The Character as Construct: Mr Hyde in The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde

In the last posts, we’ve been having a look at the way in which Stevenson creates his characters in The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. This Victorian novella remains popular at GCSE, and it’s really important to have a good understanding of the characters before you take your exam.

Having looked in some depth at Henry Jekyll and Gabriel Utterson, we now take a look over the next two posts at the character of Edward Hyde, exploring how Stevenson creates him. We’ll look at some of the deeper meaning and contextual details that help us understand Jekyll’s famous alter ego.

From the very beginning, Stevenson lets us know that Hyde will be a central character in the novel, simply because of the title. We’ll spend a little time in this post thinking about the social, scientific and literary context which gave rise to Hyde. In the next, we’ll look at how he is portrayed in the novella.

#1 The choice of Hyde’s name

From the very beginning, before we even start reading, Stevenson is keying into our understanding of the word ‘Hide’, playing on it in ways we later come to understand when Utterson says, ‘If he be Mr Hyde… I shall be Mr Seek.’

It’s not simply so Utterson can make a pun on this name. The word hide has many connotations, not least that of being concealed. The fact that Stevenson makes Utterson pun on his name just draws even more attention to it. Stevenson keys us into the idea that Jekyll’s alter ego is something that he has been hiding within him, not unlike we all might hide away sides of our personality that conform less with social norms. The other meaning of ‘hide’ also relates to animal skins, and although we might not think this as evident, it’s also true that what lies underneath the skin isn’t always the same as what might be on show. It’s a name that also reflects the notion of appearances and how they can hide reality. Thus, the concepts of concealment, deception and deceit have their groundwork laid by Stevenson. From the title, we understand that the fates of Jekyll and Hyde are intertwined, even if we are naive readers who don’t know the real nature of the relationship between the two.

The choice of title for the first chapter may also seem strange, ‘The Story of the Door’, but this keys the reader in to some very Gothic themes, such as the symbolism of the home. Right from the very beginning, the home has represented the family line or the individual, with Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto starting things off, where the decaying family mansion not only represents the crumbling family line, but the castle itself plays an integral part in bringing the family line to an end. Likewise in The Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe. The crumbling mansion is the perfect symbol of the crumbling family line.

Stevenson is writing some time before Freud would come along with his psychoanalysis at the tail end of the nineteenth century and into the first decade of the twentieth century. Jung would come later still. Both picked up on ideas about the psychology of everyday iterms and what they could reveal about our inner worlds. Psychology was in its infancy, but Stevenson seems to be remarkably in tune with some of its ideas. William James, widely acknowledged as the father of psychology and brother of writer Henry, would produce his Principles of Psychology in 1890, only a few years after Stevenson published The Strange Case. William James’ brother Henry was not averse to the gothic mystery or chiller, writing The Turn of the Screw which was published in 1898.

Psychiatry and psychology might have been in their infancy, but that does not mean Stevenson was out of step with thinking. The nature of evil, the nature of humans, the nature of the individual and our behaviour were all hot topics for philosophers, psychologists and psychiatrists. The Human Condition was very much up for discussion. Ever since Darwin had postulated his theory of evolution in 1871, what it meant to be human and what divided us from the animals was hotly debated as biology, psychology and archaeology chipped away at the divide between humans and animals. While I have no desire to unpick the various readings of The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde from a psychoanalytical point of view, I think Stevenson would have been quite pleased that people study it as a medical phenomenon, given his title and its allusion to medical case studies. The world wasn’t ready for Darwin and his theories of evolution: it took him twelve years from publishing his Origin of the Species in 1859 to publish The Descent of Man, partly because he was almost forced into publishing the first and he realised that if he came out with his theory about how humans were on a spectrum with animals, the world wouldn’t be ready for it. When he did, it threw the Christian world into a moral quagmire. The question over what separates us from the animals has long since been debated.

It’s into a world filled with unease and disquiet that Stevenson brought The Strange Case. It’s a world asking uncomfortable questions about all kinds of things, and the unsettled and darkened minds of philosophers and scientists were not the only ones to be asking these questions.

That the first chapter should focus on a door reveals much. Doors are entrances, ways in. Closed and locked doors can easily come to represent

#2 Stevenson establishes the animalistic nature of Hyde

Darwin wasn’t the first to speculate that humans were connected to animals. For many years, notions that some races or ethnic groups of humans were little more than animals, if human at all, had been hotly debated. These notions weren’t new: we can trace the seeds of how some groups of humans were portrayed as animalistic back beyond Shakespeare. Perhaps his legacy of Jewish money-lender Shylock being dog-like is one of early literature’s most striking images of the deliberate attempts of one group to reduce another to the status of animals. Over the course of the next three centuries, things had only worsened. Stevenson writes in that dark period between slavery and atrocities such as the Armenian genocide, where beliefs in the superiority of certain groups of people over others really took a frightening turn.

There is nothing new, then, in reducing Hyde to an animal.

