(The bold indicates grade 7-9 analysis, so you can see how to move from grades 5 and 6).
The passage describing the murder of Sir Danvers Carew is relevant to every question! If you don’t know it, I’ve reproduced it at the bottom of this post.
We witness the savage and apparently motiveless murder of Sir Danvers Carew. Stevenson deliberately withholds any first-hand account, so that we cannot really be sure why the murder happened. This is actually the central mystery of the novel, because the answer to the other mystery – who is Hyde, and what does he have to do with Jekyll – are fully answered at the end of the novella.
He places the witness, a maid, in the same position as the Victorian reader who enjoys the sensationalism of news stories, Penny Dreadful books, and Gothic fiction. Consequently, her narrative follows those sensationalist and Gothic conventions. It is very likely that Stevenson does this to associate his readers’ interest in this kind of story with the uneducated working classes. It is another way for him to peel back the mask of respectability, and suggest to his middle class, respectable readers that they revel vicariously in other people’s sins, just like Utterson appears to do, and a bit like Jekyll.
He implies that all his Victorian readers might well share Jekyll‘s desires, and would take a similar advantage of the scientific ability to create a doppelgänger, an alter ego, to experience all those forbidden pleasures without fear of society’s disapproval. ‘You like this stuff, he seems to say, because if it weren’t for society’s rules and the fear of being caught, it is exactly what you would be doing. You think you are socially and morally superior to a mere maid? Think again!’
She describes Sir Danvers Carew as looking both beautiful and innocent. The way he steps back when Edward Hyde becomes angry is probably intended to be comic, as though Stevenson is amused at the thought of beating him to a pulp, which Hyde now does, for the delightful shock and entertainment of Stevenson’s readers.
The improbability of Carew’s body bouncing up and down on the pavement while Hyde is both standing on it and beating it with his cane also adds to the comedy. To the Victorian reader, salacious and eager to hear details of the murder, this scene only points to Edward Hyde’s evil savagery – it isn’t comic at all. To a more logical reader, the impossibility of these simultaneous actions happening at the same time reveals Stevenson’s purpose, to ridicule this interest in violence and crime. Perhaps he is also pointing out that such random attacks, without any motive, are so rare as to be entirely fictitious – they only exist in books.
Once we realise this, Stevenson asked us to consider what the real motive might have been. He drops several clues, but refuses to help us solve it.
Clue number one:
Sir Danvers Carew is out walking near the Houses of Parliament, where he works, yet the police have assumed he doesn’t know where to post a letter: unlikely. Much more likely that he was out walking with a different purpose.
Clue number two:
The letter is addressed to Gabriel Utterson. Why? What confidential matter might Sir Danvers want the lawyer to keep secret? Utterson refuses to tell us, and so we are left with the coincidence that the one man Utterson is obsessed about, Edward Hyde, has chosen to kill only once, and to pick the one man brandishing a letter addressed to Utterson. What might his motives be? Jekyll refuses to tell Utterson what the motives are when he writes his confession. Instead he says that Hyde had no motive at all, he simply saw an opportunity to murder someone, and excitedly took it.
This is entirely unlikely, given his night-time travels, through the fogs of London. He could easily have murdered dozens of people without choosing a bright night under the light of the silvery moon. There are any number of back alleys in which he could murder someone in complete darkness, with no available witnesses. Instead he chooses an open street, with great visibility, opposite a house where a maid is sitting at a window.
Instead, it is far, far more likely that something was said by Sir Danvers which enraged Hyde. But Stevenson refuses to tell us what it is – only that a conversation took place.
Clue number three:
The maid recognises Edward Hyde as a visitor to her master. This strongly suggests a connection between Hyde’s desire to commit sins and the master of the house. After all, the whole point of Hyde’s existence is to seek his illegal or immoral pleasure: Hyde is here on purpose. As for Carew, let’s face it, who tries to post a letter at nearly midnight? Which MP couldn’t simply ask his butler to do it for him? In fact, Utterson lives just a few hundred meters south of the Houses of Parliament, at Gaunt Street. It would be just as easy to deliver the letter to Utterson by hand!
On the other hand why might an older man be out cruising “in a very pretty manner“ in the middle of the night? Why might he stop the young man and proposition him in some way? Why might that young man suddenly decide to beat him to death?
