Please enable JavaScript.
Coggle requires JavaScript to display documents.
Jekyll and Hyde (Themes (Curiosity, Lie and Deceit, Science, Appearances,…
Jekyll and Hyde
-
Characters
Mr Gabriel John Utterson - A prominent and upstanding lawyer, well respected in the London community.
Mr Edward Hyde - A strange, repugnant man who looks faintly pre-human. Hyde is violent and cruel, and everyone who sees him describes him as ugly and deformed—yet no one can say exactly why.
Dr Henry Jekyll - A respected doctor and friend of both Lanyon, a fellow physician, and Utterson, a lawyer. Jekyll is a seemingly prosperous man, well established in the community, and known for his decency and charitable works.
Dr Hastie Lanyon - A reputable London doctor and, along with Utterson, formerly one of Jekyll’s closest friends.
-
-
Mr Guest - Utterson's clerk, confident and hand writing expert
Sir Danvers Carew - A well-liked old nobleman, a member of Parliament, and a client of Utterson.
Context
Stevenson was born in Edinburgh in 1850. He was sickly as a child and adult which meant he was familiar with medical practices. He trained in the law, which is Utterson’s profession.
In the 1900s, London was a city of extremes of wealth and poverty, with a lot of violent crime. It was plagued by thick fogs.
Advances in science in the nineteenth century changed the way people saw the world and humanity. Psychology – the science of the mind – was just beginning.
Many people became interested in the paranormal and spirits in the nineteenth century. Some, like Lanyon, thought it all nonsense. Others remained undecided.
Gothic literature was popular from the eighteenth century. It told supernatural tales of horror and madness, using mysterious settings and exploring strange and fearful ideas.
Quotes
Dr Henry Jekyll
-
I was no more myself when I laid aside restraint and plunged in shame,
a grinding in the bones, deadly nausea, and a horror of the spirit that cannot be exceeded at the hour of birth or death.
My two natures had memory in common, but all other faculties were most unequally shared between them.
my evil, kept and innocent life
I never saw a man so distressed as you were by my will; unless it were that hide-bound pedant, Lanyon, at what he called my scientific heresies.
-
Mr Edward Hyde
The other snarled aloud into a savage laugh; and the next moment, with extraordinary quickness, he had unlocked the door and disappeared into the house.
A mist dispersed; I saw my life to be forfeit; and fled from the scene of these excesses, at once glorying and trembling, my lust of evil gratified and stimulated, my love of life screwed to the topmost peg.
Once a woman spoke to him, offering, I think, a box of lights. He smote her in the face, and she fled.
Mr Gabriel Utterson
But he had an approved tolerance for others; sometimes wondering, almost with envy, at the high pressure of spirits involved in their misdeeds; and in any extremity inclined to help rather than to reprove
It offended him both as a lawyer and as a lover of the sane and customary sides of life, to whom the fanciful was the immodest
And the lawyer set out homeward with a very heavy heart. "Poor Harry Jekyll," he thought, "my mind misgives me he is in deep waters!
The thoughts of his mind, besides, were of the gloomiest dye; and when he glanced at the companion of his drive, he was conscious of some touch of that terror of the law and the law's officers, which may at times assail the most honest
He was austere with himself; drank gin when he was alone, to mortify a taste for vintages; and though he enjoyed the theater, had not crossed the doors of one for twenty years.
-
We told the man we could and would make such a scandal out of this as should make his name stink from one end of London to the other. If he had any friends or any credit, we undertook that he should lose them.