Katharine Elizabeth Alan Stevenson de Mattos (1851–1939) was
RLS’s cousin and Bob Stevenson’s sister. RLS and Katharine
played together when they were children. (The
Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson)
Katharine de Mattos: the sister of R.L.S.'s cousin and close
friend, Bob Stevenson. She caused a family scandal by marrying
and later divorcing Sydney de Mattos, a 'Cambridge Atheist'.
R.L.S. dedicated two of the poems in Underwoods to her
as well as Jekyll and Hyde.
(Letley
211)
"Letter:
To Mrs. de Mattos," The
Complete Works of Robert Louis Stevenson (Delphi
Classics, 2015)
[Skerryvore, Bournemouth] January 1st, 1886.
Dearest Katharine,—Here, on a very little book and accompanied
with lame verses, I have put your name. Our kindness is now
getting well on in years; it must be nearly of age; and it
gets more valuable to me with every time I see you. It is not
possible to express any sentiment, and it is not necessary to
try, at least between us. You know very well that I love you
dearly, and that I always will. I only wish the verses were
better, but at least you like the story; and it is sent to you
by the one that loves you—Jekyll, and not Hyde.
R. L. S.
Ave!
Bells upon the city are ringing in the night;
High above the gardens are the houses full of light;
On the healthy Pentlands is the curlew flying free;
And the broom is blowing bonnie in the north countrie.
We cannae break the bonds that God decreed to bind,
Still we'll be the children of the heather and the wind;
Far away from home, O, it's still for you and me
That the broom is blowing bonnie in the north countrie.
R. L. S.
14
Cain's heresy...I let my brother go to
the devil in his own way:
Genesis 4 (King
James Bible Online)
8 And Cain talked with Abel his brother: and it came to pass, when they
were in the field, that Cain rose up against Abel his brother, and slew
him.
9 And the LORD said unto Cain, Where is
Abel thy brother? And he said, I know not: Am
I my brother's keeper?
10 And he said, What hast thou done? the voice of thy brother's blood
crieth unto me from the ground.
11 And now art thou cursed
from the earth, which hath opened her mouth to receive thy brother's
blood from thy hand;
[...] the narrator Utterson remarks quaintly that he inclines to
Cain's heresy—he "lets his brother go to the Devil" (e. g., be as
dissolute as he likes). The reference to the Genesis 4 functions here
not merely as a clever quip, but as foreshadowing, for the good brother
(Jekyll) must murder the evil brother (Hyde) to save the world from the
actions of a sadist. The irony, of course, is that in Genesis it was the
evil brother (Cain) who slew the good brother (Abel); however, the
reference is appropriate since Hyde wishes to take over the body and
possessions of his elder brother. Indeed, Hyde's physical deformity,
which produces revulsion in anyone who sees him, may be related to his
bearing the mark of Cain, the first murderer. (Allingham, "Allusions")
25 troglodytic:
troglodyte (Oxford
Dictionaries) 1 (Especially in prehistoric
times) a person who lived in a cave.
The troglodyte site of Barry
was continuously occupied for thousands of years. 1.1 A hermit.
He then studied philosophy for a couple of years, lived as a troglodyte
in Crete and had a short career as a street corner worker in
the city of Groningen. 1.2 A person who is regarded as
being deliberately ignorant or old-fashioned.
Its a balmy 18 degrees, but I miss the sun already (that's Celsius, for
all you troglodytes still
living in the 18th century).
A
Chapter on Dreams
And
then, while he was yet a student, there came to him a dream-adventure
which he has no anxiety to repeat; he began, that is to say, to dream in
sequence and thus to lead a double life—one of the day, one of the
night—one that he had every reason to believe was the true one, another
that he had no means of proving to be false. I should have said he
studied, or was by way of studying, at Edinburgh college, which (it may be
supposed) was how I came to know him. Well, in his dream-life, he passed
along the day in the surgical theatre, his heart in his mouth, his teeth
on edge, seeing monstrous malformations and the abhorred dexterity of
surgeons. [...] Time went quicker in the life of dreams, some seven hours
(as near as he can guess) to one; and it went, besides, more intensely, so
that the gloom of these fancied experiences clouded the day, and he had
not shaken off their shadow ere it was time to lie down and to renew them.
