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- Herausgeber: Hesperus Press Ltd.
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015
One of the most well-known gothic stories of all time, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is a harrowing tale of good and evil and the duality of man set against dark, Victorian London. A new edition of one of the most famous stories of English literature: inspired by a feverish dream, Stevenson's renowned horror fantasy is a glimpse into the darker side of all human beings. Dr Henry Jekyll has been obsessed since early manhood by the uneasy duality of good and evil he senses in himself and others, and is driven - to his peers' dismay - to tamper with the mysterious and transcendental side of science. The respected doctor becomes inexplicably silent and reclusive, while at the same time the terrifying Mr Edward Hyde begins to stalk the streets of London… At heart a chilling tale of the perils of ambition and hubris, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde reflects many of the preoccupations of Stevenson's own Victorian milieu - the dangers of a morbidly repressive society, and the post-Darwinian fear of man's beast nature.
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The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
Robert Louis Stevenson
CONTENTS
FOREWORD
The world of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is one of locked doors, secrets, watchers and witnesses. It is a world where feeling must be muffled, and relationships simmer with what is withheld.
It is also, almost entirely, a male professional world. The focus is on those who dominated and shaped Victorian Britain. Robert Louis Stevenson, child of the Scottish professional middle class, knows what lies beneath its dissembling of individuality in the service of social order and cohesion. As the hidden, unruly self grows powerful, it may bear the fruit of nightmare.
The story opens in the company of the respectable, and obliges us to see the action through their eyes. Utterson, the lawyer, is coolly undemonstrative, and forms friendship where he feels no warmth. Richard Enfield, ‘the well-known man about town’, is young enough to be more expressive, but he already knows that it’s best not to try to open the locked doors of others’ lives, for fear of scandal. The ‘great’ Dr Lanyon is enraged by anything which does not fit his rational, scientific principles. He has seen himself as the professional brother of Dr Jekyll, but that brotherhood has been destroyed by Jekyll’s inadmissible, ‘unscientific’ conduct.
These are the citizens who ponder the erratic behaviour of Dr Jekyll, and watch and wait for Mr Hyde. Their cramped emotional and verbal repertoires must capture Mr Hyde’s evil as well as Dr Jekyll’s ambiguity.
The evil of Mr Hyde is beyond doubt. It is florid, brutal, terrifying. He is identified with the snake and with the ape, and yet there is a cunning in his cruelty which is all too human. Descriptions of him are tense with fascination: Hyde moves ‘with extraordinary quickness’, he gives ‘a hissing intake of the breath’, he tramples calmly over a child’s body ‘like some damned Juggernaut’. He is evasive and he must be hunted. Indeed he must be hunted out, for the good of the tribe. In Utterson’s words: ‘If he be Mr Hyde, I shall be Mr Seek.’
This observation is one of the many instances where Stevenson pairs the evil and the respectable, as if matching a pack of cards. Naturally the most dramatic comes as Stevenson pairs and blends the Jekyll/Hyde identities, but there are many others. Stolid Mr Utterson is transformed while asleep in his ‘great, dark bed’ into an intuitive, imaginative man, seduced by evil and longing to see ‘the face of a man without bowels of mercy’. Utterson and Enfield together witness an instant of ‘abject terror and despair’ on the face of Dr Jekyll. Utterson, in a rare moment of self-knowledge, says, ‘God forgive us, God forgive us,’ as if he realises that they are all in some way implicated in the horror that has overtaken Jekyll. Enfield nods his assent. They have watched and witnessed evil and a subtle paralysis has made them its accomplices.
What terrifies them most is that Mr Hyde is not a stranger at all. He belongs where they belong. He possesses the key to the door, and uses it. They long to see his face, perhaps because they fear that they will recognise it. Dr Jekyll, after all, has been one of them.
In all this, Stevenson speaks prophetically of the respectability and banality of an evil safely lodged in civil society, which cannot be cast out because it has grown there, and claims its rights there. Dr Jekyll imagined that he was in control, and could enter and leave his world of licence at will. He was entirely mistaken. The child trampled underfoot without a second of concern, the ‘aged and beautiful gentleman with white hair’ beaten to death in the public street, are all too familiar to the twenty-first-century reader.
Equally familiar is the passivity of the witnesses. A maid watches the savage murder of Sir Danvers Carew from her attic window. She records every detail of the event with almost supernatural clarity, but she does not intervene. She does not even cry out. She faints, as the victim’s bones are shattered and the body jumped upon by Mr Hyde. Similarly, when Mr Hyde tramples the child, the act is witnessed, but cannot be stopped.
