Gothic fictions in the late Victorian era presented the conditions for a shift in the conception of how character works. During this period, the creation of prominent literary personae such as Jekyll and Hyde, Sherlock Holmes, and Dorian Gray came to rely less on the personality of their fictional identities and more on their ability to stand in for and elicit reactions to complex social, political, and economic debates. By this I do not mean that these characters are “flat” in the sense E. M. Forster proposes when he states in Aspects of the Novel (1927) that such characters are, in their purest form, “constructed round a single idea or quality” (103–04). What I mean is rather that the specific manner in which these characters are composed has been directed in such a way so as to deny the evolution of emotional, intellectual, and moral traits in favor of a narrative approach that employs fictional identity as a location for the representation of important social questions. In the final decades of the nineteenth century, character, I suggest, provides a particularly important site for writers to construct difficult arguments.

Along the same lines, the reevaluation of character in the late Victorian era also entailed a reassessment of the concept as a collection of features marking members of certain social and economic classes. To take a case in point, the late nineteenth-century ideal of the Victorian gentleman met its decline as a result of political and social unrest when the growing socialist movement that began in the 1870s tarnished the integrity of economic powers. Skepticism – and, in the case of the Black Monday riots that took place in Hyde Park on February 8^th, 1886, insubordination – towards the economic hierarchy forced England's class system to maintain itself through the incorporation of dissent as it reinforced its ranks to weather the social upheaval that spanned the 1880s. Images of bourgeois corruption were a common staple of late Victorian public discourse, assuming prominence not merely in the pamphlets and speeches commonly found in radical activity, but also in popular novels such as Anthony Trollope's The Way We Live Now (1875) and the daily writing of W. T. Stead for the Pall Mall Gazette. Patrick Brantlinger, in The Reading Lesson: The Threat of Mass Literacy in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction, has argued that the late Victorian anxiety about increasing access to the tools of cultural production for women and members of the working class was a common preoccupation for Victorian men of means. As a forerunner to and agent of social change, the proliferation of text by cultural others implied a proliferation of criticism, confirming the notion that the professional class could not brand itself an authority without also allowing rival parties to articulate their belief that the nation's most privileged men had become agents of moral and economic corruption. The distribution of intellectual capital to marginalized groups meant that the narratives of bourgeois identity set forth by the professional class were subject to revision as marginalized groups gained the opportunity to reinscribe class identity on their own terms.

As a text that is emblematic of the reassessment of character as an aesthetic category and social marker, Robert Louis Stevenson's 1886 novella the Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde employs the malleability of fictional identity to illustrate the superficial nature of social standing for individuals and groups. Jekyll and Hyde is often read through the position of its title characters as a novel about psychological doubling and atavism, an interpretation that reflects, among other things, the nineteenth-century's scientific and intellectual uncertainty about the perceived link between evolution and social ills.Footnote ¹ Taken at a glance, recent interest in cultural interpretations of the novel has, among its central accomplishments, helped topple Jekyll and Hyde from its comfortable position as an archetypal myth outlining the internal tension between what Henry James first called the “difficulty of being good and the brutishness of being bad” (Partial 170). At the same time, while the turn towards cultural history has helped reconstitute the novel as a text that is substantially more relevant to its nineteenth-century context than readers have historically believed, the emphasis on Victorian pathologies in so many contemporary readings has partially obscured the complex web of social relations that hold Jekyll and Hyde together. These forces are important to the novel's interpretation because, despite Jekyll's claim in his full statement of the case “that man is not truly one, but truly two,” the novel's fragmented structure suggests that his character lacks an identifiable interior essence and is perhaps best understood as a composite sketch of the various stories, incidents, and letters the narrative collects from independent observers (48). In accepting the novel's interest in matters of cultural authority, it seems fruitful to further investigate the way Jekyll and Hyde manipulates the discourse conventions that drive the sociological relationships between members of the novel's urban culture. Put succinctly, the value system that spares other members of the professional class while exposing Jekyll's fraudulence can be productively understood as hegemonic in its assumption that the existing set of social relations are the best possible, even in the face of contradictory evidence.

