Elaine Is Reading: Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde > Chapter 8 – Part 2

You’re listening to. Elaine is reading the Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, episode 14, chapter 8, part 2. Thanks for coming back for more. This is a continuation of my discussion of chapter eight, the Last Night. I stand by the fact that chapter eight is one of the best chapters in the entire novella. This is where the entire mystery comes to a head and then also just seems to abruptly, with no final resolution.

The people who are on the other side, and I said this in my last video, or the video before that, like the Dahmer movie that came out where Niecy Nash was playing the neighborhood that knew about what Dahmer was doing and was trying to get the police to believe her. The perspective of someone on the outside of the Dahmer murders, that’s not Dahmer or one of his victims or the police chasing him, but a neighbor, someone off to the side who’s watching the, you know, on the periphery, who’s seeing people go in or never come out or whatever. Right. Things like that. That’s a really interesting perspective. And the fact that this woman existed in real life makes it even more interesting.

You could tell the Dahmer story a million ways. You could tell it as Dahmer. You could tell it from the perspective of one of his victims. You could tell it from the perspective of the cops chasing him. We’ve seen it all, but never from the perspective of someone off to the side.

Someone who even, you know, maybe Dahmer didn’t notice at first. Just a neighbor, just somebody observing things. That’s new. That’s interesting. That is also a person who is affected by this, especially because no one believed her and she couldn’t get anyone to listen. Listen to what she was seeing happening. That is a new way of telling this story. Right?

Different perspectives offer different perspectives. Right. They give you a different way of not only telling the story, but of allowing the person, you know, experiencing the media to feel something differently.

There are other people in the world outside of Dahmer, the police and his victim.

There are people who are observing. There are people who are adjacent to the victim. There are people who are adjacent to Dahmer. And what must their perspectives be like? What was their experience with this story that you know. Right. There’s other people in the world.

And Jekyll and Hyde is the best example of that. There are so many people in this book who have not had their stories told.

And it’s absolutely mind blowing to me that literally the narrator of the story is one of those people that is. Has never had their version of the story told.

And that Poole, the primary butler who’s worked for this guy for 20 years and at the end of this book is bringing Utterson in and trying to save his master or trying to figure out what happened. His perspective has never been told.

And I think it would be terrifying to have been Poole. I think it would be sad to have been Poole. And to be honest with you, I’ll tell you right now, we never get the end of Poole’s story.

When Utterson leaves at the end of this chapter, when they find the letters and the will and everything that Jekyll left for them. And he’s like, I’m gonna go home and. And read all this stuff and then, you know, I’ll come back and we’ll get the police.

That is the last you hear of him. That is the last you hear of Utterson. That is the last you hear of Poole. You never. They never get the police. They. There’s never any ending to the book.

After he leaves, he goes home and sits in his study and he reads the. What’s called Dr. Lanyon’s narrative, which is a letter that Dr. Lanyon wrote to him that he had in his safe the whole time that never opened. And then he. Then you get Henry Jekyll’s full statement of case, which is the last, you know, from page 83 on, you get Dr. Jekyll’s diary.

And it ends with the words of Dr. Henry Jekyll, the end of his diary. So Utterson never gets the police.

We never know what happens to Poole. We never know what happens to, you know, what they.

I assume Utterson’s not going to publish and maybe he will. I mean, I don’t know what his plan was. He seemed very interested in keeping Jekyll’s reputation intact.

But there’s no ending to this.

There’s no ending where Utterson reads these two accounts and goes, oh my God, Jekyll was Hyde. And he did these weird experiments to figure out if he could be free and crazy and kill people and then also walk amongst society. Whatever it is that is in Jekyll’s diary. And to be honest with you, half of it is out of my head because I didn’t care.

But there’s no ending where he reads both, decides what he’s going to do, you know, goes back, calls the police, decides to tell Poole, like, look, we’re not going to tell anybody about this. We’re just going to keep it on the down low. We’re just going to say that, you know, whatever happened, happened because what happens is weird, right? Because when they finally get inside because you know Utterson’s like, I need to see you. I’m going to break down the door if I have to.

And when they finally break down the door, what they find is Hyde’s body, right? They find Hyde’s body on the ground because he took something. He took poison or swallowed poison. And he’s, he’s dying on the ground. He’s pretty much dead. He’s just twitching it says.

And when they roll the body over, it’s hide, it’s a little shriveled dwarf in Dr. Jekyll’s clothes, right?