In these passages Stevenson echoes James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. Both writers savagely indict the bourgeois city by developing it as a site of vicious murder. In both books there are witnesses, but these remain hidden, and do not prevent the crimes. During the murder of young Dalcastle in Confessions of a Justified Sinner ‘the moon shone full’, just as Sir Danvers Carew is murdered in a lane ‘brilliantly lit by the full moon’. Illumination offers no protection, but only a disturbing, hallucinatory clarity. The murder-witnesses’ perceptions are sharpened, while their will to act is paralysed, as if by a drug.
Dr Jekyll insists in his Statement of the Case that the drug which he takes to transform himself into Mr Hyde is intrinsically neither good nor evil. What it does is to release inhibitions. In fact the drug makes the murderer as dynamic as the witnesses are passive: ‘it but shook the doors of the prison-house of my disposition; and like the captives of Philippi, that which stood within ran forth.’
This image of the prison-house is one of many in the story which relate to enclosure, imprisonment and inhibition. Stevenson explores this whole question very sensitively. On one hand, the result of liberation from the code of respectability is a flowering of evil, as when Mr Hyde is liberated from the being of Dr Jekyll. But on the other, respectability itself creates a social and inner ‘prison-house’ which cripples men such as Dr Jekyll, and leads directly to their search for licence, rather than freedom.
Stevenson brilliantly ensures that it is impossible for Utterson, Enfield, Lanyon or the reader to place Mr Hyde safely on the far side of the door, to render him ‘other’ and therefore harmless. Mr Hyde is forever appearing in unexpected places, using his own key or knocking so softly and civilly that we feel confident in opening up to him. He lives at the heart of things, no matter how much he is denounced as animal and alien. In this chilling and wonderful piece of fiction, Mr Hyde penetrates the household of society and makes it his own, as he has long ago penetrated the body and spirit of Dr Jekyll.
–Helen Dunmore, 2003
Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
To Katharine de Mattos1
It’s ill to loose the bands that God decreed to bind;
Still will we be the children of the heather and the wind.
Far away from home, O it’s still for you and me
That the broom is blowing bonnie in the north countrie.
Story of the Door
Mr Utterson the lawyer was a man of a rugged countenance, that was never lit by a smile; cold, scanty and embarrassed in discourse; backward in sentiment; lean, long, dusty, dreary and yet somehow lovable. At friendly meetings, and when the wine was to his taste, something eminently human beaconed from his eye; something indeed which never found its way into his talk, but which spoke not only in these silent symbols of the after-dinner face, but more often and loudly in the acts of his life. He was austere with himself; drank gin when he was alone, to mortify a taste for vintages; and though he enjoyed the theatre, had not crossed the doors of one for twenty years. But he had an approved tolerance for others, sometimes wondering, almost with envy, at the high pressure of spirits involved in their misdeeds, and in any extremity inclined to help rather than to reprove. ‘I incline to Cain’s heresy2,’ he used to say quaintly: ‘I let my brother go to the devil in his own way.’ In this character it was frequently his fortune to be the last reputable acquaintance and the last good influence in the lives of down-going men. And to such as these, so long as they came about his chambers, he never marked a shade of change in his demeanour.
No doubt the feat was easy to Mr Utterson; for he was undemonstrative at the best, and even his friendships seemed to be founded in a similar catholicity of good nature. It is the mark of a modest man to accept his friendly circle ready-made from the hands of opportunity; and that was the lawyer’s way. His friends were those of his own blood, or those whom he had known the longest; his affections, like ivy, were the growth of time, they implied no aptness in the object. Hence, no doubt, the bond that united him to Mr Richard Enfield, his distant kinsman, the well-known man about town. It was a nut to crack for many, what these two could see in each other, or what subject they could find in common. It was reported by those who encountered them in their Sunday walks, that they said nothing, looked singularly dull, and would hail with obvious relief the appearance of a friend. For all that, the two men put the greatest store by these excursions, counted them the chief jewel of each week, and not only set aside occasions of pleasure, but even resisted the calls of business, that they might enjoy them uninterrupted.
It chanced on one of these rambles that their way led them down a by-street in a busy quarter of London. The street was small and what is called quiet, but it drove a thriving trade on the weekdays. The inhabitants were all doing well, it seemed, and all emulously hoping to do better still, and laying out the surplus of their gains in coquetry, so that the shopfronts stood along that thoroughfare with an air of invitation, like rows of smiling saleswomen. Even on Sunday, when it veiled its more florid charms and lay comparatively empty of passage, the street shone out in contrast to its dingy neighbourhood, like a fire in a forest; and with its freshly painted shutters, well-polished brasses, and general cleanliness and gaiety of note, instantly caught and pleased the eye of the passenger.
