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Victorian lawyers to the rescue... again
Feb. 28th, 2023 11:56 amFebruary feels meant I brought out a nice fancily bound Peebles Classic Library copy of Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and Other Stories. I had read The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde when I was first discovering Gothic literature, nearly 20 years ago now, but hadn’t reread it since. Also this copy was much nicer than the battered paperback I picked up at Chatham Booksellers in 2004 or so, which I will be donating to Goodwill or an LFL or something as soon as I remember (probably the LFL by the House of the Seven Gables; that seems appropriate somehow).
Jekyll and Hyde is very nineteenth-century in some ways, with its actual protagonist being a stolid sort of lawyer who is not the titular character (but is the first person introduced), and who serves as our guide to the mystery largely through the 19th-century ideas about being lawyerly, which apparently means a) they are trustworthy, rational men, and therefore creditable narrators when mysterious otherworldly stuff shows up, b) they are meticulous and wield the Power of Document Review, and c) they don’t have large personalities, therefore letting the larger personalities of the other folks in the story lead the show. This is very different from the way lawyers tend to be portrayed in modern fiction, which tends to favor court lawyers who are good at speechifying in front of judges and being Machiavellian. Here, Mr. Utterson (a name that has not made its way into the popular consciousness) is a quiet estate lawyer who is old school chums with some doctor types, including the very respectable Dr. Henry Jekyll, whose will he holds on file. Dr. Utterson is perturbed when, upon a walk with his cousin, he learns about a nasty little wretch of a man named Edward Hyde, whom the respectable Jekyll has recently changed his will to name his sole heir and benefactor in the case of any mysterious disappearances. Utterson does not wish to be nosy, and frankly isn’t, but he keeps his ears peeled and does a little bit of networking among his little good-old-boy’s network, over the course of the novella calling upon his cousin Mr. Enfield, Dr. Jekyll, Dr. Jekyll’s manservant Poole, and Dr. Lanyon, an old mutual school chum of theirs who is also now a doctor but has had a falling out with Dr. Jekyll over what to Utterson just sounds like Incomprehensible Doctor Stuff that they really ought to be reasonable and not ruin their friendship over. What Dr. Utterson finds out you probably already know, but that doesn’t make reading the story any less rewarding, in my opinion–I still wanted to see how Dr. Utterson specifically got to the end, since I had utterly (lol) forgotten he existed in the 20 years since the last time I read this story.
In terms of themes ‘n’ shit, I know that this story is well known to be about the duality of man and the dangers of indulging your shadow side/the bad one of the two wolves inside you/whatever, but it wasn’t until reading it again that I got hit in the face with the extremely unsubtle allegory about addiction. Like, honestly: A respectable doctor creates and takes some strange drugs to get away from himself and indulge his wild side and escape the strictures of morality–understandable enough–except then he starts spending increasing amount of time as Hyde and spends all his Jekyll time pretty much just waiting until he can get away and have Hyde time. His Hyde side gets stronger to the point where he starts turning into Hyde not on purpose and has to start taking the drugs to turn back into Jekyll; the whole situation continues to escalate into a messy spiral, scaring the shit out of all the people in Jekyll’s life until he hits rock bottom and does the only thing he can think of to get Hyde out of the picture permanently. It is certainly enough to make me wonder if Stevenson had anybody in his life that he lost to an addiction that turned them into a whole different person, although a little bit of Googling is turning up that it seems more likely to have been inspired by a friend of his who turned out to be a serial killer.
The stories in this volume that are not Jekyll and Hyde are clearly lesser-known for a reason, but overall I still found them really interesting reads and sometimes even quite good stories. There are a few portrayals of non-white folks that have, shall we say, aged poorly, especially as some of these are very Scottish stories and feature the old belief in the Devil appearing in the form of “a black man.” When a “black man” in the Devil and when one is some poor African bloke with the misfortune to find himself in nineteenth-century Scotland is usually pretty clear and, in fact, the confusion in terminology seems almost played for laughs. Uncomfortable invocations of blackness aside, both stories where this appears are delightful in most of the rest of their use of language, which features a lot of absolutely jaw-cracking phonetically rendered Scots dialect. The Merry Men is told by a young gentleman who narrates normally, but as the story concerns his relatives on an isolated stretch of shoreline in extremely rural Scotland, most of the other characters, namely his religious zealot of an uncle, are the types who keep using words like “muckle.” Thrawn Janet is a deliciously classic ghost story that, apart from a few opening paragraphs in plain English to set the stage, is told by “the older folk” of the parish, recounting the events of “fifty years syne” and in addition to the specifically Scots vocabulary, has all of the accent written out (“awfu’” for “awful,” classic eye-dialect stuff) until the whole story looks like it sounds like it’s being read from the bottom of a pond. Me being me, I loved this, but I think it’d be pretty difficult to read if ye nae ken a wee bit o’ Scots.
Most of the stories in this collection lean a bit toward the horror/gothic end; this set of short stories seems picked to have been “other stories by the author of Jekyll and Hyde” pretty specifically, and not necessarily “other stories by the author of Treasure Island,” for example. We’ve got a story from the point of view of a serial killer; a story about a man who goes to recuperate from some sort of illness in a decadent Spanish mansion belonging to the inbred last dregs of a once-great but evil family; a somewhat goofy French morality tale that is nonetheless mostly about bourgeois hypocrisy (this one does feature some treasure-hunting, to be fair); another somewhat depressing morality tale about a guy who stoically talks himself out of ever going anywhere or doing anything with his life except quietly carry on the family business; and as previously mentioned, ghost story Thrawn Janet and the rural gothic The Merry Men.
