“The Transforming Draught”: Jekyll and Hyde and the Temperance Debate

Chapter Outline

Chapter One, “Alcohol in the Text: The Letter” (5200 words), founds the analysis of Stevenson’s novella in a detailed, formalist look at the work’s many literal references to alcohol – and at the way those references not only introduce the clash of “High” and “Low” principles that Stevenson extends into his broad exploration of psyche and social class but also reflect, in their own topical microcosm, the work’s consistent ambivalence towards the values of restraint and free expression. Chapter Two, “Alcohol in the Text: The Spirit” (8200 words), expands the careful analysis of language to the work’s metaphors, further revealing the novella’s overriding concern with alcohol and, indeed, with alcoholism as it was defined by Stevenson’s predecessors and contemporaries and by twentieth-century clinical psychologists as well.

Chapter Three, “RLS and the Drinking World” (6700 words), shifts the primary attention from text to social context. It examines the sociology of drink in Victorian Britain, surveys Stevenson’s life-long patterns of drinking, defines his borderline “alcoholism,” and treats the marked frequency with which his correspondence concerns itself with other drinkers and with the virtues and dangers of alcohol. “The Literary Contexts of Stevenson’s Tale of Alcohol” (Chapter 4 – 6000 words) subsequently explores a range of “Low” and “High” nineteenth-century literary treatments of the alcohol problem in comparison to which one may assess J&H and its “seriousness” and success as a novel. The chapter also considers other, more explicit treatments of alcohol as they are laced throughout Stevenson’s fiction and poetry. The fifth chapter, “‘Self’ and ‘The Other Fellow’” (6500 words), takes Stevenson at his word when he claims that the novella spoke directly to the lives of those he knew well. It seeks to identify a number of likely fictional and real-life “models” for the duality of Jekyll and Hyde, including James Hogg’s Justified Sinner, Stevenson himself, and the writer’s fatally alcoholic friend, Walter Ferrier – whose death Ferrier’s mother most consequentially blamed on Stevenson and his pernicious bacchanalian influence.

Chapter Six, “The Temperance Agenda” (5000 words), shifts the contextual focus from people to politics. It traces the history of the temperance movement in nineteenth-century Britain, reviews the popular temperance imagery with which Stevenson was familiar and which he incorporates into his text, and surveys his intermittent commentary on the temperance movement in his other fiction and in his letters. Chapter Seven, “Dream Scenes: Neighborhoods of Nightmare” (6300 words), discusses those two central scenes of J&H that Stevenson claimed came to him via his “Brownies” in a dream – thereby affording him the “vehicle” for “the tale of man’s duality” which he had long been eager to write. This section returns to the close, textual scrutiny which characterizes the opening chapters, demonstrating the extent to which these two seminal scenes were driven in thoroughgoing, if subtle, ways by traditional temperance imagery and ideology. The novella grew, in other words, out of a dream that was “scripted” by the contemporary politics of the Drink Question.

Chapters Eight, Nine, and Ten continue to probe the specifics of Stevenson’s language, plot, and imagery with an eye to their trenchant topical allusiveness. “Street Crime” (Chapter 8 – 11,200 words) documents the extent to which the three specific acts of violence that we watch Hyde commit are specifically informed by the ideas and images of the temperance movement. I propose in the process several historical models for the murdered Member of Parliament, Sir Danvers Carew, and offer an entirely new hypothesis for Stevenson’s choice of his villain’s name. “The Language of the Times” (Chapter 9 – 7200 words) then treats the way what could appear to be the least ideologically charged language and imagery in the text is in fact derived from the lexicon of temperance. “Beginnings and Endings” (Chapter 10 – 11,000 words) in turn ties the novella’s action and language to the substantial impact which Britain’s industrial development exerted on the patterns and oversight of working-class recreation – most particularly recreational drinking – as well as on housing patterns and evolving challenges to social control. This chapter also explores the rich topicality of the tale’s interest in “adulterated” chemicals and in tea.

Chapter Eleven, “Stevenson’s ‘Allegory’ and Its Reception” (5500 words), begins the process of stepping back from the study’s argument in order to assess its strength and utility. It explores just how plausible it is to read J&H as, in substantial part, an intentional allegory of alcoholism – first by looking at the representational modes that were common to the most influential spokespersons of temperance and, in turn, by assessing Stevenson’s own bent for allegorical, as opposed to realistic, narratives. The chapter then surveys both the contemporary and the modern reception of the novella, demonstrating that Stevenson’s text was indeed read by some of his contemporaries as “about alcohol,” while modern readers have been blinded to the text’s most potent topicalities by social and cultural changes and, perhaps even more consequentially, by the irony that the work is now simply too well-known. One can hardly read it any longer in the “naïve” ways that lead one initially to look for “realistic” reasons why Hyde looks and behaves the way he does – among those possible reasons being alcoholic excess and the bestial violence it so commonly entails.

Finally, the Conclusion, “Finding the Balance” (6200 words), confirms that the novella’s varied representations of alcohol reflect the ambivalences of Stevenson and his Age to Temperance and the Drink Trade, but that the work ultimately advocates and models the same “balanced” approach to drink that Stevenson sought to achieve in his own life.