Discuss the insight which 'Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde' gives the reader into Victorian society.

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Peter Weeks 10K English course work

English course work: Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde

Discuss the insight which ‘Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde’ gives the reader into Victorian society.

 

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‘The strange case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde’ gives an insight into Victorian society because they address some key characteristics which can be attributed to Victorian society, for example the supernatural, the fog, Victorian buildings and finally the advances in science which the Victorian society feared. This paper will now address these issues in more detail.

‘Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde’ was written in 1886 by Robert Luis Stevenson when he was thirty-six years old. The structure of this novel is unique in that it is not cast entirely as a first-person narration, it could have been possible to tell the story in the manner of a confession from Jekyll’s point of view. Robert Louis Stevenson uses multiple narrators to give the effect of different points of view.

The story shows three different genres, detective story, horror story and gothic novella. Gothic novella became a very popular genre as other gothic novellas were written at this time, including ‘Dracula’ and ‘Frankenstein’. The reasons gothic novellas became increasingly popular within the Victorian era this is because the fear of advances in science this is shown in the story. Also the fear of foreign or exotic elements taking over the mind and spreading doubt over a religion. Many motiveless murders occurred in the Victorian era this meant huge interest in detective cases meaning that the book would have sold many more copies. Cases like jack the ripper may have been the inspiration for Robert Louis Stevenson. The novel also shows a ‘doppelganger’ story line this means an individual is split into several characters, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, creating more story lines for the novel. Many motiveless murders occurred in the Victorian era this meant huge interest in detective cases meaning that the book would have sold many more copies. Cases like jack the ripper may have been the inspiration for Robert Louis Stevenson.

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The supernatural features which break into reality in ‘Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde’ gives it the classification of a Gothic Fiction, which became increasingly popular in nineteenth-century-Europe, and particularly in Britain, where other novels such as Dracula and Frankenstein were written. The term ‘Gothic’ covers many different stories, but certain motifs and themes define the genre. Gothic novels may contain supernatural material as Dracula does, or imply supernatural phonomena without directly stating it, as ‘Jekyll and Hyde does’. They may not even hint supernatural events at all, just convey a sense of strangeness, or dark elements which break the ...

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