To understand what Stevenson is doing, we really need to consider the word degenerate.

Remember, the word degenerate can be an adjective, a noun or a verb.

As an adjective, it suggests the idea not only of decline, but also of going backwards. This ties in to the notion of evolution being some kind of mystical mountain and that progress is an improvement. If you are a degenerate person, it means that you are regressing. Of course, evolution isn’t about improvement. Humans are not an improvement on great apes. Apes are apes and people are people. Apes are very good at being apes and people are very good at being people. Believing that evolved = good or improving suggests that there’s some kind of hierarchy within a species as well as across species, and this idea was sadly one that came to the forefront because of people who didn’t understand that evolution is about environmental necessity, not about improvements. This was one way that Christians could reconcile their place at the top of any hierarchy.

Darwin’s half cousin Francis Galton was the biggest name associated with Victorian concepts of ‘good genes’ (eugenics) and degeneration. He published many works on notions of intelligence, superiority and breeding, including believing that people would regress. Around the time that Stevenson was writing The Strange Case, Galton was lecturing across the UK and publishing books about race, breeding and heritage. It’s into this scientific climate that Stevenson publishes his novella.

Degenerate can also be a verb, carrying notions of regression, of becoming ‘primitive’ and ‘savage’ once more. If we’re at the (hopefully!) tail end of believing that one group of people are less evolved or another group are some kind of new, improved, superior brand, Galton was right there at its pinnacle, right at the very moment Stevenson is writing his book.

Galton was also interested in twins – a concept not too far removed from the ideas in the novella: two sides of the same coin, two beings from one stock. While Jekyll and Hyde are clearly not twins, they are two individuals from one root. For these reasons, Stevenson’s book is hugely shaped and influenced by beliefs at the time that if we weren’t careful, we’d all degenerate, that, in some real sense, there was a degenerate inside of us waiting to get out. You could be well-bred, like the ‘large’ and handsome Jekyll, of good stock, and yet still harbour this regressive seed within you. We know more about heritable qualities these days, understanding recessive and dominant genes, how an individual can be born with qualities from much earlier generations. Galton’s theories were rudimentary and incredibly flawed, but it didn’t stop him going around spouting on about good breeding and intelligence and race, enough that many, many nations, from the United States, Canada, the UK and Australia, to, ultimately, Nazi Germany and their ‘final solution’ to eradicate people they believed were responsible for the degeneration of ‘German Stock’. What we see, then, is a Hyde who is very much degenerated and atavistic, a lesser man, lurking in the shadows of the most civilised city of all.

# Hyde as a Victorian criminal

The Victorians were a funny lot. Those who did well, living middle-class lives in rural areas, did very well. London became an economic powerhouse off the back of mill towns further north. Great Britain moved more solidly from agrarian and rural trade focused around wealthy market towns to become an industrial powerhouse. Driven by land enclosures, high food prices and crop failures, brought into towns by the new transport routes, shifting from the British wool and weaving industry to the importation of cotton from the United States, virtually everything in Great Britain changed in an incredibly short time. Slums and tenements sprung up wherever there was industry. The population of England doubled between 1800 – 1850. As we got better at medicine, childbirth and war, we stopped dying so often. Famines in Ireland brought people to Great Britain in search of work. The slave trade made many landowners richer, fuelling the creation of scientific and engineering schools and England prospered. Or, at least, parts of it did.

When Dickens describes his fictional northern town in Hard Times, he said this:

It was a town of red brick, or of brick that would have been red if the smoke and ashes had allowed it; but as matters stood, it was a town of unnatural red and black like the painted face of a savage.  It was a town of machinery and tall chimneys, out of which interminable serpents of smoke trailed themselves for ever and ever, and never got uncoiled.  It had a black canal in it, and a river that ran purple with ill-smelling dye, and vast piles of building full of windows where there was a rattling and a trembling all day long, and where the piston of the steam-engine worked monotonously up and down, like the head of an elephant in a state of melancholy madness.  It contained several large streets all very like one another, and many small streets still more like one another, inhabited by people equally like one another, who all went in and out at the same hours, with the same sound upon the same pavements, to do the same work, and to whom every day was the same as yesterday and to-morrow, and every year the counterpart of the last and the next.

No wonder Karl Marx came to visit Friedrich Engels in Manchester, having read the latter’s The Conditions of the Working Class in 1845. Both were inspired together by Manchester’s slums and working conditions to write a polemic against the perils of capitalism in The Communist Manifesto – the best known and most popular criticism of inequality ever written.

It’s into this world that Hyde is born.

Where inequality flourishes, crime follows. The pickpockets of Fagin’s gang in Oliver Twist were only one sign of how many turned to a life of crime simply to scrape a living. It truly was a hard-knock life as Annie would later sing.

