Themes

Addiction

Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson can be read as an allegory about addiction. The language used to describe Dr Jekyll’s relationship with Mr Hyde suggests that he is obsessed with or addicted to the feeling of being Mr Hyde. Hyde represents the dark side of Dr Jekyll’s character, but Hyde is free from the restraints of society. 

In contrast, Dr Jekyll’s whole life is guided by his need to be respectable and successful: “the worst of my faults was a certain impatient gaiety of disposition, […] such as I found it hard to reconcile with my imperious desire to carry my head high, and wear a more than commonly grave countenance.” (p. 52)

When he develops a drug that releases his inner Mr Hyde, Dr Jekyll quickly becomes addicted to the criminal pleasures of Mr Hyde. He starts to worry that Hyde is beginning to take over his mind, and resolves for a while to stop taking the drug to transform himself. However, his craving eventually becomes too much: “I began to be tortured with throes and longings, as of Hyde struggling after freedom; and at last, in an hour of moral weakness, I once again compounded and swallowed the transforming draught.” (p. 60)

At this point, Jekyll compares himself to an alcoholic: “I do not suppose that, when a drunkard reasons with himself upon his vice, he is once out of five hundred times affected by the dangers that he runs through his brutish, physical insensibility.” (p. 60). Jekyll suggests that in his addiction, he ignored the potential consequences to himself and others in becoming Mr Hyde again: “My devil had been long caged, he came out roaring.” (p. 60). This time, Hyde commits murder. 

From this point on, Jekyll refuses to become Hyde by taking the drug. It is too late, however; Hyde manages to take over even without the influence of the drug, eventually causing Jekyll’s destruction. 

On a surface level, the novella deals with Jekyll’s addiction to becoming Mr Hyde and committing criminal acts free from the restraints of society. However, it is also possible to read the narrative as an allegory. Jekyll’s supernatural transformation into Hyde could be seen as a metaphor for the mental transformation caused by taking drugs. 

In this reading, Jekyll is addicted to the drug itself, which makes him lose his inhibitions. He has to take increasingly large doses to feel the effect; when his original batch runs out and the new versions fail to work, he “had London ransacked” (p. 66) to find the right drug, but it doesn’t work. He ends up “shuddering and weeping” (p. 66), suggesting he is suffering from withdrawal symptoms.

It is interesting that Jekyll’s addiction is reflected in the personalities and habits of the other characters. Stevenson repeatedly mentions Mr Utterson and his friends drinking wine, suggesting that these characters have a low-level alcohol addiction, which is accepted by society in a way that Dr Jekyll’s addiction to drugs and crime isn’t. 

Mr Utterson’s liking for wine is mentioned twice in the first paragraph of the book: “At friendly meetings, and when the wine was to his taste, something eminently human beaconed from his eye […]. He was austere with himself; drank gin when he was alone, to mortify a taste for vintages.” (p. 5). Note that rather than avoiding drinking when he is alone, Mr Utterson drinks gin instead of wine. 

Some of the most poetic language in the novella is used to describe drinking wine: 

In the bottle the acids were long ago resolved; the imperial dye had softened with time, as the colour grows richer in stained windows; and the glow of hot autumn afternoons on hillside vineyards, was ready to be set free and to disperse the fogs of London. Insensibly the lawyer melted. (p. 26)

Wine makes Mr Utterson “insensible”; he becomes less rigid, sensible, and dry. The language here suggests that Mr Utterson is dependent on alcohol. Similarly, the friendship group shared by Mr Utterson, Dr Lanyon, and Dr Jekyll often bonds over drinking wine, suggesting that alcohol allows them briefly to escape from the strict social rules they live by: “the doctor gave one of his pleasant dinners to some five or six old cronies, all intelligent, reputable men and all judges of good wine.” (p. 18)

The doppelganger

Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde features the theme of the doppelganger. Victorian novels often use this theme (or motif), with doppelganger meaning a double. The doppelganger character can be considered the main character's evil twin, who can act beyond the social norms that bind the other characters. 

The doppelganger also creates conflict in the story. This can be an external conflict where there main character is fighting his double, or an internal conflict where the main character is struggling to reconcile his good and evil sides.

Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is concerned with the double and the fundamental duality of human nature. Dr Jekyll learns this from his experience and his experiments: “I thus drew steadily nearer to the truth, by whose partial discovery I have been doomed to such a dreadful shipwreck: that man is not truly one, but truly two.” (p. 52)

Dr Jekyll knows that he is a mixture of good and evil:

I learned to recognise the thorough and primitive duality of man; I saw that, of the two natures that contended in the field of my consciousness, even if I could rightly be said to be either, it was only because I was radically both. (p. 53)

In his experiments, he aims to achieve “the separation of these elements” (p. 53), claiming that if he managed this, “the unjust might go his way, delivered from the aspirations and remorse of his more upright twin; and the just could walk steadfastly and securely on his upward path.” (p. 53). Here, Jekyll represents the good and evil sides of his personality as two identical but opposite “twins”.

However, when he completes his experiment, it doesn’t work like this. Mr Hyde, the double he creates, is purely evil. “Evil was written broadly and plainly” on his face (p. 55), and he lacks any human sympathy. He is “a being inherently malign and villainous; his every act and thought centred on self; drinking pleasure with bestial avidity from any degree of torture to another; relentless like a man of stone.” (p. 57). 