The implication is that Hyde is enraged by the older man propositioning him for sex, or moved to violence when he discovers Carew is an MP and represents the repressive laws which prohibit the expression of his sexual desires, or is overcome at discovering a connection to Utterson or it is just entirely both a random encounter and a motiveless crime. Which one seems more likely?
When we consider that the law criminalising homosexuality was written in the same year as the novel, 1885, we can see a direct connection between the two. Stevenson attacks the law by having one of its creators killed!
This also gives Jekyll a motive – he has had to create an alter ego, Hyde, specifically because his homosexual desires are illegal. And now he has met an MP who not only made that law, but also has done so while being homosexual himself. He is therefore killed for his hypocrisy.
The police come to Utterson because the letter Carew was carrying was addressed to him, and they would like him to identify the dead body. Utterson still has Edward Hyde’s address, and so takes the police immediately to Soho, where they discover Hyde has left. They do find the other half of the murder weapon, a cane given to Henry Jekyll by Utterson.
Another coincidence links Utterson to the murder, and also links Utterson to Hyde in Jekyll’s mind: symbolically, he has given Hyde Utterson’s gift.
What is Jekyll’s reason for linking Hyde with Utterson? Does he believe that Utterson’s desires are the same as Hyde’s desires?
And why does Stevenson decide that all roads should lead back to Utterson? There is, after all, no need in the plot to give Hyde this murder weapon – it could imply have been a cane bought by Jekyll himself.
Instead, this is another clue. Stevenson refuses to tell us what it means. You can come up with your own solution – for me, the logical explanation is that Jekyll understands Utterson’s repressed homosexual desires. He has created Hyde in order to live out his own homosexual desires, so that he no longer has to repress them or hide them.
The police also find the burnt remains of Hyde’s cheque-book, and assume that he will need to visit the bank in order to finance his escape. They stake out the bank, but Hyde never appears (because, as we will later discover, he has simply transformed back into Jekyll, who has no intention of returning to the form of Hyde.)
Next Steps
This is about 1200 words. Take the ideas and quotations and rewrite it as an essay of just the right length you could reproduce in the 45 minutes available in the exam.
Or, try an actual exam question on a different extract, use some of the ideas here to get grade 9 when linking the extract to the rest of the text and Stevenson’s intentions.
“Nearly a year later, in the month of October, 18—, London was startled by a crime of singular ferocity and rendered all the more notable by the high position of the victim. The details were few and startling. A maid servant living alone in a house not far from the river, had gone upstairs to bed about eleven. Although a fog rolled over the city in the small hours, the early part of the night was cloudless, and the lane, which the maid’s window overlooked, was brilliantly lit by the full moon.
It seems she was romantically given, for she sat down upon her box, which stood immediately under the window, and fell into a dream of musing. Never (she used to say, with streaming tears, when she narrated that experience), never had she felt more at peace with all men or thought more kindly of the world.
And as she so sat she became aware of an aged beautiful gentleman with white hair, drawing near along the lane; and advancing to meet him, another and very small gentleman, to whom at first she paid less attention. When they had come within speech (which was just under the maid’s eyes) the older man bowed and accosted the other with a very pretty manner of politeness. It did not seem as if the subject of his address were of great importance; indeed, from his pointing, it sometimes appeared as if he were only inquiring his way; but the moon shone on his face as he spoke, and the girl was pleased to watch it, it seemed to breathe such an innocent and old-world kindness of disposition, yet with something high too, as of a well-founded self-content.
Presently her eye wandered to the other, and she was surprised to recognise in him a certain Mr. Hyde, who had once visited her master and for whom she had conceived a dislike. He had in his hand a heavy cane, with which he was trifling; but he answered never a word, and seemed to listen with an ill-contained impatience.
And then all of a sudden he broke out in a great flame of anger, stamping with his foot, brandishing the cane, and carrying on (as the maid described it) like a madman. The old gentleman took a step back, with the air of one very much surprised and a trifle hurt; and at that Mr. Hyde broke out of all bounds and clubbed him to the earth. And next moment, with ape-like fury, he was trampling his victim under foot and hailing down a storm of blows, under which the bones were audibly shattered and the body jumped upon the roadway. At the horror of these sights and sounds, the maid fainted.”