Robert Louis Stevenson: Writer of Boundaries

"City of Dreadful Night": Stevenson's Gothic London

“City of Dreadful Night” Stevenson’s Gothic London             In his study of crowds, published in translation in Britain in , Gustave Le Bon warned of the atavistic nature of crowd behavior, declaring that “an individual in a crowd resembles primitive beings” (Le Bon : ). In  Jekyll and Hyde had concentrated on individual duality, separating the moral from the immoral in an exploration of the human psyche ; some years later, Le Bon attributed the bestial behavior exhibited by Hyde to entire groups of people. Stevenson had exploited the popular notion of “the beast within” to create a horrifying vision of one divided soul; by the s the fear of this inner beast had become a hysteria, not just about the degenerative capabilities of the individual but of the whole race. Le Bon’s fear that “all our ancient beliefs are tottering and disappearing, while the old pillars of society are giving way one by one” (: xiv–xv) is prefigured in the downfall of that professional “pillar of society,” Jekyll. In showing Jekyll increasingly under the control of Hyde, Stevenson gave fictional form to an emerging anxiety of the late nineteenth century: the perception that the race itself was succumbing to degenerative tendencies that threatened the very fabric of society. Using gothic narrative motifs, Stevenson touched a nerve in the middle-class sensibility, and as William Greenslade (: ) says, “Jekyll and Hyde provided a timely myth.” Metropolitan and Imperial Anxiety In  W. T. Stead’s “The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon” sensitized British public consciousness to vice in lower and upper classes, and Hyde can be seen as symbolizing the metropolitan anxiety about moral dissipation in the heart of the city. Furthermore, it was Stead who first suggested a Jekyll and Hyde parallel in the Ripper murders, which prompted a rash of similar allusions to Stevenson’s novel (Walkowitz : ). The East London Advertiser invokes Hyde in its predications of more atrocities to come: “On  September the Advertiser again warned that ‘the murderous lunatic, who issues forth at night like another Hyde to prey upon the defenceless unfortunate class’ would attack again, and that ‘three successful murders will have the effect of whetting his appetite further’” (Fishman : ). In the wake of Annie Chapman’s murder at the hands of the Ripper, the Globe, on  September , also invoked Stevenson’s story; now “Life—or rather death—was imitating art, because the ‘obscene Hyde’ took no more ‘intense delight in murder for murder’s sake’ than did the Whitechapel assassin” (Curtis : ). The connection, whipped up by the press, between the Ripper Murders and Jekyll and Hyde curtailed Richard Mansfield’s famous staging of the story, “because Hyde’s behavior came too close for comfort to the Ripper’s reign of terror”: “Audiences emerging from the theater in September occasionally heard newsboys in the Strand crying ‘Another ‘Orrible Murder,’ and rumours soon connected Mansfield to the crime” (Curtis : ). By the s the London population of . million was mushrooming, and its vastness inspired panic. After the first Ripper murder the Advertiser gave voice to public fears: “The circumstances of this awful tragedy are not only surrounded with the deepest mystery, but there is also a feeling of insecurity to think that in a great city like London, the streets of which are continually patrolled by police, a woman can be foully and horribly killed almost next to the citizens peacefully sleeping in their beds, without a trace or clue being left of the villain who did the deed” (Fishman : ). Hyde’s nocturnal criminality echoes public insecurity engendered by the expanding city even before the awful events in Whitechapel in the summer and autumn of . The anxiety also had a class-dimension: the Bryant and May matchgirls strike of the same year pressed home the point that the proletariat was a constant presence on the city’s streets. The reader infers that it is highly likely that Jekyll/Hyde’s activities included sexual exploits. The contemporary reader would have thought of sadistic relationships with child prostitutes as among the possible vices that Jekyll/Hyde indulged in during his nightly forays into the nether world of London: “The Maiden Tribute,” a sensational press exposé of the child prostitution trade in London, appeared in the summer of , and Henley  Evolutionary Psychology, Masculinity, Jekyll and Hyde had forwarded the installments to Stevenson. The coincidences are too compelling to ignore. Hyde’s trampling of the child in the dead...