Rakhee Ratan, English, Miss Dwyer
English coursework
"Man is not truly one but truly two"! Robert Louis Stevenson wrote the strange case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde in 1866. One of the themes in the story is about the two sides of human nature, which shows the good, and evil in man. Robert Louis Stevenson showed this very well by using one person with two completely different characters. In the essay I will be discussing the Carew murder case and analysing Stevenson's portrayal of the dual nature of man's personality. I will be showing the effects of the setting, character, and language across the novel as a whole.
Stevenson was born in 1850 and grew up as a Victorian. In the Victorian times the attitudes of the people towards good and evil were very strong. The Victorians used to keep things behind closed doors, although once something was spread around the town the people used to decide on if the matter was of good or of evil. The attitudes of the Victorians were very ill mannered and self-keeping. They believed that the origin of species, which claimed that human beings had evolved from apes, was very frightening and many people also had made fun of these ideas. They thought of all scientists to be evil, wrong and people who spoke nothing but nonsense. Most of the upper and middle-class Victorians lived by a strict moral code and even though they seemed to stick to this in public, they frequently lived secret lives. They were strained to hide their secret desires and thoughts in public but in private they gave in to them often in the darker, sinister and less respectable parts of towns and cities. This part of their secret lives could lead to extreme and violent behaviour. This type of society influenced Stevenson highly, especially when he was a student. As a student he kept short of money by serious parents. He used to go down to the pubs in the older areas of the city at night and by doing this he became aware of the contrast between the magnificent streets of the city centre and the ugly narrow alleyways close behind them. Stevenson drew on his own experience in part in imagining this story. Though he set the novel in London he relied on his memories of Edinburgh in his youth for much of the description. These views and thoughts Stevenson had on the towns and cities gave him a chance to study the towns and cities when he was a student, which helped him write his story. Stevenson came from a strict religious background. Although he eventually rebelled against the stern and proper Calvinist beliefs of his father, the themes of 'sin' and 'evil' are easy to see in The Strange Case of Jekyll and Hyde. When Stevenson was a child growing up in Edinburgh, he would have been familiar with the story of Deacon Brodie, who was a cabinetmaker by day and a criminal by night. This kind of double life may well have affected his portrayal of Dr Jekyll. While his Calvinist upbringing would have taught him to beware of the devil and to elude sinfulness. Stevenson held strong views on good and bad conduct and believed that everyone is capable of evil. He believed that evil is just as much a part of human nature as good is. The evil Mr Hyde is part of the respectable Dr Jekyll. At the time the story was published in 1885 although the novel was a success, people found the fact shocking. Stevenson's story is still relevant today, as people use the same sort of idea for superheroes and fairy stories. For example, the fairy tale of Cinderella was about a simple girl called Cinderella who was slaved about, and towards the story she becomes a princess. In Spiderman, there is a normal boy who suddenly turns into a spider-man. They all show the fact that there is a double-life in the stories. Or that something or someone changes into something else.
