London as a Setting in Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde

Examine the role and significance of setting, particularly of the London cityscape, in Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.

Setting plays a vital role in Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Not only is it the space in which the action occurs but it is also a vital narrative device, which Stevenson utilizes to create a classically Gothic atmosphere. His use of light and darkness, of the familiar and the unfamiliar and of space and its denial, all recall the methods employed by the writers of gothic fiction that preceded him. However, Stevenson also utilizes scenes, images and devices that are less commonly associated with the gothic mode, and at times inverts gothic tropes and motifs, in order to create a unique effect. Stevenson’s is a deeply psychological and subjective gothic, which, rather than attempting to create one objective London, or to construct a dualistic London based on east/west or light/dark dichotomies, is an imagined London presented to the reader through a multitude of voices and perspectives.

The use of London as a setting for a gothic text was a comparatively recent development in Stevenson’s time. The gothic narratives of earlier periods, starting with what is often considered the first and archetypical gothic text, Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, were often set in far away, mythologized settings that were “perceived to harbour unreasonable, uncivilised, and unprogressive customs or tendencies” (Mighall, 1999, xviii). These settings were the more natural scene for the gothic text to the pre-industrialized reading public, who were still in the midst of the transition from aristocratic to bourgeoisie social and economical organisation; this was a reading public who would have believed that such horrors, as Mighall puts it, “could only take place in ‘less civilized’ ages or places” (Mighall, 2003, xi). However, by the late-nineteenth century these settings had lost intrigue and relevance for the increasingly urbane, middle class reading audience. London was now the centre of the British Empire, and indeed, to late-Victorian sensibilities, the world (Gilbert 03). The centrality of the city to the middle class psyche made it the ideal setting for the gothic fiction that other related social and cultural factors were bringing to prominence. Stevenson’s writings, particularly Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, epitomize this phenomenon.

In Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Stevenson first shows his readers a light and vibrant area of London, as experienced by the two middle classed gentlemen, Mr Utterson and Mr Enfield, on one of their exploratory perambulations. It is a street that, while “small” and “quiet,” drives a “thriving trade,” populated by inhabitants that are “doing well,” and “hoping to do better still” (Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde 06). This is an area associated with light and cleanliness, with opportunity and even community. However, these positive associations are not wholly pure; like a “fire in a forest,” this space still possesses the potential for danger. And this danger is quickly found “two doors from one corner, on the left hand going east … “ (Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde 06). This slightly intangible spatial reference is to a nearby court that is remarkable only for a solitary door which shows “the marks of prolonged and sordid negligence”. It is a door that is “connected in the mind,” of Mr Enfield with the “very odd story” of Mr Hyde’s trampling of a young child in the early hours of a “black winter’s morning” (Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde 07).

Here, in the first major episode of the novella, we are presented with a multi layered and threatening London. It is the scene of a markedly bourgeoisie exchange of goods, being experienced by two middle class gentlemen; a likely scene and one that is still not wholly unfamiliar to us today. However, throughout the description there is a latent sense of foreboding, perhaps best exemplified by the simile “like a fire in a forest”. This is notable as it not only implies the above mentioned sense of threat, but also uses fire, a symbol of light and warmth to convey it. Threat lurks everywhere in Stevenson’s London, not just behind sordid doors and in hidden alleys. This theme is further enforced by Enfield, who, when telling Utterson the tale of his first encounter with Hyde, describes passing through a part of London where there “was nothing to be seen but lamps … street after street, all lighted up as if for a procession and all as empty as a church” (Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde 07). This again draws on gothic elements such as solitude and desolation, but also perverts the image of the gas lit street as a symbol of civilisation and safety, into something ‘other’ and threatening. Enfield’s description of Hyde’s late night misadventure utilizes many classic gothic tropes in order to describe his evil and to create an atmosphere in which such evil is likely to thrive. However, implicitly, this ‘dark London’ could just as easily be right next to a bright and friendly market place or be a street lit up with the light of civilisation. And it is through the subjective lens of the civilised “man about town,” (Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde 06) Mr Enfield, who himself was out on London’s streets at 3am “coming home from some place at the end of the world,” (Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde 07) that we are presented with this picture.

