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Robert Louis Stevenson's nightmare Gothic novella from the late Victorian era, the strange case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, speaks right to the heart of our deepest human concern, which is best expressed by the story's tortured man of science when he says man is not truly one, but truly too. And many will look back across the vast wasteland of history and wonder how the bloodiest atrocities and darkest crimes could have taken place. How can one's neighbours, who are civilised and good on the surface one day turn to hateful and evil murderers the next? How can one's friends become fiends? This is the terror at the dark centre of Stevenson's story. And alongside Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Bram Stoker's Dracula, this furious shot out of hell continues to disturb readers well beyond its time of publication and has secured itself as one of the three most influential tales of terror ever composed. So thank goodness Robert Louis Stevenson did not abide by his wife's decision to destroy the story. During a six day and night writing fuelled by a frenzied cocaine binge and feeling delirious from tuberculosis, the Scottish writer, now frequently best loved for his enduring children's narratives like Treasure island and Kidnapped furiously committed the tale of Jekyll and Hyde to manuscript. Stevenson was still haunted by horrific real life events that took place in Edinburgh several years prior, when his Eugene Chantrell was convicted of murdering his wife with opium after taking out a large life insurance policy on her right before her death. After his hanging, many believed he poisoned or pushed several others to overdose too. Feeling Jekyll and Hyde to be his best work yet. Stevenson presented the story to his wife, who found it to be nothing but fiendish ravings, a choir full of utter nonsense. And she thought this to be the kind of story one might find in the shilling shockers and penny dreadfuls of the day. And she thought this to be far beneath her husband's storytelling prowess. And so she burnt it. She consigned the first draft of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde to the family fireplace. Steven, rather than allow the work to vanish in the flames, then spent the next three days and nights in a white hot flash of demonic reinspiration and with copious cocaine use, once again rewrote the manuscript by hand. And it swiftly became the work that made Stevenson's name as a writer in his lifetime. And it rescued the family from crippling debt. The work was a smash hit. But in an age of sensational stories, grotesque tales and yarns of abject terror, what Is it about this particular work that resonated so powerfully with the reading public? It comes down, in my opinion, to how fully and perceptively Stevenson put his finger on what truly terrifies us at the bottom of the great horror stories. What is the one facet that is sure to unsettle even those most immune to such tales? It's the idea that the monster is man. The monster is within us, which means the monster is us. Stories like Jekyll and Hyde offer us a mirror. They show us our own reflection in the glass. And we can either turn away and aghast and refuse to acknowledge what we see, refuse to acknowledge the fact that, as Alexander Solzhenitsyn would say, the line separating good and evil runs right down the center of every human heart. We can reject this assertion, the assertion that we contain violent, base animal impulses that are barely constrained and that are constantly needing to be kept in check. And in so richly rejecting that notion, we make ourselves more susceptible to falling prey to those impulses. Or we can unnervingly accept the premise that our lives are a tightrope walk between upright morality, good benevolence and its direct opposite, downward plunging immorality and malevolence. And in accepting that burden of knowledge, we can hopefully be saved. Because stories like this one are ultimately grotesque, moral tales that can serve as a tonic to those darker impulses brooding inside of us. Although the readers in Stevenson's lifetime might have missed that, we might consider the irony that the stage adaptation of Jekyll and Hyde was actually pulled from the stage when just a couple of years after publication, a new kind of vil, the serial killer known as Jack the Ripper, struck fear into the population as he went on a brutal and prolonged murdering spree in the slums of London's East End. It was speculated not only by Scotland Yard, but also in the sensationalist tabloids who were profiting from the bloodshed and being rewarded with greater circulation thanks to their reporting on it. Indeed, 1 million newspapers were being sold each day in the fall of 1888 because they contained stories and updates on the case. And this was absolutely unprecedented. In the early half of the 19th century, the newspapers got their circulation up by serialized sensational stories that were fictive and the great ones were by writers like Charles Dickens. But as the century limped on, the papers discovered that true scandal is what really sells. It was theorised that the killer, who was never caught, had surgical and anatomical knowledge, as after the victims throats were cut, several had their internal organs removed. The stage play of Stevenson's novella was pulled not just because the subject matter was hitting a little too close to home, but outrageously, because many reasoned that the actor playing the role of Hyde should surely be considered a prime suspect as the Ripper. After all, what kind of person plays the role of such an abominable villain if they themselves did not have such bloodthirsty proclivities? Now, in recent years, historical research, combined with modern forensic analysis, which examined the DNA from traces of blood left on a shawl at one of crime scenes, would claim to assert a match for one of the prime suspects in the case back in the day. Not a surgeon and not an actor, but a hairdresser who was committed to an asylum. So it's safe to say that some of the contemporary readership and audiences might have missed the thrust of the story. But that's to be expected when a nation is in the grips of fear. And fear is what predominates and governs and compels when it comes to hate, when it comes to evil, and when talking about the strange case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, today we talk with the assumption that even newcomers to the work know the basic plotline, the crux, the reveal of the story, because the idea of feeling like Jekyll and Hyde has entered the public consciousness and entered common parlance. And there's no end of retellings of this story in film, radio, theatre, graphic novels and even video games. Even those who've never read the story or seen the film adaptations likely know where the story is heading. And the same can certainly be said for Frankenstein and Dracula too. They are embedded in our collective cultural consciousness, and so we're unlikely to be to reclaim the first reading experience, something that I like to endeavor to do when it comes to these great books. That's probably not going to happen for this one, though. I assure you that readers in 1886, which is when it was published, would not have seen the ending coming, even if it appears obvious, due to cultural saturation to us today. So why do we read and reread this story? Well, coming to the work, we find, as is often, but not always the case with works that have a reputation that precedes them, we find that this is an extraordinarily well written work. The prose is crisp and evocative and successfully throws us back in time to a London that was foggy, smoggy, dirty and filled with criminality and dark, illicit activity lurking in the mist, hiding beneath the veneer of respectability we Read this story because regardless of whether we know the big reveal, we still, or at least I still, feel a feverish sense of terror throughout. And I feel the kind of fear that ultimately leads to wisdom. And we also read it because at the end of the day, this is a thumping good read and ultimately a hell of a lot of fun. So grab your volume of the tale, light your fire or make sure your lamp has sufficient oil to light the page long into the night. And let's try not to give too much mind to what could very well be lurking outside our door right this very instant. And let's appreciate the Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson together. So the story of Jekyll and Hyde begins with Mr. Utterson, who is a respectable London lawyer. His full name is Gabriel John Utterson. It's always fascinating to analyse the names in great literature, especially Victorian literature. There is biblical weight to this protagonist's name, isn't there? Gabriel, of course, is the guardian angel. And John, we think of the Gospelist, the writer of the Gospel of John, or the John, the Book of Revelation. And we also get a banal, rather Dickensian aspect come through. Utter son, Utter son. The son of an utterer, or perhaps the son of what may not be uttered, we might think, in his legal meetings. There's a lot of uttering going on, low voices and so on. So the story begins with Mr. Utterson and his friend Mr. Enfield, and they are taking one of their regular Sunday walks, we're told, of Mr. Utterson, we're told, to illustrate his character, that he used to say, quaintly, I incline to Cain's heresy. I let my brother go to the devil in his own way. In his character, we're told it was frequently his fortune to be the last reputable acquaintance and the last good influence in the lives of downgoing men. So he's being ironic when he says he is like Cain, letting his brother go to the devil in his own way, when in fact he's the last port of call for men in very desperate situations. This is a very interesting idea because the opening question posed indirectly to us from this is essentially, to what extent are we responsible for the deeds of others? What did Cain say? Am I my brother's keeper? Now, of course, Cain directly murdered his brother. Many will quote Cain erroneously and ironically, without realizing the irony of what they are saying. To what degree are we responsible for the misdeeds of other people, even if we didn't ourselves have any active involvement in it? To what extent are the deeds of others our deeds too? That's the opening question that Stevenson poses to us. As these two, Utterson and Enfield pass through a quiet London street, Enfield points out a strange door that reminds him of a disturbing incident he once witnessed. And of course the symbolism of door is striking. What is a door? It is an entrance, it is an entrance into a building. But this door is shut. So we've got this figuration of things being shut away. We can't help but wonder what's locked behind the door. When we see a very curious door on a very curious building, we wonder what's inside, don't we? What's hidden? And so we've got this theme come through in this short work of the public versus the private self. There's a strong dichotomy between who we really are behind closed doors and what we present to the public. What is a scandal by definition a scandal is when something abhorrent or something the public would consider to be abhorrent or immoral that happens in private quarters but is brought into the light, into the public awareness. So he points out a door, specifically a cellar door. So you think not only about going in but going down, plunging down. And he tells him the story of how late one night he saw a sinister trampling a young girl in