Consequently, then, in an effort to illustrate the role of hegemony in maintaining class hierarchy, both in the novel and under the unique social conditions associated with late Victorian culture, I will show how cross-class negotiations influence the atmosphere of horror that plagues gentlemanly culture in Stevenson's text. I approach this study well aware that the critical reception of Jekyll and Hyde has recently given way to interpretations rooted in narrative strategies and social position. As an illustration of this point, in her exploration of servant voices and the politics of narration, Jean Fernandez has insisted that the novel initiates a reworking of cultural authority whereby Jekyll's servants, who begin the novel as gatekeepers to his secrets, undergo an imaginative reawakening that employs the “presence, immediacy, and consciousness” of their speech to commence the production of subversive counternarratives with the potential to dismantle the edifice of bourgeois identity (373). While Fernandez admits that the novel's narrative instabilities complicate its commentary on class, she asserts that her goal is not to misrepresent Stevenson's literary stereotypes as analogs for London's labor relations so much as to suggest that the domestic servant's position – a narrative reference point in so much of nineteenth-century fiction – also forms a vital (albeit repressed) point of interest in Jekyll and Hyde. Making use of Marxist analysis and deconstruction, Fernandez reads the uncertainty of the servant's position at the novel's conclusion as a sign of the cracks inherent in its seemingly rigid class borders. With the seeds of dissent firmly planted in the novel, the next step, she suggests, is simply to wait: “The working classes and their narratives will, perversely, continue to reside within both bourgeois texts and townhouses, making for a clamor of narratives, and the rule of Mrs. Beeton” – the Victorian author and authority on household management – “is at an end” (385).

When reduced to its basic premise, Fernandez's interest in the circulation of public discourse is extremely useful to the interpretation of Jekyll and Hyde in that it moves discussion away from the red herring of Jekyll's criminal desires and locates the novel's interest in the production and maintenance of class privilege. Although I agree with Fernandez that Jekyll and Hyde has a significant interest in the production and maintenance of class identities, and that the servants’ narratives represent an important but frequently overlooked aspect of the novel, I am reluctant to endorse a reading that undercuts the open design of the novel to place peripheral elements like Jekyll's servants at the center of the text. Moreover, I am at odds with her assertion that “an indeterminate reading public's presence, and an awareness for the circulation of unpoliced subaltern narratives within the masterless bourgeois home, are all we are left with in the end” because it allows her to consider “Dr. Lanyon's Narrative” and “Henry Jekyll's Full-Statement of the Case,” what constitute the final chapters in Jekyll and Hyde's denouement, only insofar as those documents fail to “reestablish bourgeois hegemony and repress servant narration” – an interpretation that raises the troubling question of scope (383). Simply put, by selectively emphasizing the importance of servant narratives at the expense of other texts, Fernandez ignores evidence that the novel's interest is not in class conflict, understood here as the direct or indirect battle between the “haves” and the “have-nots,” so much as in the difficulty of maintaining class identities for the novel's gentleman. Thus, while her analysis provides the foundation for a new look at Jekyll and Hyde, it stands on dubious grounds in its allusions to structural change.

Jekyll and Hyde is not a cliffhanger. The inclusion of lengthy documents from Lanyon and Jekyll point to Utterson's continued control of the public realm after Hyde's death and suggest that, whatever we are to make of the novel's peculiar course of events, we can assume that the status quo will persist without interruption. But rather than abandon the question of class completely, I want to propose the terms for a more refined understanding of how class identities are maintained in relation to the novel's conception of fear. I argue that a sociological approach to issues of class, in contrast to Fernandez's method, might draw from an understanding of hegemony to emphasize that conflicts typically occur within groups – not between them – and that when altercations do take place between groups, it is usually by proxy with limited effect on existing social hierarchies.Footnote ² Specifically, then, this essay identifies the evolution of the Victorian gentleman's identity through three scenes in the novel: first, the projection of class identity represented by Utterson's performance in the opening paragraph; second, the role of rumor, speculation, and resistance in distorting class privilege amongst London's residents after Hyde's murder of Sir Danvers Carew; and third, the momentary retreat and restylization of the gentleman's code of conduct in the novel's conclusion. Throughout I demonstrate how Jekyll and Hyde's interpretation resists the neatly structured opposition between lower and upper classes in favor of a more nuanced understanding of how interclass dialogue circulates and influences change. Ultimately, I suggest that the animosity that plays out between classes in the public sphere, while palpable, fails to target the Victorian gentleman directly and is instead mediated by a reasonable center of debate: Mr. Utterson.

