Robert Louis Stevenson published Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde in 1886. The story is told primarily from the perspective of Gabriel Utterson, a London lawyer who becomes disturbed by his friend Dr. Henry Jekyll's association with the brutal Edward Hyde. Utterson witnesses Hyde trample a young girl, later identifies Hyde as the murderer of Sir Danvers Carew, and eventually discovers, after Jekyll's apparent disappearance, the full account in Jekyll's written statement. Jekyll, a respectable physician who finds his scientific work constrained by the social necessity of maintaining his reputation, has developed a chemical compound that separates his moral and immoral selves into two distinct physical bodies.
Stevenson's novella is most often read as an allegory of Victorian moral repression and the dangerous consequences of suppressing the instinctual self, but the text itself is more cautious than this reading suggests. Jekyll does not suppress a hidden self; he separates a part of himself from moral accountability and gives it permission to act, which is a different psychological structure. Hyde is not Jekyll's authentic self liberated; he is a specific set of impulses stripped of the civilizing overlay that makes social life possible, and he grows stronger with use. The question of which is "really" Jekyll, the respectable doctor or the brutal Hyde, is one the novella refuses to answer simply.
The novella is short and reads in a single sitting, but its central question, what constitutes moral identity when a person's behavior differs radically across contexts, has not become simpler since 1886. The plot device of the chemical separation of selves reads as a nineteenth-century fantasy, but the psychological reality it depicts, the capacity of intelligent people to maintain radically different behavioral standards in different contexts while maintaining a unified self-narrative, is as available for observation now as it was in Stevenson's time. The ending, where Jekyll's inability to obtain the specific salt he needs for the compound kills both him and Hyde, is one of those endings that seems arbitrary until you understand that Stevenson is making a precise point about the limits of chemical self-management.
Jane Austen wrote all six major novels without a dedicated writing room, she hid her work under blotting paper whenever visitors arrived.
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