Caroline Cooper
English 358 - Nineteenth-Century English Novels
Professor Pennington
May 13, 2015
Phrenology and Darwinism in Robert Louis Stevenson’s novel The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll
and Mr. Hyde
Robert Louis Stevenson wrote The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde primarily for
economic reasons. Because of the importance that this book make money Stevenson needed to
appeal to a vast audience in order to sell as many copies as possible. By taking popular culture
into account at this time Stevenson was sure to increase his readership. One of the aspects of
popular culture that Stevenson explored in his book was the science of phrenology. This would
be an effective topic to use to expand his reach because it was not a science only for the rich,
“enthusiasm for phrenology eventually spilled over the edge of upper-middle-class respectability
and trickled down to clerks, shopkeepers and artisans. For the most part, they learned phrenology
in mechanics’ institutes and from the flood of inexpensive pamphlets on the subject” (Parssinen
2). This goes along with why Stevenson wrote and incorporated phrenology to appeal to all types
of people as well as to feed into the fear that class distinctions were becoming much more
blurred. This concept is seen in Dr. Jekyll’s concern over being viewed as a proper gentleman of
the upper class. The novel was published in 1886 which was a time of many changes, mysteries,
science, and fears in England. Firstly, it was the age of the disappearance of God and the age of
Darwinism. With Darwin’s Origin of the Species many Victorians’ beliefs were turned upside
down. Science had made its way into the spotlight and thus pushed God out. The Victorians were
now, nearly for the first time, living in a world without God which brought about many fears and
anxieties. These fears are what Stevenson plays off of and captures in his novel.
Victorians were very concerned with Evolution which has a positive connotation of
progression, but also they were concerned with Devolution which holds a negative connotation
of a person who becomes more animalistic or beast-like. Stevenson captures, particularly, the
Victorian fear of the double; someone having an evil side or persona within them that he or she
cannot control. Dr. Jekyll is the perfect example of a double identity because by day he is a well
respected Victorian gentleman, but by night he degenerates into Mr. Hyde who is genetically
mutated into an animalistic criminal. A person’s morals become separated and ultimately, in Dr.
Jekyll’s case, completely taken over by the impurities to expose the evil double within him. This
brings to life the terrifying ideas that by day an average person could be good and by night that
same person could be evil. Stevenson sets up his novel as science fiction, a story within a story
that mimics the Victorian fear of the double within us.
In Robert Louis Stevenson’s novel The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde there is
a great deal of time dedicated solely to the description of the physical appearances of the
characters, particularly the appearance of Mr. Hyde. Over and over again throughout the novel
characters see Mr. Hyde and immediately judge him to be a bad, grotesque, and evil person.
According to Harriet Hustis, “Stevenson’s conception, writing fosters a conflation of the
intentional with the unintentional that destabilizes the (presumably fundamental) boundaries
between self and other at even the most basic level” (995). In this case it is correct to judge a
book by its cover because Mr. Hyde is exactly who he appears to be. Mr. Hyde is the monster
and the mystery is not if Mr. Hyde is evil or not, but rather what his relationship is with Dr.
Jekyll.
This relates to the Victorians’ interest in phrenology and how the appearance of a person
reflects that person's status. The Victorians' interest in phrenology is directly related to the idea
of the monster or the other. This is what made this book so successful and scary for the
Victorians. As Dr. Jekyll, the good Victorian man, transforms into Mr. Hyde, the criminal he
reveals, “I knew myself, at the first breath of this new life, to be more wicked, tenfold more
wicked, sold a slave to my original evil; and the thought, in that moment, braced and delighted
me like wine” (Stevenson 80). The Victorians were terrified of a person’s double, the evil side of
a person, taking over just as Mr. Hyde does to Dr. Jekyll.
To understand the extent of which Mr. Hyde’s appearance and transformance was
frightening and intriguing to Victorians it is important to fully comprehend the Victorians’
association with the science of phrenology. Phrenology is analyzing the shape of a person’s skull
and noting that, “an individual’s character can be discovered from a careful examination of his
head” (Parssinen 2). Therefore, phrenology is basically the science of examining the shape of
people and how that relates to a person’s character and to criminality. Phrenology was very
popular during this time which is one of the reasons why it is a prevalent theme used by
Stevenson throughout the novel. Mr. Hyde is small, hunched over, and covered with hair. If a
Phrenologist would have examined him it would have been found that he was a criminal and a
lower version of man which, continuously shown throughout the novel, he was just that. Mr.
Hyde degenerates into something that is not quite human, something animalistic, but has the
same signature as Dr. Jekyll, the respectable, well-dressed, good, Victorian man.
According to the Victorian Web, “Phrenology was a faculty psychology, theory of brain
and science of character reading, what the 19th-century phrenologists called "the only true
science of mind". It was derived from the theories of Franz Joseph Gall, a Viennese physician.
