Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde

Notes Introduction 1. Howard Haycraft dates the first critical article on fictional detectives as appearing in the Saturday Review in May 1883. However, that article did not refer to detective fiction as a separate and distinct genre. See Haycraft 6. 2. See Smith, Golden, an anthology which covers the period 1891–1917. As countless critics have pointed out, the problem of definition itself provides potential pitfalls for any historian of the genre. What is the difference between a story about crime and a work of crime fiction? Can a story without a detective be termed detective fiction? In this matter I follow the modern viewpoint espoused by Knight (Crime), Ascari and Sussex that ‘crime fiction’ is the most comprehensive and flexible appellation for the genre. In my study, all of the stories I examine feature detectives of one sort or another – some are members of the constabulary, some are unofficial friends or helpers, some are privately employed consulting detectives, some are masquerading as detectives, some are successful in solving crime, some are not, some are corrupt, some lie to, steal from or even murder their clients. For this reason, I retain and employ the terms crime and detective fiction alongside each other throughout the study, emphasising the extent to which both categories can co-exist and apply to individual texts coming out of the late Victorian period. 3. For more on criminal broadsides and the eighteenth- and early nineteenth- century crime genre, see Worthington. 4. It would be impossible to attend to all the works of Victorian detective fiction which thus far have been overlooked by critics of the genre. The problem is that the corpus is just too large. Hubin lists approximately 6000 works of crime fiction published in this period alone. 5. The notion of the detective and criminal being the same person of course draws upon earlier works like the criminal biographies of the 1700s featuring thief-turned-thief-taker Jonathan Wild and French criminal Eugène François Vidocq, who became the founder and head of the French police. For more on this see, for example, Emsley and Shpayer-Makov. 1 ‘Ordinary Secret Sinners’: Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) 1. Hereafter, abbreviated as Jekyll and Hyde. 2. See, for example, Joyce; Pittard (‘Real Sensation’); Ascari; Spooner. 3. Maurizio Ascari, for instance, argues that Jekyll and Hyde, along with The Dynamiter, cannot be omitted from studies of the detective genre as both novels greatly influenced Doyle’s A Study in Scarlet. Ascari suggests that the separation of detective and gothic fiction more broadly is an artificial and 184 Notes to Chapter 1 185 misleading project, produced by a critical investment in rationalism. For Ascari, many of the first critics of the detective genre, such as R.A. Freeman and Howard Haycraft, selectively composed the detective canon in order to confirm their view that the detective story celebrated rationalism. Therefore they excluded any ‘impure’ works with supernatural, sensational or transgressive elements such as criminal heroes (Ascari 1–11). In doing so, these critical works promoted and sustained an enduring and ‘norma- tive view’ of ‘a genre whose borders were being traced with increasing sharpness’ (4). In Capital Offenses, Simon Joyce likewise argues for the important place of Jekyll and Hyde in the Victorian crime genre. For Joyce, Stevenson’s novel belongs to a group of late Victorian works featuring ‘privileged offenders’ of the type that had featured in novels from the earlier gothic tradition (164). Stevenson’s Henry Jekyll, then, along with Wilde’s Dorian Gray and Doyle’s Professor Moriarty, is a reworking of the type of ‘aristocratic rake and lib- ertine’ found in the novels of Ann Radcliffe and Matthew Lewis. In crime fiction of the 1880s and 1890s, these aristocratic offenders are ‘taken out of European castles and country houses and transplanted into the modern metropolis’ (164). The emergence of this body of privileged offenders desta- bilises readings of the trajectory of the Victorian crime genre, such as Ernest Mandel’s, where the detective wholeheartedly replaces the criminal as hero as the nineteenth century comes to a close. 4. This and subsequent references to Jekyll and Hyde are taken from the 2002 Penguin edition of the text, edited by Robert Mighall, unless otherwise stated. 5. In a first draft of the text, commonly referred to as the ‘Printer’s Copy’, Stevenson was a little more explicit about these acts, terming them ‘disgrace- ful pleasures ... [and] vices ... at once criminal in the sight of the law and abhorrent in themselves’. For more on this, see Veeder and Hirsch. 6. See also Emsley; Shpayer-Makov. 