This subjectivity, uncertainty and perversion of the familiar can also be identified in the scene of the murder of Carew. The image of a maidservant, who goes to bed around eleven, is a banal and most likely familiar one to the late-Victorian reader. However, Stevenson represents her as a “romantically given” (Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde 21) young woman, who, presumably exhausted, doesn’t go to bed but instead sits down on a box in front of a window and falls into a strange and altered state of consciousness. Her reverie is soon broken when she witnesses Hyde’s attack, with “ape-like fury,” (Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde 22) of the hapless, though “beautiful,” (Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde 21) Carew. This attack occurs in a “brilliantly lit” lane on a “cloudless” night; before “a fog rolled over the city in the small hours,” well after the event (Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde 21).

It is significant that Stevenson privileges the perspective of an innocent if not somewhat unusual maid in the depiction of this crime. The description is horrific and surprisingly detailed, right down to Mr Carew’s bones being “audibly shattered” (Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde 22). Stevenson has created here an uncanny depiction of a domestic scenario in order to describe an extremely uncanny, horrific and gothicised event. Again it is not simply the obviously spine-tingling and gothic that is perverted in Stevenson’s London. Additionally, Stevenson has inverted the weather conditions that one might expect in such an event, which instead of veiling or obfuscating the crime, elucidate it. Compare for instance, Mr Utterson’s thoughts after hearing Enfield’s narrative on Mr Hyde:

It was already bad enough when the name was but a name of which he could learn no more. It was worse when it began to be clothed upon with detestable attributes; and out of the shifting, insubstantial mists that had so long baffled his eye, there leaped the sudden, definite presentment of a fiend. (Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde 11)

In this metaphor the mist of ignorance has concealed the evil of Hyde from view, but in the case of the romantic maidservant the mist doesn’t roll in until after the evil crime.

This depiction of the young maidservant has parallels with the scene that describes a dream sequence experienced by Mr Utterson. Again it is a scene marked by altered consciousness and individual subjectivity, which conjures an image of the labyrinthine streets of a gothic London. Mr Utterson’s dream visions also include the image of his friend Dr Jekyll’s home being invaded by the faceless Mr Hyde; another distortion of a domestic scene, which is a brilliant inversion of the threat of Hyde upon Utterson, who is himself in the same threatened position as the imagined Dr Jekyll. While this scene presents archetypally gothic imagery, it also includes the image of the “field of lamps,” (Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde 13) an ostensibly affirming symbol of civilisation and safety, which recalls Enfield’s earlier description.

In all three of these examples there is a focus on the subjective experience of the characters involved. Stevenson does not simply attempt to create a gothic setting, in London, but instead creates a gothic experience that the reader can access through his polyphonic and multi-perspective text. In this, although he was probably pursuing a purely gothic objective—writing a spine-tingling and commercially successful story— his methods were, arguably, something new. It may be said that Stevenson attempted to bring the gothic mode as close to the Victorian reader as he could. He did this, firstly, by setting the action in London, the socio-political centre of the Empire and the symbolic heart of the Victorian psyche. Secondly, within this London setting, Stevenson utilized common tropes, images and devices such as the juxtaposition of east and west and of light and dark, as well as the ever present London fogs and mists, to create a gothic atmosphere; however, by targeting and questioning the symbols of the ostensibly good and civilised, Stevenson also actively transcended what might be termed the common gothic. Just as the danger at the centre of the protagonist’s story is that which lies within himself, for Stevenson, the threat to London and, indeed, of London, is not simply derived from that which is overtly grotesque. Murder, evil and degeneration may occur in front of an innocent maid under brilliant moonlight; or reside just metres from a thriving community market place.