By situating the Victorian gentleman at the point at which exclusionary identities must defend themselves in the public realm and at which the city composes itself around the acceptance and rejection of Jekyll's character, Stevenson created a transparent figure that could demystify the concentration of power in a tenuous and uncertain age – a characterization that reflects the unique social position of male privilege in the 1880s and 90s. For the mask of the Victorian gentleman, as James Eli Adams notes in his exhaustive study of nineteenth-century masculinity, was a basic component in the elevation of the gentleman's status above that of his contemporaries.Footnote ³ Confronted with a public social sphere too vast to be controlled, the gentleman used his isolation as a structuring tool to generate power and distinction. If public knowledge of the lower orders was absolute and could be found through the presentation of sanctioned and unsanctioned information evinced in the form of statistical data, union protests, and investigative journalism, the gentleman recognized that the assurance of an upper-class identity necessarily entailed some form of privacy if not secrecy. And if the representation of poverty depended on tropes of exposure and vulgarity, the gentleman understood that, by contrast, maintaining the appearances of affluence would demand persistent control and restraint.

Making use of his access to institutional power through privileged associations with the official tools of cultural production in the medical, educational, political, artistic, and military fields, the Victorian gentleman paired his professional connections with others to confirm his place at the top of contemporary social hierarchies. But his power was not absolute, for while the gentleman could use his status to gain access to the centers of cultural production within which he wielded considerable influence, that influence mattered little when it came time to defend his position at the basic level of the streets. As Adams notes in his study, at a certain point, the logic of a selfhood that can only be displayed through the practice of self-repression becomes extremely paradoxical, generating a crisis in representation for social performers who can no longer act. When men of the professional class fail to actively assert their dominance over the cultural landscape and instead turn inward to the isolation of secret societies and fraternal organizations, of private studies and their homes, the mask of the Victorian gentleman threatens to become the mask of shame.

Stevenson initiates his discussion of the practices of isolation that accompany the performance of class in the novel's opening paragraph. This lengthy description of Mr. Utterson's character warrants careful attention for the sense of interiority it seeks to depict. The novel begins with the declaration that, “Mr. Utterson the lawyer was a man of a rugged countenance, that was never lighted by a smile; cold, scanty and embarrassed in discourse; backward in sentiment; lean, long, dusty, dreary, and yet somehow lovable” before embarking on an extended description of the lawyer's reserved demeanor and religious conviction (7). Given the ambiguity that accompanies so much of the plot in Jekyll and Hyde, the use of concrete detail in this passage underscores an important point: this is the Victorian gentleman in the flesh (Figure 29). From the very beginning, Utterson is set forth as a quintessential representative of his class – a man who is public even in his privacy, comfortably displaying emotional reserve in a set of carefully planned appearances and highly stylized acts. The words that comprise his description not only provide the most salient image in the novel but present the thesis to which Stevenson will continually return and contest.

Figure 29.

Charles Raymond Macauley, “Mr. Utterson.” Illustration from the chapter “Story of the Door” in Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (New York: Scott-Thaw, 1904), 14.

The implication here is that, unlike Jekyll, Utterson can easily negotiate his contemporary landscape without falling victim to the threat of gross improprieties. Lacking the “aversion to the dryness of a life of study” that propels his friend towards “undignified” pleasures, Utterson thrives upon the mastery of the self (52). His actions are partially the product of self-denial and his moral framework, but they also speak to an inner longing for distinction through the valorization of his presence in the public sphere. After all, it is not that Utterson passes his days in quiet seclusion, toiling over the law, but rather that he gains pleasure through his interaction with others, when he is given the opportunity to incorporate subtle alterations to his normally brusque form. In addition to the physical connection he receives from Sunday walks with his cousin Enfield – which comprise “the chief jewel of each week” despite their sparse conversation and singularly dull appearance – Utterson longs for tasteful moments in which he can let down his guard and transmit the impression of a private emotion covertly shared (8). Whether amongst colleagues or with his fellow citizens, he carries himself with an air of authority, deftly manipulating his features to ensure the viability of his status and respect.