the street and then barging off. I was coming home about 3 o' clock of a black winter morning, Enfield says, and my way lay through a part of town where there was literally nothing to be seen but lamps. Street after street and all the folks asleep, street after street all lighted up as if for a procession and all as empty as a church. But then all at once I saw two figures. One a little man who was stumping along eastward at a good walk and the other a girl of maybe 8 or 10 who was running as hard as she was able down a cross street. Well, sir, the two ran into one another naturally enough at the corner. And then came the horrible part of the thing. For the man trampled calmly over the child's body and left her screaming on the ground. It sounds nothing to hear, but it was hellish to see. It wasn't like a man, it was like some damned juggernaut. Enfield gives a great cry to try and stop the man. And the streets go from completely deserted and empty to suddenly being crowded with people, drawing people. And London is really described in an extraordinarily uncanny way. We can feel just how cramped the streets are, how narrow the streets are. We can see the lamp lit alleys, we can see the fog, maybe we can smell it, feel it. A crowd gathers, which is very strange, at three in the morning, and they get hold of the man and they threaten him with a scandal and force him into making amends. Enfield describes this figure as having a black, sneering coolness and being like Satan. And this figure says, no gentleman, but wishes to avoid a scene. So the threat of scandal is enough to force his hand. And at the Hardcore Literature Book Club, we have been reading Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca recently. So we've been talking a lot about scandal and we've seen how du Maurier's dark modern Gothic work is really an extension of, or a hark back to the late Victorian Gothic. In the Gothic, we have a healthy dose or an unhealthy dose of class anxiety running through the genre. It's a dark streak running through the Gothic. But why do we find such a preoccupation with class mingled with criminality when it comes to the Gothic? Well, the Gothic is one of the greatest mouthpieces of the collective of a time. It really does give voice to contemporary fears and concerns. And it's interesting, just a couple of years after the publication of this story, when Jack the Ripper was on his killing spree, there were hundreds of theories about the identity of this man, and many posited that he must have been a physician, so that would make him of the upper middle class. Or if he was not a physician, he was at least a respectable gentleman by day, and some even thought him to have aristocratic or royal connections. Obviously, people's imagination ran away with them a little bit, but they believed, or some believed, that this killer was targeting working class sex workers, feeling secure in the knowledge that they wouldn't be missed and thus he was, wouldn't be found. So the Gothic has always got that class anxiety. Oh, the criminality. It must be someone of the upper echelon, socially, hierarchically speaking, the Gothics always got that anxiety. We can even go back to around the time of the French Revolution, which is when we really see an explosion of the Gothic. What happened around the French Revolution? We see the working men and women revolt and they guillotine the gluttonous royals and aristocrats in the street. And then, of course, the beast feasts upon itself. And those early Gothic stories from the likes of Anne Radcliffe, who is the mother of the Sublime, or Matthew Lewis were essentially attempting to reconcile in fiction the real bloodshed they saw taking place across the Channel. They were trying to think it through and assimilate it because it was traumatic. So back to the story. This beast of a man has trampled this girl in the street and he's forced to make amends. And so he enters through that door, the door that Enfield points out to Utterson, and then he returns with a check signed by a respectable gentleman not himself, another man, which makes the whole situation even stranger. It was signed with a name I can't mention, Enfield says, But we've seen appear in print very often. We might think about the hand that signs the check, who is that attached to? And we might wonder, what is a signature? A signature is a stamp. It's a sign off. It's an indication of you. It is a mark of your identity. It's something that gets printed by celebrities in autograph form, but it's also something that you put to legal documents that have great consequence tied up with money. So the man who trampled this girl is described by Enfield as being a damnable man. But the man who drew the cheque, well, he's one of your fellows who do what they call good. And Enfield really can't reconcile what's gone on. Does this evil figure that they've found in the street, who's just committed this heinous act, does he have some blackmail over this respectable gent? What is he holding over him that he can secure a check from him to put some of this messiness to rest? And imagine being the first readers, Stevenson was working very hard at leading his original readers up this pathway, the pathway that this figure, this dark figure, must have some blackmail over this respectable gent. Maybe he was guarding a scandal. Now, of course, what Stephenson actually does with the story is now incredibly overplayed in so many works since. But what he does with this story in Stevenson's day would have been a genuine twist. But we'll get to that properly shortly. We learn that this awful fellow has a key to this respectable gent's door. And then Enfield reveals the name of this evil man who walked over the child in the night. And he says he had the name of. Of Hyde. What sort of man was he? Artisan asks. And Enfield says, 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. Stevenson, in this story, is really working up what we call the uncanny, which is a real hallmark of the Gothic. It's very present in the Gothic. What is the uncanny? It is a disturbing feeling, perhaps a disturbing feeling of lingering evil, or a feeling that Something's not quite right, but you don't know why. So he says he gave the impression of deformity. So you don't know there's something wrong, but I don't know why. And if you want a deeper understanding about the development of the uncanny in Gothic literature, I encourage you to turn to ETA Hoffman's short story the Sandman, which is one of the greatest tales of terror ever penned. Hoffman was hugely influential in the early 19th century. He was a German romantic writer, and the Sandman comes from his 1816 night pieces. And his influence runs deep, deep in the world of psychoanalysis, cinema, painting, even in the world of ballet. The Sandman is the story that psychoanalysts like Sigmund Freud and Ernst Jentsch would use as their springboard for writings on the unheimlic, the uncanny. Hoffman's the Sandman, which, by the way, if you haven't read it but you intend to and don't want to hear plot details, you may wish to skip forwards a minute. The Sandman's really great. It's a tale about a young man who is haunted by his childhood fears of the sinister figure known as the Sandman, who supposedly steals children's eyes. And as an adult, this man, Nathaniel, becomes obsessed with a mysterious optician who resembles this Sandman, Sandman figure from his childhood fears. And he ends up falling in love with a woman who actually turns out to be a lifelike automaton, a doll, a lifeless but lifelike mechanical wooden doll. And in this story, we get this sublime blurring of the lines between reality and illusion, waking life and deluded nightmare, even though it's a dole. In the story, the word being used, used is automaton. 100, 200 years back, we would speak of waxworks and dolls as being uncanny, having an uncanny resemblance to life. And today, in the age of the Machine, we speak of what Masahiro Mori Darbed the uncanny valley. It's the sense that something's not quite human, something's off. There's a lack of life, despite the outward guise. And this is the unnerving feeling that pervades Stevenson's story, too. Now, another principle of the got what you'll see time and again in Gothic literature is terror, or you'll get the feeling of terror. So you've got the uncanny, but that feeds into the terror the writer wants you to feel. And Ann Radcliffe, writer of the Mysteries of Udolpho, delineated the difference between terror and horror, because they're different. Horror is when the awful Event is come upon you. You're down in the crypt and a hand reaches out and grabs you. Terror is the sense of foreboding and precipitation leading up to the terrible event. So you're down in the crypt before anything happens to you. But you fear that something's not quite right. That's terror. And that is the more sublime and elevated feeling. Indeed, they used to call Gothic novels around the turn of the 18th century, at the very end of the 18th, going into the 19th, they used to call gothic novels terror novels because a lot of them, a lot of the writers were trying to work up the feeling of terror. Some went for horror. It depends on which writer you're going for now, today or in contemporary times. Stephen King, in his fantastic Dance Macabre talks about how he will try to go for terror when he's really going for it. He'll go for terror, but when he can't do that, he will settle for horror. But when he can't do that, he's not a bad above the third rung, which he calls the gross out. But back to the story. In the second chapter, the Search for Mr. Hyde, we see that Mr. Utterson becomes troubled late at night. He can't sleep and he's troubled because he recalls his friend Dr. Henry Jekyll made a strange will leaving all of his property to a man called Edward Hyde. H Y, D E upon sudden same name from Enfield's story. Oh dear. We're told in case of the decease of Henry Jekyll, M.D. dCL, LLD, FRS, etc. All his possessions were to pass into the hands of his friend and benefactor, Edward Hyde. It's interesting to contrast the names. We've got the mere Mr. Hyde and then we've got Dr. Henry Jekyll's qualifications that come after his name in a grand process that peters out into and etc. These initials tell us that he's a doctor of medicine. He's a doctor of civil laws, doctor of laws generally, and he's a Fellow of the Royal Society. Upon his decease, Edward Hyde should step into his shoes. So there's something fishy going on here with this will and think about the meaning of will. Of course, a will is a legal document that sets out your wishes upon your passing. But we might also think about how William Shakespeare or Will Shakespeare punned relentlessly upon his own name and he thought about will as desire. Your will is your wish, your desire. When we say I will or this will, that will. It's also an indication of what Is going to happen in the future. And we often ask with these great books, do we have free will? This is a concern that comes through time and again with the greatest writers. Do we have free will? Or is an external force loaded against us? Indeed, is an internal force loaded against us? How much of our lives is fated biologically or environmentally determined. And how much is actually within the remit of our own wishes, our will? The idea of a will as a document is very interesting because it is a tangible expression of the dead. Still exerting their power from beyond the grave upon the living. So you can keep something of you, your spirit, your will, alive through writing. And we know this from reading these great