But they can’t find Jekyll anywhere, right? So the theory that Hyde murdered Jekyll and like buried him somewhere eight days ago or whatever, they can’t find Jekyll’s body and there’s no way out of the room that they’re in. There’s one door and they broke the, the key is broken on the inside.

So there’s no way for Jekyll to have gotten out.

So they’re like, well maybe his body is in here somewhere because you know, Hyde, Hyde’s body is here and Hyde committed suicide. And Utterson has the wherewithal to think well this is not good because is this really a suicide? Because maybe Jekyll killed him and then fled, which is why he’s not here.

And if so we have to like think about the predicament, right, that Jekyll is going to be in if it comes out that he murdered somebody and has fled the police.

So he’s still very concerned about Jekyll’s reputation as to what went down.

If they went in and found, you know, Jekyll’s body and then they had to kill Hyde in self defense or something. That’s easy to explain to the police.

Everybody’s been looking for Hyde anyway because he already killed somebody. So if it turns out he killed Jekyll too, then the police come in and you know, story over. But that’s not what they found. They found Jekyll’s body, I mean Hyde’s body, but no Jekyll. So how do you explain that? Does that mean that Jekyll disappeared? He got out of the room some other way. The, the door is locked, the key is broken on the inside. He couldn’t have left that way.

Where is Jekyll?

So then you’re left with maybe he killed Hyde, but did he?

We didn’t see what happened. They run into the room. And Hyde has a vial in his hand. That seemed like some sort of poison. And all they see is that he killed himself.

But there’s no sign of Jekyll.

So never do we get the aftermath of that.

Utterson says, don’t tell anybody. I’m taking all these documents home. I’m going to read them, and then I’ll come back and we’ll call the police. And the next chapter is Dr. Lanyon’s letter to Utterson. Explaining what happened with Jekyll and why he died. Basically, why Lanyon ended up dying shortly after.

And then Dr. Jekyll’s diary that he leaves for Utterson to read. And he also leaves his will. In which he’s left everything to Utterson. And that was the other thing Utterson couldn’t understand. He’s like, this will was dated a while ago. And it says, it leaves everything to me. And the whole point on why they were suspicious of Hyde Is because originally Jekyll had changed his will to leave everything to Hyde.

That was the whole how this started, you know, with Utterson going, why did you do this? Who is this man to you? Why are you leaving him everything?

So now there’s a will that’s been changed. And it says, I’m leaving everything to Utterson. And Utterson’s like, this will has been here the whole time.

But Hyde didn’t destroy it. It’s a will that literally writes him out. But he didn’t throw it into the fire. It’s just sitting here. So why is the will sitting here? So there’s all these mysteries that happen at the very end of chapter eight. Where they run in, expecting to find Jekyll dead. And hide there, and they got bats, and they’re ready to take them out with fire pokers. But that’s not what they find. But then there’s no explanation or no answer for the lives that have been changed. At the end of this chapter, Utterson never comes back and says, we need to figure out what to do. I’ve just read Jekyll’s diary. And you’re not going to believe it. And neither is anybody else. And we can’t let this come out kind of thing. Like, what would Utterson do if, you know, after he read those. After he read Dr. Lanyon’s letter. Which I’ll get to in the next episode. And just his mind is blown and realizes why Dr. Lanyon died. And then he reads Henry Jekyll’s diary, his friend’s diary. And. And reads the most Wild science ever.

What does he do with that information?

We never know, because no one cares.

And Stevenson didn’t care to write it. Like, as far as he was concerned, that’s all you needed to know. And maybe that’s also where these adaptations come from. Because even Stevenson didn’t think of a proper ending to this story.

His ending is, Utterson goes home, reads two letters in a diary.

And the end.

As far as he’s concerned, the only thing the story ends on. Dr. Jekyll’s diary. Which is an explanation of everything that happened. And that. That’s all the readers need to know.

As far as even the author is concerned, nothing else matters.

Once you get the explanation. Once you get Jekyll’s explanation.

Then you have all the knowledge that you need. Everybody else is a throwaway.

And maybe that’s why every adaptation ignores everybody else in the story. Because even the author does. By the end, Utterson has been your narrator from page one.

The book opens with him, and the book closes with Jekyll’s voice.

So Utterson is completely disregarded. By the end of chapter eight.

He ceases to exist. Pool ceases to exist.

Literally.

The last line of chapter eight, the last dialogue we get from Utterson. Is.