In other words, Utterson most clearly emerges through his interactions as an image: a perfect, self-regulating ideal. But if he is a man known for his mystery, Stevenson implies that he is also a figure who is self-conscious about his position. Like most of the novel's characters, Utterson resides in that social network Elaine Showalter has called “Clubland”: an exclusively male sphere designed to reinforce the solidity of patriarchal values in an era of gendered uncertainty.Footnote ⁴ As an informal system of homosocial relations structured on long-standing bonds rooted in university educations, Clubland provides a restricted setting within which men of power may meet and discuss the issues of the day. Here the reader discovers a vast collection of class markers – lavish dinners, expensive artwork, vintage wines – not to mention a lingering sense that the novel's characters have cut off ties to the outside world. Showalter argues, for example, for the need to situate the novel within a narrow community of middle-aged bachelors who have “no relationships with women” – or for that matter, rival cultures – “except as servants” (108). Working from this assumption, she goes on to outline the “shadow of homosexuality” that overwhelms the community's members and suggests its role in “revealing [the] forbidden emotions between men that constituted the dark side of patriarchy” (107).

When taken in its entirety, Showalter's work on Jekyll and Hyde succeeds in maintaining a keen eye for the biographical and historical context surrounding Stevenson's life, as well as in its efforts to effectively document a cultural shift in theatrical and film adaptations away from the novel's suspiciously homoerotic plot. Yet despite these accomplishments, the foundation of her argument remains troublesome. In privileging the territory that protects Clubland from rival groups, Showalter operates on a fairly reductive notion of social relations that ignores the wealth of connections Stevenson actively depicts in his representation of law enforcement, domestic service, and urban life. If we follow her on this course and read the novel in terms of the sexual corruption she finds in the “mating” between Jekyll and Hyde, we have little choice but to conclude that in investigating the matter and upholding the order of this tight-knit community, Utterson is primarily an agent of scientia sexualis – affirming the value of privacy and coding the novel's agenda in patently Victorian terms (109).Footnote ⁵

But Stevenson's novel is more complex. His characters do not merely occupy a bleak Foucauldian world where the observance of private spheres triumphs continuously in the production of knowledge. Their lives are, rather, overcome with connections to each other that form the foundation for a common desire to act. Part of the problem with Showalter's reading rests in her desire to offer a clear sense of limits, to affirm Clubland's position as a static, physical space that automatically confers status upon its members and ensures the order of power dynamics through the protection of information from the public sphere. Showalter fails to recognize, however, that in the novel gentlemanly culture has no fixed location or positioning; it exists only in its creative capacity to alter public space. In illustrating the importance of audience as a precondition for the performance of class identity, Stevenson pinpoints the ways in which social environments do not exist in isolation but are held together by the networks and thoroughfares that unite their constituencies – be they the parlor, the club, or the street. For failed cultural negotiations always take place in Jekyll and Hyde when private identities are publicly challenged – whether that public resides inside of Clubland or not.

It follows, then, that the recognition of the gestures and appearances that supply the foundation for the Victorian gentleman's identity in Stevenson's description of Utterson pave the way for the location of cultural authority, already troubled by incursions upon Clubland's spaces, to split further at those points at which the novel shifts back to the public realm. Midway through Jekyll and Hyde, Stevenson allows public speculation to reach its apex in the media blitz surrounding the death of Sir Danvers Carew, the respected Member of Parliament whom Hyde bludgeons to death during a brief altercation in the street. Often dismissed as one of Jekyll and Hyde's narrative dead-ends, “The Carew Murder Case” is in fact crucial to the novel's course of events: Stevenson's decision to cast the scene as a sensational newspaper account not only identifies a primary audience for Hyde's performance in the London citizenry but begins the process of reevaluating his character in the public realm. When the Carew Murder is focalized through the eyes of a London maid (ironically enough, one of Jekyll's own household), identities collapse as the mechanisms of metropolitan cultural production confirm the crisis in cultural authority that plagues the images, locations, and interpretations of the professional class. If we have previously been led to believe that Hyde's violent outbursts are limited and that, with the exception of an occasional snarl, he can carry himself as a gentleman, his actions in this passage undermine all notions of his character's authority, thrusting the vestiges of propriety that remain in his person into a realm of grotesque parody through the very transparency of his acts.

