The first time we meet Mr Hyde he is attacking a small child in the street “trampled calmly over the child’s body” which is not normal practice for the normal man in the street. Stevenson makes this more horrific by saying “it sounds nothing to hear” but I think it does sound quite nasty to hear “but it was hellish to see” implying that it is much worse than it sounds. Mr Hyde’s appearance made the doctor who would usually have nothing to hold against Hyde “turn sick and white with the desire to kill him”. Later in the book Mr Utterson tries to describe Hyde “there is something wrong with his appearance, something displeasing, something downright detestable. I never saw a man I so disliked and yet I scarce know why. He must be deformed somewhere, he gives a strong feeling of deformity, although I couldn’t specify the point”. All this suggests that Mr Hyde is not normal. Stevenson then goes to describe Hyde through his house and his front door.
Mr Hyde’s house lies just past a market that is described as having “an air of invitation, like rows of smiling sales women”. Mr Hyde’s house is nothing like this being situated in a court and is one of “a sinister block of buildings” this description immediately makes you imagine a dark house with dark anti-social inhabitants. Stevenson then goes on to say the house “showed no windows, nothing but a door on a lower story” and “the door which was equipped with neither bell nor knocker, was blistered and distained” all of this is not actually just describing the house but Hyde as well. It says Hyde is a dark anti-social man that does not like visitors and does not generally fit in.
In “The Fifth Child” there is also an object like Mr Hyde’s door used to describe, but this time peoples feelings and what is going on. This is the big table; it is used to show the state of the family and relationships. The table near the beginning of the book before Ben is born is full of people at Christmas who are all happy and Christmassy but when Ben is born less and less people come around until at the end of the book the table is totally empty apart from Harriet. Harriet is imagining what it used to be like before Ben was born with many people all enjoying themselves and how much better it would have been without him.
Mr Hyde and Ben are both violent people. Mr Hyde had trampled over a small child in the street and killed an MP with a walking stick; both of these people were people that someone of Hyde’s age should have been stronger than, an old man and a small child. Ben had sprained his older brothers arm and “attacked an older girl in the playground”, both of these people should have been able to overpower someone of Ben’s age but Ben seems to be abnormally strong. When Ben was a small baby his mother did not breast-feed him like she did with her others because it hurt too much “the child looked at her and bit, hard”.
This may suggest that Ben is more evil than Hyde in being able to attack people that should be stronger than him.
Stevenson describes the event of Hyde trampling a small child in a different way to the way Lessing describes how Ben attacks a girl in the playground. Stevenson tells the story through Mr Enfield who is talking to Mr Utterson but Lessing uses Harriet’s thoughts to tell the story of Ben. Stevenson doesn’t just describe what Hyde did to the girl he goes on and makes the incident more realistic and tries to compare Hyde with other things such as a “juggernaut” to provoke more feeling in the reader “it sounds nothing to hear but it was hellish to see”. Lessing on the other hand describes Ben’s actions almost as a series of bullet points, stating what he did and nothing else “he had pulled her down, bitten her and bent her arm back until it broke”. For this reason, that Stevenson used more description in parts of his book I can find parts of “Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde” more believable and mare memorable.
These parts of the two books also show how far apart they were written. In Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde Stevenson uses the word juggernaut, which then meant a large unstoppable force but in today’s world has become to be associated with large lorries. Also in Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde there are few women and the ones we do hear about are servants or maids but in the Fifth Child there are many women and one of the most important people in the book, Harriet, is a woman. We also do not hear many people called by their first names in Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde but in the Fifth Child last names are seldom used.
The title of this essay I agree with most of except for the part that says, “progressively released”. This part of the statement is true for Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, as Mr Hyde is only really understood at the end of the book “he is not easy to describe”. In the Fifth Child Ben is thrown into the middle of everything suddenly and can even be different before he was bourn “David felt a jolt under his hand”. The second part of this statement “destroying peace and goodness as it comes” I totally agree with. In Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Hyde causes Jekyll so much pain that eventually he commits suicide. In the Fifth Child Ben scares Harriet and David off having any more children and breaks the family apart by making some of Harriet’s other children go to boarding school and by making them go and live with relatives.
James Stephens T10