I cannot tell how long it was that he endured this discipline; but it was
long enough to send him, trembling for his reason, to the doors of a
certain doctor; whereupon with a simple draught he was restrored to the
common lot of man.
[...]
And
the point of interest for me lies partly in that very fact: that having
found so singular an incident, my imperfect dreamer should prove unable to
carry the tale to a fit end and fall back on indescribable noises and
indiscriminate horrors. It would be different now; he knows his business
better!
For,
to approach at last the point: This honest fellow had long been in the
custom of setting himself to sleep with tales, and so had his father
before him; but these were irresponsible inventions, told for the teller's
pleasure, with no eye to the crass public or the thwart reviewer: tales
where a thread might be dropped, or one adventure quitted for another, or
fancy's last suggestion. So that the little people who manage man's
internal theatre had not as yet received a very rigorous training; and
played upon their stage like children who should have slipped into the
house and found it empty, rather than like drilled actors performing a set
piece to a huge hall of faces. But presently my dreamer began to turn his
former amusement of storytelling to (what is called) account; by which I
mean that he began to write and well his tales. Here was he, and here were
the little people who did that part of his business, in quite new
conditions. The stories must now be trimmed and pared and set upon all
fours, they must run from a beginning to an end and fit (after a manner)
with the laws of life; the pleasure, in one word, had become a business;
and that not only for the dreamer, but for the little people of his
theatre. These understood the change as well as he. When he lay down to
prepare himself for sleep, he no longer sought amusement, but printable
and profitable tales; and after he had dozed off in his boxseat, his
little people continued their evolutions with the same mercantile designs.
[...]
Hereupon, with a pang of wonder and mercantile delight, the
dreamer awoke. His mercantile delight was not of long endurance; for it
soon became plain that in this spirited tale there were unmarketable
elements [...] It was not his tale; it was the little people's! [...] the
story was told with really guileful craftsmanship. the conduct of both
actors is (in the cant phrase) pyschologically correct, and the emotion
aptly graduated up to the surprising climax. [...] Who are the Little
People? They are near connections of the dreamer's, beyond doubt; they
share in his financial worries and have an eye to the bank-book; they
share plainly in his training; they have plainly learned like him to build
the scheme of a considerate story and to arrange emotion in progressive
order; only I think they have more talent [...] they are but just my
Brownies, God bless them! Who do one-half my work for me while I am fast
asleep, and in all human likelihood, do the rest for me as well, when I am
wide awake and fondly suppose I do it for myself. [...] by that account,
the whole of my published fiction should be the singlehanded producted of
some Brownie, some Familiar, some unseen collaborator, whom I keep locked
in a back garret, while I get all the praise and he but a share [...] I
pull back and I cut down; and I dress the whole in the best words and
sentences that I can find and make; I hold the pen, too; and I do the
sitting at the table, which is about the worst of it; and when all is
done, I make up the manuscript and pay for the registration; so that, on
the whole, I have some claim to share, though not so largely as I do, in
the profits of our common enterprise.
I can but give an instance or so of what part is done
sleeping and what part awake, and leave the reader to share what laurels
there are, at his own nod, between myself and my collaborators; and to do
this I will first take a book that a number of persons have been polite
enough to read, the Strange Case of Dr.
Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. I had long been trying to write a story on
this subject, to find a body, a vehicle, for that strong sense of man’s
double being which must at times come in upon and overwhelm the mind of
every thinking creature. I had even written one, The
Travelling Companion, which was returned by an editor on the plea
that it was a work of genius and indecent, and which I burned the other
day on the ground that it was not a work of genius, and that Jekyll
had supplanted it. Then came one of those financial fluctuations
to which (with an elegant modesty) I have hitherto referred in the third
person. For two days I went about racking my brains for a plot of any
sort; and on the second night I dreamed the scene at the window, and a
scene afterward split in two, in which Hyde, pursued for some crime, took
the powder and underwent the change in the presence of his pursuers. All
the rest was made awake, and consciously, although I think I can trace in
much of it the manner of my Brownies. The meaning of the tale is therefore
mine, and had long pre-existed in my garden of Adonis, and tried one body
after another in vain; indeed, I do most of the morality, worse luck! and
my Brownies have not a rudiment of what we call a conscience. Mine, too,
is the setting, mine the characters. All that was given me was the matter
of three scenes, and the central idea of a voluntary change becoming
involuntary. Will it be thought ungenerous, after I have been so liberally
ladling out praise to my unseen collaborators, if I here toss them over,
bound hand and 189 foot, into the arena of the critics? For the business
of the powders, which so many have censured, is, I am relieved to say, not
mine at all, but the Brownies’.
There could be no pretense he was not an invalid and a very sick man. He had
horrifying hemorrhages, long spells when he was doomed to lie motionless on
his bed lest the slightest movement should restart the flow, when he would
speak in whispers, and one sat beside him and tried to be entertaining—in
that room he was only too likely to leave in his coffin.
How thus handicapped he wrote his
books is one of the marvels of literature—books so robustly and
aboundingly alive that it is incredible they came out of a sick-room; and
such well-sustained books with no slowing down of their original impetus,
nor the least suggestion of those intermissions when their author lay at
the point of death. Those years in "Skerryvore" were exceedingly
productive. The "Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" was written
here; so was "Kidnapped"; so was "Markheim," and any number of his best
short stories; so too, as the "Life of Fleeming Jenkin."
One day he came down to luncheon in
a very preoccupied frame of mind, hurried through his meal—an unheard-of
thing for him to do—and on leaving said he was working with extraordinary
success on a new story that had come to him in a dream, and that he was
not to be interrupted or disturbed even if the house caught fire.
For three days a sort of hush
descended on "Skerryvore"; we all went about, servants and everybody, in a
tiptoeing silence; passing Stevenson's door I would see him sitting up in
bed, filling page after page, and apparently never pausing for a moment.
At the end of three days the mysterious task was finished, and he read
aloud to my mother and myself the first draft of "The Strange Case of Dr.
Jekyll and Mr. Hyde."
I listened to it spellbound.
Stevenson, who had a voice the greatest actor might have envied, read it
with an intensity that made shivers run up and down my spine. When he came
to the end, gazing at us in triumphant expectancy and keyed to a pitch of
indescribable self-satisfaction—as he waited, and I waited, for my
mother's outburst of enthusiasm—I was thunderstruck at her backwardness.
Her praise was constrained; the words seemed to come with difficulty; and
then all at once she broke out with criticism. He had missed the point,
she said; had missed the allegory; had made it merely a story—a
magnificent bit of sensationalism—when it should have been a masterpiece.
Stevenson was beside himself with
anger. He trembled; his hand shook on the manuscript; he was intolerably
chagrined. His voice, bitter and challenging, overrode my mother's in a
fury of resentment. Never had I seen him so impassioned, so outraged, and
the scene became so painful that I went away, unable to bear it any
longer. It was with a sense of tragedy that I listened to their voices
from the adjoining room, the words lost but fraught with an emotion that
struck at my heart.
When I came back my mother was
alone. She was sitting, pale and desolate before the fire, and staring
into it. Neither of us spoke. Had I done so it would have been to reproach
her, for I thought she had been cruelly wrong. Then we heard Louis
descending the stairs, and we both quailed as he burst in as though to
continue the argument even more violently than before. But all he said
was: "You are right I have absolutely missed the allegory, which, after
all, is the whole point of it—the very essence of it." And with that, as
though enjoying my mother's discomfiture and her ineffectual start to
prevent him, he threw the manuscript into the fire! Imagine my feelings—my
mother's feelings—as we saw it blazing up; as we saw those precious pages
wrinkling and blackening and turning into flame.
