multifarious,
incongruous,
independent denizens. [ibid.]
and
This is a peculiarly modern claim, one
which runs counter to many of the cherished
tenets of Victorian belief. For a culture which
sought to fix and pin down events, facts and
meanings in order to feel that the rapidly
changing world remained a knowable place
such a claim is profoundly troubling.6
Stevenson sets his story in the heart of
London, seat of the British Empire, in the
domestic interiors of such respectable
professional people as lawyers, doctors and
men of science, yet what he shows us is a city
fraught with divisions and homes which, far
from being castles, are disrupted by
mysterious and uncanny occurrences.
The powerful bonds of affection and
mutual support between men which are at the
heart of this novella – when women do appear
they are in subservient roles or victims – can
be read as a representation of the social
bonds which held together a male-dominated
late-nineteenth-century society. Whether this
is a reflection of a particular social milieu, a
celebration of an all-male coterie or an
occasion for a thinly veiled diatribe about the
threat of homosexuality or independentminded women to patriarchal society is left
very much for the reader to decide.7 The
critic Andrew Lang, in an early review,
implied that the marginalisation of women
was a necessary precursor to an adventure
story but does comment that middle-aged
professional men are not often heroes of
such tales.8 That the novella relies upon such
unlikely juxtaposition is one of the ways in
which it draws upon the conventions of
gothic fiction to achieve its ends. In order to
understand some of the reasons why this
troubling tale appears to have struck such a
chord with its contemporary readership it is
necessary to give some consideration to the
wider contexts, literary and cultural, against
which it was read.
Gothic fiction emerged as a popular
literary mode in the eighteenth century, in
part as a reaction to the epoch’s celebration
of such Enlightenment values as rationality,
order and social progress. It deals in
irrationality, excess and transgression,
frequently
involving
madness,
the
supernatural and the macabre and is set in
castles, ruins, graveyards and wild landscapes.
It is a literature which exposes the fears and
foibles of mainstream society, delighting in
unlikely
juxtapositions
and
uncanny
coincidences. It is also a writing which is
interested in the relationship between past
and present, largely, though not exclusively,
in terms of repressed histories and hidden
family secrets. The mood of much gothic
fiction is one of questioning of accepted
order and of the re-vision of apparently
secure and established truths. Gothic fiction
flourished once more in the late nineteenth
century when the looming fin de siècle
occasioned great cultural ferment as the
seemingly solid certainties of Victorian
Britain withered and mutated.9 Imperialists,
like the adventure-story writer Rider
Haggard, drew upon gothic conventions to
create tales of white degeneration that
conjured fears of the waning of British power
whilst decadent and avant-garde authors,
like Oscar Wilde in his novel The Picture of
Dorian Gray (1891), drew upon gothic
codes to critique middle-class mores.
Gothic fictions tapped a vein of latenineteenth-century anxiety regarding what
was increasingly perceived as the perilously
narrow line between civilisation and
barbarism. The late nineteenth century was a
time of heightened awareness of a number of
deep contradictions inherent in the dominant
‘Victorian’ account of society.10 Many of
these were centred upon the experience of
urban living and London, setting for
Stevenson’s novella, was particularly replete
with stark juxtapositions of class and
privilege; Laynon’s Mayfair butts up against
Hyde’s Soho; respected men about town like
Richard Enfield spend time in the warrens of
the East End. In London, as in many other
cities, prostitution was a national scandal and
the widespread occurrence of venereal
disease, often brought into middle-class
homes by seemingly respectable men, was
regarded as a threat to national identity and
Britain’s (increasingly threatened) status as