Overall I found this to be a great little collection of stories, and I’m really glad to have revisited Jekyll and Hyde.
Jekyll and Hyde is very nineteenth-century in some ways, with its actual protagonist being a stolid sort of lawyer who is not the titular character (but is the first person introduced), and who serves as our guide to the mystery largely through the 19th-century ideas about being lawyerly, which apparently means a) they are trustworthy, rational men, and therefore creditable narrators when mysterious otherworldly stuff shows up, b) they are meticulous and wield the Power of Document Review, and c) they don’t have large personalities, therefore letting the larger personalities of the other folks in the story lead the show. This is very different from the way lawyers tend to be portrayed in modern fiction, which tends to favor court lawyers who are good at speechifying in front of judges and being Machiavellian. Here, Mr. Utterson (a name that has not made its way into the popular consciousness) is a quiet estate lawyer who is old school chums with some doctor types, including the very respectable Dr. Henry Jekyll, whose will he holds on file. Dr. Utterson is perturbed when, upon a walk with his cousin, he learns about a nasty little wretch of a man named Edward Hyde, whom the respectable Jekyll has recently changed his will to name his sole heir and benefactor in the case of any mysterious disappearances. Utterson does not wish to be nosy, and frankly isn’t, but he keeps his ears peeled and does a little bit of networking among his little good-old-boy’s network, over the course of the novella calling upon his cousin Mr. Enfield, Dr. Jekyll, Dr. Jekyll’s manservant Poole, and Dr. Lanyon, an old mutual school chum of theirs who is also now a doctor but has had a falling out with Dr. Jekyll over what to Utterson just sounds like Incomprehensible Doctor Stuff that they really ought to be reasonable and not ruin their friendship over. What Dr. Utterson finds out you probably already know, but that doesn’t make reading the story any less rewarding, in my opinion–I still wanted to see how Dr. Utterson specifically got to the end, since I had utterly (lol) forgotten he existed in the 20 years since the last time I read this story.
In terms of themes ‘n’ shit, I know that this story is well known to be about the duality of man and the dangers of indulging your shadow side/the bad one of the two wolves inside you/whatever, but it wasn’t until reading it again that I got hit in the face with the extremely unsubtle allegory about addiction. Like, honestly: A respectable doctor creates and takes some strange drugs to get away from himself and indulge his wild side and escape the strictures of morality–understandable enough–except then he starts spending increasing amount of time as Hyde and spends all his Jekyll time pretty much just waiting until he can get away and have Hyde time. His Hyde side gets stronger to the point where he starts turning into Hyde not on purpose and has to start taking the drugs to turn back into Jekyll; the whole situation continues to escalate into a messy spiral, scaring the shit out of all the people in Jekyll’s life until he hits rock bottom and does the only thing he can think of to get Hyde out of the picture permanently. It is certainly enough to make me wonder if Stevenson had anybody in his life that he lost to an addiction that turned them into a whole different person, although a little bit of Googling is turning up that it seems more likely to have been inspired by a friend of his who turned out to be a serial killer.
The stories in this volume that are not Jekyll and Hyde are clearly lesser-known for a reason, but overall I still found them really interesting reads and sometimes even quite good stories. There are a few portrayals of non-white folks that have, shall we say, aged poorly, especially as some of these are very Scottish stories and feature the old belief in the Devil appearing in the form of “a black man.” When a “black man” in the Devil and when one is some poor African bloke with the misfortune to find himself in nineteenth-century Scotland is usually pretty clear and, in fact, the confusion in terminology seems almost played for laughs. Uncomfortable invocations of blackness aside, both stories where this appears are delightful in most of the rest of their use of language, which features a lot of absolutely jaw-cracking phonetically rendered Scots dialect. The Merry Men is told by a young gentleman who narrates normally, but as the story concerns his relatives on an isolated stretch of shoreline in extremely rural Scotland, most of the other characters, namely his religious zealot of an uncle, are the types who keep using words like “muckle.” Thrawn Janet is a deliciously classic ghost story that, apart from a few opening paragraphs in plain English to set the stage, is told by “the older folk” of the parish, recounting the events of “fifty years syne” and in addition to the specifically Scots vocabulary, has all of the accent written out (“awfu’” for “awful,” classic eye-dialect stuff) until the whole story looks like it sounds like it’s being read from the bottom of a pond. Me being me, I loved this, but I think it’d be pretty difficult to read if ye nae ken a wee bit o’ Scots.
Most of the stories in this collection lean a bit toward the horror/gothic end; this set of short stories seems picked to have been “other stories by the author of Jekyll and Hyde” pretty specifically, and not necessarily “other stories by the author of Treasure Island,” for example. We’ve got a story from the point of view of a serial killer; a story about a man who goes to recuperate from some sort of illness in a decadent Spanish mansion belonging to the inbred last dregs of a once-great but evil family; a somewhat goofy French morality tale that is nonetheless mostly about bourgeois hypocrisy (this one does feature some treasure-hunting, to be fair); another somewhat depressing morality tale about a guy who stoically talks himself out of ever going anywhere or doing anything with his life except quietly carry on the family business; and as previously mentioned, ghost story Thrawn Janet and the rural gothic The Merry Men.
Overall I found this to be a great little collection of stories, and I’m really glad to have revisited Jekyll and Hyde.