Nineteenth-century novel, Year 10: respectability and fear in the 1880s, language, setting and symbols (The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde option)

1886

提示In the mid-1880s, during Queen Victoria's reign.

为什么It was published in London and New York within days of each other in January 1886, and was an immediate success.

shilling shockers

提示A nickname made from the price and the effect.

为什么The book was first sold in this form but became a best-seller, taken seriously by critics. The novella shows how a popular thriller can also ask serious questions.

That if people could evolve from apes, they could also slip back into something more ape-like and primitive

提示A fear of going backwards rather than forwards.

为什么This fear was called devolution. Hyde is smaller, hairier and more bestial than Jekyll, and he acts with ape-like fury, so the book plays on this anxiety.

William (Deacon) Brodie

提示A cabinet-maker and council member.

为什么Brodie was a deacon by day and a thief by night. Stevenson had been interested in such double lives since his teens, long before he wrote the novella.

hypocrisy

提示To pretend to be better than you are.

为什么The book has been called a guide to the contrast between outward respectability and inward lust. Jekyll's need to look dignified is what drives him to create Hyde.

With a dream: he dreamt scenes of a voluntary change becoming involuntary

提示He used a night-time vision.

为什么He wrote it in days, and his wife thought it was an allegory. He burned his first draft and rewrote it in a different spirit.

It has neither bell nor knocker, and is blistered and stained

提示An ordinary house needs something for visitors to use.

为什么The door is described as sordid and neglected, with tramps and children using the steps. It sits in sharp contrast with the polished street around it.

It makes the bright, prosperous street stand out against its dingy neighbourhood, so the door seems more sinister

提示A single light surrounded by darkness.

为什么The tidy shop fronts with shining brass contrast with the blistered door in the same street. Stevenson sets safe, orderly London against the hidden London of the door.

That Jekyll has a public, respectable face and a hidden, shameful one

提示The same building shows two sides to the world.

为什么The pattern of two faces is repeated in the story: the house, the man and the city. It is a symbol that the reader can use in an essay on duality.

Secrecy and confusion: the truth is hidden from view

提示Think about what it does to what you can see.

为什么The fog covers the search for Hyde, which makes London seem like a place where anything can be hidden. The word pall also hints at death, since it can mean a cloth over a coffin.

That Hyde is like a cave-dweller: primitive, and less than a modern civilised man

提示A word for people who once lived in caves.

为什么It is one of several words that connect Hyde with the animal and prehistoric. Utterson uses it half in jest, but it fits with the novel's fear of going backwards.