J + H - context Flashcards
Victorian Gentlemen
The ‘gentleman’ was an important figure in Victorian society.
A man’s social class was one part of being a gentlemen – gentlemen were from the upper-classes of Victorian society.
Gentlemen were expected to have strong morals and be kind, particularly towards poorer people. Some, however, saw this as a less important part of being a gentleman.
Victorian Gentlemen - The Reputation Obsession
Gentlemen were determined to maintain their reputations – without a good reputation, a man couldn’t be considered a gentleman at all.
Gentlemen were expected to keep their emotions under strict control. This forced them to hide their desires for things like alcohol, gambling and sex. Perhaps this is what is hinted at by the description of Enfield as a “man about town”. It certainly describes Henry Jekyll.
Many gentlemen were publicly snobbish about disreputable places, like public houses and brothels, whilst visiting them secretly at night. Again, think about why Enfield is walking the streets of Inner London at 3 a.m.
They were prepared to pay large sums of money to keep such activities private, which made them vulnerable to blackmail, something that both Enfield and Utterson think explains Hyde’s ability to draw cheques in Jekyll’s name.
Victorian London
Victorian London wasn’t all gentlemen in top hats and tails. Whilst the middle and upper-classes lived in richly-furnished houses, this wasn’t true of everyone.
The Industrial Revolution meant that many working-class people migrated to large cities to live and work.
Housing had to be built rapidly, resulting in poor quality housing and slums in an area known as Soho, an area near the centre of London (although as we will see, Soho also housed a large middle-class population).
The streets in the slums were narrow and poorly lit. Victorian London was known for its smoke, caused by burning coal on an industrial scale.
Disreputable Working-Class
There were some parts of London where most respectable men wouldn’t want to be seen, such as the working-class slums. They also wouldn’t want to be seen visiting brothels or public houses.
The two sides of the city – upper-class and middle-class, and working-class – did overlap. Some gentlemen would deliberately travel to the ‘dismal’ areas of London (where there was less chance of being recognised) to satisfy the desires they hid in public.
In the opening chapter, the family of the trampled girl are working-class. They are all too easy to bribe with the sum of £100, a figure that would have represented around two years’ salary for a low-paid worker. Living conditions for such people were poor, as can be seen from the photograph of Victorian slum-dwellers on the following slide.
Note that the street on which Hyde appears to live is actually well presented. The inhabitants here are depicted as motivated and hardworking shopkeepers; it is Hyde’s door that gives the neighbourhood a poor reputation.
Religion Versus Science in the 19th Century
Lanyon’s objections to Jekyll seem largely based on scientific disagreement, but this was not the only tension of the period. Jekyll is an innovator, a risk-taker, and such approaches to scientific discovery often clashed with religious teaching.
Like many writers of the late 19th Century, Stevenson was greatly influenced by Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species published in 1859. This groundbreaking book introduced theTheory of Evolutionin which Darwin put forward the theory that all life has evolved over millions of years. The book was (and still is) very controversial and many saw it as an attack on religion.
This was a time when science and religion were beginning to appear very much at odds with each other and many people felt they had to choose between the two.
There was also a concern amongst religious people that science was becoming dangerous and was interfering in matters over which only God has control.
Such clashes had been characterised earlier in the period by experiments like those of Luigi Galvani, whose work with electric current and dead tissue influenced Mary Shelley’s gothic masterpiece, Frankenstein.
Physiognomy
The description of Jekyll as “handsome” provides a strong contrast with the presentation of Hyde. Hard as it may be for modern readers to believe, there were a number of pseudo-sciences in Victorian England (and later) that sought to explore the idea that a person’s appearance could be used to define their character.
Physiognomy
The ‘art’ of judging a person’s character from facial features.
Atavism
Atavism: a tendency to revert to something ancient or ancestral; recurrence of traits of an ancestor in a subsequent generation.
Atavism refers to reversion; in this case the reader might be reminded of the controversy created by Charles Darwin’s work on evolution. It is not too much of an imaginative leap to imagine Hyde as regressing to a more primitive version of humanity.
The murder of Carew is committed in a passion of ‘ape-like fury’ by Hyde. Animal imagery is routinely used by Stevenson in association with Hyde, and seems to draw on the ideas on atavism developed by Cesare Lombroso.
The novel was written at a time when concerns about degeneration were current. This was the idea that evolution made it possible to believe that humanity could regress, a fear amplified by the perceived rise in criminality.
The idea that attributes such as criminal behaviour and mental illness were hereditary meant that a person’s antecedents were effectively within them still, struggling to emerge. This tension is evident in the story.