I would say nothing of this paper. If your master has fled or is dead, we may at least save his credit. It is now 10. I must go home and read these documents in quiet. And I shall be back before midnight. When we shall send for the police.

That is Utterson’s last line of the book.

The last line of the chapter is, they went out, locking the door of the theater behind them in Utterson. Which once more, leaving the servants gathered around the fire in the hall. Trudged back to his office to read the two narratives in which this mystery was now to be explained.

That’s how chapter eight ends. And then chapter nine is Dr. Lanyon’s narrative.

So that’s it for Utterson.

That’s it for Poole.

That’s it for everybody else in the story.

I’m gonna go home, I’m gonna read.

And when I come back, we’ll call the police.

Never happens. If it does, we don’t know what happens. We don’t know how they explained this. I wouldn’t imagine that Utterson would take those documents in Jekyll’s diary. And share them with the public. Because that would be.

That would destroy his friend’s reputation and his friend’s memory. And you would never know.

But then did they leave it with just Jekyll killed Hyde. And Then fled somehow, but they don’t know how. So now his friend is just on the run from the law for the whole rest of his life. And that can’t be good for his reputation either. How did Utterson leave it? How did he explain this to people?

What happened to Paul and the rest of the servants? How did they ever get an explanation for what happened? Did Paul ever get an explanation to what happened to his master?

Did Stevenson’s wife burn the rest of the book? Maybe she. He wrote more and she burned it all and he just had to end it with the last, you know, two documents, right, to explain it all. Because it seems a weird way to end the story.

It seems highly bizarre to end the story like that, don’t you think?

So when I get to the end, when I get to chapter eight, I think to myself, this is the most interesting part of the book, bringing these two characters together. The two characters that have known and loved Henry Jekyll the longest, who have been watching this mystery unfold with no clear explanation of what’s going on and never truly getting it. Well, Utterson does because he gets to read the diary and everything. And he gets full blown. The full explanation of Gould never does.

I mean, and what’s going to happen if Jekyll’s on the run from the police?

They’re not going to get anything. It’s not like they were taken care of in his will, though. I would assume Utterson would do something to take care of the servants at least. Right, but like they’re just dropped from the story completely.

I mean, it’s like they, they don’t matter. And maybe that’s why they never matter in any adaptations.

And that’s hard for me to take because these people have been telling the story the whole time and then you just abandoned them in favor of letters.

I mean, I don’t know. Like, I. I have to think that maybe there was more and that was what got burned.

I have to look it up specifically. Or maybe you guys can when, you know, after you’ve watched this podcast.

I don’t know whether he wrote the whole book and his wife burned the whole book and he had to start over from scratch and this is the result.

Or whether he was partway through it and she burned most of it. I don’t know.

At some point it feels like the story is unfinished. It feels like the story stops and then all that’s left is these two letters that tell the rest of the story. For Stevenson, there’s no other bit left. So I don’t know because I didn’t look it up, you know, specifically what she burned or when she burned it. I mean, I suppose I could look it up now while I’m doing this, right. So that maybe we can get this question answered.

Let me see.

Actually, let me. Instead of doing it on my phone, I’ll just, I’ll just do it on the computer. So Robert Louis Stevenson wife burned his manuscript.

And let’s see if we can get some information here.

So it is well known is a well known anecdote that Robert Louis Stevenson’s wife, Fanny Stevenson burned the first draft of his novella the strange case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. She reportedly considered the initial manuscript to be utter nonsense and an allegory that Stevenson had missed. Following this, Stevenson rewrote the story and the revised version became the published text.

So there’s a few different, like, you know, AI thingamajiggies.

According to some accounts, Stevenson, possibly fueled by illness and medicinal cocaine, reacted by burning the manuscript himself. Other accounts suggest that his wife did it.

Stevenson subsequently rewrote the story, producing the version that is now famous. He reportedly rewrote the 300,000 word story by hand in three days.

So it seems like he wrote an entire first draft and then she burned the whole first draft. And then he rewrote it into what we have.

And what we have is very much something that feels unfinished. That’s how I feel about it.

