‘Two and the Same’: Jack the Ripper and The Melodramatic Stage Adaptation of Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde

Abstract

Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), with its close concentration on possible violent tendencies concealed beneath respectability, saw a development in the Gothic novel tradition. Stevenson’s emphasis upon Hyde as an atavistic ancestor reflects nineteenth-century debates over degeneration, as the narrative taps into the reversal of progress through the exploration of latent animalistic impulses. The articulation of what may lurk beneath was carried to London’s Lyceum theatre in 1888, shortly before Jack the Ripper emerged. Scholarship identifies crossovers between the novella and play with the Ripper press, with a general agreement that the murders caused the play to abruptly close. However, this article asserts that before the curtain fell, a much more complex network was at play. In previous work on Stevenson’s narrative and the Ripper, the melodrama has tended to be considered as subsidiary to the novella. My close examination of the specific changes made to Jekyll and Hyde, and Richard Mansfield’s portrayal, demonstrates that more of an emphasis was placed on the superficiality of respectability in the play. The adaptation's depiction thus had a crucial role in shaping the public's shifting perceptions of the Ripper, as fuelled through newspapers in dynamic interactive engagements between the stage, press, and public consciousness.