By HARLEIGH KERIAZES
Initially written in a feverish three days, Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1886 novel STRANGE CASE OF DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE has staying power. There have been countless adaptations of the novel from plays to graphic novels to films in the 136 years since its initial publication. There’s no denying that it’s a staple of horror. We sat down with legendary scholar Leslie S. Klinger to dig into the bones of Stevenson’s terrifying tale. Klinger has previously annotated editions of Dracula, Sherlock Holmes, Sandman, Frankenstein, and the works of H.P Lovecraft.
Author, literary scholar and annotator Leslie S. Klinger
He used his expertise to explore the story of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, the 19th century, and Stevenson himself in-depth in his new book THE NEW ANNOTATED STRANGE CASE OF DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE releasing on October 18th.
Thank you for being here to speak with me. My first question is kind of broad, so forgive me for that. What draws you to JEKYLL AND HYDE? There’s such a breadth of work from Stevenson, what do you think makes this one stand out?
Well, so in choosing things that I have annotated – and this is not my first annotated book I’ve done – I don’t know. By now, maybe eight or ten – something like that. And there is a central commonness among them and that is … that they’re iconic in the sense that people have been fascinated for generations with the characters or the story – something about that particular book. And so, I am drawn to books that have that kind of power.
It started for me with Sherlock Holmes. I was a Sherlockian long before I was an annotator. When I annotated Sherlock Holmes, it was that aspect of it that made me really want to focus on that. When that was finished, Dracula was the next after that. It drew me again because of the power of the book – the power of the character. Why were people so fascinated by this and drawn to it? Jekyll and Hyde, in looking at the 19th century, which is not the only place that I’ve selected books from, but it’s my primary ground, is one of those books that just has an audience. It’s fascinated people for 100-plus years. So it’s not that it was Stevenson’s only work. Certainly, most people remember him for Treasure Island or Kidnapped, but it seems to have a power that the other books don’t. This is illustrated by the number of stage plays, films, comic books, etcetera, that the book has spawned.
I really agree with you about the power of those books. Can you talk more about that power?
I think that these characters, if we look at Sherlock Holmes or Dracula or Frankenstein’s creature, what they all have in common is a certain plasticity. That is they can be adapted; They’re not stuck in the Victorian time period. They can be lifted out and moved to other periods [and] other settings and work almost as well or work in slightly different ways, but they still have that power. So that’s another question… What’s the power?
You mentioned putting the iconic characters into different eras through adaptations. What do you think are the must-haves for a reimagining of JEKYLL AND HYDE?
Well, there are a lot that have gotten it wrong. It’s often reinterpreted – I think badly – as this story about evil and good or the danger of pure good vs. pure evil and pure evil conquering good. That’s sort of what people imagine.
In a way, it gets interpreted as another sort of Frankenstein misinterpretation – that is, the evils of science. So it’s been adapted a lot that way, it’s been adapted as an exemplar of if we mess around with science and we go up against nature, you know, bad things happen, and be careful what will be let loose.
That’s not what the book is really about, but that is one of the core stories that gets retold over and over. I don’t think those are good interpretations. I think the good adaptations are the ones that stick to the true core of the story, which is, as Chesterton put it, not the discovery that one man is two people but the discovery that the two people are one person that we have inside us – these dual natures, these competing urges.
What would you say is the best film adaptation?
Well, this is tough because the films have in almost every single case not told the real story of the book. They want their own interpretation. They’ve made Dr. Jekyll or JEE-kul, depending on how you want to pronounce it, very virtuous and therefore a victim of this evil creature that is somehow created by his science. There are a lot of those, but I think probably the 1920 John Barrymore film, which is just a remarkable performance by Barrymore. But there are so many. There are several from that period. [The] Spencer Tracy [version] has its own merits. It’s got Ingrid Bergman in it. It’s got a lot of great things going on. Or the Fredric March one, which is directed by the great Rouben Mamoulian is also a great film. I’ve tried to cover the films in some depth in the book, but it’s tough to choose. The short answer is none of them have done a good job of telling the original story. If you don’t know the story, they may be interesting films, but if you know the story, you come away feeling a little bit disappointed that they didn’t just stick to the original.
I mean, they’re done with affection. They’re just simplifications if you will. In some ways, it’s a more popular story to say, ‘Here’s a really good person who has been victimized by some bad choices and some bad science.” And in the end, in some of them, virtue triumphs, which is not where Stevenson’s story ends.
John Barrymore as the diabolical Mr. Hyde in DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE (1920).
What is your research process like for a project this large?
The first thing I say to people about how to choose when you’re gonna annotate something is it needs to be a book that you’re willing to spend a lot of time with because it’s a long process. There’s a reason why most of my books are called the “new annotated.” That’s because there’s an old annotated in many cases, so in the case of JEKYLL AND HYDE, there is an annotated edition that had come out many years ago.
But my process of annotating consists of first reading the book really slowly and dropping in what I call “dummy footnotes,” just sort of as I go through it. I’ll drop in notes to myself like, “What is this? This needs a definition,” as I come across them. Words that strike me as needing explaining or places or historical references and so on. I could have questions about the plot, questions about the science or the social customs even. I ask myself lots and lots of questions as I go through it the first time.