And looking up, looking that up now, I could see where if you had already written something and then someone burned the whole thing and you had to go back and write it from scratch based on kind of what you remembered of the story or what you wanted the story to be. Maybe it might be a little choppy and it’s not going to come out the way that you had intended. And it feels very much like the book just fell off and he just, you know, went with what he had. And, and that’s unfortunate because I feel like drops off somewhere, especially with that year jump. We just go a year like it. It was very much a book about Utterson. And then all of a sudden we have a time jump a year ahead and then it’s all about Hyde murdering people and you know, all of this stuff. And I, I feel that somewhere in there is the change. I feel like he was writing a story that was truly about Utterson and Jekyll and Lanyon and these three men and their relationship and how, you know, they had, you know, Lanyon and Jekyll had differing opinions as scientists and blah Blah, blah. And it was slowly going that way and would build to sort of a monstrous conclusion.

Whereas it builds up, and then somewhere in the middle, we do a year ahead. It jumps a year ahead, and all of a sudden we’re back and Hyde is murdering people, and there’s all this chaos, and it doesn’t make sense, and it feels very jarring, and it feels like somebody burned it. And then he just sort of was like, well, we’ll just start from here. And that’s really sad to me, because the first part of the book and where I felt the book was going, especially by chapter eight, where we’re bringing Poole and Utterson together in a way that makes perfect sense as them being the people that cared about him the most to finish telling the story.

And we never get it. And I just. I think that sucks. It just sucks so bad.

So I.

I hope that again, this whole podcast, if you’ve survived listening to me talk this long, I. I hope that what you get is this understanding that this book has. There’s been just such a disservice to this story from. From the beginning, from his wife burning it or him burning it or whatever, you know, to how people have adapted it ever since then.

No one has done it proper justice. And we will never know what he had intended the book to be because someone else took that from us. Someone burned it, you know, his wife or whatever, or him.

And if he was addicted to cocaine, truly, or opium or any of those drugs back then, then that also expl how close this story goes to what it means for an addict to be an addict, and how that takes over your life and makes you a different person and how that affects the people who love you. That gives even more weight to what I’ve been saying about how the book feels like it was trying to be written versus what it ended up as. And it sucks that no one will give it the real justice of trying to write something closer to what he probably wanted the book to be. That’s what I would like to see somebody do. Not someone take the last, you know, chapter 83 and beyond and just keep making the same story over and over and over about Jekyll and Hyde. I want someone to read this and say, this could have been really interesting, but either Fanny burned it or he burned it or whatever, and now all we have is this, this. And maybe I could extrapolate right, from what the beginning of the story was, toss the end right, and start building from that midpoint where it jumps ahead a year and turns Into a completely different book. I would like someone to write an actual story about this addict. And maybe if you’re going to be creative, be creative in that way.

Tell me the story of.

Of this perspective about Utterson, about Lanyon and their relationship. And Poole’s relationship with Jekyll. Tell me the story of what it looks like to watch your friend get lost in addiction and destroy himself. And in the end commit suicide. Someone needs to tell that story. Because that is the story that I really feel like Stevenson was trying to tell. And again, I’m not a historian. I’m not classic literature nutball. I’m just a regular old person who just happened to decide to read this book. And was astonished at what I found. I don’t know all of the backstory of everything with Stevenson. I don’t know what kind of person he was. If there is any information about what kind of person he was back then. If he was a cocaine addict, if his wife really did burn his manuscript. Or if he accidentally burned it in a cocays. I don’t know what the actual truth is, and I don’t think it matters. I read the book and my feeling is the first part of the book is true to what the story was trying to be. And then the last half of it is just what happens when someone burns your manuscript and you have to start from scratch.

That’s how I see it and that’s what I feel as a reader. Because it feels so different going forward. And then there’s parts that feel similar, like chapter eight feel similar to the beginning of the book. It’s like maybe those parts were saved or something. And then everything in between is just a mess that he had to put together. Because in three days, because she burned the rest.

I wish somebody would truly make this story and truly tell it in a way that I think he might have been trying to tell it. And you, of course, can never know. But it just would be nice to see someone tell the story as written as is at least to give it that attempt at respect. And that attempt at telling it the way that maybe possibly he would have wanted to tell it initially before it was destroyed.

So with that, I hope that I’ve given you guys maybe a different way of looking at this things. Maybe a different way of coming at especially this story.

As far as you know, it having been one thing. And then in three days became something completely different. And that’s why it feels off and it feels unfinished. And Utterson’s story is just ignored at the end. But we literally Started with him walking in the park with his friend, but it ends with him just going home to read. And then there’s nothing left. That’s weird.

So, if anything, maybe I’ve inspired you guys to maybe think more about Utterson. To maybe think more about what the story is trying to say.

And how it really is even more relevant to the modern world when it comes to dealing with addiction.

