more complex, rewarding and disturbing story than the version that has been handed down in popular culture form.’ (p.ix)

As Mighall writes in the introduction, following the path of Gothic novelist Stevenson changes the set of his stories: abandoned ruined castles and woods, Stevenson set the horror in the mind of individuals. The Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe is the past, the good and the evil are inside the mind.

‘I saw that, of the two natures that contended in the field of my consciousness, even if I could rightly be said to be either, it was only because I was radically both; … I had learned to dwell with pleasure, … on the thought of the separation of these elements. If each … could but be housed in separate identities, life would be relieved of all that was unbearable; the injust might go his way … and the just could walk steadfastly and securely on his upward path.’ (p.56)
This edition contains a brief dissertation of Robert Mighall: Diagnosing Jekyll: the Scientific Context to Dr Jekyll’s Experiment and Mr Hyde’s Embodiment; although very useful, I prefer a different point of view ‘diagnosing’ Stevenson and his book.
Cesare Lombroso’ s idea about the connection between head’s shape and criminality (drawn from physiognomy): ugly means crime, handsome means honest person; is only an easy and popular connection. In my opinion, on the other hand, Stevenson writes about the dichotomy between good and evil. Good or just has always tried to keep a distance from evil or unjust, but Stevenson wants to find another solution: both just and unjust living in the same person. But morality liked, from biblical times, dichotomy; so Stevenson doesn’t solve the problem with Dr Jekyll: his friend ‘can’t describe him’ (p.10)

The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde was first published in 1885; the next year, 1886, Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche wrote Beyond Good and Evil (Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future). Nietzsche ‘screaming’ his ‘Affirmative Philosophy’ or ‘Philosophy of Yes’ preludes how to build a bridge towards / beyond just and unjust.
Stevenson and Nietzsche: same times, same ideas, different solutions.

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OLALLA

Olalla was first published in 1887 and is set in Spain during a war. The narrator is an English soldier recovering from his wounds in an hospital. After a while the soldier takes residence with a local family. The family consists of a mother, a son, Felipe, and a daughter, Olalla; they are an old Spanish family living in a residencia.

‘It was a rich house, on which Time had breathed his tarnish and dust had scattered disillusion.’ (p. 112)

The soldier cuts his wrist and asks Olalla’s mother for help. Seeing the blood the woman starts screaming and bites the soldier’s arm.

In Olalla Stevenson retrieves from the Gothic genre the themes of old and decayed families, vampires, buildings resembling castles, and, of course, the atmosphere of angst. Although the soldier’s infatuation with Olalla takes most of the story and Stevenson keeps the Gothic themes in the background, Olalla suggests an idea of passage between the Gothic genre tout court and its themes transferred inside the individuals (for instance Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde). ( )

Like most people, I've been aware of Jekyll and Hyde most of my life, chiefly as a common descriptor for the contradictions and duality of human nature. I mean, even Eddie Murphy took up the theme in The Nutty Professor. Reading the classic short story filled in a lot of intriguing details left out of later reinterpretations. Stevenson evokes the fog-shrouded streets of London so convincingly I could almost hear the clip-clopping of horse's hooves on damp cobble-stoned streets. Not as frightening as it must have been to uninitiated 19th century readers, but still a deserving classic of the horror genre. ( )