Then, I try and find the answers to my own questions. So that will consist of not only reading again but reading annotations by other people. Often, I will say to myself, “Gee, if someone else wrote a footnote about that, probably I should write a footnote.” … I will try not to say the same thing, but at least think about what that person wrote about. That’s sort of one layer of annotations, glossary, historical context, identification of places and people and so on. I also then try to read a lot of criticism – a lot of analysis of the work by other people to see what they found interesting, and then, that ends up going into notes. Sometimes it doesn’t. These books are not intended to be academically oriented. Critical writing about the books is less interesting to me than somebody who has done the same kind of sort of textual analysis that I’m doing.
And I have, as you can see, a large library of reference material, Victorian travel guides, encyclopedias – all kinds of reference material relating to the Victorian Age. One of my favorites is the 1888 Britannica. I try not to just reuse footnotes that I wrote for other books on the same point. That’s a temptation. Another part of any annotation [is finding] textual variants. I am fascinated by the craft of the writing and how the writer changed what came from his or her head and ended up going onto the page, ultimately. in the final product.
An 1880s poster for a stage adaptation of JEKYLL AND HYDE.
In THE NEW ANNOTATED STRANGE CASE OF DR. JEKYLL AND MR.HYDE we have three different texts, including the final product. In the footnotes, I’ve compared, at some length, the differences – different ways to phrase things, different ideas and characters. There’s even a character who appears in an early draft and is completely cut out. That interests me. I hope that is [something] special about this book … for someone who’s interested in the craft. Nobody’s done that before; Nobody’s done that kind of textual analysis.
Those are the notes, and then, we get sorted into the last part, which is the most fun: the pictures. I try to make these books visually interesting. I am selecting pictures from a multitude of sources. So I have illustrations from maybe six or seven different editions in this book – some of them choosing completely different scenes to illustrate, some of them choosing the same scene to illustrate – plus, covers of magazines, covers of comic books … all that in there to make it a pretty book.
Robert Louis Stevenson, author of STRANGE CASE OF DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE.
I assume you were familiar with the material beforehand. However, did anything surprise you while researching this project?
I think I was surprised by the craft, the art of it. People think of it as a simplistic story, but it’s meticulously done. I mean, when you go back, especially when you read it the second time, you know what’s going to happen. You know the secret, a big secret that Jekyll – by the way, we should have set this up. There is definitely a spoiler alert here! Once you know that Jekyll and Hyde are the same person, you see how meticulously Stevenson wrote the story – that it’s totally consistent with that premise, and it explains a lot of “huh” moments earlier in the book. And when you go back and you know the answer, you can see that he did everything extremely carefully so that it was the surprise it is. It’s this beautiful little carefully assembled meticulously mosaic kind of puzzle.
What is it about the Victorian era that lends itself so well to horror?
I’ve done several annotations and anthologies of ghost stories and other supernatural fiction from the 19th century. [The Victorians] were fascinated by [horror], I think, partly, they were fascinated because it was so contrary to the general spirit of the age. This was an age filled with itself, filled with the idea of reason – that they could know everything and that reason could explain everything … The Victorians [believed they] could conquer everything, be in charge of everything. The supernatural is a contradiction of that. It’s a way to explore that maybe we’re wrong, maybe that isn’t possible – that reason can explain everything. I mean, Sherlock Holmes is the opposite. Sherlock Holmes is the proof that everything can be mastered by the Victorians, but these other stories are are exploring exactly the opposite – that there are things that we will never understand. There are things that will never be explicable by reason, and I think that fascinated the Victorians, and it fascinates us still because, if anything, we’ve gotten worse. As science has marched on and we now talk about atoms and things like that, we realize how stupid we are and how little we know.
It’s scary thinking about what lies beyond our understanding.
Yeah. And specifically to JEKYLL AND HYDE, I think that this is really puncturing the hypocrisy of the age, that outwardly was all about propriety [and following the rules and behaving certain ways, not admitting that there were certain social problems and so on. In this book, we get into what’s wrong with Dr. Jekyll, you know? What is he covering up? The book is very vague. [It is] deliberately ambiguous about his youthful sins. We can guess what some of them were because we can see what Hyde gets into. Did Dr. Jekyll frequent prostitutes when he was a young man? Was he gay or closeted? We’re not sure, but I think there are enough hints there that there’s something about his past that he believes was very unseemly, very inappropriate. He’s covered it up, and he’s covered it up for himself, and he’s built this sterling reputation … He’s deeply engaged in good works to try to sort of redeem himself for having been a bad person in the past.
Miriam Hopkins and Fredric March in 1931’s DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE.
What’s the big thing you want readers to know about THE NEW ANNOTATED STRANGE CASE OF DR.JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE? Your sales pitch if you will.
This is a Victorian book that, like all classics, is timeless. It really isn’t about the Victorian era; It’s about every era. It’s about the human condition, and it will speak to you just as well today as when it was written 136 years ago. Don’t be put off by the fact that it was published so long ago. You’ll find the message. You’ll find the story just as compelling today because nothing’s changed about human beings.
Having spent a lot of time with this book now, I’m very happy to get it out into the world and have people join the club of enthusiasts by saying, “Yeah, that really is a good book, and it really does deserve careful attention.”
THE NEW ANNOTATED STRANGE CASE OF DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE from Mysterious Press hits the shelves on October 18, 2022. Grab yourself a copy at your preferred bookseller!