Navigating friendships that have addiction in the center of them.

What it means to, you know, have male friendships for long periods of time.

And how they may change. Especially like with Lanyon and Jekyll. They’re both scientists, but they. They went in two different kind of directions.

And how professionally that affects their relationship again as men. There’s no women in this book. There’s no, you know, women getting in the way. This is a book about male friendships and male relationships and colleagues and. And longtime friends and disagreements and gentlemen’s disagreements, as well as trying to protect the reputation of your oldest friends who might be going, you know, in a downward spiral. And how do you do that in the most respectful way? How do you try to save someone that can’t be saved or doesn’t want to be saved?

Those are such interesting concepts, and they’re powerful and emotional concepts that could be even more emotional told through the lens.

Through a male lens, right, Of. Of telling a story about men, you know, that care about each other and are trying to help each other and how they navigate those relationships. And even if you want to look at Jekyll as a kind of representation of a man struggling with the two sides of himself. Right, the side that society is dictating you be. And the side that you really are inside, that’s in the book, too.

I think that that would be such a great film or story or series or whatever, if somebody wanted to make it. Especially if it was a male writer and director that took the reins of that. Instead of trying to turn it into a love story like Mary Riley or just a murderer mystery or just stupid shit. There’s actually a deep story in that deserves to be told. And there’s characters that deserve to be known.

So I hope that I at least have given you some knowledge of these characters. And maybe an appreciation that you didn’t have before if you did read it. And maybe just a new curiosity if you haven’t read it.

I’m not going to skip the last two chapters. I am going to do episodes on them, even though I hate them.

And I think that the book should have ended with Lanyon’s letter only because I just hate this psycho of it all, you know, the explanation of everything.

It would have been such a beautiful mystery, and it would have left it open more to an interpretation of. Was he a drug addict? And Dr. Hyde was just sort of what becomes of people when they’re addicted to opium? Like, they shrink up because they don’t eat, you know, and they. They really do change, and they. Their faces change. And if you’ve ever known anyone who’s been addicted to, like, hard drugs, you know that the body, the face, the. The personality can change so drastically that they do seem like another person. And again, I’ll die on that hill that Jekyll and Hyde is, you know, about drug abuse. Ultimately, it’s a. It’s not about all of these other things that people have tried to make it about. I think it’s about wrestling with the changing world, trying to find your way of fitting into that changing world, trying to figure out who you are in a changing world and dabbling in things that make you feel more free and not as controlled and how that can spiral into abuse and addiction.

All of these things are in there, and they’re worth exploring.

And I want to stress that the ending, you know, Jekyll’s diary is a way of looking at all of what I just said. It definitely touches on those factors. And I’ll.

I’ll get into it more and I’ll reread it myself, because I only read it once, and I was so irritated by the whole thing that it kind of went out of my head, and I. I just was so bothered by it. And that’s when I kind of decided to even do this podcast is when I read that last chapter of the book, and I was like, I don’t care about that. I care about the rest of this book, and I want to talk about the rest of this book. So now that I’m coming back to the last chapter, I will read it again and I will get a.

I will get into it and talk about it, and maybe I’ll have the same feeling. Maybe I’ll have a different feeling. I don’t know.

But I hope you’ll come back and stick around for that last chapter.

And again, I hope that I’ve given you maybe something different to think about through these past episodes and that maybe you’ll look at classic literature differently and just life in general differently, from a different perspective and consider an outside perspective, not just your own. Because, again, there’s other people in the world other than you who have their own realities and their own perspectives of things. And understanding those is important. It’s part of empathy. It’s part of building better relationships with people, is recognizing that they have a view that’s not yours. And it’s worth it to try and understand what that view is and learn about it and appreciate it.

Yeah.

So thank you again for tuning in, and I promise not to wait like 80 million months to do the next chapter, chapter nine.

Hopefully I’ll get to it in another couple weeks. Give me another couple weeks and I’ll.

I’ll revisit and try to get everything edited and put up and jump right into the next chapter so you guys don’t have to wait too long.

See you soon and be good to yourselves and everyone else.

[00:32:29] Speaker B: End of part two.

Thanks for listening to my discussion of chapter eight of the Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Coming up in chapter nine, we finally get the entire perspective of Dr. Lanyon and find out why he actually died.

I might die, too, if I sat through the horror show that he did. Jesus Christ on a bicycle. It’s nasty. Y’, all, thanks for your support and see you soon.