My first impression was that he had
done it out of pique. But it was not. He really had been convinced, and
this was his dramatic amend. When my mother and I both cried out at the
folly of destroying the manuscript he justified himself vehemently. "It
was all wrong," he said. "In trying to save some of it I should have got
hopelessly off the track. The only way was to put temptation beyond my
reach."
Then ensued another three days of
feverish industry on his part, and of a hushed, anxious, and tiptoeing
anticipation on ours; of meals where he scarcely spoke; of evenings
unenlivened by his presence; of awed glimpses of him, sitting up in bed,
writing, writing, writing, with the counterpane littered with his sheets.
The culmination was the "Jekyll and Hyde" that every one knows; that,
translated into every European tongue and many Oriental, has given a new
phrase to the world.
The writing of it was an astounding
feat from whatever aspect it may be regarded. Sixty-four thousand words in
six days; more than ten thousand words a day. To those who know little of
such things I may explain that a thousand words a day is a fair average
for any writer of fiction. Anthony Trollope set himself this quota; it was
Jack London's; it is—and has been—a sort of standard of daily literary
accomplishment. Stevenson multiplied it by ten; and on top of that copied
out the whole in another two days, and had it in the post on the third!
—Lloyd Osborn, An
Intimate Portrait of R. L. S. (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons,
1924)
The People of the Abyss
Chapter
1: The Descent
`BUT
YOU can't do it, you know,' friends said, to whom I applied for assistance
in the matter of sinking myself down into the East End of London. `You had
better see the police for a guide,' they added, on second thought,
painfully endeavoring to adjust themselves to the psychological processes
of a madman who had come to them with better credentials than brains.
`But
I don't want to see the police,' I protested. `What I wish to do, is to go
down into the East End and see things for myself. I wish to know how those
people are living there, and why they are living there, and what they are
living for. In short, I am going to live there myself.'
`You
don't want to live down there!' everybody said, with disapprobation writ
large upon their faces. `Why, it is said there are places where a man's
life isn't worth tu'pence.'
`The
very places I wish to see,' I broke in.
[...]
Nowhere
in the streets of London may one escape the sight of abject poverty, while
five minutes' walk from almost any point will bring one to a slum; but the
region my hansom was now penetrating was one unending slum. The streets
were filled with a new and different race of people, short of stature, and
of wretched or beer-sodden appearance. We rolled along through miles of
bricks and squalor, and from each cross street and alley flashed long
vistas of bricks and misery. Here and there lurched a drunken man or
woman, and the air was obscene with sounds of jangling and squabbling. At
a market, tottery old men and women were searching in the garbage thrown
in the mud for rotten potatoes, beans, and vegetables, while little
children clustered like flies around a festering mass of fruit, thrusting
their arms to the shoulders into the liquid corruption, and drawing forth
morsels, but partially decayed, which they devoured on the spot.
Chapter
21: The Precariousness of Life
The
figures are appalling; 1,800,000 people in London live on the poverty line
and below it, and another 1,000,000 live with one week's wages between
them and pauperism. In all England and Wales, eighteen per cent of the
whole population are driven to the parish for relief, and in London,
according to the statistics of the London County Council, twenty-one per
cent of the whole population are driven to the parish for relief. Between
being driven to the parish for relief and being an out-and-out pauper
there is a great difference, yet London supports 123,000 paupers, quite a
city of folk in themselves. One in every four in London dies on public
charity, while 939 out of every 1000 in the United Kingdom die in poverty;
8,000,000 simply struggle on the ragged edge of starvation, and 20,000,000
more are not comfortable in the simple and clean sense of the word.
[...]
In
the West End eighteen per cent of the children die before five years of
age; in the East End fifty-five per cent of the children die before five
years of age. And there are streets in London where, out of every one
hundred children born in a year, fifty die during the next year; and of
the fifty that remain, twenty-five die before they are five years old.
