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306 The nineteenth century
there came, I thought, a change – he seemed to swell – his face
became suddenly black and the features seemed to melt and
alter – and the next moment, I had sprung to my feet and leaped
back against the wall, my arm raised to shield me from that
prodigy, my mind submerged in terror.
‘O God!’ I screamed, and ‘O God!’ again and again; for there
before my eyes – pale and shaken, and half fainting, and groping
before him with his hands, like a man restored from death –
there stood Henry Jekyll!
This is the classic story of the alter ego, personifying good and evil in
one character. This dichotomy, essential to Calvinist thinking, runs
through all Stevenson’s works, and can be seen to embody a part of
the general Victorian crisis of identity – where good and bad cannot
be easily delineated, where moral ambiguity, masks of social behaviour
covering up shocking secrets, and the disturbing psychological depths
of the human character are revealed. Stevenson is a writer who reveals
realism behind the social mirror. Such writing caused even further
discomfort for Victorian readers.
The ‘double’ in Scottish fiction can be traced back to James Hogg’s
The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824). This
was one of the first novels which could be called ‘psychological’ in its
examination of an evil alter ego – the devil in the seemingly normal
person. Hogg plays with point of view and psychology in a surprisingly
modern way. He anticipates the concern with masks and faces which
was to be exploited so successfully by Stevenson and Oscar Wilde
more than sixty years later.
In The Amateur Emigrant (1892–95), a travel book which examines
the phenomenon of emigration to and across the United States – at a
time when people were flooding into that land of freedom and hope
– Stevenson summed up in one simple phrase much of the
philosophising of the age: ‘We all live by selling something.’ He thus
undercuts with directness and simplicity the moral and philosophical
ideas of mid-Victorian society. The end-of-the-century capacity for
such brevity, without moralising, reaches its highest point in the
epigrammatic and paradoxical witticisms of Oscar Wilde.