#69: The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
One part Jekyll, one part Hyde, all boring.
This review was originally posted to Twitter on March 16, 2019.
Initial publication: January 5, 1886
Author: Robert Louis Stephenson
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is probably the split-personality story; it’s an icon in gothic fiction, and one in which the twist at the end is well and truly spoiled. But for all its gothic and detective novel overtones it’s curiously lacking in substance.
Indeed, there doesn’t seem to be a great amount of plot. The story opens with the main character, a lawyer named Utterson, walking with his cousin (there’s your frame story) who tells him about a house they passed that he (the cousin) chanced to be familiar with fairly recently.
After Edward Hyde, a quite disagreeable gentleman, trampled a child, he buys off the witnesses with a check signed by the reputable Dr. Henry Jekyll, who turns out to be Utterson’s client — and who had recently altered his will to make Hyde the sole beneficiary. The rest of the book centers around Utterson’s attempts to investigate who Hyde is, especially after Hyde randomly beats to death a Minister of Parliament (and another one of Utterson’s clients.) But Jekyll doesn’t really do much; indeed, he hides in his lab most of the time. At the end of the book they bust down the door and find Hyde there, having committed suicide by cyanide; all that’s left are two letters, one to a mutual friend, and the other to Utterson, and it’s through this that the actual plot is revealed. It’s frustrating that Robert Louis Stephenson decided to tell his story this way; the actual movements of Jekyll and Hyde are left a mystery until the very end, with Stephenson not even deigning to reveal the twist in the story proper. I find it rather lazy.
While the book attempts to ruminate on the duality of man (good vs evil, and how even good people can be a little bad, etc.) it feels half-formed and largely perfunctory. At best, it’s a penny dreadful with a half-assed moral. In spite of its fumbling attempts at having “meaning,” very little actually happens and then it’s over and then we get the actual story. It’s also incredibly short, with most of the story broken up into relatively small chapters.
While the book itself is of little substance, it’s certainly inspired a great deal in terms of horror and science fiction, influencing everything from mad scientists to werewolves; moreover, “like Jekyll and Hyde” is commonplace slang for hypocrisy, or mood swings.
And, indeed, there’s been ten shitloads of adaptations for stage and screen; not everyone liked Mary Reilly but as Julia Roberts vehicles go it’s a good look at Jekyll and Hyde from another perspective (and it’s got John Malkovich in it!) Or you could go with the straightforward 1931 adaptation. In fact, there’s been so many adaptations, so many extrapolations of the basic idea, that you are not bereft of choice for doing literally anything other than reading this book. For all its lasting influence, it seems that its importance outstrips its actual value as a book itself.