The core of the science was focused around the fact that the brain was the organ of the mind and
that ultimately, “as the skull takes its shape from the brain, the surface of the skull can be read as
an accurate index of psychological aptitudes and tendencies” (Victorian Web). The science was
very popular during the 1820s-1840s where even employers would make sure to have character
references of their employees. Through phrenology exams employers believed they could tell if
an employee was trustworthy and hard-working or deceitful and lazy. Through phrenology,
“man's physical and, by extension, moral, intellectual, and social development, could be
determined by, and seen in, his physiognomy — in, say, jaw structure and shape of the head-were to many respected sciences that enjoyed wide currency”. Phrenology made a comeback by
the American "phrenological Fowlers" in the 1860s and 1870s (Victorian Web).
While this science may sound innocent it was in many ways used against certain
ethnicities who shared a certain trait. For example, those with a prominent brow line or with
more of a protruding jaw line were seen to be more animalistic and less refined. As stated before,
this was the age of Darwinism where the Victorians began to believe that humans were
descended from apes so people who had these traits were seen as being below parr, less
developed, and therefore less trustworthy. According to the Victorian Web, “racial
anthropologists argued that working class people were more prognathous than their social
superiors- who were- self-flatteringly described as also biologically superior”. Phrenologists
would make sure that traits of the people who belonged to the lower class or who were foreign
were the reason they were in the lower class. Also, Phrenologists would make sure that people in
the upper class had the more favorable traits based on the shapes of their skulls. Historian Robert
M. Young makes the point that:
The analogy between the theory of evolution and that of craniology is
instructive….Logically [evolution] was in the same position as phrenology for most of
the nineteenth century. It rested on naturalistic observations and a mass of anecdotes
collected more or less systematically. Doubt remained whether the causal relations
proposed by the theory were real, or only mistaken references from correlations reflecting
the union of chance circumstances. (Postlethwaite, 85)
This statement further proves the point that phrenology was not an absolute science and it was
more or less based on a standard that was fabricated through speculation ultimately in the favor
of the upper class and, as the members classified it, the elite class.
Much in the same way phrenology ties in with the fears of the public during this time the
setting of London also adds an element of mystery and anxiety. Stevenson focuses his novel on
the monster or the other and London was a place where this would be believable:
It was Victorian culture that bequeathed to moderns a London conceived as a place you
might visit in reality or indeed in imagination in order to visit places associated with the
dead and their literary works; a city defined not just by topography but by reading, and in
particular by the mapping of the latter onto the former. (Watson 139)
London was a large city during this time and during the day it must have been filled with
the normal hustle and bustle of an English city, but at night the ordinariness of the place
changed. Even for the upper class at night London was a foggy, dreary, and even scary place
filled with alleyways which could be lurking with all kinds of dangerous figures, doubles, or
others. This is what makes London the perfect setting for Mr. Hyde to be lurking around at night
as the malformed and mutated Dr. Jekyll. The split personalities of the two men mirror the split
visage of London from day to night. This setting could help to explain why there is a little girl
out in the London streets at 3 o’clock in the morning to be trampled by Mr. Hyde. The why of
the matter is not as important as the image of a dark, hunched, revolting figure of a man who
would do something so abominable as to run over a small child, a little girl, in the middle of the
night while she was on the way to call a doctor. This opening scene shows the malice of this
creature, Mr. Hyde, and thus demonstrates to the reader as soon as possible what a foggy London
night is capable of and who or what kind of figure it could be hiding. Everyone in the story is
trying to figure out who this creature Mr. Hyde is and Stevenson uses this to appeal to society’s
greatest fear: the fear of the self and the other invading a person’s body. The fear of the eternal
and the external and how the other could invade the body and wreak havoc on the upper class
London town.
As the descriptions of the setting add to the feeling of uneasiness and anxiety so do the
descriptions of Mr. Hyde throughout the novel. It is shocking how much time and effort is put
into describing Mr. Hyde and not just what he does. The most descriptions about Mr. Hyde are
not for the evil things he does or the crimes he commits, but the vast descriptions are devoted to
explaining how grotesque his appearance is to the people he comes into contact with. This relates
directly to the science of phrenology. Again, “phrenology stressed man’s physical and organic as
well as his moral nature; his oneness with the natural world was implicit in phrenology’s
assertion that mind was also matter” (Postlethwaite, 86). This means that a person’s appearance
is directly related to that person’s morality. So much of the story is simply text devoted solely to
the description of Mr. Hyde and how his appearance affected every single person who
encountered him. The very first description of Mr. Hyde is as follows:
Mr. Hyde was pale and dwarfish, he gave an impression of deformity without any
nameable malformation, he had a displeasing smile, he had borne himself to the lawyer
with a sort of murderous mixture of timidity and boldness, and he spoke with a husky,
whispering and somewhat broken voice; all these were points against him, but not all of
these together could explain the hitherto unknown disgust, loathing and fear with which
Mr. Utterson regarded him. (Stevenson 41-42)
Only a few pages later the descriptions the other characters given to Mr. Hyde are actually
described providing even more emphasis on his appearance and his character, “the few who
could describe him differed widely, as common observers will. Only on one point were they
agreed; and that was the haunting sense of unexpressed deformity with which the fugitive
impressed his beholders” (Stevenson 49). Every person who comes in contact with Mr. Hyde is
immediately taken back by how grotesque he looks. In fact, Mr. Hyde is so revolting that Dr.
