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Understanding the context of The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is essential for achieving top marks at GCSE. The examiner wants to see that you can connect Stevenson's choices to the Victorian world he was writing in. This lesson covers Stevenson's life, the Victorian era, and why this novella was so shocking and relevant for its original audience.
| Fact | Detail |
|---|---|
| Born | 1850, Edinburgh, Scotland |
| Died | 1894, Samoa |
| Key works | Treasure Island, Kidnapped, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde |
| Jekyll and Hyde published | 1886 |
| Genre | Gothic novella / horror |
| Narrative form | Multiple narrators, epistolary elements |
Stevenson wrote Jekyll and Hyde in 1886 during the height of the Victorian era. Legend has it that he wrote the first draft in just three days after a vivid nightmare, burned it, and rewrote the entire novella from scratch.
The Victorian era (1837–1901) was named after Queen Victoria, who reigned over a period of enormous change in Britain.
Stevenson's London is central to the novella. The city in Jekyll and Hyde is a place of duality — respectable streets sit alongside dark, sinister alleyways.
| Feature | Respectable London | Dark London |
|---|---|---|
| Architecture | Grand townhouses, squares | Narrow alleys, crumbling buildings |
| Inhabitants | Doctors, lawyers, gentlemen | Criminals, sex workers, the destitute |
| Atmosphere | Order, light, propriety | Fog, darkness, danger |
| Symbolism in the novella | Jekyll's front door — grand and welcoming | Hyde's door — blistered, without a knocker |
Examiner's tip: The two doors of Jekyll's house are a powerful symbol of duality. The front door faces a respectable square; the back door (used by Hyde) opens onto a sinister by-street. This physical structure mirrors Jekyll's double life.
For Victorian gentlemen, reputation was everything. The worst thing that could happen to a man of status was public disgrace.
"I learned to recognise the thorough and primitive duality of man" — Jekyll's full statement of the case
This quote is central to the novella's meaning. Jekyll recognises that every person contains both good and evil, but Victorian society demands that the evil be completely hidden.
One of the most important contextual tensions in Jekyll and Hyde is the conflict between science and religion.
Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859, arguing that humans evolved from earlier primates through natural selection. This was deeply controversial because:
Hyde is repeatedly described in animalistic terms — "ape-like fury", "like a monkey", "hardly human". This connects directly to Victorian fears about degeneration: the idea that humanity could devolve — regress to a more primitive, bestial state.
| Concept | Explanation |
|---|---|
| Degeneration | The fear that civilised humans could revert to a primitive state |
| Atavism | The reappearance of ancestral, "primitive" traits in modern humans |
| Criminal type | The idea (from Lombroso) that criminals had distinct physical features — ape-like, deformed |
Hyde embodies Victorian fears of atavism. He is smaller, younger, and physically deformed — as if he is a less evolved version of Jekyll.
Examiner's tip: When writing about Hyde's physical appearance, always connect it to degeneration theory. For example: "Stevenson presents Hyde as 'troglodytic' — literally cave-dwelling — which reflects Victorian anxieties about evolutionary regression and the fear that the 'primitive' self lurked beneath the civilised exterior."
Jekyll and Hyde belongs to the Gothic tradition — a genre characterised by horror, mystery, and the supernatural.
| Convention | How Stevenson uses it |
|---|---|
| Dark, oppressive settings | Foggy London streets, locked laboratories, sinister alleyways |
| Doubles / doppelgangers | Jekyll and Hyde are literally the same person split in two |
| The supernatural | The transformation itself — science pushed to unnatural extremes |
| Secrecy and mystery | Locked doors, sealed letters, withheld information |
| Fear and horror | Witnesses are physically repulsed by Hyde; Carew's murder is brutal |
| Transgression | Jekyll crosses moral and scientific boundaries |
The novella also draws on the tradition of the doppelganger (German: "double-goer") — the idea that every person has a dark double. This concept appears throughout Gothic literature, from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein to Edgar Allan Poe's William Wilson.
Although Jekyll and Hyde is set in London, Stevenson was inspired by his hometown of Edinburgh, a city famous for its literal duality:
Stevenson was also influenced by the real case of Deacon Brodie (1741–1788), an Edinburgh cabinet-maker and city councillor by day who was a burglar and gambler by night. Brodie was eventually caught and hanged. His double life directly inspired the Jekyll/Hyde duality.
