Jekyll and Hyde: Context

Question 1

pace of science

Answer 1

During the Victorian period, the pace of scientific change was something that concerning for many people. Experiments such as blood transfusions presented the human body not as something whole and made by God, but something temporary that scientists could corrupt and adapt, and Stevenson is playing on these fears in his modern urban gothic.

Question 2

coexisting wealth and crime

Answer 2

Stevenson is commenting on the way that poverty, crime and wealth co-existed in Victorian England. Victorian London was rife with prostitution, opium dens, gambling houses and pubs. It was also a heavily unequal in terms of wealth.

Question 3

gentleman

Answer 3

In Victorian times, a Victorian Gentleman was supposed to be a well-mannered, respectable Christian man, who was ‘better’ than the lower classes.

Question 4

repressed

Answer 4

It was a highly repressed, moralistic culture that contrasted with the vice present in London at the time. Stevenson is critiquing the hypocrisy of a society which is so full of contradictions

Question 5

queer reading

Answer 5

in the unpublished first draft manuscript,we learn that jekyll became”in secret the slave of certain appetites
In the published book,the doctor is merelly of a “certain impatient gaiety of disposition”
The brirish parliment enacted the criminal law amendment act in 1885 section 11 of which known as the lambouchere admentment prohibited gross indecency between males