Context & Introduction

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.

Robert Louis Stevenson: The Basics

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

The Victorian era (1837–1901) was named after Queen Victoria, who reigned over a period of enormous change in Britain.

Key features of Victorian society

Rigid class system — society was strictly divided into upper, middle, and working classes. Reputation and status mattered enormously.
Respectability and propriety — especially for middle- and upper-class men, outward appearance and moral conduct were paramount.
Hypocrisy — beneath the surface of Victorian respectability, there was widespread vice: prostitution, opium dens, alcoholism, and poverty.
Rapid industrialisation — cities like London and Edinburgh grew rapidly, creating stark contrasts between wealthy areas and slums.
Scientific revolution — Darwin's On the Origin of Species (1859) challenged religious beliefs and raised questions about human nature.

Victorian London: A City of Contrasts

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.

Victorian Morality and Reputation

For Victorian gentlemen, reputation was everything. The worst thing that could happen to a man of status was public disgrace.

The cult of respectability

Men were expected to be rational, restrained, and morally upright in public.
Emotions, desires, and anything considered "base" or "animal" had to be suppressed.
This created enormous psychological pressure — men could not express their full humanity without risking their social standing.
Stevenson explores what happens when this suppression becomes unbearable — Jekyll's experiment is an attempt to separate his respectable self from his hidden desires.

"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.

Science vs Religion in the Victorian Era

One of the most important contextual tensions in Jekyll and Hyde is the conflict between science and religion.

Darwin and Evolution

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:

It challenged the biblical account of creation (Genesis)
It suggested humans were animals, not divinely created beings
It raised terrifying questions: if we evolved from apes, is the "beast" still inside us?

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.

Degeneration Theory

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."

The Gothic Genre

Jekyll and Hyde belongs to the Gothic tradition — a genre characterised by horror, mystery, and the supernatural.

Gothic conventions in Jekyll and Hyde

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.

Stevenson's Edinburgh: The Inspiration

Although Jekyll and Hyde is set in London, Stevenson was inspired by his hometown of Edinburgh, a city famous for its literal duality:

The New Town — elegant, rational, Georgian architecture (the "Jekyll" side)
The Old Town — dark, medieval, cramped, and dangerous (the "Hyde" side)

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.

Key Contextual Ideas: Quick Reference

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

Why Was Jekyll and Hyde Written?

Stevenson wrote the novella for several interconnected reasons:

To explore the duality of human nature — the idea that every person contains both good and evil.
To critique Victorian hypocrisy — a society that demanded moral perfection while hiding widespread vice.
To engage with contemporary scientific debates — Darwin, degeneration, and the limits of science.
To horrify and entertain — the novella was a bestseller, combining mystery, horror, and psychological depth.
To dramatise the consequences of repression — Jekyll's experiment is born from the unbearable pressure of hiding his true self.

The Original Audience

When Jekyll and Hyde was published in January 1886, it was an immediate sensation:

It sold 40,000 copies in the first six months in Britain alone.
It was widely discussed in churches — clergymen used it as a parable about sin and temptation.
The story became a cultural phenomenon — "Jekyll and Hyde" entered the English language as a phrase meaning someone with a double personality.
Victorian readers would have found the themes deeply uncomfortable — Stevenson was holding a mirror up to their own society.

Key Context Revision Checklist

Summary

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.