books. When we read, we are in the company of the long, dearly departed. But we're keeping them alive by reading them. So we see. Utterson restlessly begins to investigate the mystery, Attempting to discover who Mr. Hyde is. And what connection he has to his friend, Dr. Jekyll. And we're told he feared madness at first. But now he fears it must be disgrace. So his friend, he could have been mad. And that's why he's left his will to this fellow. But there's obviously something darker going on here. There's some disgrace at hand. So Utterson heads to Cavendish Square, the great citadel of medicine in London, to see his friend, Dr. Lanyon. Dr. Lanyon will know. And he navigates through this nighttime world again. Stevenson shows us a great field of lamps of a nocturnal city. It's foggy, smoggy, misty and labyrinthine. This is a world of secrets right in the heart of the city. A world that is alternately empty and eerily so. Or uncannily bustling with people. Whether it's empty or crowded with people, something doesn't feel right. And, of course, this is a city filled with professional men. Doctors, lawyers. The sorts of men who must wear. Wear a guise both literally and metaphorically. And they must present one way to the world. But, of course, when they take off their professional garments at the end of the day. And they look at themselves in the mirror in the privacy of their own home, what do they see? We're all human, same as one another at the end of the day, no matter how we outwardly present. And as Utterson moves through this foggy world, I can't help but feel a little bit of Dickensian indebtedness here. We might compare some of the descriptions of London in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. To the descriptions of London and Bleak House. Particularly the profound beginning of that masterpiece. And Bleak House is a very complimentary book and a great one to read across the course of the autumnal season. Bleak House is very gothic in the fact that that novel is about a legal case that has become so convoluted and labyrinthine and has stretched on for so many years and pass down the generations. The parties feel trapped in it and do not understand it anymore. The gothic preoccupation is the sins of the fathers haunt the next generation. And in Bleak House you've also got that delightful satirical edge of mocking modern bureaucracy that would find its way into the absurdest and genius short stories of Franz Kafka. Here's some of the beginning of Bleak House. Implacable November weather, as much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth. Smoke lowering down from chimney pots, making a soft black drizzle with flakes of soot in it as big as full grown snowflakes gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs undistinguishable in mud, horses scarcely better splashed to their very blinkers, foot passengers jostling one another's umbrellas in a general infection of ill temper. We see crusts of mud and looming gas lamps. And of course we come to the iconic passage. Fog everywhere. Fog up the river where it flows among green eights and meadows. Fog down the river where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pillars of a great and dirty city. And I talk about Dickens because of course at the hardcore Literature Book club during the festive season at the end of every year we dig in to a great Dickens novel that is our festive tradition. Each and every year we end the year off and then we see in the new year by reading another great novel from Mr. Charles Dickens. And if you don't know already, I did reveal the Dickens from just a couple of days ago@patreon.com hardcore literature if you don't know already. Can you guess what the choice is? Previous choices and lectures are still available for all of these. Previous choices include Great Expectations, the Mystery of Edwin Drood, A Tale of Two Cities and David Copperfield. And this year we've got a great one too. I think you can guess which one it is. And Stevenson, he would have been been three years old when Bleak House came out, so he would have read it growing up. And we do get that sense of a Dickensian dirty smoggy London come through in his work. And Stevenson presents a London that is a shadowy nighttime city it's maze like, and it's very much like the unconscious itself. And we can see that much of the late Victorian Gothic presages the writings of Sigmund Freud. The Interpretation of Dreams was the last great Gothic work of the era. If you're interested in digging into that, we have a lecture on that work too. So we can see that navigating this smoggy, foggy realm, this locale, is like a metaphor for searching one's psyche. And when it comes to Freud, he did not reinvent the wheel with his theories, no matter how outlandish and grotesque some of them seem to be. Freud actually pulled age old and enduring wisdom and ideas from the great books, and he pulled them together in a systematically compelling way. Utterson goes to visit with Lanyon and he says, you must know what's going on because we're the two oldest friends Dr. Jekyll has. What does Lanyon say? Well, he says we used to have a bond of common interest, but it's more than 10 years since Henry Jekyll became too fanciful for me. He began to go wrong, wrong in the mind. And though of course, I continued to take an interest in him for old sake's sake, as they say. I see and I have seen devilish little of the man. Such unscientific balderdash, added the doctor, flushing suddenly purple. This little spirit of temper, we're told, was somewhat of a relief to Mr. Utter. They have only differed on some point of science, he thought, it's nothing worse than that. And then he asks him if he has heard of his so called Protege, Mr. Hyde, and Lanyon has not. But this is very interesting. Scientific balderdash has increasingly alienated Dr. Jekyll from his peers, from his friends. Along the way, he's lost his friends. 10 years is quite a stretch of time. And it can be easy to lose people across the course of a decade when you find yourself committed to one course of action over another. But it's very interesting. 19th century Gothic literature absolutely abounds with dodgy doctors and mad scientists. And the most famous one is of course, Dr. Victor Frankenstein. And as you know, that's the name of the scientist, the creator, not the creation. But erroneously, when you, you say Frankenstein, people think of the monster, but it's actually the man, the creator. Of course, in Mary Shelley's sublime Gothic work, the point is the same one that we see here, man is the monster. And the second most famous mad scientist would probably be Dr. Jekyll. And then of course, you've got Dr. Van Helsing and you've got the asylum manager, Dr. Seward from Bram Stoker's Dracula. But there are many more besides Victor Frankenstein. He was a student of natural philosophy, wasn't he, who became obsessed with anatomical experimentation and experiments into galvanism. Galvanism was the theory that electricity could reanimate the dead. And thus what does he do? He goes graveyard plundering. And he gifts the world a creation of corpse bits stitched together and then electrified. From Mary Shelley's 1818 Frankenstein or the modern Prometheus, we're told I collected bones from charnel houses and disturbed with profane fingers the tremendous secrets of the human frame. I collected the instruments of life around me that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet. Here's a little tip, a little reading tip. If you want a fun autumnal reading project, read Frankenstein side by side with the poetry of Mary's partner, Percy Bysshe Shelley. You can read Mont Blanc and read this alongside Polidori's the Vampire, which was said to be by Lord Byron but was actually by his physician. Though Lord Byron of course inspired the bloodsucker of that tale. These writers wrote together around the same time when they were holiday in the Swiss Alps and found themselves confined indoors in their chalet by two weeks of bad weather, relentless rain. The story goes that they would terrify themselves at night. They would read poems like Coleridge's Christabel and they'd read stories from the Phantasmagoriana, a French anthology of German tales of terror. They would read these tales and mix them with serious Lord Anima abuse. And that is supposedly scared the absolute bejesus out of them. Who else do we think about when we think about mad doctors and scientists from the Victorian era? I think of Dr. Moreau from H.G. wells. The island of Dr. Moreau from 1896. That's actually my favourite of Wellesley's stories and there are a lot of great ones to choose from. That story features a vivisectionist who creates human animal hybrids through painful and torturously inhumane experiments. You've also got Dr. Griffin from Wells Invisible Man. You've got Dr. Raymond from Arthur Machen's 1890 short story the Great God Pan. Tremendous work. And he is a scientist philosopher obsessed with exploring the limits of human consciousness and performs surgical brain experiments intended to lift the veil between the material and spiritual worlds. Why were the Victorians so obsessed with this archetypical figure? Well, it speaks to an obsession or a fear that goes beyond the age of Victoria. Quite frankly, the perennial moral warning at the heart of so many of our stories is that of man attempting to play God. We're constantly warned not to play God. This warning is there in God, Goethe's Faust. It's there in Aeschylus, Prometheus, Bounds. It's there in the story of Icarus flying too close to the sun. And we have discussions, we have lectures on all of these stories at the Hardcore Literature book club@patreon.com hardcoreliterature and this warning is also there in the foundational story at the center of Western culture. The eating of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, that defying of God, that transgressing in the pursuit of expressly forbidden, taboo knowledge, that attempt to usurp the Almighty's throne. And what happens? That leads, of course, to the fall of man, the fall of mankind. But in the 19th century, specifically, there was a scientific revolution taking place with constant breakthroughs in chemistry and biology and electricity. And science ceased to be primarily about observation of the material world. And it became a lot more interventionist. What can man bring to nature? Man saw himself almost outside of nature. And trying to improve Mother Nature, the scientist became both creator and destroyer. And one would see this reach its horrific peak in the 20th century, of course, with the creation of the atom bomb. And we get Robert Oppenheimer iconic quoting of the Bhagavad Gita. Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds. But in the Victorian era you had enormous advances taking place in science and medicine. But this was also an incredibly unregulated realm. Surgeons and anatomists often obtained their bodies illegally. There were body snatching scandals in the early half of the century. And often criminals who had been executed would have their bodies experimented on after death. Many high profile doctors were caught in scandals showing them as well to be murderous or morally corrupt. And science and medicine has come a long way since then. And I am in continuous awe of, of those who practice it. I am in awe of the incredible life saving service to humanity that men and women of medicine and science offer us today. But this was not the public perception in the 19th century. To be fair, even today there are many who will put off seeing the doctor when they need to because they're afraid. They're afraid of so many things. They're afraid of what might be found. Or they're afraid of unnecessary intervention leading to a problem that wasn't there initially. Or they'll be concerned about the intimacy of their situation, can they trust the one responsible for looking after them? But in an age where serious surgery was done without anesthesia, surgeons were often seen as masochistic butchers. Indeed, there was a derogatory slang term for them which comes through in Stevenson's story. A surgeon was known as a sawbones. Even if they wanted to be of public service, one can understand why a visit to the doctor would be a very scary thing indeed. And when it comes to anesthesia, that was actually discovered by an American dentist in the 1840s and then a Scottish obstetrician introduced chloroform to Britain and Queen Victoria famously used chloroform during, during childbirth, which then popularized that as a practice. And of course narcotics like opium were widely available. They were sold in tincture form, the tincture form, lordanum, over the counter in Britain, as was cocaine by the way, until many years into the 20th century. So many were addicted to opium at this time. It was a real part, a real feature of daily life. That's why we see opium dens abound in Victorian stories, stories like the mythical of Edwin Drood by Charles Dickens. The thing is, a lot of people didn't quite understand what they were gripped with. They would have known it was linked to what they were taking, but they definitely wouldn't have had the same level of understanding when it comes to addiction and dependency that we do today. But of course without opium and without many narcotics that were available legally, many of the great works of literature wouldn't have come to be. And you can see that in the romantic poetry especially it's a bit of a double edged sword because a lot of the these substances would provide relief from the plethora of incurable illnesses that ravaged many of the time. But it also meant that ill understood psychosis would have been rampant in the population too. If you ever think it would have been better to live back in the 19th century or back a hundred years ago, all you need to look at is the advances in modern medicine and the rate of illness back then. And that might change your mind quite quickly. But. But what else is going on in the age of Victoria? Well, as I've said before, the two paradigm shattering voices of the century came from Schopenhauer with his philosophical pessimism and Charles Darwin his 1859 on the Origin of Species, which sold out on day of publication with his theory of evolution, challenged traditional religious understanding and belief about humanity and creation. And it led to a lot of vicious debate. My favourite debate is from 1860 where Bishop Wilberforce taunted Thomas Huxley, the grandfather of Aldous Huxley, the writer of Brave New World, in our lecture series for that novel is available still@patreon.com hardcoreliterature Thomas Huxley was a strong advocate for Darwin's theory and the book bishop taunted him, asking him whether it was through his grandfather or his grandmother that he claimed his descent from a monkey post. Darwinian anxiety is everywhere in the late 19th century and it led to a lot of existential questioning about the soul and divine order. And whilst all of this was going on, as though that wasn't enough, we also see at the end of the century the birth of psychology and the evil era's fascination with dreams and the unconscious and split personalities, mental illness and so on. And there was a tension between science and what was originally seen as very much a pseudo science at best, because psychology at this time blended with hypnotism and psychic mediumship and studies into the occult and the paranormal. Many famous experiments, experiments sought to contact the dead. And charlatans of course, were rife and predatory across the age. So for Dr. Jekyll and Dr. Lanyon to have had a falling out over scientific differences, what Lanyon calls balderdash was actually a pretty common occurrence outside of fiction during this time. But back to the story. Utterson is still hell bent on finding this figure. And he says, if he be Mr. Hyde, I shall be Mr. Seek. And we're told he begins to haunt about the door pointed out to him by Enfield. Of course, haunt. Etymologically that means where you regularly hang out or visit. If you go back into the ancient pockets of meaning with this word etymology, it also has the meaning contains the nuanced meaning of returning home. But of course, when we speak of hauntings, we typically do so in terms of ghostly apparitions. But when he says if he be Mr. Hyde, I shall be Mr. Seek, he invites us overtly to think about the etymological nuance in these character names. And in Victorian England, in literature, your name was your character, your character was your name, and there was a lot of straightforward symbolism going on. What does Hyde mean, Mr. Hyde? Well, hide means to hide, to conceal, to hide. Mr. Hyde. That's how he is defined. Yes, it's spelled a little differently, but orally it sounds exactly the same. Of course, in London, when you say Hyde, one might also think of Hyde park, the park central in the city. And I used to walk it, I used to run around it when I lived in London. And hind Hyde park was historically A dangerous locale. It was dangerous during the Victorian era, especially at night, due to highwaymen and criminals. And people used to have duels there as well. And Hyde park actually became one of the first artificially lit highways in England with hundreds of oil lamps to combat that criminality. How do you prevent crime? Shine a light on it. Criminals thrive, thrive in darkness. They thrive in hiding away, working by the light of the moon, as Falstaff might say. So you can't identify them. And if you took a time machine back to the age of Stephenson and Wilde and Dickens, you would be absolutely astonished at just how dark and dirty it really was. We're told it's dark and dirty in these stories, but it would actually be on a level we can't even comprehend. Hens. What else do we think of with the name Hide? I think of an animal hide, which one might wear as a coat. You might drape it around yourself. And of course the animal has to be killed first before the skin, the pelt is peeled off for fashionable purposes. So you think of a disguise, don't you? You think of murder. And that leads us into Jekyll's name. The pronunciation in Victorian England, especially from Scotsman Stevenson, wouldn't have been like ours today. He would have been called Dr. Jekyll. Dr. Jekyll. So you've got that more clear emphasis on the second syllable. It has the ominous word kill in there. Jekyll. Jekyll. And it actually comes from the old Breton, which combines the French je or I and a variant of the word kill. I kill. Jekyll, I kill. But it took on the meaning over time and noble or Lord, if he be Mr. Hyde, I shall be Mr. Seek. We get this ironic self conscious awareness on names as identifiers and character being in what we do. So he's no longer Mr. Utterson. He's going to be defined by what he's doing, seeking. And I think also, and Stevenson undoubtedly thought so too. I think of the Sermon on the Mount and the maxim of ask and you will receive. Seek and you shall find. Knock and the door will be opened. Robert Louis Stevenson was spiritual, but not religious. He was a skeptical believer, we might say he was raised Scottish Presbyterian, but he rejected the church. In adulthood he had a real crisis of faith, rejecting formal religion, which was becoming increasingly more common across the course of the 19th century. Though he would work with Christian missionaries later in life. And he did take a reverential view of the Bible. And he would ultimately develop a belief in the manifest God not rooted in Doctrine or orthodoxy? What else do we think of with this hide and seek assertion? Well, it is an allusion to a childhood game, so there's an element of play, dark play here. This is also, I think, plugging into the 19th century's increasing fascination with detectives and mystery. And we can trace a line. If we're doing some literary lineage hunting, we can trace a line from Edgar Allan Poe's detective Auguste Dupin, who was the first professional detective appearing in literature. Read his 1841 the Murders in the Rue Morgue, read the Mystery of Marie Roget and read the Purloined Letter. Poe is the American short story writer who captured the collective unconscious and reinvigorated the short story form. And he is also of course profoundly and prototypically gothic too. His detective Dupin solved crimes through logical reasoning. We can trace a line from him through to Inspector Bucket in Dickens Bleak House, who's the first professional detective that appears in a novel. We can trace a line, line through to Scotland Yard Detective Sergeant Cuff in Wilkie Collins's the Moonstone. And of course we trace this line up to Sherlock Holmes, who first appeared the year after Jekyll and Hyde in Beaton's Christmas annual with a study in Scala, 1887. Again with Holmes, not only do we see logical deduction and reasoning, but we see all of this in a gothic world of fog, smog and opium addiction. And with Holmes, the golden age of detective fiction begins. And from there into the 20th century we see the reading public's taste for mystery only deepens. We become insatiable for it with the likes of Agatha Christie with her Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple. And then of course we see the hard boiled noir crime fiction of American writers like Dashiell, Hannah Hammett and Raymond Chandler. And of course the reason for the popularity, the incredible popularity of novels like Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca is due to the fact that the readers loved a good mystery. But if he be Mr. Hyde, I shall be Mr. Sieg. I also think of the age old warning when I read this assertion. I think of the warning, be careful what you wish for or, or what you will. Be careful what you seek, what you look for, because you might just get it. You might just get more than you bargained for. Time and again we see the best horror stories and the best speculative fiction are cautionary moral tales with this message at the core. And if you want a great short story that really exemplifies this teaching tale, then the Monkey's Paw is a really great encapsulation of that horror is often perverted wish fulfillment, like dreams, as Freud would say. And again, we can return to the religious reading with this assertion. Utterson is searching for knowledge. And the perennial story is in the search for knowledge that leads to the fall of mankind, eating of the tree of knowledge, of good and evil. Artisan sets out on a quest, an urban quest, because Gothic is a corrupted quest. Romance, it is a form of romance, but it's a perverted form. And when we say romance, that's a structural designation. The same with comedy and tragedy. A comedy is a comedy because it ends in marriage. A tragedy is defined by its ending, too. It ends in death, with the stage or page awash with blood. And romance has a bit of both death and marriage, love and chaos. And ultimately everything ends in rebirth and new life. But the Gothic ends in stagnation and decay. Romance is summer mythos, according to Northrop Fry. But I see Gothic as the genre of endless winter. So Utterson's searching out for the truth, for knowledge. And in the streets, he comes face to face with Mr. Hyde, and he's struck by the man's unnatural and repulsive presence. He