Context

A modern world with unsettling secrets

Robert Louis Stevenson published Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde in 1886. Its central figures belong to the respectable professional world: Utterson is a lawyer, while Jekyll and Lanyon are doctors. Yet this world of qualifications, comfortable homes and trusted friendships contains secrecy, violence and a terrifying experiment.

Context helps explain why these contradictions mattered. Victorian readers lived amid scientific advances and expanding cities, but progress also raised uncomfortable questions. Could appearances be trusted? Were humans fundamentally different from animals? Could science explain the soul? Stevenson turns these questions into a Gothic mystery rather than simply stating an opinion about them.

Respectability: appearing good and being good

For professional gentlemen, reputation helped sustain social standing and trust. Respectability involved self-control, proper behaviour and an honourable public identity. A scandal could threaten not only an individual but also his family and associates. This encouraged secrecy when private conduct conflicted with public expectations.

In Chapter 1, Enfield explains his reluctance to investigate suspicious circumstances: “the more it looks like Queer Street, the less I ask.” His rule can suggest discretion and a wish to avoid harming others. However, it can also suggest that gentlemen protect reputations by leaving troubling questions unanswered. Stevenson makes silence part of the machinery of the mystery: the agreement not to discuss Hyde again delays understanding.

Jekyll later reveals the personal cost of maintaining his public image. In his first-person confession in Chapter 10, he admits, “Hence it came about that I concealed my pleasures”. The verb “concealed” identifies secrecy as a deliberate response to the gap between his desires and his ambitions. His experiment offers him a way to indulge himself while keeping the respectable identity of Dr Jekyll apparently untouched.

The vague noun “pleasures” also invites readers to imagine the hidden conduct for themselves. The central professional circle consists of unmarried men, with little access to their intimate lives. One reading sees Jekyll’s secrecy as concealing desires that society condemned, including same-sex desire. The 1885 Criminal Law Amendment Act criminalised ‘gross indecency’ between men, making exposure and blackmail serious threats. This gives particular force to Enfield’s early suspicion that Jekyll is being blackmailed. Another reading treats the unnamed pleasures more broadly: withholding details allows Jekyll’s conflict between desire and public identity to speak to many forms of hidden vice. The sexual reading sharpens the historical threat of scandal; the broader reading emphasises the reach of Stevenson’s moral argument.

Jekyll may therefore be seen as damaged by demanding social expectations, which encourage repression and a double life. But he also chooses deception and uses Hyde to escape responsibility. His confession gives access to his motives, yet its self-explanations need evaluating: social pressure helps explain his behaviour without excusing his cruelty.

Edinburgh and Deacon Brodie: the double life before Hyde

Stevenson was born and educated in Edinburgh. Its contrasting Old Town and New Town offered a powerful image of division: crowded older districts associated with poverty and illicit activity existed alongside the spacious homes of wealthier residents. These contrasts help illuminate his interest in respectable surfaces and hidden lives, although the novella itself is set in London.

Stevenson was also fascinated by William Brodie, known as Deacon Brodie. Brodie was an eighteenth-century Edinburgh cabinet-maker, trades-guild leader and city councillor who secretly committed burglaries to support gambling and his private life. His legitimate work gave him access to locks and keys that he exploited for theft. He was hanged in 1788, long before Stevenson’s lifetime. Stevenson later co-wrote a play about him.

Brodie’s relevance is the coexistence of public trust and concealed criminality in one person. Jekyll similarly uses the advantages of his respectable position to shelter Hyde. Brodie is an influence on Stevenson’s exploration of duplicity, not a literal model for the chemical transformation.

Darwin and the fear of the animal within

Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species appeared in 1859, explaining how species change over generations through natural selection and common descent. His The Descent of Man (1871) addressed human origins more directly. Such ideas challenged assumptions that humans occupied an entirely separate position from other animals.

Some late-Victorian thinkers feared degeneration: the possibility that civilisation or humanity could decline towards a supposedly primitive condition. These fears were not the same as Darwin’s theory and did not originate solely with him. They nevertheless gained force amid debates about evolution, crime and the security of civilisation.

In Chapter 4, the narrator describes Hyde attacking Sir Danvers Carew “with ape-like fury”. The animal comparison makes his violence seem uncontrolled and strips away the restraint expected of a gentleman. Carew’s courteous behaviour intensifies the contrast. A reader anxious about degeneration might recognise Hyde as the primitive brutality supposedly lurking beneath civilised behaviour.

Contemporary attempts to identify criminals through physical appearance also illuminate the characters’ reactions to Hyde. Physiognomy means reading character from outward features. Related theories associated criminality with supposedly primitive physical traits. In Chapter 2, Utterson thinks he can read “Satan’s signature upon a face”. The metaphor imagines evil as an identifying mark, mixing a judgement about appearance with religious language.

Yet Stevenson makes such judgements uncertain. Observers feel that Hyde is deformed without identifying a definite malformation, while the handsome, respected Jekyll conceals wrongdoing. The deeper disturbance is that Hyde emerges from an educated, wealthy doctor. Stevenson places the threat inside respectable society, rather than safely outside it: appearance and status cannot guarantee moral goodness.

