)Īs such, the novella becomes an allegory for the double life lived by many homosexual Victorian men, who had to hide (or Hyde) their illicit liaisons from their friends and families. (See Showalter’s Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siecle. Some critics have suggested that the idea of blackmail for homosexual acts lurks behind the story, and the novella itself mentions this when Enfield tells Utterson that he refers to the house of Mr Hyde as ‘Black Mail House’ as a consequence of the girl-trampling scene in the street.Įlaine Showalter has called the book ‘a fable of fin-de-siecle homosexual panic, the discovery and resistance of the homosexual self’ in which ‘Jekyll’s apparent infatuation with Hyde reflects the late nineteenth-century upper-middle-class eroticisation of working-class men as the ideal homosexual objects’. Some critics have interpreted Jekyll and Hyde in light of late nineteenth-century attitudes to sexuality: note the almost total absence of women from the story, barring the odd maid and ‘old hag’, and that hapless girl trampled underfoot by Hyde.

Stevenson was an atheist who managed to escape the constrictive religion of his parents, but he remained haunted by Calvinistic doctrines for the rest of his life, and much of his work can be seen as an attempt to grapple with these issues which had affected and afflicted him so much as a child. Hogg’s book is told by a man who thinks he can get away with committing awful crimes (crimes which he attributes to his double or alter ego!) because he has been pre-selected for salvation (which is the Calvinist doctrine in which Stevenson himself was brought up).Īs such, the story has immediate links with the story Stevenson would write sixty years later. James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner n/e (Oxford World’s Classics) (1824) is an important precursor to Stevenson’s book in this regard. Religious interpretations of Jekyll and Hyde have also proved popular: see the references to Hyde as a ‘devil’ and a ‘child of Hell’, but also the numerous Biblical allusions (and here the Luckhurst edition, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Other Tales (Oxford World’s Classics), is particularly useful). However, note the way that Jekyll, in his ‘full statement’ becomes reliant on the ‘draught’ or ‘salt’ towards the end. This is essentially a development of the previous interpretation concerning alcohol, and arguably has similar limitations in being too restrictive an interpretation. You could purchase cocaine and opium from your local chemist in 1880s London (indeed, another invention of 1886, Coca-Cola, originally contained cocaine, as the drink’s name still testifies: don’t worry, it doesn’t any more). Some say he was too sick to be taking anything.

Scholars are unsure as to whether Stevenson was on drugs when he wrote the book: some accounts say Stevenson used cocaine to finish the manuscript others say he took ergot, which is the substance from which LSD was later synthesised. Similarly, the idea that the ‘draught’ is a metaphor for some other drug, whether opium or cocaine. This thesis – that the novella is about alcohol and temperance – is intriguing, but has been contested by critics such as Julia Reid for being too speculative and reductionist: see her review of The Transforming Draught in The Review of English Studies, 2007.

Jekyll and hyde poole flavor