sees fear on his face. He sees him as savage and snarling. And when he says Mr. Hyde, he says, how did you know me? Artisan makes him show his face, and he says, ah, now I will know you. He describes Mr. Hyde as having great deformity, as being dwarfish and troglodytic and having a murderous look of loathing and disgust and fear. And he says he's hardly human, the opposite of life. Love is not hate, but fear. Hatred is a dimension of fear. And he looks upon Hyde and he feels the radiance of a foul soul transpiring through and transfiguring its clay content again. This intensely biblical lexis points to the tension of the era, the tension between religious belief and reason and scientific advance. And when he looks looks upon Hyde, he says he can read Satan's signature upon his face. Now, after this, he visits Dr. Jekyll's house. He goes down a street of decaying abodes which are let to all manner of men. And you might note the play on the word manner. Manner, man. Your manner is your way of being, but it's also your civil public facing politeness, but potentially not your true self. It's something you wear. It's something you hark Hyde behind. He visits Jekyll's house, And he sees Mr. Hyde go in there. But Jekyll's butler, Poole Turns him away, saying that the doctor's not home, Jekyll's not home. We might think of the figuration, the metaphor of not being home. We have long spoken of our corporeal form metaphorically as a kind of abode, our bodily mansion, we might say. So Jekyll's not home. And utters asks Paul the butler, well, is it right then that Hyde just went in? And Paul says yes, he has a key. And we see that he went in through the old dissecting room. Artisan leaves with the impression that this Mr. Hyde, if he were studied, must have secrets of his own. Black secrets by the look of him. Secrets compared to which poor Jekyll's worst would be like sunshine. So we've got this idea of man being studied. Lawyer and vivisector alike see man as a subject, almost an animal like subject. But thinking about the deep waters that his poor friend Jekyll must be in, oh, he must be in some real trouble. He then turns his mind to his own conscience and he thinks about how in the law of God there is no statue of limitations. Utterson is ever the professional, ever the lawyer. Thinking in legalistic terms, it must be that the ghost of some old sin, the cancer of some concealed disgrace, punishment coming years after memory has forgotten and self love condoned the fault. And the lawyer, scarred by the thought, brooded a while on his own past, groping in all the corners of his memory. Yet he was hungry, crumbled to the dust by the many ill things he had done and raised up again into a sober and fearful gratitude by the many he had come so near to doing, yet avoided. Isn't that fantastic? So he's thinking he's going back in his conscience. He's thinking not only of the bad that he's done, but the bad that he almost did but managed not to do. That's interesting. The Gothic reminds us that we're all sinners, we're all foolish, fallen, and we all have a past that in some way or another continues to bear upon the present. We've said before, in the words of Norman O. Brown in Life Against Death, that the psychoanalytical idea of neurosis is really just a poetic transmutation of original sin. We're born flawed. It's just how neurotic, how flawed, how sinful we become now. A few days after meeting hut Utterson then attends a dinner party at the home of Dr. Jekyll, who seems fine. And later he speaks privately with him about his will and his connection to Mr. Hyde. But then he becomes defensive and uneasy and he insists that Utterson must not worry about him. And he says, the moment I choose, I can be rid of Mr. Hyde. Which is a weird thing to say. You wouldn't say such a thing or feel the need to assert your will if you didn't feel like your will was actually decaying and being corrupted or usurped. And this sounds to me like the language of drug addicts and alcoholics. I can be rid of him when I like. Oh, I can quit whenever I like. I can stop it whenever I like. This is also the language of toxic relationships. If it ever gets too bad, I can always leave. We might think to any of the bad habits that we indulge. And we probably have told ourselves and others. We've lied to ourselves and others. I can stop whenever I can. Simply not choose to. I just don't want to just yet. So this sounds like a drug addict in denial of his problem. What's the first step in the 12 step program? Something that we spoke about with David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, which we have a lecture series for at the book club. You admit. Admit you are powerless over your problem. And thus give yourself over to a higher power. And then as the story continues, we come forward a year, one year after these events. And we're told that London, in the month of October, 18 something. It's a convention of the time to blot out the exact date. London was startled by a crime of singular ferocity. And it feels like when we're reading this, we're reading a newspaper clipping. This is the fourth chapter, which is entitled the Caroe Murder Case. London was startled by a crime that was rendered all the more notable by the high position of the victim. We're told a respected elder gentleman called Sir Danvers Carew. So if you read Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca with us at the Hardcore Literature Book Club, you might see where she got the name for Mrs. Danvers. The character Mrs. Danvers, Sir Danvers Carew, who was a client to Utterson, was brutally beaten to death in the street by Mr. Hyde. And it really is brutal. With his heavy cane, all of a sudden he broke out in a great flame of anger, stamping with his foot, brandishing the cane and carrying on like a madman. The old gentleman took a step back with the air of one very much surprised and a trifle hurt. And at that, Mr. Hyde broke out of all bounds and clubbed him to the earth. And next moment, with ape like fury, he was trampling his victim underfoot and hailing down a storm of blows under which the bones were audibly shattered and the body jumped upon the roadway. Again, we see the delineation between horror and terror. Terror. This event is described as horror because you're seeing it, you're seeing the clubbing to death. But interestingly, seeing this horror, we don't get to see ourselves, but we get it through hearsay. Seeing this horror increases the terror, for the story increases the sense of impending harm that lays ahead. The murder of Sir Danvers Carew was witnessed by a maid who identifies Mr. Hyde and the police. Police track him through the broken cane he left one half of at the scene, a cane that once belongs, they find to a Dr. Henry Jekyll. And we might think of the oral play on words with Cain as in a walking stick and Cain as in Cain and Abel. And we get that grotesque visual metaphor of being broken in two. When the line separating good and evil run right through us, we may just one day find that we snap. Inspector Newcomen of Scotland Yard, and maybe his name points to the relative newness of the police force. It's there in his name, Newcomen means newcomer. In the 1820s, so the beginning of the century, Britain actually had no organized national police force or law enforcement. It was a mixture of parish constant constables, watchmen and magistrates. And in urban areas like London, crime was absolutely rampant and always rising. This put pressure on politicians for reform. So the Metropolitan Police was founded in 1829 and gave us the first modern bobbies on the beat, if you like. In 1842, we see the creation of the detective branch of the police. So we can see why detective fiction starts to become a thing. And we see plainclothes officers investigating serious crime, collecting evidence and so forth. It's in 1878 that you get the opening of the criminal Investigation Department. So you get a lot more professionalism with this. And officers here are responsible for collecting witness statements, again, collecting evidence. And we start to see very early rudimentary forensic as the century goes on. But it's not very good. And Victorian detectives came to be seen as both a symbol of modern rationalism, but also state surveillance. So there was a mixture of trust and mistrust there. So Inspector Newcomen visits Mr. Utterson because not only was one half of a cane belonging to his client Jekyll left at the scene, but at the scene of the crime there was a sealed envelope with Mr. Utterson's name and address on the front. So again, we get that Symbolism of things shut away. This is a world of locked doors and sealed envelopes. Now, together, the inspector and the lawyer, they go to Hyde's lodgings in Soho. And this was an area of cramped, dirty housing that had a reputation for criminality. As early as the 1830s through to the 50s, SoHo was soon seen as bohemian, cosmopolitan, but also disreputable. It was home to many migrants, home to many artists, and home to sex workers too. There was cheap housing and the theatres were down there ever since Shakespeare. The theatres rubbed shoulders with brothels. And later in the century, Soho developed a hidden network of COVID gay hangouts and meeting places. Of course, homosexuality was illegal. That got Oscar Wilde in trouble and scandalized the nation. The criminalizing of homosexuality meant many were forced to live double lives. And that's why we see doubles or doppelgangers. The idea of splits in personality abounding in literature at this time. Many felt as though they had to hide their true selves in the shadows. We see this come through, through in the utterly sublime, hauntingly beautiful gothic masterwork, the picture of Dorian Gray. So they go to Hyde's lodgings and everyone they speak to has no idea of what Hyde really looks like. Even his maids, they hardly ever saw him. He was not photographed. No one could agree on his appearance. Aside from one point. He had a haunting sense of unexpressed deformity. Now there was a very unfair negative stigma attached to, to physical deformity. In the Victorian era. They tied physical deformity to inward deformity. This was still the era of the so called freak shows and circus sideshows. Indeed, you might watch Tod Browning's freaks from 1932. So the modern era, which is seen as exploitative cinema now, and it is, but also for the time, this film radically empathized with and sympathized with real life circus, sideshow performers humanizing them. This film is very subversive and it is essentially a critique of exploitation itself. But still this film shocked audiences and would end up banned. And just as an aside, what an age for cinema. By the way, around the Halloween season, I like to watch some classic horror films and gothic films, that sort of thing. What an age for cinema. We spoke in the hardcore literature book club of Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca coming out in 1938 and she took five years to write it. She would have seen a trio of incredible films. Just before writing that novel. We can look to the vintage year of 1931 and what do we find? James Wales, Frankenstein with Boris Karloff, Dracula With Bella Lugosi and Jekyll and Hyde, directed by Rubon Mamoulion and starring Frederic March, who won Best Actor. And his performance is still very much a haunting powerhouse today at Hyde's lodging. They find his rooms in disarray and it looks like he fled hastily and he cannot be found. But they recover the other half of the cane and some burnt papers suggesting Hyde tried to destroy some evidence of criminality which