Chapter
24: A Vision of the Night
Late
last night I walked along Commercial Street from Spitalfields to
Whitechapel, and still continuing south, down Leman Street to the docks.
And as I walked I smiled at the East End papers, which, filled with civic
pride, boastfully proclaim that there is nothing the matter with the East
End as a living place for men and women.
It
is rather hard to tell a tithe of what I saw. Much of it is untellable.
But in a general way I may say that I saw a nightmare, a fearful slime
that quickened the pavement with life, a mess of unmentionable obscenity
that put into eclipse the `nightly horror' of Piccadilly and the Strand.
It was a menagerie of garmented bipeds that looked something like humans
and more like beasts, and to complete the picture, brass-buttoned keepers
kept order among them when they snarled too fiercely.
I
was glad the keepers were there, for I did not have on my `seafaring'
clothes, and I was what is called a `mark' for the creatures of prey that
prowled up and down. At times, between keepers, these males looked at me
sharply, hungrily, gutter-wolves that they were, and I was afraid of their
hands, of their naked hands, as one may be afraid of the paws of a
gorilla. They reminded me of gorillas. Their bodies were small,
ill-shaped, and squat. There were no swelling muscles, no abundant thews
and wide-spreading shoulders. They exhibited, rather, an elemental economy
of nature, such as the cave-men must have exhibited. But there was
strength in those meagre bodies, the ferocious, primordial strength to
clutch and gripe and tear and rend. When they spring upon their human prey
they are known even to bend the victim backward and double its body till
the back is broken. They possess neither conscience nor sentiment, and
they will kill for a half-sovereign, without fear or favor, if they are
given but half a chance. They are a new species, a breed of city savages.
The streets and houses, alleys and courts, are their hunting grounds. As
valley and mountain are to the natural savage, street and building are
valley and mountain to them. The slum is their jungle, and they live and
prey in the jungle.
The
dear soft people of the golden theatres and wonder-mansions of the West
End do not see these creatures, do not dream that they exist. But they are
here, alive, very much alive in their jungle. And woe the day, when
England is fighting in her last trench, and her able-bodied men are on the
firing-line! For on that day they will crawl out of their dens and lairs,
and the people of the West End will see them, as the dear soft aristocrats
of Feudal France saw them and asked one another, `Whence came they?' `Are
they men?'
But
they were not the only beasts that ranged the menagerie. They were only
here and there, lurking in dark courts and passing like gray shadows along
the walls; but the women from whose rotten loins they spring were
everywhere. They whined insolently, and in maudlin tones begged me for
pennies, and worse. They held carouse in every boozing ken, slatternly,
unkempt, bleary-eyed, and tousled, leering and gibbering, overspilling
with foulness and corruption, and, gone in debauch, sprawling across
benches and bars, unspeakably repulsive, fearful to look upon.
Why is it odd that Mr. Utterson
and Mr. Enfield are friends? (1)
Search
for Mr. Hyde
What does Mr. Utterson think of
Dr. Jekyll's will? (15)
What does Dr. Lanyon think of
Dr. Jekyll at the point in their acquaintance when Utterson
asks about him? (17)
Dr.
Jekyll Was Quite at Ease
The
Carew Murder Case
Who is the "aged and beautiful
gentleman with white hair" (36)?
What does Utterson recognize
about the broken stick? (39)
Incident
of the Letter
Remarkable
Incident of Dr. Lanyon
Incident
at the Window
The
Last Night
Dr.
Lanyon's Narrative
Henry
Jekyll's Full Statement of the Case
Study Questions
What types of information are
used to identify characters?
What qualities make Mr. Hyde
repellent to others and what qualities evoke sympathy and
fascination?