If this perspective of Stevenson’s text is accepted, the logical question that follows is, why? As Mighall rightly points out of Gothic setting:

Setting is important, but its depiction depends on the socio-political and cultural attitude which informs the writer’s view of the geographical or institutional locale in question. (Mighall, 1999, xviii)

As demonstrated above, the centrality of London in Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, is indeed, very much an historical one. However, Mighall goes on to argue that gothic fiction “clings to the totems of enlightenment, modernity, and civilisation … through their troubled recognition of the alternative” (Mighall, 1999, xviii). He believes that the gothicization of London by writers like Stevenson ultimately serves to “to reinforce a distance between the enlightened now and the repressive or misguided then” (Mighall, 1999, xviii). However, it can be argued that Stevenson’s text ultimately serves, if not to undermine, then at least to encourage a questioning of enlightenment thinking. London is an historical setting in Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, but it is also an imagined city constructed in the mind of Stevenson and presented to the reader through the lens of differing fictional subjectivities. In this sense Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is a deeply psychological text. Indeed, rather than being a socially and historically affirming one, as Mighall’s conception would suggest, this novella is instead a questioning, critical and truly disturbing one; a narrative that encourages the reader to go down into their own psyche and, indeed, that of their society and to question what it means to civilised, what it means to be mad and, of course, what it means to be evil.

The interplay between the real and the imagined is exemplified both in terms of London as a setting, and in terms of the protagonist’s story; as Dryden puts it, “Hyde becomes a product of both metropolitan imagination and the metropolitan experience” (Dryden 256). The split in Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde’s psyche is both mimicked and enabled by London; the physical space, labyrinthine and socially divide is ideal for the divided protagonist. It is little wonder, then, that Stevenson’s story resonated so strongly with the reading public. His aim at producing a commercially successful novella, or “shilling shocker,” (Walkowitz 207) was fulfilled by the combination of his depiction of the city of London, as it was experienced by his characters, and by the parallel story of his protagonist.

It is, arguably, the combination of the concerns of the city of London and the psyche of its residents that made Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde so pertinent at a time when questions over the individual and the Empire were intersecting. However, as this essay has attempted to demonstrate, Stevenson’s depiction transcends dichotomies of good/evil, light/darkness, civilised/barbaric. London is a dual city of east and west, the protagonist is both Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, but it is those places and those times where the two converge, which present the most compelling and human depiction of both man and city:

It was a fine, clear, January day, wet under foot where the frost had melted, but cloudless overhead; and the Regent’s Park was full of winter chirruppings and sweet with Spring odours. I sat in the sun on a bench; the animal within me licking the chops of memory; the spiritual side a little drowsed, promising subsequent penitence, but not yet moved to begin. After all, I reflected I was like my neighbours; and then I smiled, comparing myself with other men …

At the very moment of that vainglorious thought, a qualm came over me, a horrid nausea and the most deadly shuddering … I looked down; my clothes hung formlessly on my shrunken limbs; the hand that lay on my knee was corded and hairy. I was once more Edward Hyde …

(Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde 66)

Reference List

Dryden, Linda. ‘City of Dreadful Night: Stevenson’s Gothic London’. Robert Louis Stevenson: Writer of Boundaries. Ed. Ambrosini, Richard, Dury, Richard. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006. 253-264. Web. 20 August 2013.

Gilbert, Pamela. Imagined Londons. New York: State University of New York Press. 2002. Print.

Mighall, Robert. A Geography of Victorian Gothic Fiction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1999. Print.

Mighall, Robert. Introduction to The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Other Tales of 

Terror. ix-xlii. Stevenson, Robert Louis. The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Other Tales of Terror. London: Penguin. 2003. Print.

Stevenson, Robert Louis. The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Other Tales of Terror. London: Penguin. 2003. Print

Walkowitz, Judith. City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London. London: Virago Press Limited. 1992. Print.