| Contextual idea | Relevance to the novella |
|---|---|
| Victorian respectability | Jekyll suppresses his desires to maintain his reputation |
| Hypocrisy | The novella exposes the gap between public appearance and private reality |
| Darwin / evolution | Hyde is described in animalistic, primitive terms |
| Degeneration theory | Hyde represents the fear of evolutionary regression |
| Science vs religion | Jekyll's experiment challenges God's natural order |
| Gothic genre | Doubles, secrecy, darkness, horror, transgression |
| Deacon Brodie | Real-life inspiration for the double life |
| Edinburgh / London | Cities of duality — respectable fronts hiding dark interiors |
Stevenson wrote the novella for several interconnected reasons:
When Jekyll and Hyde was published in January 1886, it was an immediate sensation:
A thoughtful and developed response to a context-facing question should refuse to treat 1886 as mere background. Stevenson published The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde into a culture already destabilised by Darwin's On the Origin of Species (1859) and by the degeneration theories of Lombroso and Nordau, which argued that civilised man might "slip backwards" into an atavistic, pre-moral state. When Jekyll confesses that he has discovered "the thorough and primitive duality of man", Stevenson is not simply inventing a Gothic curiosity; he is ventriloquising a mainstream late-Victorian anxiety that the respectable professional classes were morally continuous with the "beast within". The urban Gothic setting of fog-bound London, which "lay under a pall", is equally historically specific: the Ripper murders of 1888 were two years away, but the sense that the capital concealed predatory, unreachable violence behind its respectable façades was already forming. The epistolary, multi-framed narration — Enfield's anecdote, Utterson's investigation, Lanyon's sealed letter, Jekyll's "Full Statement" — mirrors the Victorian obsession with the document as evidence, the same evidentiary logic that underwrites contemporaneous detective fiction. Stevenson's novella therefore participates in a broader cultural argument about whether science, respectability and the rational case-file could still contain what Jekyll calls "that insurgent horror" at the heart of the bourgeois self.
Edexcel's mark scheme moves from "limited" through "some understanding", "clear", "thoughtful and developed" to "sustained, critical and evaluative / perceptive". A Grade 4 response shows some understanding of context by naming it and bolting it on: "Victorians were religious and did not like science, which is why Jekyll is punished." Context is present but detached from the text; quotations are general and AO2 analysis is thin.
A Grade 6 response is clear and begins to integrate context with textual detail. It might argue: "Stevenson uses the 1886 setting to reflect Victorian fears about Darwinism, which is shown when Hyde is called 'ape-like' and 'troglodytic'." The quotation supports the contextual claim, and AO3 is doing real work rather than sitting as a separate paragraph. The response identifies methods but tends to label rather than analyse their effect.
A Grade 9 response is sustained, critical and evaluative. It treats context as a lens rather than a fact: "By reaching for the pseudo-scientific lexis of degeneration — 'troglodytic', 'ape-like', 'dwarfish' — Stevenson positions Hyde not as an external monster but as a diagnostic figure through whom late-Victorian readers were invited to examine their own civilising fictions." Context, language and structure are woven into a single argument; alternative readings are acknowledged; conceptual vocabulary (atavism, urban Gothic, epistolary framing) is used with precision. Crucially, the candidate evaluates Stevenson's craft rather than simply endorsing a "message".
Examiners reward candidates who treat context as integrated rather than bolted on. On the Paper 2 Section A introduction-style question, the strongest responses avoid a free-standing "context paragraph" and instead allow AO3 to inhabit every analytical move: a word-level comment on "troglodytic" that invokes degeneration theory, or a structural comment on the epistolary frame that invokes Victorian evidentiary culture. Examiners also reward precision — "1886", "Darwin 1859", "Lombroso" — over vague gestures towards "Victorian times". Finally, they reward evaluation: a sense that the candidate is weighing Stevenson's choices rather than merely cataloguing them.
Several critical lenses illuminate the novella's historical moment. A Freudian reading, retrospectively applied, locates Jekyll's tripartite self in the emerging topography of id, ego and superego: Hyde is the unsocialised id released from the superego's Victorian grip. A Marxist reading foregrounds the bourgeois respectability that Jekyll must protect — his professional reputation is a form of symbolic capital whose maintenance requires the displacement of pleasure onto a disposable proletarian double. A queer reading notes that the novella's all-male bachelor world of clubs, chambers and closed doors, and Jekyll's unspecified "pleasures", rhymes with the period's coded discourses of same-sex desire, only a decade before the Wilde trials. A Darwinian reading treats Hyde's "ape-like fury" and "dwarfish" stature as the textual surface of degeneration anxiety — the fear that civilisation was only a thin veneer over a reversible evolutionary history.
The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde was written in a world where respectability was paramount, science was challenging religion, and fears about human nature were intensifying. Every choice Stevenson makes — from the foggy London setting to Hyde's ape-like appearance to the locked doors and sealed letters — is shaped by this context. Understanding Victorian society, its anxieties, and its hypocrisies is the foundation for everything that follows.
This content is aligned with the Edexcel GCSE English Literature (1ET0) Paper 2 specification.