Two doors from one corner, on the left hand going east, the line was broken by the entry of a court; and just at that point, a certain sinister block of building thrust forward its gable on the street. It was two storeys high; showed no window, nothing but a door on the lower storey and a blind forehead of discoloured wall on the upper; and bore in every feature the marks of prolonged and sordid negligence. The door, which was equipped with neither bell nor knocker, was blistered and distained. Tramps slouched into the recess and struck matches on the panels; children kept shop upon the steps; the schoolboy had tried his knife on the mouldings; and for close on a generation no one had appeared to drive away these random visitors or to repair their ravages.
Mr Enfield and the lawyer were on the other side of the by-street, but when they came abreast of the entry, the former lifted up his cane and pointed.
‘Did you ever remark that door?’ he asked; and when his companion had replied in the affirmative, ‘It is connected in my mind,’ added he, ‘with a very odd story.’
‘Indeed?’ said Mr Utterson, with a slight change of voice, ‘and what was that?’
‘Well, it was this way,’ returned Mr Enfield: ‘I was coming home from some place at the end of the world, about three o’clock of a black winter morning, and my way lay through a part of town where there was literally nothing to be seen but lamps. Street after street, and all the folks asleep – street after street, all lit up as if for a procession, and all as empty as a church – till at last I got into that state of mind when a man listens and listens and begins to long for the sight of a policeman. All at once, I saw two figures: one a little man who was stumping along eastward at a good walk, and the other a girl of maybe eight or ten who was running as hard as she was able down a cross-street. Well, sir, the two ran into one another naturally enough at the corner; and then came the horrible part of the thing, for the man trampled calmly over the child’s body and left her screaming on the ground. It sounds nothing to hear, but it was hellish to see. It wasn’t like a man; it was like some damned Juggernaut3. I gave a view halloa, took to my heels, collared my gentleman, and brought him back to where there was already quite a group about the screaming child. He was perfectly cool and made no resistance, but gave me one look, so ugly that it brought out the sweat on me like running. The people who had turned out were the girl’s own family; and pretty soon the doctor, for whom she had been sent, put in his appearance. Well, the child was not much the worse, more frightened, according to the sawbones; and there you might have supposed would be an end to it. But there was one curious circumstance. I had taken a loathing to my gentleman at first sight. So had the child’s family, which was only natural. But the doctor’s case was what struck me. He was the usual cut-and-dry apothecary, of no particular age and colour, with a strong Edinburgh accent, and about as emotional as a bagpipe. Well, sir, he was like the rest of us: every time he looked at my prisoner, I saw that Sawbones turned sick and white with the desire to kill him. I knew what was in his mind, just as he knew what was in mine; and killing being out of the question, we did the next best. We told the man we could and would make such a scandal out of this, as should make his name stink from one end of London to the other. If he had any friends or any credit, we undertook that he should lose them. And all the time, as we were pitching it in red hot, we were keeping the women off him as best we could, for they were as wild as harpies. I never saw a circle of such hateful faces; and there was the man in the middle, with a kind of black sneering coolness – frightened too, I could see that – but carrying it off, sir, really like Satan. “If you choose to make capital out of this accident,” said he, “I am naturally helpless. No gentleman but wishes to avoid a scene,” says he. “Name your figure.” Well, we screwed him up to a hundred pounds for the child’s family; he would have clearly liked to stick out, but there was something about the lot of us that meant mischief, and at last he struck. The next thing was to get the money, and where do you think he carried us but to that place with the door? – whipped out a key, went in, and presently came back with the matter of ten pounds in gold and a cheque for the balance on Coutts’s, drawn payable to bearer, and signed with a name that I can’t mention, though it’s one of the points of my story, but it was a name at least very well known and often printed. The figure was stiff, but the signature was good for more than that, if it was only genuine. I took the liberty of pointing out to my gentleman that the whole business looked apocryphal, and that a man does not, in real life, walk into a cellar door at four in the morning and come out of it with another man’s cheque for close upon a hundred pounds. But he was quite easy and sneering. “Set your mind at rest,” says he; “I will stay with you till the banks open, and cash the cheque myself.” So we all set off, the doctor, and the child’s father, and our friend and myself, and passed the rest of the night in my chambers; and next day, when we had breakfasted, went in a body to the bank. I gave in the cheque myself, and said I had every reason to believe it was a forgery. Not a bit of it. The cheque was genuine.’
‘Tut, tut!’ said Mr Utterson.
