The doctor recalls his actions as Hyde using the pronoun 'I,' not 'he,' despite his claim that the diminutive, apelike brute is a separate entity with motivations all his own. In effect, Edward Hyde is a chemically induced disguise.Īs made clear in the text, Jekyll remains the dominant personality, always thinking of himself as Jekyll even while in the guise of Hyde. He's an aging and highly repressed man of the Victorian upper class desperate to indulge his prurient desires free of guilt and consequence. Henry Jekyll is no squeaky-clean servant of science bent on eradicating evil from the human condition. Jekyll's creation of Hyde is a consequence of disrupting the natural order, a terrible accident as it were, Hyde is, in fact, Jekyll's intended result. While innumerable adaptations across a variety of media would have us believe that Dr. Hyde.Īs explained by Steven Padnick of TOR, there is no Mr. 'I was dreaming a fine bogey tale.' Apparently, he had dreamed up until Jekyll's first transformation into Mr.

'Why did you wake me?' a furious Stevenson asked. As detailed in Graham Balfour's biography, The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson, the indignant writer was not at all grateful for his wife's intervention. Distressed by her husband's cries, Stevenson's wife, Fanny, stirred the author from his fitful sleep. In the autumn of 1885, a feverish and heavily medicated Stevenson, suffering from a lung hemorrhage, screamed out in his sleep. When he had a touch of fever at night, and the room swelled and shrank, and his clothes, hanging on a nail, now loomed up instant to the bigness of a church, and now drew away into a horror of infinite distance and infinite littleness, the poor soul was very well aware of what must follow.' It would be this fusion of chronic illness and dreams that fueled the writing of Strange Case of Dr. Writing of his childhood dreams in an 1888 essay, the author explains, 'He was from a child an ardent and uncomfortable dreamer.

Rl stevenson dr jekyll and mr hyde