#BEST FLAVOR OF MR HYDE FREE#

I say two, because the state of my own knowledge does not pass beyond that point. I thus drew steadily nearer to that truth, by whose partial discovery I have been doomed to such a dreadful shipwreck: that man is not truly one, but truly two. Read the passage below and then tell me that Freud doesn’t come briefly into your mind. However it is likely that Freud did influence many later readers interpretation of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. So Freud surely had no influence on Stevenson’s writing. By coincidence Freud set up his practice in the same year that the book was published (1886), but this was a few years prior to the development of his psychoanalytic theory. When I first read the story I thought Stevenson might have been influenced by the “Jack the Ripper” murders (they didn’t happen until 2 years after Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde was published) and I could even read into the story the influence of Sigmund Freud.

The lawyer liked this letter well enough it put a better colour on the intimacy than he had looked for and he blamed himself for some of his past suspicions.īut perhaps I am reading into the text something that is not there. Later on the lawyer receives a letter from Hyde: It turns me cold to think of this creature stealing like a thief to Harry’s bedsideīlack mail I suppose an honest man paying through the nose for some of the capers of his youth. “I thought it was madness,” he said, as he replaced the obnoxious paper in the safe, “and now I begin to fear it is disgrace.” Given that context it, perhaps, puts a different perspective on some of Jekyll’s lawyer friend’s comments in the story:

This was the legislation used to send Oscar Wilde to prison in 1895. This is purely speculation but, as it happens, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde was written in the same year that saw the passage of the famous/notorious Criminal Law Amendment Act, 1885, creating the offence of ‘gross indecency’ (sometimes referred to as the “Blackmailers’ Charter”). Jekyll’s “disappearance or unexplained absence for any period exceeding three calendar months,” the said Edward Hyde should step into the said Henry Jekyll’s shoes without further delay.Īt this point what would Jekyll’s close friends (and many Victorian readers) have made of this? Victorian novels commonly contained “issues of the day”. in case of the decease of Henry Jekyll, M.D., D.C.L., L.L.D., F.R.S., etc., all his possessions were to pass into the hands of his “friend and benefactor Edward Hyde,” but that in case of Dr. Jekyll’s lawyer is horrified that his friend has made Hyde (almost) the sole beneficiary of his large estate.

#BEST FLAVOR OF MR HYDE FREE#

Hyde has been granted free access to Jekyll’s house, and the servants have been commanded to obey his every order. Henry Jekyll, are concerned that he is protecting a mysterious and vicious young man of dubious appearance, Mr. The story begins when we learn that friends and colleagues of a rich and respectable man of 50, Dr. So the pleasure the modern reader must take is different from that of the late Victorians we already know the ending, and we must instead enjoy the ride. The names have even entered the English language: “ My boss has a Jekyll and Hyde personality!”. That nice Doctor Jekyll, who likes to do amateur science experiments in his basement, is also that horrible Mr Hyde with a hygiene problem and a taste for murder two names one person. The problem for the reader is that hardly anyone will read this novella without knowing the ending. The clues are presented to us and if we didn’t guess the ending correctly, then perhaps we weren’t paying attention.

It’s a story with an atmospheric setting (foggy Victorian London), a murder, an investigation both by the official police and by amateur investigators – and in the end we get a shocking solution. And arguably Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde would not be out of place within that genre either. My last review was a book discussing mystery and detective fiction. I’m cataloguing this story under the category: “Mad scientists” (part of a series), but I could equally have placed it under: Alternatively you can read it more carefully (or reread it) and extract any number of fascinating subtexts and dream up your own interpretations and that is exactly what I have done. If you want a quick, thrilling gothic read you can have that. In an ideal world a person should know nothing about this book and come to it fresh, but it is far too late for most people, such is the fame of the story. O God!’ I screamed, and ‘O God!’ again and again for there before my eyes–pale and shaken, and half fainting, and groping before him with his hands, like a man restored from death – there stood Henry Jekyll!

Best flavor of mr hyde