How Does Stevenson make Victorian London an essential element of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde?

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How Does Stevenson make Victorian London an essential element of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde?

Robert Louis Stevenson was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, son to a Thomas Stevenson, a prosperous civil engineer and Margaret Balfour a daughter of a Scottish clergyman. Stevenson suffered from T.B. and in an attempt to cure himself he spent most of his time in warmer countries. Stevenson was looking at London from an outsiders’ point of view. Edinburgh was a similar town at the time, and he must have used Edinburgh as his model for his fictional London.

 Morality was very important to the Victorians as they thought they had to set an example to all the ‘barbaric’ and ‘uncivilized’ nations such as India in their empire. A few centuries before the Victorian era the nobility led around armies and they pillaged, raped, killed and generally did what the wanted. A member of the Victorian gentility had to be Christian, rational and respectable, this was impossible for a person to keep up all of the time so led to much hypocrisy.

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Dr Jekyll comes to the conclusion that “man is not truly one, but truly two” he tried to separate the personalities so “upright twin; and the just could walk steadfastly and securely on his upward path, doing good things in which he found his pleasure,” so his original intention was to get rid of evil from the world. The reason he did not destroy Hyde was because he felt so free “like a school boy, strip off these lendings and spring headlong into the sea.

In Victorian Times London was a drab, dreary place, except for the ...

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