Dr Lanyon

Hastie Lanyon, though a secondary character, is useful to analyse in relation to both the other characters and many of the central themes of the text. Stevenson uses this character to symbolise the traditional god-fearing scientific community, who believed that many of the new ideas of the Victorian age were “blasphemies” and went against the natural order of God and man. These opinions were voiced by many in the wake of Darwin’s Origin of Species and other hypotheses which threatened understandings of man’s history. Lanyon is the voice of scientific scepticism, his relationship with Jekyll being compromised by their differing beliefs as he places his professional integrity above his friendship. He maintains a friendship with Utterson, eventually confiding through his posthumous letter the reason for the rapid decline in his health: the discovery of Hyde’s transformation into Jekyll. Until this point, Lanyon has embodied uncompromising rationalism to the reader, grounding us in a text which uses the Gothic to unseat and destabilise. Through his death, Lanyon’s uncompromising rationalism must cede to the inexplicable reality of Jekyll and, in turn, the reader must recognise the possibility of such supernatural occurrences within their own context.