Looking at the two violent incidents involving Mr Hyde, how does Stevenson convey the horror of the events to the reader?

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Looking at the two violent incidents involving Mr Hyde, how does Stevenson convey the horror of the events to the reader?

‘Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde’ is a novel written by Robert Louis Stevenson in 1886. It is set in Victorian England, in the creepy streets of London. The Victorian people who were of the high social class were against the idea of appearing with bad habits, such as addiction, gambling and homosexuality. Therefore due to their hidden pleasures they would have ended up leading double lives, in particular at night where there would be a slimmer chance of anyone finding out about their guilty contentment.

 The novel ‘Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde’ reflects the idea of the Victorian people, who gave attention to the inner difference of ones sense of good and evil. It looks at the theory of duplicity, the way it has challenged religion with science, and good combined with evil. In Sigmund Freud’s Freudian Theory the feelings and desires that are exiled by the unconscious mind stimulates the actions of the conscious mind. Stevenson has used these consequences for Mr Hyde’s character, where he has exiled all evil to the unconscious mind in an attempt to be good. It is never mentioned in the novel as to why Mr Hyde enjoys his regular irruptions; just that it is something from his evil and shameless character. Hyde could merely have been indulging in actions that are inappropriate to a man of Dr Jekyll’s importance. Nevertheless the Victorian people were starting to inspect a variety of natural influences on human ethics, which included the addiction of drugs and alcohol and double personality disorder. They were at a time of immense advancements in science and the retaliation of the concept of religion due to Charles Darwin’s ‘Theory of Evolution’.

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Charles Darwin’s ‘Theory of Evolution’ made a lot of people change their opinion of the world. Darwin’s theory caused many questions of the concept of ‘Heaven’ and ‘Hell’. This led to many people believing that science was starting to get dangerous, due to its interference with God’s control over the world.

The genre of this novel is ‘Gothic Horror’. There were several other gothic horror novels which were released during the Victorian era, along with Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Some of these included ‘Dracula’ and ‘Frankenstein’, these contained good, evil, death and rebirth in their storyline which were similar ...

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