Jekyll and Hyde Historical Background:
- RL Stevenson attended Edinburgh University where is went against his parents' wishes and became a writer.
- Soon after graduating, he openly rejected his parents' strict Calvinist religious outlook, igniting a long disagreement between the sternly devout father and the bohemian, agnostic son that would last until his father's death in 1887.
- The focus of Jekyll and Hyde is on the rigid ideal of social respectability in Stevenson's era that stood in stark contrast with the less acceptable inner impulses and appetites.
- The Victorian era experienced unprecedented scientific progress, much of which added to the prevailing intellectual climate of religious skepticism.
- Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, which was proposed in his book The Origin of the Species argued that organisms evolve over generations.
- Throughout the 1860's there was a series of highly publicized disputes about Darwin's theory and focused attention on the question whether humans and apes evolved from a common ancestor.
- Scientists used this question of humans and apes to describe a mysterious phenomenon they noticed earlier in the century, the "split personality." They noticed that people who had this rare syndrome lived perfectly normal lives but occasionally experienced episodes in which they seemed to take on separate, antisocial personalities.
- In 1870, Dr. Franz Hoffman, who studied several people with split personality disorder developed a theory based on current evolutionary thinking in which he suggested that the split personality represented a temporary reversion to an earlier stage in evolution.
- Also during Stevenson's era, the most dramatic advances in science were made in medicine by Louis Pasteur who conclusively demonstrated a new germ theory in which he maintained that injecting a person with a weaker version of a disease-causing germ would immunize that person against the disease.
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