Victorian science and morality in Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886)

Abstract

This article analyzes how Scottish writer Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894) depicts the relationship between science and morality (secular or religious) in his 1886 novella The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. For this purpose, I analyze the setting choice (London) and some characteristics of late Victorian Gothic fiction that constitute the negative aesthetics of which Stevenson’s characters are formed. Then, I analyze how the negative aesthetic juxtaposes with an order that is both scientific and moralist in a cultural context in which the reading public is obsessed with crime. Eventually, I discuss the theories of 19th-century philosophers and scientists, such as Herbert Spencer (1820-1903), Cesare Lombroso (1835-1909), and Francis Galton (1822-1911), in an attempt to understand Stevenson’s novella from an allegedly scientific point of view. I conclude that Hyde/Jekyll was “destined” to fail since both late Victorian science and morality were prone to condemn the “unfit”.