hardly seems fitting for a man heir to a quarter of a million sterling and who is the favourite of the respected Dr. Jekyll. And they find in the embers the butt end of a green checkbook. And Utterson says to the inspector, well, we need only wait at the bank because money's life to the man. Following the murder, Mr. Utterson visits Dr. James Jekyll. We go through his laboratory, his dissecting room. We're told it was the first time that the lawyer had been received in that part of his friend's quarters. And he eyed the dingy, windowless structure with curiosity and gazed round with a distasteful sense of strangeness as he crossed the theatre, once crowded with eager students and now lying gaunt and silent. The tables ladies laden with chemical apparatus, the floor strewn with crates and littered with packing straw. And the light falling dimly through the foggy cupola, we see that Dr. Jekyll appears deadly sick and shaken. Artisan says, you've not been mad enough to hide this fellow, have you? And Dr. Jekyll says that he's cut off all contact from Hyde forever. I'm done with him forever. I cannot say that I care what becomes of Hyde. He will never more be heard of. Utterson says, you know, if it came to a trial, your name might appear. So we get that fear of public disgrace coming through again. And Jekyll shows Utterson a letter supposedly from Hyde, in which Hyde apologizes for causing all this trouble and says he will disappear. Now, Utterson rightfully suspects that the letter is not genuine and that Jekyll may have written it himself. It's signed Hyde, but there's something off about the handwriting and there's something off about the fact that Jekyll claims to have burnt the envelope the letter came in. This is very suspicious. How is this not incredibly suspect? This sounds like aiding and abetting the escape of a murderer. Utterson, hearing that Hyde had dictated the terms of Jekyll's will, said, I knew it. He meant to murder you. You have had a fine escape. And as we navigate London, we hear newsboys crying out in the Street Special edition Shocking murder of an MP the eddy of a scandal swirls around us because scandal sells. We have this morbid, macabre, sinister curiosity about the worst crimes. And one of the worst aspects of this curiosity is that real life, terror and horror and evil can become like entertainment. It's understandable from an evolutionary perspective why we might be attracted to it. Because we feel as though we might avoid harm ourselves. If we can just be exposed to and learn about different cases because we're collecting information, maybe we can prepare ourselves. And it is a double edged sword when it comes to the media. I've got personal experience with this myself because my family does sadly know somebody who became a very widely publicized victim of a murder. Murder. It's a double edged sword because you've got the gawkers who come to lap up the drama of it all, forgetting that these are real people at the center of the so called story. But if done in a respectful way, a somewhat respectful way, time and again we see that the dissemination of information through the media very frequently is what brings about justice. Because you're getting information out and so you can get people to come and add information. And many crimes have been solved. So there's this uneasy symbiotic relationship between law enforcement and the media. And in this case, with Hyde's name being splashed about the papers of the nation, that should mean that he will probably be recognized and caught. No, if he can, can he hide forever? Utterson goes again through the streets of London, through the fog which is still sleeping on the wind above the drowned city where. Where the lamps glimmered like carbuncles. We're told. Isn't that a great image? Dickens talks about the infection of the city. Stevenson talks about the lights being like carbuncles. What's a carbuncle? It's an abscess or an infected boil on the skin. So the city is like a living thing, but a diseased, unsightly thing. That might be one of my favorite descriptions of the city. And Utterson takes this letter that Jekyll gave him to his head clerk, Mr. Guest, who's a handwriting expert, and he presents him with a murderer's autograph, which is quite a phrase and speaks to how the most heinous criminals would indeed become celebrities in a way. We see that still today with serial killers who have fans, they get fan mail. But Mr. Guest says that the handwriting is like a mirror image of Jekyll's. It's identical. The only difference is in the direction in which it is sloped. And Utterson says, what Henry Jekyll forge for a murderer and his blood ran cold in his veins. Think about the idea of forgery. It means to fake, to lie, to commit deceit and fraud, to pretend one thing that is not and to be another. But perhaps the real forgery is not Hyde's handwriting but Jekyll's. Now time passes. After Hyde's disappearance, thousands of pounds were offered in reward for the death of Sir Danvers was resented as a public inquiry, we're told. But Mr. Hyde had disappeared out of the ken of the police as though he had never existed. Much of his past was un unearthed indeed, and all disreputable tales came out of the man's cruelty at once so callous and violent, of his vile life, of his strange associates, of the hatred that seemed to have surrounded his career. But of his present whereabouts, not a Whisper. After this, Dr. Jekyll seems happier and more social. We're told a new life began for him where he seemed to be doing much public good, keeping busy and seeming at peace. But this does not last. The nightmare is not over. And Utterson finds Dr. Lanyon has falled deadly ill. His death warrant was written legibly upon his face and his face was filled with terror, we're told. And this happens after a mysterious event involving Jekyll. And Lanyon says he wishes to hear or see no more of Dr. Jekyll. I am quite done with that person. What does that remind us of? I regard him as dead. Now, Lanyon refuses to say what happened, but he hints that he's witnessed something horrifying and unnatural. And Utterson talks of Lanyon's unmanning condition, which is an interesting phrase. There was a lot of fear around. Around unmanning conditions at the time. One fear was the fear of syphilis, which was incurable and sent people mad and worsened over time. My Oxford tutor, Dr. Methven, would talk of the late Victorian Gothic as showing civilization as being unmanned by progress. I love that phrase, unmanned by progress. It's that Promethean Faustian searching, the questing for fire, the searching for answers. Answers and in searching for life, ultimately securing one's death. Max Nordau would refer to the late Victorian era, the fan de siecle, as an era of degeneration and decay, moral and physical decay. This was an era of corruption and sterility. But looking again to the start of the era, we can see in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein the fascination with bringing life into the world. But in a corrupted way. Dr. Frankenstein brings life into the world out of death. Now, indeed, one can already bring life into the world. And tragically, Shelley was writing off the back of having just lost her infant, her newborn. So that works its way into the story. But the idea of bringing life out of death is quite unmanning indeed, we might say. And yet many will tragically know personally the painful desire, the wish to reanimate the dead or communicate with the dead and the dearly departed that arises from profound grief. We're going to continue to see the commentary made in works like Frankenstein come through in our time, but we're going to see it in science fiction. And there is a big overlap in these realms of speculative fiction. Utterson receives another letter from Jekyll, who says, you must suffer me to go my own dark way. And he says he has brought a punishment and a danger I cannot name on myself. And he refers to himself as the chief of sinners and the chief of sufferers. Now, a fortnight on, Dr. Lanyon dies and he leaves another letter for Utterson, a sealed letter, to be opened only after Dr. Jekylls or disappearance. And if Utterson himself dies, the letter is to be destroyed unread, and Utterson locks it away in a safe. So you've got a sealed envelope with dark contents locked in a safe. And we see Dr. Jekyll has withdrawn from society and completely isolates himself. And in a really symbolically compelling and eerie and nightmarish scene, we see the Utterson and Enfield continuing their Sunday walk. They stop outside of Jekyll's house and they see him bizarrely, sitting at an open window. And he looks pale and miserable. And they speak. They speak to him from the window for a time. They speak pleasantly for a moment. But then suddenly the expression on Jekyll's face transforms into terror and he slams the window shut, vanishing from sight, hiding away from public view. And then we see that Poole, the butler of Dr. Jekyll. Late one night, he visits Mr. Utterson in a state of terror, and he insists, you've got to come to the house. Something terrible has happened to my master. His manner has been altered for the worse, and you've just got to come. Something's not right. And they make their way through the deserted streets of London. London. It was a wild, cold, seasonable night of March, with a pale moon lying on her back as though the wind had tilted her, and a flying rack of the most diaphanous and lawny texture. The wind made talking difficult and flecked the Blood into the face. It seemed to have swept the streets unusually bare of passengers. Besides, for Mr. Utterson thought he had never seen that part of the London so deserted. When they get to the house, it is eerily quiet, except for some strange noises coming from Dr. Jekyll's laboratory. And Poole believes that the man locked inside is not Dr. Jekyll, but really Mr. Hyde. A tortured voice cries out from within, crying out to heaven. And Paul believes that Hyde has murdered Dr. Jekyll and then remained locked in there. And Utterson thinks, why would the murderer stay beside the murdered? Which prompts me to think of Khalil Gibran's maxim. The murdered is not unaccountable for his own murder. Murdered and murderer are one and the same. Paul says him or it, or whatever it is that lives in that case cabinet has been crying night and day for some sort of medicine, and he cannot get it to his mind. The man inside has kept sending them to fetch certain chemicals from druggists, but keeps rejecting every batch, saying that it's impure and useless for his present use. Poole presents Utterson with a note from Jekyll which is imploring them for the drug. Please, I need this drug, drug, I need these chemicals. So again we see that this is a story about many things, but it's a story about drug addiction. Pool saw that thing, that thing which was not my master, searching through crates as he cried out in pain. And when it saw me, it cried, why did it cry like a rat and then run from me? And he describes the creature as dwarfish and is again convinced that murder has been done. Now, in a really visually powerful scene, Utterson and Paul break down the door with an axe. And what do they discover before them? They discover the body of Mr. Hyde, dead, seemingly by suicide, but contorted and still twitching. Right in the midst there lay the body of a man, sorely contorted and still twitching. They drew near on tiptoe, turned it on its back and beheld the first face of Edward Hyde. He was dressed in clothes far too large for him, clothes of the doctor's bigness. The cords of his face still