Your task is to research contextual factors in preparation for studying The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde. You can focus your research on at least two of the following areas:

 

Ø Author context (Robert Louis Stevenson): Personal life, Other work, Political interests, Travels, Reception of literature at the time it was first published 

 

Ø Historical context: Law, Technology, Culture, Religion, Science, Duality of Britain

 

Ø Social context: Society, Values, Beliefs

 

Ø Literary context: Gothic literature, Literary canon, Popularity, Writing style, Criticism

 

Ø Novel influences: Other work, Nature of Edinburgh, Charles Darwin’s ‘Theory of Evolution’, Industrial Revolution, Deacon Brodie, Louis Vivet

 

Using the information found, prepare a presentation. This can be in a form of your choice, including: PowerPoint, physical poster, digital poster, essay/report or any other creative form of your choosing - be inventive!

 

 Any work must be emailed to me: hterry@keshacademy.com or given in as a physical copy in the first lesson back. I will choose some students to present their findings to the class. 

 

For links to websites: www.padlet.com/missterry 

 

 | 1818 | Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is published | Dr Frankenstein is an overreaching scientist whose monstrous creation pursues and eventually destroys him.  Dr Jekyll also overreaches, and is ultimately destroyed for doing so.  Both novels employ layered, framed narratives that help to generate a sense of unsettling opacity.

 |  1859 | Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species is published | Charles Darwin′s Origin of Species challenged traditional Victorian perceptions of science and scientific possibilities, whilst also undermining the value of religion as a guiding force.  The resulting debates around morality and existentialism are clearly present throughout Jekyll and Hyde.

| 1871 | Charles Darwin’s The Descent of Man is published | Darwin considered ‘whether man, like every other species, is descended from some pre-existing form’.  Jekyll and Hyde captures many of the anxieties that arose from late nineteenth-century evolutionary thought, specifically the fear of regression.  It is notable that Hyde is described as ‘ape-like’ and ‘troglodytic’.

|  1885 | Criminal Law Amendment Act | Henry Jekyll is part of a circle of respectable Victorian professionals.  His life, outwardly, is sterile and self-consciously repressed.  Hyde’s ‘undignified’ and ‘monstrous’ nocturnal acts are suggestive of what, at the time, would have been classified as gross indecency.

| Robert Louis Stevenson publishes The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde in 1886

| 1888 | The Whitechapel murders are committed. | The first of the eleven unsolved Whitechapel murders were committed two years after Jekyll and Hyde was published.  Speculation in newspapers that the identity of the murderer was Edward Hyde did not, at the time, seem entirely implausible.

| 1890 | Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray is published | Both Dorian and Jekyll lead double lives and, outwardly, maintain gentlemanly exteriors.  Each character is able to create a double, with all the resources necessary to indulge in the ‘sordid and sensual’ whilst avoiding public shame.  However, Dorian, like Jekyll soon grows ‘deadly sick’.

 | 1895 | Oscar Wilde’s trial results in his imprisonment | Section 11 of the Criminal Law Amendment Act was used to send Wilde to prison; he was convicted of sodomy.  A number of oblique references to Jekyll’s homosexuality are made in the novel, and the power of Hyde to blackmail him over the ‘concealed pleasures’ of his past greatly concerns Utterson.

| 1897 | Bram Stoker’s Dracula is published | Dracula’s dual identity as a refined Count and primitive monster mirrors Jekyll’s own duality.  The novel, like Jekyll and Hyde, is a dramatization of fears at the time that civilisation was only a thin veneer, emphasised by the common imperialistic view that colonial subjects were primitive savages.