Religious upbringing and the divided self

Stevenson grew up with Presbyterian and Calvinist influences, including biblical reading and his nurse’s religious stories. Calvinism is a Protestant Christian tradition based on John Calvin’s teachings. For understanding this novella, its concern with human sinfulness, salvation and judgement helps explain why inner desires could become a source of fear and shame rather than simply private preferences.

In 1873, Stevenson’s rejection of his parents’ faith caused painful family conflict. His upbringing helps explain his familiarity with religious language and moral struggle, without making every character a direct expression of his beliefs or reducing his later religious outlook to a single position.

In Chapter 10, Jekyll proposes “that man is not truly one, but truly two.” The balanced contrast between “one” and “two” gives his claim the force of a general statement about humanity. His account turns an inward struggle between good and evil into a literal separation of identities. Read alongside his religious background, this can suggest the frightening persistence of sin within someone who seeks to appear virtuous.

However, Jekyll is not simply a wholly good man opposed to an evil stranger. He remains a mixture of good and evil, while Hyde expresses the evil he releases. His attempt to separate them promises freedom from remorse and disgrace rather than genuine moral improvement. A religious reading can therefore see his experiment as an attempt to evade the responsibility of resisting temptation.

Science and religion: competing explanations of human nature

Scientific developments prompted debate about religious accounts of creation and humanity. Christianity remained influential, however; the 1880s were not simply a period in which science replaced religion. The novella brings scientific investigation and religious ideas of sin, temptation and punishment into the same story.

Jekyll’s experiment tries to solve a moral problem through chemistry. Lanyon rejects his approach as “unscientific balderdash” in Chapter 2. This is a dispute within science, between Lanyon’s conventional outlook and Jekyll’s speculative investigations, not merely a simple opposition between a scientist and a believer.

Religious language remains important even to these professional men. Lanyon’s appeal to God when he witnesses the transformation in Chapter 9 briefly exposes the collapse of his confidence: the revelation threatens both his scientific understanding and his sense of moral order.

The story can be read as a warning against arrogant attempts to escape ordinary human limits. Yet Jekyll’s own account in Chapter 10 describes the drug as “neither diabolical nor divine”. This supports another emphasis: the danger lies in his motives and misuse of discovery, rather than science being inherently evil. A justified reading can acknowledge scientific uncertainty while placing moral responsibility on Jekyll.

Gothic London: danger beside the familiar

Late-Victorian London combined wealth and professional prestige with overcrowding, poverty, pollution and crime. Its contrasts offered Stevenson a setting in which a man could move between public respectability and a concealed private life.

In Chapter 4, the narrator presents Soho through Utterson’s perceptions as “like a district of some city in a nightmare”. The simile transforms an ordinary urban district into a threatening mental landscape. Fog obscures what Utterson can see, connecting physical uncertainty with the mystery he cannot yet understand. This is a crafted, fearful perspective, not a neutral description of every Soho resident.

The house also embodies division. In Chapter 2, the narrator describes Jekyll’s entrance as wearing “a great air of wealth and comfort”; in Chapter 1, the rear door is “blistered and distained”. The respectable front and neglected rear belong to the same property. Their connection gives a concrete form to the relationship between Jekyll’s public identity and hidden conduct.

Gothic fiction creates fear through disturbing settings, secrecy, extreme emotion and events that challenge ordinary explanation. Stevenson brings this tradition into the modern city and the scientific laboratory. The double, or doppelgänger, makes the familiar self frightening. The compact prose novella moves quickly between disturbing incidents, while delayed explanations sustain suspense. Its final documents expose what the earlier investigation could not reveal; the chapter-by-chapter pattern is explored in the plot overview.

Sold in paperback for one shilling, the novella belonged to the market for sensational ‘shilling shockers’. Yet its reception also included religious discussion and quotation in sermons. Its frightening entertainment could therefore carry a serious argument about good, evil and responsibility.

Turning context into analysis

Useful context changes how we understand a particular word, action or structural choice. It should remain connected to the argument about the novella.

Worked paragraph: Stevenson suggests that protecting a gentleman’s reputation can obstruct the discovery of wrongdoing. In Chapter 1, Enfield declares, “the more it looks like Queer Street, the less I ask.” The balanced opposition between “more” and “less” turns avoidance into a rule: increasing suspicion produces decreasing investigation. In a professional society where scandal could damage a man’s standing and his associates, this discretion might seem considerate. However, the agreement to remain silent also delays understanding of Hyde, making respectable behaviour part of the mystery’s structure. Stevenson therefore allows readers to question whether preserving a good name always serves the good.

Essential context and connections

• 1886: publication of Stevenson’s Gothic novella.
• Respectability: public trust matters to professional gentlemen; discretion can protect people or conceal wrongdoing.
• Unnamed pleasures: Jekyll’s vague confession invites broad readings of hidden vice and a sexual reading shaped by the 1885 law against ‘gross indecency’ between men.
• Edinburgh: contrasting Old and New Towns illuminate divided identities; the fictional setting is London.
• Deacon Brodie: respected craftsman and councillor, secretly a burglar; executed in 1788. An influence on Stevenson’s interest in duplicity.