moved with a semblance of life, but life was quite gone. And by the crushed file in the hand and the strong smell of kernels that hung upon the air, Utterson knew that he was looking on the body of a self destroyer. So they've got Hyde before them, wearing clothes that seem to be Jekyll's clothes too big for him. But there's no sign of Dr. Jekyll, dead or alive. But the salts and chemicals that he had been experimenting with are all around. And they search the abode. And one of the eeriest things they come across is the cheval glass, which is the mirror. And there's an uncanny moment where we're told they came to the mirror. Into whose depths they looked with an involuntary horror. Isn't that fascinating? Why? Why, at this scene of the crime. A scene that you've taken for murder or suicide. You don't know quite what's gone on. But something horrific and evil has taken place. Why is it looking in the mirror brings about a look of involuntary horror upon your face? What do you see in the glass? You see yourself unconsciously. What do they already potentially intuit about this situation? Now, on the desk, they find a new will. Leaving everything to Utterson instead of Hyde. And they find a letter asking UTTINGERSON to read Dr. Lanyon's narrative. And they find a sealed confession written by Jekyll, explaining the whole story. Utterson leaves the house in the hopes of learning the truth at last. And we get a chapter right near the end, the second, last chapter, which takes the form of a letter written by Dr. Lanyon. And in this narrative, Lanyon describes the strange request one night he received from Dr. Jekyll. To go to his house, take a drawer from the laboratory. And to give it to a man who will present himself in my name. Who would collect it at midnight. And this man turned out to be Hyde. Hyde drank the potion from the drawer. And transformed before his eyes into Dr. Jekyll. And here we get the revelation that these two men were one. They were one and the same person. And this revelation destroyed Lanyon's belief in reason and his faith in science. And ultimately led to his swift decline and death. Perhaps his not telling Utterson was his sparing him the same fate. It's very interesting. At the hardcore literature book club, we begin. Began this year at time of recording. We began the year as winter went into spring. By reading Ovid's Metamorphoses. But now we end the year as autumn rolls into winter. And we see again another transformation in fictive form. We see the transformation from human to baser creature and back again. The interesting thing to ponder when it comes to transformation, is he. Is it really a metamorphosis? Or is what we transform into ultimately something that was already always within us? It was always there? So we get this letter from Lanyon. And it's interesting to note the framed nature of the narrative. And the layers upon layers of removal or enveloping in this text. That's very gothic. We've got Utterson telling his story. Of course, initially he heard story, a story from Enfield, but he's telling a story and then he tells the story of Lanyon's narrative, which then tells a further story and within which contains a letter from Jekyll. So we've got these layers upon layers, like Russian dolls. It's a great way, a great narrative figuration of showing what's really going on with Jekyll and Hyde. And Hyde said to Lanyon, a new province of knowledge and avenues to fame and power lay open to you, and your sight shall be blasted by a prodigy to stagger the unbelief of Satan. You who have denied the virtue of transcendental medicine. You who have denied your superiors. Behold. And there he melts and alters and changes. He put the glass to his lips and drank at one glass gulp. A cry followed. He reeled, staggered, clutched at the table and held on, staring with injected eyes, gasping with open mouth. And as I looked, there came, I thought, a change. He seemed to swell. His face became suddenly black. And the features seemed to melt and alter. And the next moment I had sprung to my feet and leapt back against the wall, my arm raised to shield me from that place. Prodigy. My mind submerged in terror. O God. I screamed, O God. Again and again. For there before my eyes, pale and shaken and half fainting and groping before him with his hands like a man restored from death, there stood Henry Jekyll. My life is shaken to its roots. Lanyon says sleep has left me. The deadliest terror sits by me at all hours of the day and night. I feel that my days are numbered and that I must die. The creature who crept into my house that night was, on Jekyll's own confession, known by the name of Hyde and hunted for in every corner of the land as the murderer of Karu. And the moment that readers have all been waiting for. We get the 10th chapter. The final chapter is Henry Jekyll's full statement of the case. And I think this is an absolutely incredible, incredible climax or concluding chapter of a work, one of the best that I have read. This final chapter gives us Dr. Jekyll's full confession and reveals the man behind the doctor and the beast behind the man. And in this confession, we get the how and the why of his creation of Mr. Hyde, the transformation and how it ultimately destroyed him. Dr. Jekyll wrote, writes that he long had deep scientific interest in the duplicity of life, good versus evil. And he was keenly interested or indeed obsessed with man's dual nature. Man had a moral and intellectual side, but we cannot deny that man has his baser impulses too. Man is not truly one, but truly two and one. Witnessing the contest between these two natures within himself, he started to think, even if I could rightly be said to be either, it was only because I was radically both. So I'm the good that I do. I'm the bad as well. As much as we try to deny it, as much as we might want to hide it, the evil within us is a present force, as is the good. And these two clash. They butt heads and. And Jekyll's hypothesis was that life would be relieved of all that was unbearable if each of these impulses could be housed in separate identities. So you had your evil side that can run amok and delight in it. And you had your good side too. And so he experimented, finding certain agents that could lead to such dissociation, compounding a drug that shook the fortress of identity itself. And the 1931 film, you really should watch that, it really captured this split perfectly in a really visual way. And it really captured the 19th century's Darwinian anxiety because this is an anxiety that came about by virtue of Darwin's evolutionary theory. We see that the hired creature in that film is very much a primate figure in eight like figure, a primitive figure. Another great film that I really highly recommend is the hammer horror film from the early 1960s, the lesser known Hammer horror called The Face of Dr. Jekyll. That's brilliant because they add so much more to the story. They add his relationships, they fill out Dr. Jekyll's life. And there's some fantastic lines in there. A really inspired addition to Stevenson's story in that film, right from the very start, Dr. Jekyll talks about his experiments in freeing the creature within. Because there are two forces within struggling for supremacy. And he says there are two. One, man as he could be, which is beyond good and evil, and two, man as he would be, which is also beyond good and evil. This sounds very much like Nietzsche's Ubermensch, doesn't it? The man who wrote rises above good and evil. And Dr. Jekyll's asked in that film, and this is a great line, will you cut evil out of man with a scalpel? Henry? We've always had this tension that we're tightrope walking partway between beast and angel. We see this in the Renaissance model of the world that Was Hamlet's anxiety. What a piece of work is a man. The Renaissance anxiety is that man is left to ordain the limits of his own humanity. Will we rise or will we fall? And we see this all the way back in the Eastern philosophies and spiritual practices with that desire to rise above both pain and pleasure alike because, as Freud would say, they are ultimately of the same substance. So Jekyll became obsessed with his work. He became solitary and reclusive and possessed by ideas and obsession is possession. We've spoken about possession a lot in our lectures of the hardcore literature book club. We've spoken about possession with Rebecca, with the lost Stradivarius. And when you are immersed in your work, you want to access a flow state where it feels like a daimonic, creative, otherworldly, divine force is working through you. That flow state helps you move along and produce and create and bring things to life. But there's a dark side to flow. There's something much, much darker where you also feel like something that is not you or is a part of you that you would like to hide away, shut away is grabbing hold of you too. That which obsesses you can end up possessing you. And so Jekyll says in his confession that he thought that the unjust might go his way, delivered from the aspirations and remorse of his more upright twin. So aspiration and remorse. There's a part of us that does not want to aspire for hire. And there's a side of us that does not want our conscience, that burden of guilt, always feeling like I've done something unjust. If only the baser, animalistic side of us could go his own way. It was the curse of mankind. He writes that these two were bound together, continually struggling. The battle between good and evil takes place within us. And Jekyll says that he began to perceive the trembling immateriality, the mist like transience of this seemingly so solid body in which we walk attired. The doom and burden of man's life is in attempting to cast off what is forever bound to his shoulders. And the more you try to cast it off, the more it returns upon us with even more awful pressure. And so Dr. Jekyll found a way to keep his respectable, civilized front whilst splitting off his baser self into another so as to delight or take pleasure in evildoing as another, thus sparing the conscience of Jekyll. And he says that he felt younger, lighter and happier when tenfold more wicked and sold as a slave to his original evil. Now Vladimir Nabokov, in his reading of the novella, points our attention to the fact that there aren't actually just two personalities here. