Robert Louis Stevenson's novella The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was published in 1886. Legend has it that he wrote it frenziedly, possibly high on stimulants, in three days. Since then, it has been adapted for film an astonishing 123 times; many more versions have been made for the stage and radio. It has been the subject of spoof and parody almost as many times as it has been seriously adapted. The phrase "Jekyll and Hyde" has become shorthand for split personality. That phrase has titled at least a dozen pop songs.
Its latest incarnation is a high-budget British television drama, now airing on CBC TV, called Jekyll and Hyde. There were apparently no Canadian television creators available for this time slot, even for ready money. Ten episodes of this show were broadcast in Britain last year, where it was well received but not renewed. It was created by Charlie Higson. It airs on CBC on Mondays at 9 p.m.; you can watch the episodes you have missed on the CBC's website.
It's a lush and violent costume drama, full of magic and monsters and superpowers. The story has been updated to reflect contemporary entertainment trends in such a way that it is barely recognizable: The action has moved from Victorian London – surely a setting crucial to its romance and significance – to London in the 1930s, a place also full of natty suits and automobiles and toff accents but not quite the same sense of squalor and smog and inequity. The protagonist is not the original Dr. Jekyll, but his grandson, who discovers that he has superhuman strength, whether he consumes his chemical potion or not. There are monsters and shape-shifters haunting London, and a team of supernatural investigators (led by Sir Roger Bulstrode, played by the haughty Richard E. Grant carrying the inescapable whiff of Withnail about him). It owes more to Ghostbusters than to Victorian ideas about psychology. There is some stealing from James Bond as well: There are secret agents from a shadowy evil organization called Tenebrae, which is something like SMERSH.
The idea of the comic-book superhero is also better suited to the 1930s, I suppose, the decade that Superman was invented. Jekyll even begins to fight crime like Batman. The whole thing has been rendered, through its exaggerated violence, paradoxically less dark and more childlike: Its action sequences resemble the Power Rangers cartoons my son watches.
There is the mandatory red-wallpapered brothel/saloon with the piano and the wily madam; a staple of TV period drama that I have described before.
Well, there are only so many stories. Jekyll and Hyde is one that we keep rewriting because at its base is a permanent human fear: our own propensity for violence and immorality. The original story was written at a time of advances in the field of psychiatry, when conditions were finally being isolated and catalogued. The idea of the "split personality" was making its way into the intellectual consciousness (and, in fact, Stevenson had become interested in the case of a French mental patient named Louis Vivet, said to have six identities). Interesting coincidences: Richard von Krafft-Ebing's influential work, Sexual Psychopathy: A Clinical-Forensic Study, was published in 1886, the same year as the novella. This is the same year Sigmund Freud left his hospital and established his private practice. Stevenson's imagining of the uncontrollable unconscious prefigured Freud's published idea of the id by about 34 years.
And so Mr. Hyde has been seen as a parable of an extraordinary number of things: sexual repression, class oppression, the id, the failure of the privileged classes, schizophrenia, the dangers of science. The story has been called a harbinger of detective fiction, since it involves a police investigation. It was always a popular story, but not exactly a children's one.
Somehow the idea of secret sin, of a shameful secret propensity or drive, has morphed, over the years, into the idea of the superpower. In 1886, one drinks a chemical potion and becomes morally deformed; by the 1930s, one undergoes the accidental scientific process (the spider in the machine) and gains extra strength. This reflects, one might guess, a changing perception of evil, one influenced by psychology. There is no such thing as evil, in psychology, only illness. Much much contemporary therapy encourages patients to explore their dark or sad or inadequate sides. Your failing, say a dozen self-help gurus, is your superpower: Embrace it. Children's superhero comics reinforce the idea that everybody has a special power.
This is a weakening, I think, of the original story. The story relies on absolute evil, on monstrosity. It is far more frightening to think that a respectable doctor could attack a peasant girl in the street than to think he must tame his illness for the sake of fighting crime. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde ends with the tortured character's suicide: There is no hope for him, no solution to the problem of the untamable violence inside us.
But it is still fascinating that certain legends continue to serve, 130 years later, as serviceable narrative vessels, sturdy structures into which we pour the preoccupations of the moment.