What are the Main Difficulties for a twenty-first Century reader in fully appreciating Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde(TM)

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What are the Main Difficulties for a twenty-first Century reader in fully appreciating ‘Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde’

The most prominent factor that affects how a twenty-first century reader can fully appreciate the novella, is simply the ‘old-fashioned’ grammar and vocabulary. This novella displays expressions that have either died out or changed meaning over the years. There are concepts within the novella that may have been controversial and new at the time it was written but have now have been discovered as a result of scientific advancement.

The description in the novella is limited in such a way that the reader has to know a lot about London before the introduction of modern transport and roads.

                   “…the low growl of London…”

(p21),

which most likely refers to the sounds of a horse and cart going along the cobbled roads. Although nowadays the ‘low growl’ could be related to the noise of cars, it is not a thought-provoking image as the reader has to relate the sound to something in the reader’s experience and cars are an unrealistic idea to imagine in this novella. A twenty-first century reader could have difficulties in understanding the surroundings, as the writer assumes that the knowledge of the conditions is already there and he just needs to build on that.

A likely difficulty for a twenty-first century reader is that this novella frequently switches between characters, to get an idea of the emotions of different individuals. But, from my experience, many novels and novellas in the twenty-first century are one long plot from a single character’s perspective, for example, ‘Cell’ by Stephen King. ‘Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde’ is based around the different outlooks from characters in certain situations.

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         “But Mr Enfield only nodded his head very seriously…

          Mr Utterson was sitting by his fireside...”

(pp46-47)

shows the confusion this could cause the imagination of a twenty-first century reader. On top of this, it also makes it harder to follow the plot and timescale of the novella if the view keeps on changing.

Dual identity plays a large part in the plot of ‘Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde’ and nowadays it can be treated to a certain extent using psychiatrists and drugs. A twenty-first century reader might find it ...

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The Quality of Written Communication is very good. There is a wide range of vocabulary used in this answer and a good range of punctuation. To improve this answer further, the candidate should work on their ability to use all manner of punctuation with confidence and flair (colons, semi-colons, parentheses, etc.) to vary the structure of their answer and to show examiners they are comfortable writing with more complex linguistic tools.

This answer addresses many of the aspects about the novella which prevent it being fully-appreciated in today's society, such as Louis Stevenson's choice of language; thematic elements like religion and ugliness as a sign of criminality; the advancement of science and the readers' schema and expectation of setting which prevent the appropriate atmosphere being conjured in their minds. In every sense, this novella has aged very badly, but instead of simply condemning it as such, this candidate handles the topic very sensitively, realising a number of challenges for the modern day reader and, with every point made, has drawn upon an appropriate source from the text itself. This is an excellent form of effective analysis as it shows the candidate has overcome the hurdles the novella presents and understands it on a level profound enough to comment objectively (and subjectively, in part) and provide evidence from the source text.

This question orientates around the belief that Robert Louis Stevenson's 'The Curious Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde' is not as potent a novella as it would be considered in the Nineteenth Century. This is a common exam question for this novella, and as such candidates should do well to appreciate the temporal effect of text that has been interpreted in so many ways to a modern day audience; it's hard not to feel slightly underwhelmed when reading the original scripture and so this question requires a very sensitive awareness of how the effect of the novella has eroded over time. There is a successfully consistent focus on the proposed question steer and there are a number of highly valid analytical comments made about why the novella isn't as potent as it once was to it's original, Nineteenth Century audience.