Consider, specifically, Stevenson's tone as he follows the maid's account of Hyde's attack on Carew. The author describes Hyde acting “with ape-like fury. . . 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” (22). In filtering “the horror of these sights and sounds” through the maid's perspective, Stevenson points towards the simulacrum Hyde: a figure that is more caricature than real (22). For in these lines we no longer find ourselves in contact with the gruff figure first displayed in Enfield's “Story of the Door,” the elusive authority Poole notes in his conversation with Utterson, or even the foul soul the lawyer sees for himself in his brief altercation with Hyde on the side street just outside of Jekyll's home (Figure 30). This Hyde is barbaric. It is worth noting here that rather than expand upon our perception of Jekyll's double as a complex and engaging character at this crucial point in the narrative, which does in fact mark his final appearance as a viable figure who can actively influence the novel's events, Stevenson forces us to associate Hyde with an abstract form that has fallen victim to the generic limits of melodrama in his lack of emotional depth. In so doing, he suggests that the true source of Hyde's monstrosity rests not in what is hidden so much as what gets revealed and how. For in this moment Hyde himself becomes an image – a synthetic projection that defines the individual even as it lacks the emotional and biological complexities necessary to ensure an organic, spontaneous sense of self. Preconfigured as “the other,” it is fitting that he does not speak in this passage, brandishing his cane instead to register his identity in the public record with a single, representative act (21). There certainly appears, on the surface, no need to embellish his psychological motivations, for the gestures that delineate his appearance also determine his existence, employing the narrative of the real, as Hayden White contends, to impose a formal coherence on events.Footnote ⁶

Figure 30.

Charles Raymond Macauley, “Clubbed him to the earth.” Photomechanical illustration from the chapter “The Carew Murder Case” in Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (New York: Scott-Thaw, 1904), 62.

As part of the novel's argument, the public recognition of Hyde's “monstrosity” allows Stevenson to experiment with a shift in cultural authority through the proliferation of speech. Upon leaving the narrative limits of the “The Carew Murder Case,” Stevenson describes, in the space of the city, an impassioned series of exchanges that defy our understanding of the gentleman's ability to define himself in opposition to the public as a credible social force. Indeed, everything about the backlash to the murder suggests an uncontrollable exchange of text that challenges our perception of who speaks and with what authority. Initially, the narration observes how bold-faced newsboys scream out the headline – “Special edition. Shocking murder of an M.P.” – from their perch on the side of the street (27). From there, it goes on to detail the proliferation of handbills and the donation of thousands of pounds in reward for the successful apprehension of the culprit, whose actions have come to be unanimously regarded as a “public injury” and total violation of caste (28). “Sucked down in the eddy of the scandal,” the “tales” of Hyde's cruelty that emerge in the weeks that follow – “at once so callous and violent, of his vile life, of his strange associates, of the hatred that seemed to have surrounded his career” – imply a turn away from vengeance towards a broader reevaluation of class (27, 28). Or, to put it another way, it would appear that in a world so completely overwhelmed with images that their place of construction cannot be assured, the location of power becomes displaced to such a degree that it can only be spoken of generally as the discourse that fills the public realm.

The clever trick of Jekyll and Hyde, however, is the way in which the hegemonic influence of the Victorian professional class allows the group to position itself as a reasonable power that retains the status and function of authority during times of moral panic. From this scene, which establishes the height of speculation about members of that group, the subsequent incursion upon Jekyll's laboratory cabinet marks a point of negotiation whereby Utterson positions the status of the English gentleman above Jekyll's servants for a second time. The most compelling feature of Utterson's actions in these pages is not the struggle in which he participates but the fact that the restoration of the Victorian gentleman as a social category does not reflect a deliberate act of self-interest on Utterson's part so much as a collective endorsement. Let us not forget that Poole seeks out Utterson in his home after a week of his master's disturbing behavior (Figure 31). Right or wrong, Utterson is presented to the reader as an exceptional figure whose status amongst the novel's characters is widely recognized. When he arrives with Poole at Jekyll's estate, there is an air of anxiety amongst the servants, who stand “huddled together” around the hearth “like a flock of sheep” (34). Their appeal to Utterson's leadership in this climactic scene alludes to an unspoken endorsement of the lawyer's expertise as a regulatory force. The ensuing cross-class coalition that opens the social hierarchy to expunge Jekyll from the community is thus symptomatic of the novel's understanding of social power as a force that is more complicated than a matter of domination and subordination.

Figure 31.