7. Sindall uses the definitions of class based on the Registrar General’s classification of 1921. As he points out, ‘although the Registrar General’s classifications are open to criticism they are still a widely used classification for the ordering of nineteenth-century material, and that of 1921 is the nearest comprehensive and reliable social classification to the period under review’ (23). Although Sindall’s study itself is now more than 30 years old, it still represents one of the fullest and most-cited studies on nineteenth- century crime and the middle classes. 8. The case inspired the 1894 pornographic novel Raped on the Railway: a True Story of a Lady who was ﬁ rst ravaged then ﬂ agellated on the Scotch Express. See Sweet. 9. For more on Dr Thomas Neill Cream, see McLaren, Prescription. 10. For more on late Victorian scandals see Diamond; Cohen; Garrigan; Walkowitz. 11. Bizarrely, however, in the course of his investigation, Stead procured a vir- gin himself and was eventually tried and jailed for this offence. As Andrew Smith has pointed out, the investigation ironically turned Stead into the type of Minotaur he sought to expose. See Smith, Victorian Demons. 186 Notes to Chapter 1 12. The Saunterer’s letters were later attributed to Harold Frederic, an American writer and journalist, based in London. See Dodge. 13. However, Symonds’s responses to Stevenson have frequently been inter- preted as related to the topic of homosexuality. See, for instance, Roger Luckhurst’s Introduction to the 2006 Oxford World’s Classics edition of Jekyll and Hyde. 14. In City of Dreadful Delight, Judith Walkowitz briefly suggests that the ‘Maiden Tribute’ articles influenced a number of works of 1880s and 1890s fiction, including: Jekyll and Hyde; The Picture of Dorian Gray; Dracula; and The Island of Dr Moreau. In The Modern Gothic and Literary Doubles, Linda Dryden has also briefly made this connection between Jekyll and Hyde and ‘The Maiden Tribute’ articles. For Dryden ‘the coincidences are too compelling to ignore’ (82). Dryden does not analyse the connections between the two in any detail, however. 15. This and subsequent references to this letter are from: W.E. Henley, letter to Robert Louis Stevenson, 9 July 1885. The Edwin J. Beinecke Collection of Robert Louis Stevenson, GEN MSS 664, Request Box 13, Letter number: #4841, Beinecke Library, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut. 16. The practice known as ‘mashing’ – that is, a descent across space and class boundaries in search of sex or drugs – should be distinguished from the practice of ‘slumming’, which carries associations of benevolent intent. For more on this see Koven. 17. See also Gray, who suggests that ‘although the trampling scene may well be disturbingly indicative of the abuse of children in Victorian society generally, it may also have a much more specific literary source in George MacDonald’s Phantastes: A Faërie Romance, published in 1858’ (493). In ‘Psychopathia Sexualis’, Stephen Heath links the trampling incident with some sort of sexual assault, and more broadly links Hyde’s depravity with sexual perversion. 18. Stevenson would no doubt have protested against both accounts; in a letter to John Paul Bocock he railed against the public interest in specifying the sexual nature of Hyde’s crimes, exclaiming ‘the beast Hyde ... is no more sensual than another’ (Stevenson, Letters, vol. VI, 56). Yet even this protest seems to suggest the links that Stevenson wished to draw between Hyde, Jekyll and the average late Victorian male. And as he acknowledged in another letter, the nature of Jekyll’s sins remains unspecified precisely to allow for the many interpretative possibilities that they suggest. As he put it: ‘I have said my say as best as I was able: others must look for what is meant’ (Letters, vol. V, 211) 19 . Measuringworth.com, a website containing various tools for calculating con- temporary relative values of past assets and transactions, calculates that the relative value of £100 in 1885 to be between £8080.00 and £11,000.00 in 2011. Measuringworth.com, ed. Lawrence H. Officer and Samuel H. Williamson, 28 Jan. 2011. www.measuringworth.com/index.html. 20. For more on Victorian blackmail see McLaren, Sexual Blackmail; Kucich; Welsh. 21. For many critics, this blackmail suggests the homosexual blackmail which gained popularity after the Labouchere Amendment to the 1885 Criminal Notes to Chapter 1 187 Law Amendment Act, which outlawed acts of ‘gross indecency’ between two men. For more on this see McLaren, Sexual Blackmail; Showalter. 22. Perhaps suggesting that the old sin was a sexual indiscretion of which Hyde was the product. In ‘The Sedulous Ape’, Stephen Arata notes that the rela- tionship between Jekyll and Hyde is suggestive of that between a father and son, as Hyde is variously referred to as ‘little’, ‘young’ and Jekyll’s ‘protégé’. 23. For more on this distrust of surveillance and the detective police see Summerscale; Shpayer-Makov. 24. As Worthington has suggested, it was most probably not until after Sherlock Holmes gained popularity in the early 1890s that the public’s negative per- ceptions of the detective police began to change and improve.

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