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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 strong AQA answer integrates context without bolting it on. Consider this Level 5/6 worked paragraph on how Stevenson uses Victorian context to frame Jekyll's transgression:
Stevenson's presentation of Jekyll's hidden laboratory is inseparable from the post-Darwinian anxieties of 1886. The scientist's decision to "conceal" his "pleasures" reflects a specifically Victorian pressure: a gentleman's reputation depended on the absolute segregation of public virtue from private appetite. By situating Jekyll's transformation behind "blistered" doors and fog-bound by-streets, Stevenson dramatises the architecture of respectability itself — a facade of order concealing an interior of transgression. The "troglodytic" quality he lends Hyde is not merely atmospheric; it engages directly with degeneration theory, which claimed that the civilised self was a fragile veneer over a primitive ancestor. In this context, Jekyll's experiment is not simply scientific hubris but a recognisably Victorian response to a society that offered no legitimate outlet for the "thorough and primitive duality of man". Stevenson's Edinburgh-born familiarity with the double city — the Enlightenment New Town beside the medieval Old Town — sharpens this critical vision. The novella therefore functions as a conceptualised critique: science, far from rescuing humanity from its dual nature, accelerates the collapse of the very respectability it was recruited to preserve.
The paragraph succeeds because it sustains a conceptualised thesis, integrates judicious references, and treats context as an interpretive lens rather than a detachable paragraph.
Sub-question: How does Stevenson use context to shape the reader's view of Jekyll at the opening of the novella?
Jekyll is a Victorian man. Victorians cared about being respectable and had strict rules. Jekyll is a doctor so he has a good reputation. The Victorians believed in Darwin which made them scared of evolution. Stevenson shows Jekyll as a typical Victorian gentleman because he has a big house and is rich. This makes the reader think Jekyll is good at first.
Band commentary: The response offers a simple, explicit engagement with context. Points are accurate but generic; there is no sustained argument, no precise reference, and no analysis of Stevenson's methods. Context is bolted on as background information.
Stevenson uses the opening to align Jekyll with Victorian respectability while planting doubt about its stability. Jekyll is described as "a large, well-made, smooth-faced man of fifty", a description that reflects the era's belief in physiognomy — the idea that outward appearance mirrored inner character. For a contemporary reader, Jekyll's size and smoothness would connote prosperity and moral health. However, Stevenson undermines this by locating the mystery of Hyde within Jekyll's own household, suggesting that respectability conceals rather than prevents corruption. The hypocrisy of Victorian society is therefore dramatised through the novella's architecture from the start.
Band commentary: This demonstrates clear explanation and some thoughtful analysis. The reference to physiognomy is purposeful; the argument about architecture is developing but not yet fully conceptualised. Context is integrated rather than listed.
Stevenson's opening presentation of Jekyll is inflected by the specifically Victorian conviction that character was legible on the body. The adjective "smooth-faced" carries both reassurance and warning: in a society shaped by physiognomy and the emergent pseudoscience of Lombroso, smoothness implies innocence, yet it also implies a surface without trace — a face that has been carefully curated. Jekyll's size, respectability and professional status align him with the idealised Victorian gentleman, but Stevenson's Edinburgh readership would have recognised the precedent of Deacon Brodie in this construction: civic virtue as a facade. By framing Jekyll within a narrative of "concealed pleasures", Stevenson converts Victorian respectability from a moral achievement into a system of suppression, anticipating Freud's later model of the unconscious. The reader is therefore positioned not simply to admire Jekyll but to read him diagnostically, as a symptom of a culture whose demand for moral perfection generates precisely the duality it claims to prohibit.
Band commentary: This is convincing, critical analysis and exploration. The response is conceptualised, with judicious use of precise references. Context is not summarised but deployed as an interpretive instrument; the critical idea of respectability-as-symptom sustains the paragraph.
AQA mark schemes privilege context that is conceptualised rather than listed. Top-band responses integrate Victorian ideas — degeneration theory, the cult of respectability, Darwinism, urban Gothic, Edinburgh duality — as interpretive lenses that sharpen textual analysis. Examiners reward candidates who move beyond "Victorians believed X" towards explaining how such beliefs shape Stevenson's choices at the level of word, sentence and structure. Reference to specific contextual figures (Darwin, Lombroso, Deacon Brodie) is credited when used judiciously, not decoratively. Weaker responses treat context as background; stronger responses treat it as the grammar of the text. The language of the mark scheme — "critical, exploratory, conceptualised response" — signals that the examiner is looking for sustained argument, not informed commentary.
A Freudian reading treats Jekyll's experiment as the failed separation of superego (respectable Henry Jekyll) from id (Edward Hyde), with the ego disintegrating under the strain. A Marxist reading positions the novella as a critique of bourgeois respectability, where Jekyll's professional class polices its own desires to maintain cultural capital, and Hyde erupts when those economies of self-discipline collapse. A feminist reading notices the conspicuous absence of named women: the novella's crisis of masculinity unfolds in an all-male professional world, and the trampled child and unconscious maid function as silent indices of male violence. A Darwinian reading frames Hyde as atavism made flesh — the civilised present haunted by the ancestral past. A queer reading attends to the homosocial bachelor culture of Victorian professional London, where "pleasures" that cannot be named may reflect the period's unspeakable intimacies.
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 AQA GCSE English Literature (8702) specification.