However, Dr Jekyll himself does not become purely good. He remains human, which means he remains a mixture of good and evil. As he puts it, “all human beings […] are commingled out of good and evil.” (p. 55). The relationship therefore remains unbalanced; together, Jekyll and Hyde are weighted towards evil. 

Dr Jekyll’s experiments could suggest that every man has an evil side that is hidden inside him, repressed by the laws of society and civilization. On the surface, Dr Jekyll seems very similar to his friends and social equals Mr Utterson and Dr Lanyon. The novella might contain a warning that appearances can be deceptive. But moreover, if to be human is to be a mixture of good and evil, the novella might be asking readers to study the evil inside themselves – and to avoid letting it out.

The social order

In Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, maintaining the social order is very important to the upper-middle class social circle of Mr Utterson, Dr Lanyon, and Dr Jekyll. They are friends out of habit and because they share similar backgrounds: “these two were old friends, old mates both at school and college, both thorough respecters of themselves and of each other.” (p. 12)

They are all deeply concerned for their own reputations and for their friend’s reputations. For example, when Mr Hyde is accused of murder, Mr Utterson is afraid that Jekyll’s reputation might be damaged by the case: “ ‘If it came to a trial, your name might appear.’ ” (p. 25). Like Mr Utterson, Dr Lanyon wants to avoid damaging another man’s honor or reputation. Even when he learns the horrible truth about Dr Jekyll and says that he considers Jekyll to be dead (p. 29), Lanyon decides he will only share his knowledge after his own death and only in the event of “the death or disappearance of Dr Henry Jekyll” (p. 30).

Dr Jekyll is also obsessively concerned with his reputation. He explains at the beginning of his confession that he was “fond of the respect of the wise and good among my fellow-men” (p. 52). His main reason for not being Mr Hyde all the time is that he wants to maintain his social position: to permanently become Mr Hyde would be “to die to a thousand interests and aspirations, and to become, at a blow and forever, despised and friendless.” (p. 59)

The characters’ concern for the social order is also a question of class. They pride themselves on being “gentlemen” and behave accordingly. It is interesting therefore that Mr Hyde appears to belong to a lower social class than Dr Jekyll. This is suggested initially by their different titles: “Mr” versus “Dr”. Mr Hyde appears to be short and deformed (p. 55) and he is described as “ape-like” (p. 20), echoing contemporary depictions of the poor in London. Other signs that he is lower class are that he lives in Soho (a poor area), he enters Dr Jekyll’s home via the back door (which would be the tradesman’s entrance), and he never speaks or acts like a “gentleman”.

One reading of the novella is that Dr Jekyll and his friends are repressed by their obsession with their social position and that Mr Hyde represents freedom from the social concerns that come with being upper-middle class. In this reading, Dr Jekyll is in the wrong for trying to maintain both an upper-middle class and a lower-class position and morality.

The story is set at a time in which the social order is changing and becoming more mixed. This can be seen in the physical setting. For example, although the square in which Dr Jekyll lives is grand, it is near a poor and depressing area. Most of the houses in the square have “decayed from their high estate” and are now home to “all sorts and conditions of men” (p. 16).

The back of Dr Jekyll’s house opens onto a small street of shops, inhabited by lower-class people. Whereas the wealthy people who originally owned the houses in Dr Jekyll’s square have apparently been doing less well, the people who live on the lower-class street at the back are becoming richer: “The inhabitants were all doing well, it seemed, and all emulously hoping to do better still […], the street shone out in contrast to its dingy neighbourhood.” (p. 6). The area where Dr Jekyll lives, therefore, could be seen as evidence that the social order is changing, making the upper classes afraid. 

Science versus the supernatural

In Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, there is a tense relationship between the scientific and the supernatural. Until the final revelation that Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde are the same person, the novella appears to be an ordinary story about the mysterious relationship between two people. By the end, however, it becomes clear that Dr Jekyll’s scientific experiments have had supernatural results. 

One of the reasons for Dr Jekyll’s “success” in creating Mr Hyde seems to be his openness to the illogical and the mystical: “my scientific studies, which led wholly towards the mystic and the transcendental” (p. 52). His approach is contrasted with Dr Lanyon, who is committed to scientific thinking, valuing logic and rationality. He disapproves of Dr Jekyll’s more philosophical and imaginative approach to science, describing Jekyll’s work as “unscientific balderdash ”: “ ‘it is more than ten years since Henry Jekyll became too fanciful for me. He began to go wrong, wrong in mind.’ ” (p. 12)

Mr Hyde accuses Dr Lanyon of being “bound to the most narrow and material views” and of denying “the virtue of transcendental medicine” (p. 50). However, Mr Hyde’s evil nature is itself proof that Jekyll’s “transcendental ” approach to science is not a “virtue”, because it has only resulted in evil. 

When he understands what Dr Jekyll has done, Dr Lanyon is not sure whether to believe it, even though he has seen it with his own eyes. He remains rigid in his ideas and even chooses to die rather than accept the truth about what Jekyll has done: “I shall die incredulous.” (p. 50)

Extract 

Here, you can read an extract from our study guide: