This weekend I bought the Audible version of Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Actually, there's more than one version available on Audible and I chose the 1980 version narrated by a British chap called Alexander Spencer, which was just the ticket.
Last night, I spent a pleasant couple of hours listening while reading the Gutenberg version on my laptop and imbibing a few glasses of 7-11's finest Californian "Yosemite Road Cabernet Sauvignon," a combination of activities that I heartily recommend for a solitary evening's entertainment.
I finished off the novella this afternoon and am working my way through the rest of the bottle as I write this.
I'd been meaning to read this novella for quite a while. Up until now, the only work by Robert Louis Stevenson that I'd read was Treasure Island. My father read it to me when I was a boy of about eight or nine, and I read it again about five years ago.
Since then, I have become increasingly interested in the "gothic" underbelly of nineteenth century Romanticism, whether it be The Monk, by Matthew Lewis (1796), Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley (1818) at the astonishing age of just 19, or the Portrait of Dorian Gray, by Oscar Wilde (1890).
Stevenson's novella was published just a few years before Wilde's novel, and the influence seems pretty clear.
The Fall and Rise of Stevenson's Star
Stevenson's star fell quite swiftly with the advent of Modernism and the sometime disdain of Virginia Woolf for his "lightness" and "escapism," after which he remained pretty much out of fashion in academic circles for most of the twentieth century.
However, fashions and priorities have changed, and Stevenson's star is rising again. In his favour is the apparent queerness of Jeckyll and Hyde, a novella that deals with repressed, illegal and unspeakable activities, that has hardly any female characters and none of any interest, he he.
Then there are Stevenson's travels to the pacific islands, especially Samoa, where he lived out his last years and died at the age of 44, which can be mined for fashionable anti-colonial narratives. He certainly was critical of the corruption of colonial rulers and the damage done by missionaries and merchants (anticipating Joseph Conrad):
"The trader and the missionary, the two pioneers of civilization, have everywhere trampled the natives underfoot..."
(R.L. Stevenson, In the South Seas, 1896)
Actually, whatever the merits of his observation (and who can doubt them?), it is no real surprise that he should dislike missionaries and traders because on the one hand, he rejected his parents' dour Scottish Presbyterianism in favour of a more vital life (I write as one who similarly rejected the Calvinism of my own parents), and on the other he rejected his father's business as a lighthouse engineer and the dull respectability of middle-class routine in favour of the more bohemian life of a writer and bon-vivant - and good for him, and us, that he did!
A Quick Recap of Jeckyll and Hyde in Exactly 100 Words
Even if you haven't seen any of the film versions or read the novella, as I hadn't, you are probably aware, as I vaguely was, that Dr J and Mr H are one and the same creature, and that Doctor Jeckyll is a thoroughly respectable chap while Mr Hyde is an utter bounder. So I won't labour the point with a lengthy recap of the plot. Instead, I shall attempt a summary in exactly 100 words:
Dr. Jekyll, a respected London scientist, creates a potion to separate his good and evil selves. When he drinks it, he transforms into the ugly and violent Mr. Hyde, tramples a child and beats a Member of Parliament to death in the street. As his brutality increases, Jekyll struggles to maintain control. Hyde begins to emerge without the potion, trapping Jeckyll in a battle between his dual natures. His friends, Mr. Utterson and Dr. Lanyon, investigate the link between Jekyll and Hyde. Unable to suppress Hyde or reverse the transformation, Jekyll commits suicide and tells all in a suicide letter.
(100 word summary)
My Jekyll and Hyde Marginalia
As I listened and read along last night, I paused from time to time to take some notes and check some references, among which were these:
1. Damon and Pythias
“Such unscientific balderdash,” added the doctor, flushing suddenly purple, “would have estranged Damon and Pythias.”
The doctor in question is Doctor Lanyon, who has become estranged from Doctor Jeckyll due to differences of opinion on scientific matters to do with the old debate between materialism and idealism, or rather in Jeckyll's case spiritualism. Lanyon is appalled that Jeckyll has gone beyond rational empiricism, but there is an emotional element too - he flushes suddenly purple (which is the colour that Doctor Jeckyll's liquid turns when it is efficacious of metamorphosis).
However, what I wanted to check was who Damon and Pythias were. Those were once names with which every English gent would have been familiar since their story is told by Cicero in his last work, De Officiis as an example of an ideal friendship. De Officiis was one of the key Latin texts prized by Petrarch, but also well regarded in the Middle Ages, in Shakespeare's day and long after.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damon_and_Pythias
2. Doctor Fell
God bless me, the man seems hardly human! Something troglodytic, shall we say? or can it be the old story of Dr. Fell?
Those are some of the musings of Mr. Utterson after meeting Mr Hyde for the first time, but who is Dr. Fell? I found that allusion to be arresting and somewhat chilling because of the meaning of the adjective "fell":
“fell” (from Old French fel, Latin fellis): fierce, cruel, deadly, sinister
Then there is Lady Macbeth's chilling speech,
Come, you spirits
That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here,
And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full
Of direst cruelty! make thick my blood;
Stop up the access and passage to remorse,
That no compunctious visitings of nature
Shake my fell purpose, nor keep peace between
The effect and it!
However, the "old story" of Doctor Fell takes us back once again to the Latin classroom. One of the Roman satirist Martial's epigrams goes like this:
Non amo te, Sabidi, nec possum dicere quare;
Hoc tantum possum dicere, non amo te.
That is, being interpreted,
I do not love you Sabidi, it is not possible to say why;
All I can say is this, I do not love you.
The story goes that in the seventeenth century a student of Christ Church College, Oxford, called Tom Brown was threatened with expulsion by a certain Doctor John Fell, the dean of the said college, unless he could redeem himself by translating Martial's epigram, which he did in the following manner:
I do not like thee, Doctor Fell,
The reason why I cannot tell;
But this I know, and know full well:
I do not like thee, Doctor Fell.
I suspect that the story was made up to explain the origin of the nursery rhyme, though I don't doubt it was inspired by Martial if not by the dean of Christ Church College.
Notice also how the reference to DOCTOR Fell subtly hints that Mr Hyde might be an alter ego of Doctor Jeckyll
3. Punishment Comes Limping
My final gloss is of another Latin reference, namely this:
Ay, it must be that; the ghost of some old sin, the cancer of some concealed disgrace: punishment coming, pede claudo, years after memory has forgotten and self-love condoned the fault.
This quotation occurs towards the end of the second chapter, when Mr Utterson suspects that Mr Hyde has turned up from Doctor Jeckyll's secret past and is blackmailing him.
Okay, let's get stuck into the Latin...
pede claudo = foot + limping = limping foot
What on earth does that mean?
Well, it's an elliptical phrase that is understood to mean:
pede poenia claudo = punishment ... [with a] limping foot
The verb is missing, but the meaning is akin to the idea that punishment, though it come slowly (limping), come it will...
Once again, the allusion, instantly apprehended by your classically educated gent, goes back to classical Latin antiquity, this time to the poet Horace, who wrote at the conclusion of Ode III:2:
raro antecedentem scelestum
deseruit pede Poena claudo.
rarely does Retribution fail to catch up with the criminal despite her limping gait.
https://www.loebclassics.com/view/horace-odes/2004/pb_LCL033.147.xml
If you are wondering about the possessive pronoun, "her," it is employed because "Retribution" (poenia) is considered to be one of the furies. She limps in pursuit of her target and she never ceases to pursue; go she never so slowly, she goes implacably.
Well, I shall conclude with this rather fine copyright free image of our hero, Robert Louis Stevenson, aetatis suae 30:
By Knox Series - trussel.com, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7468366
And now that my bottle is finished and the witching hour is begun, I shall leave you as I am, for better or for worse.
David Hurley
#InspiredFocus