Charles Raymond Macauley, “Mr. Utterson, sir, I'm afraid.” Illustration from the chapter “The Last Night” in Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (New York: Scott-Thaw, 1904), 104.

Periods of crisis are always fascinating to view from an objective standpoint because they reveal so much about the way ideology works. In the case of Jekyll and Hyde, Jekyll's retreat from public life has given his servants ample reason to show concern for their master's competence. At the same time, their apprehension for his well-being remains a separate issue from the justification for the class hierarchy inside of Clubland. For the servants, Jekyll's downward spiral represents an aberration in the social order. Utterson's leadership, in contrast, leaves little concern that the moral compass of the professional class is waning. Instead of the first step towards a transformation of class roles, the events of “The Last Night” can be more appropriately read as inspiring a concerted effort to preserve the social order. Pay close attention, for example, to the language Utterson employs in this climactic scene:

Here Utterson solidifies his authority with the servant class as a benevolent figure in the social hierarchy who is concerned with matters of consensus. Jutting forward with renewed vigor, he supplants the rumors and speculations of the street to set forth his own position as the principle agent of justification. In this passage, Utterson speaks with two voices, the first of which establishes his authority, and the second of which links that authority to the will of the masses. His position is thus threatening to Jekyll for its interpellation and persuasive to the servants because it promises protection from the disorder within their home and a restoration of the common good. When Stevenson tells us that “Utterson, once more leaving the servants gathered about the fire in the hall, trudged back to his office to read the two narratives in which this mystery was now to be explained” after the discovery of Hyde's body, we can assume that restoration has taken place, for the lack of a more substantial outburst from Jekyll's servants can be explained through Antonio Gramsci's dictum that oppression takes the form of common sense (Stevenson 41).Footnote ⁷ Jekyll's servants are, in other words, content to assume passive roles during times of conflict because the potential for individual gains does not validate the risk of harm.

One objection that skeptics could raise to this reading is that the text's ambiguity impedes the kind of unified interpretation offered in the preceding paragraphs. After all, it is certainly true that the central question on most readers’ minds at the end of Jekyll and Hyde is, “What does Utterson do after he reads the statements from Lanyon and Jekyll?” Still, the problem with this question – beyond the fact that it is unanswerable – is that it assumes a level of objective reality that the novel, as a work of gothic fiction, does not support. At its core, Jekyll and Hyde's emphasis on supernatural forces leaves little opportunity for the reader to imagine an afterlife for characters beyond the novel's conclusion. Instead, the exaggerated properties of the story, which are akin to those found in Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) and Henry James's The Turn of the Screw (1898), are contained within a carefully manipulated and neatly unified atmosphere of suspense. The death of a “toxic” character in each of these novels’ conclusions allows for the restoration of the social order. The remaining characters, who have no capacity to change, do not feel the repercussions of their actions so much as the reader him or herself, who takes the novels’ lessons (i.e., “that man is not truly one, but truly two”) from the page.

In conclusion, then, my point is not that we should view the novel as a historical representation of class hierarchy in Victorian England but that we gain a more thorough appreciation of the novel's literary interests if we acknowledge the historically specific issues inscribed in Stevenson's narrative aesthetic. In 1846, two years before the publication of the Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848) and forty years before the publication of Jekyll and Hyde, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels presented the argument in The German Ideology that, “The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas: i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force,” a position that became more true in the advanced media environment of the fin de siècle (64). The values that Utterson, as a paragon of Victorian masculinity, upholds – sophistication, reserve, and should push come to shove, the willingness to use calculated force – present a transcendent ideal of English masculinity that confirms Marx and Engels's prophecy regarding the function of the ruling class as a cultural center. A utopian reading of the novel – even one couched in claims of indeterminacy – undercuts the hegemonic impulse that protects the members of Clubland. Moreover, it distorts the novel's narrative interest in fear. Jekyll and Hyde is frightening because it shows what happens when boundaries are challenged, as opposed to when those boundaries are dissolved. It reminds us that there is a difference between social hierarchies, which are, like Utterson, composed, and natural hierarchies, which are not. Thus, while there is a crisis of identity in Jekyll and Hyde, it centers on the problem of class maintenance for the novel's gentleman – not a shift in class relations. As Victorian scholars continue to reexamine the literary output of the 1880s and 90s, all will do well to keep in mind the link between emerging strategies of representation and their correlating cultural concerns.