Review Sheet
Characters
Henry Jekyll– born "to a large fortune, endowed besides
with excellent parts, inclined by nature to industry, fond of the respect
of the wise and good among my fellow-men" (106); "a large, well-made,
smooth-faced man of fifty, with something of a slyish cast perhaps, but
every mark of capacity and kindness" (30–31); "the worst of my
faults was a certain impatient gaiety of disposition" (106); "both sides
of me were in dead earnest; I was no more myself when I laid aside
restraint and plunged in shame, than when I laboured, in the eye of day,
at the furtherance of knowledge or the relief of sorrow and suffering"
(107); medical doctor (15); "'he began to go wrong, wrong in mind'"
(17) Edward
Hyde– "There is something wrong with his
appearance; something displeasing, something downright detestable. I never
saw a man I so disliked, and yet I scarce know why. He must be deformed
somewhere; he gives a strong feeling of deformity, although I couldn’t
specify the point. He’s an extraordinary-looking man, and yet I really can
name nothing out of the way...And it’s not want of memory; for I declare I
can see him this moment" (12); according to Jekyll's first will, his
"friend and benefactor" (15); lives "in Soho" (24); "extraordinary
quickness" (24); "pale and dwarfish, he gave an impression of deformity
without any nameable malformation, he had a displeasing smile, he had
borne himself to the lawyer [Utterson] with a sort of murderous mixture of
timidity and boldness, and he spoke with a husky, whispering and somewhat
broken voice" (25); "'seems hardly human! Something troglodytic" (25);
"Hyde broke out of all bounds and clubbed him [Carew] to the earth. And
next moment, with ape-like fury, he was trampling his victim under foot
and hailing down a storm of blows, under which the bones were audibly
shattered and the body jumped upon the roadway" (37)
Gabriel John Utterson, Mr. Utterson – "Mr. Utterson the lawyer was a man of a
rugged countenance that was never lighted by a smile; cold, scanty and
embarrassed in discourse; backward in sentiment; lean, long, dusty, dreary
and yet somehow lovable [...] 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; and though
he enjoyed the theater, had not crossed the doors of one for twenty years"
(1); "of Gaunt Street" (23) Poole – Dr. Jekyll's "well-dressed,
elderly" (26) butler (); Mr. Richard Enfield– Mr. Utterson's "distant kinsman, the
well-known man about town" (3) Dr. Hastie Lanyon– "Cavendish Square, that citadel of
medicine, where his [Utterson's] friend, the great Dr. Lanyon, had his
house and received his crowding patients" (16); "hearty, healthy, dapper,
red-faced gentleman, with a shock of hair prematurely white, and a
boisterous and decided manner" (16); "old mates [with Utterson] both at
school and college" (16); "'it is more than ten years since Henry Jekyll
became too fanciful for me'" (17); "'hide-bound...ignorant, blatant
pedant'" (31); Sir Danvers Carew– "M.P." murdered by Hyde; Inspector Newcomen– "of Scotland Yard" (41) Mr. Guest– Utterson's "head clerk"; "There was no
man from whom he [Utterson] kept fewer secrets than Mr. Guest"; "a
great student and critic of handwriting"; Hyde's woman servant – "ivory-faced and
silvery-haired old woman" (41); "had an evil face, smoothed by hypocrisy;
but her manners were excellent" (41); "A flash of odious joy appeared upon
the woman’s face. 'Ah!' said she, 'he is in trouble!'" (41)
Vocabulary
genre
novel,
novella
crime
fiction
science
fiction
narrative,
narration
narrator
story
plot
conflict
suspense
tension
revelation
denouement,
resolution
setting
character
protagonist
antagonist
foil
characterization
dialog
point of
view
diction
wordplay
pun
allusion
imagery
irony
metaphor
simile
epistolary
dystopia
theme
double,
doubling
doppelganger
duality
dualism
self,
other
paradox
class
urban
consciousness
psychology
subconscious
plausibility
unity
Sample Student
Responses to Stevenson's Strange Case
of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
Response 1:
Study Question:
Student Name
2202234
Introduction to the Study of English Literature