Lanyan goes into shock and dies after seeing the transformation.
What is interesting to note is that Mr. Hyde is not a large, overbearing man, but instead is
very small in stature and is not very strong at all. He is mean and cruel, but his stature is the
same as a frail, older man. The fact that Dr. Jekyll goes from a healthy, large, sturdy gentleman
to a small, decrepit, evil criminal is a representation of Darwinian Degeneration. During the
transformation from Jekyll to Hyde the clothes do not change and become baggy and ill placed
on a man who has degenerated into a being that is more like an animal than a man. This small
detail of the baggy clothes is another way Stevenson points out that the boundary between good
and evil, much like the boundaries between the classes, becomes blurred and fragile. Stevenson
elaborates on Mr. Hyde’s appearance writing that:
His clothes, that is to say, although they were of rich and sober fabric, were enormously
too large for him in every measurement-the trousers hanging on his legs and rolled up to
keep them from the ground, the waist of the coat below his haunches, and the collar
sprawling wide upon his shoulders. (Stevenson 74)
A gentleman in the victorian era could be spotted through the way he dressed and what his
clothing was like. The fact that a criminal is wearing ill-fitting luxurious clothing demonstrates
the fear of the other creeping into places that it was once strategically kept out of. Clothing is
symbolic of a great fear of our fragmented self or the dark side of the self.
Mr. Hyde’s appearance and his rage is what connects him to phrenology and Darwinism
the most throughout the novel. Anger is closer to a primate, ape, and a neanderthal so when
people get angry he or she degenerates back to his or her animal self. This is clearly shown
throughout all of the criminal acts Mr. Hyde does from trampling the young girl in the beginning
of the novel to the murder of Sir Danvers Carew. Also, there is a moment in the novel where Dr.
Jekyll is compared with Mr. Hyde:
Now the hand of Henry Jekyll (as you have often remarked) was professional in shape
and size: it was large, firm, white and comely. But the hand which I now saw, clearly
enough, in the yellow light of a mid-London morning, lying half shut on the bed clothes,
was lean, corded, knuckly, of a dusky pallor and thickly shaded with a swart of hair. It
was the hand of Edward Hyde. (Stevenson 84)
This shows how the appearance of these two men directly relates to the way these two men act.
One man is good and the other man is evil. Taking the science of phrenology into account
because Dr. Jekyll is physically attractive by the Victorian standards he would be the upright,
better gentleman and because Mr. Hyde is physically menacing and is covered with hair like an
animal he would be the evil, angry criminal. This holds true through every step of the way in The
Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
Clearly, Robert Louis Stevenson was looking to appeal to the societal fears of the
Victorians which resulted in a story about the other, Mr. Hyde, and how appearance really does
make the man. Mr. Hyde is the perfect literary example of the double coming to life and
ultimately taking over the good inside of a person. This was a very real and very frightening
concepts to the Victorians which in the end, with the popularity of the science of phenology and
Darwinism, made Stevenson’s novel a great success.
Works Cited
Hustis, Harriet. “Hyding Nietzsche in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Gothic of Philosophy”. Studies
in English Literature 1500-1900. Rice University 49. 4 (2009): 993-1007. Project Muse.
Parssinen, T. M. “Popular Science and Society: The Phrenology Movement in Early Victorian
Britain”. Journal of Social History. Oxford University Press. 8.1 (1974): 1-20. MLA
International Bibliography.
Postlethwaite, Diana. Making it Whole: A Victorian Circle and the Shape of Their World. Ohio
State University Press, 1984. Print.
Stevenson, Robert Louis. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Ed. Martin A. Danahay.
2nd ed. Toronto, ON: Broadview Editions, 2005. Print.
van Wyle, John. The Victorian Web. “Phrenology and Race in Nineteenth-Century Britain”.
Cambridge University, Nov. 2004. Web. 10 May 2015.
Watson, Nicola J. “Rambles in Literary London.” Literary Tourism and Nineteenth – Century
Culture. Ed. Nicola J. Watson. Great Britain: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. 139-149. Print.