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Man's not truly one, but two. There's not two. Jekyll himself emerging emphasizes this. You've got Hyde, that's one personality. Hyde is pure evil, but that does not mean that Jekyll is pure good. The man is not pure good. He's not the total saint in opposition to the sinner within him. He's just a normal human. So his baseline is already a mixture of good and bad. He's not pure good, he's good and bad. Sometimes virtuous, sometimes morally intense, different, sometimes doing things he wished he hadn't. So Jekyll is good and evil and contains a small percentage of the pure evil of Hyde. Hyde is pure evil and so smaller than Jekyll in stature. That shows the degradation, that shows the spiritual fall or the shrinking. He fits compactly within Jekyll like a Russian doll. It's something base, something that we try to cover up. But there's a third personality there as well. You've also got Hyde, Mr. Hyde with a small amount of Jekyll residue within him too, even though he's pure evil. You've also got this element of Hyde where he has the memories of Jekyll, but he hates him. He absolutely hates this more upright twin. It's very interesting, we see with the Incredible Hulk, who was very much inspired by, by both Hyde and Frankenstein. The Hulk grows in size, but Mr. Hyde in Stevenson's story, shrinks. He's described as a deformed dwarf or an ape like brute. The smaller version fits within the bigger version. So the evil is not something we become, it's something already housed within us that we descend to or fall to, or shrink to. Evil lies dormant in all of the us. And Nietzsche knew this. And he would say, your cowardice is not morality. Just because you say I wouldn't doesn't mean you really wouldn't. What it often means is I can't. You shouldn't, because I can't. And I would if I could, but I'm gonna say publicly I wouldn't. William Blake would tell us that the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom. And you never know what is enough until you know what is more than enough. If we are to follow the darker impulses all the way through, we should, on the other side, arrive at some divine good, some sort of virtue, where we discover the error of our ways. But who wants to take that road. Who wants to go down that road? The thing is, in one way or another we all travel that road. The road of trials, the road of mucking up and falling and doing what we know we're better than. We've all been there, we all will continue to go there. But the interesting thing about these Personas, if we extract it and try to identify with it, some days we are just a small percentage of evil or evil potential evil diluted within the grander self, the good self. Whilst other days our evil impulses can rise closer to the surface. Even ourselves said this. He thought about all the bad things he did but also the bad things that he didn't do that he could have, that he stopped. But most days we are a blend of the two. Never wholly good, never wholly bad, but experiencing a constant internal tension, a painful tension between these two polar opposites. And this is the curse of mankind. Stevenson really anticipates four Freudian analysis and Freud's understanding of the split within our psyches. We might say that Dr. Jekyll is the ego, he's respectability surface, the civilized self whilst Mr. Hyde is the id, the impulsive, immoral, animalistic drive and desire. And then of course you've got the rationalizing entity, the super ego which is the narrator or indeed the extra split off self that Jekyll makes to copy upon these two selves who's witnessing the struggle between the two. And Jekyll in his confession admits that he initially enjoyed his freedom as Hyde. Hyde was tenfold more wicked and he enjoyed the evil that he was able to do. But after indulging it for some time he wants to change back. He wants to be Jekyll, he wants to be rid of Hyde, he doesn't like what he's doing. And even within Hyde, whilst Hyde's doing all of this, he's still starts to yearn to go back. Jekyll yearns to indulge the liberty and freedom of Hyde but a bit of him remains behind when he's in Hyde. So we stress this is not a complete metamorphosis with a good man transforming into an evil one. We're just seeing the evil already present within Dr. Jekyll brought to the surface given domination by the administration of his drug of choice. And the more he takes this drug the more he has to take take to remain Jekyll and avoid Hyde. He used to take it so that he could turn into Hyde, now he is Hyde and he has to take it to be Jekyll. He has Become more evil than good. And that means now, without the drug. He needs the drug to be stable. He needs the drug to remain somewhat respectable. Otherwise he's going to be his base animal self forever. Anyone who's ever struggled with addiction sees this story as a mirror. We find our signature all over it. And we remember, of course, that Stevenson was in the grips of addiction when writing this story. He did not fabricate this tale without painful, intimate, personal experience. It came from somewhere deep and demonic within him. And developing a drug addiction is an absolutely foolproof way of accessing that evil within. If you want to suddenly start going down a very dark path indeed over time, develop a habit, develop an addiction. We all know about the double life or the secret life of addicts. We see Dr. Jekyll is just an archetypical drug addict, really. We see him trying to rationalize his past bad behavior by planning to atone for it now. Oh, I'll be good to compensate. And also showing desire to remove himself, to distance himself or even seeing that darker self as another. That wasn't me. You know, I'm not like that. That we've all heard someone say that when they're in the grips of addiction. Perhaps we've said it ourselves. That's not me. Well, if you did it, it is you. You don't like it, but it is you. It's a part of you. This is the addict fleeing from responsibility. The black dark secrets of Jekyll are the fact that there's something inside him that lusts to inflict pain. So he creates a separate identity in order to relish that sadism. But we see at this point, Hyde is Jekyll's character. Jekyll is receding and diminishing and disappearing away. Of course, there's still this romanticizing and glorification of the vice of Hyde. Even when he wants nothing to do with him, he says his love of life was wonderful. And again, we can think of drug addiction. Drug addicts will look back on the times when they were at their worst, when they were at bottom, during their darkest nights of the soul and still even distanced from it. Even in recovery. They will miss those bad times because of how good they felt. And they might reminisce, they might romanticize about the time just before things spiralled out of control. But everyone can see things went to a really bad place. But hey, you felt pretty good. But of course, in that pursuit of pleasure, one is actually committing self harm. They're both becoming a self destroyer. And in that destroying society along the way, because we are all one another. And we might say that that which you do to yourself, you often do to others. Time and again the mysticisms, the religions, the spiritual teachings teach us that pleasure is a trap leading to pain. Short term pleasure leads to long term pain. Instant gratification leads to long term suffering. Suffering and vice versa. And so there's a sense that ultimate freedom is actually a painful imprisonment. We need to ordain some limits and some constraints for ourselves in order to be free. And thus discontented civilized society is erected. In his confession, Jekyll says he felt like a stranger in his own house. All human beings as we meet them are commingled out of good and evil. And Edward Hart, along in the ranks of mankind, was pure evil. And he ends up trapped as Hyde with the dim, receding distant voice of his conscience crying out, this isn't right. I want to go back. I change my mind. Please release me. By the very end of the book in the confession, we see that the psyche of Jekyll has fractured and split even further. So you've got Hyde, you've got Jekyll and, and then you've got this other self. He's now detached from both of these entities and does not see himself as any of them. And what is he to do at this point other than bring an end to both of them and thus himself? Unfortunately, the drug stopped working. There was an impurity in the batches that he used initially that gave him access to this wonderful feeling of transformation that's no longer an and now he's trapped at his worst, which sounds to me just like a drug wearing off, losing its efficacy until you need to take more and more just to hit baseline, just to feel normal, no longer to feel good. And then no matter how much you take, you end up feeling like a monster anyway. Dr. Jekyll takes just enough of the original impure batch that actually worked to write out this last confession before he knows that he's going to be supposed to subsumed forever. Half an hour from now he says, when I shall again and forever re endue that hated personality, I know how I shall sit shuddering and weeping in my chair. And he wonders, will Hyde die upon the scaffold or will he find the courage to release himself at the last moment? God knows I am careless. This is my true hour of death. And what is to follow concerns another than myself. He here. Then, as I lay down the pen and proceed to seal up my confession, I bring the life of that unhappy Henry Jekyll. To an end. And though that sounds rather disastrous, there is a glimmer of hope nonetheless there. He knows that he's gonna lose himself, the self, the good, upright self, forever. He's gonna lose Jekyll. So he writes his confessional. He feels that he needs to deburden himself and do one last thing. Confess and admit, look the wrongdoing in the face. He seals his confession and then he goes back to Hyde. And what happens? Rather than continuing on a killing spree and then dying on the scaffold, it does seem that this base evil, pure evil, Mr. Hyde, there is some remnant of the conscience still left. He decides to take his own life. Now, Stevenson's ending, of course, is deliberately ambiguous. If you read the ending purely in the tragic mode, in a mode of despair, then perhaps, perhaps Hyde killed himself only out of cowardly self interest, as a way to escape capture, when he realises that it is inevitable that they will kill him anyway. And so we see that evil has destroyed itself. But if we try to take an optimistic reading, perhaps we can say that right at the end, Jekyll still had some sliver of control inside Hydra. There's something inside Hyde that means he could find it in his heart to die. Perhaps that is Dr. Jekyll's last act of will, of good will. So when we get to the end, what really wins out? Is it good or is it evil? The final act, that act of self destruction, given the circumstance, ends up being something of a saving grace. But it is a grand tragedy. It's grotesque, it's macabre and it's chilling. And it leaves us with a warning. It is the denial of the basest, most beastly part of our humanity that damns us, damns society. We see another in their wrongdoing. How could they murder? How could so and so do this? How could this terrible crime be committed? And we question it. I could never do that. I would never under any circumstance do that. I do not understand it. That rejection is the most terrifying thing at all. Not being able to see that the split between good and evil runs right through us, right through every human heart. That's exactly the sort of blindness that leads to atrocities and crimes being continually perpetuated. And we must end on a liberating note, because I love to end on a liberating note, even though this is a very different, dark story. Yes, there's evil within us. Yes, there's bad within us, but there's good too. And whenever I finish a reread of this story around the Halloween season, I find myself confronted with the question, how will I ensure it is the good that is within me that shines forth and triumphs over the monster lurking or indeed hiding within? We as humans are complicated creatures, never fully good, never fully evil. It's not that straightforward. We're always in that battle between good and evil. And I tell you, if you ever feel like you're going through something that this battle feels like it is raging on too violently for you to control, then I urge you to reach out and let somebody know. Or indeed if you think someone close to you is going through something, if they're in the grips of a real crisis, then reach out to them too. And don't let a friend become a fiend. And thank you very much for listening today. Thank you for reading the Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson with me. Happy reading everybody and bye bye.