The reception of Jekyll and Hyde

Jekyll and Hyde appeared in early January 1886 and was met with uncertainty by the public and literary spheres alike. Coming from a writer who was making his mark as a great of the age, a work which was labelled as a ‘shilling shocker’ left many confused about where to place the author. Some recognised that whilst it may first have appeared as a story of horror to entertain a mass readership, the ideas, morals and questions posed by the text secure Stevenson’s place within the celebrated literary canon, as he cleverly examines the major anxieties of his time period. Within six months of publishing, Jekyll and Hyde had sold over 40,000 copies in England alone, demonstrating the popularity of both the Gothic genre and of Stevenson. There were dramatisations of the novel almost immediately: in 1888, a stage adaptation opened at the Lyceum Theatre in London, with celebrated actor Richard Mansfield playing both Jekyll and Hyde. However, the production was cut short when, only days after the play opened, the first of Jack the Ripper’s victims was discovered in London’s East End, culminating in an autumn of violence and public hysteria as a total of five women were murdered by the infamous Whitechapel killer. Parallels were drawn between these events and Stevenson’s villain Hyde, with the Pall Mall Gazette noting that “a tolerably realistic impersonation of Mr Hyde” was at large. These connections were ultimately too strong to ignore and ended with Mansfield withdrawing from the production as he believed that some suspected him of these heinous crimes, due to his convincing and terrifying transformation into Hyde. This clearly highlights that the issues of morality and humanity explored in the novella were truly at the forefront of Victorian consciousness, and Stevenson’s examination of the binaries of good and evil are inextricably linked to his societal zeitgeist.