Incongruous Compounds: Re-reading Jekyll and Hyde and Late-Victorian Psychology

When Mr Utterson visits Jekyll at home, intent on investigating the possible links between the latter and the murderer of Sir Danvers Carew, Stevenson lets readers into some of the secrets of the doctor's house. Hidden across a yard to the rear of the dwelling is a building which 'was indifferently known as the laboratory or the dissecting-rooms'. ¹ The two names, it seems, have arisen from the contrasting scientific interests of the present and previous owners of the property. Jekyll has bought the house from the 'heirs of a celebrated surgeon', but his own 'tastes' are 'rather chemical than anatomical' (26), centring on processes and energies both in the external physical world and in the self, instead of on static bodily forms. This article will examine some of the implications and resonances of this change, and of the broader strand of chemical imagery in the text, considering ways in which this may shed new light on concepts of the self in the story and in late-Victorian culture. To this end, my particular focus will lie with the relationship between Jekyll and Hyde and contemporary writing about the mind, and will make the case for a significant re-examination of that relationship.

Much has been written on the manifold connections between Jekyll and Hyde and the proliferation of psychological and medical discourses late in the nineteenth century. The story has been placed in the context of theories of degeneration and of the growing literature in psycho-pathology and so-called 'sexology'. ² Most recently among critics concerned with the story's evolutionary context, Julia Reid has demonstrated convincingly the links between a range of Stevenson's writings and evolutionary psychological and anthropological debates in the final decades of the century. ³ Other important studies have focused on the period's growing interest in dynamic models of psychology, in phenomena such as hypnotism, telepathy and other aspects of psychical research, and on the oncoming impact of Freud on Western ideas about the mind. ⁴

One aim of my argument is to draw attention to a significant further aspect of the story's scientific and broader cultural context, and thus to add to our sense of the wide range of ways of thinking about the mind which are in evidence in the 1870s and 1880s. As Roger Luckhurst has suggested in his compelling account of the rise of the concept of telepathy, to concentrate exclusively on matters evolutionary and pathological in this context is seriously to underestimate the variety and vitality of late-Victorian psychological writing. ⁵ Attention to this variety, as this article demonstrates, may also give us another viewpoint from which to read the range of language, at times literally physical, at othersrichly metaphorical, which Stevenson deploys in his exploration of the extremes of selfhood.

My specific interest here is in a psychological concept which typifies the creativity – and controversy – which pervades Victorian thinking about the mind, and one which traverses some of the same conceptual terrain as Stevenson's story: the idea of 'mental chemistry'. Such a focus is meant to imply neither a simple literalization of Stevenson's fantastical gothic device, nor a 'one-way-street' model of scientific influence on literature. Rather, I want to explore this shared metaphor, and others related to it, as ways in which to understand the sophistication of models of the self available to late-Victorian culture. In that culture, as Rick Rylance has shown, literary as well as scientific writers were able to make serious contributions to debates, relatively free of the cultural bifurcation, and ever-increasing scientific specialization, which sharply limit the extent to which non-specialists are able to take part in such debates in the early twenty-first century. ⁶

In the 1880s, a psychological tradition, which sought to read minds by reading the physical features of the body, and especially of the head and face, enjoyed ever-increasing influence. Discourses about the mind, most famously in the work of Maudsley and Lombroso, locate physical shape, and the character traits which it may be interpreted as indicating, squarely...