Like anything, it’s hard to know if crime got worse, simply because another thing happened at this time: the growth of literacy and the growth of the media. There might have been as much crime as there’d ever been, but the newspapers grew rich from reporting it. Likewise the Penny Dreadfuls and the Shilling Shockers, the sensationalised accounts of all kinds of crime. Pirates and highwaymen found company in print with ghosts, ghouls and murderers. GWM Reynolds’ Mysteries of London, published in episodes from 1844 to 1856, was perhaps one of the most famous of these. Sweeney Todd, the murderous barber, and his pie-baking landlady Mrs Lovett found immortality in ink. The growing police force and the emergency of detectives also keyed in to the middle-class hunger to read all about villains catching their comeuppance. The shilling shockers united 10 or so of these stories into one, published as a cheap paperback for a shilling to satisty the appetites of the newly literate middle classes.

Whether real crimes increased is hard to really establish. Literary crimes, on the other hand…. they grew fat in Victorian times and the fervour for crime and scandal hasn’t diminished.

Hyde, then, is very much a creature of the high Victorians. He’s built to satisfy their lust for more and more shocking stories. In fact, the Christmas 1885 book market had so many shocking stories for sale that the publishers of The Strange Case waited until January 1886. The cruelty and bloodthirsty description of Sir Danvers Carew, the trampling of the young girl, all would have been grist for the mill. They were useful plot devices to sell a book, not unlike modern movie makers who keep churning out comic book hero movies. They sell.

To take Hyde out of that context is to take Loki, Lex Luthor, The Joker, Thanos, Magneto or even Darth Vader out of their context. Comic book villains are box office winners. Hyde was created out of ink to make money. And make money, he did. We can be all high-brow and philosophical about The Strange Case as much as we like, but it wasn’t conceived so much as a niche writer exploring the darkness within every one of us as much as it was a great way to bring in an income. Of course, you can be rich and really good at writing great stories – Stephen King is a great example – but I don’t think we should ignore the fact that Stevenson was asked to produce a blockbuster. Does it do other things as well? Of course. But that was almost incidental. The previous year, he’d published The Body Snatcher and he had another vampiric short story out at Christmas entitled Olalla. In October 1885, Stevenson wrote that he was finding himself under financial pressure, and therefore it was vital that he sold something to make some cash. In many ways, Olalla is some kind of a thematic prequel to The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, with the inbred degenerate vampire who provides the reader with a creepy atavistic throwback in full gothic tradition. Unlike Mary Shelley, perhaps, driven by her own psychological needs in Frankenstein, Stevenson produces a novella whose purpose is to make him money.

Of course, you can also explore salient scientific and philosophical ideas. That goes without saying.

In the next post, I’ll be exploring how Stevenson creates our first impressions of Hyde.

10 key quotes about Gabriel Utterson in The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde

In the last post, I looked at four key ways that Stevenson presents the character of Gabriel Utterson early on in the novella, including his use of description, his choice of Utterson’s name, his choice of Utterson as a narrator and the way in which Stevenson uses Utterson’s career to convey information.

Today, we have a look at ten key moments in the play where Stevenson reveals Utterson’s character, thinking about what we learn about him and how Stevenson creates our impressions.

#1 The opening sentence

The first sentence tells us:

Mr Utterson the lawyer was a man of 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.

In the last post, I wrote a little about this first sentence, discussing the extent to which Stevenson steps into the story. Unlike Dickens who wades in with his enormous Dickensian Size-10s, planting his footsteps all over his novels, Stevenson is a little more reserved. Even so, what we have here is an author not only describing the appearance but also the character of his main observer.

When we look at details from a text, we have two things to explore: the ideas conveyed by the words and the way in which the writer conveys those ideas. In other words, what does it mean and how does the writer create that meaning?

Let’s explore bit by bit, starting with his ‘rugged countenance’.

I’ve discussed when writing about Jekyll how many Victorians believed the shape of your head, all those lumps and bumps, said something about your character. It was, of course, complete nonsense, but that doesn’t stop people believing things. Utterson’s ‘rugged countenance’, then, is not just some meaningless description we should gloss over. Rugged has two main meanings. Firstly, it has a geographical meaning, like we might say something was ‘rugged terrain’, meaning that it’s rough, broken up, hard and challenging to cross. When we use this word to describe a man (it’s always a man… I’ve never heard a woman being described as someone who has ‘rugged’ good looks) it’s often used to suggest that they are attractive in a very masculine kind of a way, like their head has been carved from a block of solid stone, rather than the smooth and polished face of some guy in a boy band. Whether this word had that sense to Victorians is hard to know. Either way, it definitely had the geographical sense, and we can imagine Utterson as someone who looks tough enough to face up to challenging circumstances, just like a mountain stands up to the storm. It suggests he’s not fragile as well as suggesting that he’s made of stern stuff.

This brings us into the second meaning of rugged, meaning that things are tough and sturdy, robust and durable.

When Jekyll gets in to trouble later in the novel and Utterson has to bash the door down on a man he knows to be a murderer, we’re going to understand why Stevenson tells us this from the very beginning. He is a man capable of weathering all storms.

What we also learn is that he’s serious, his face ‘never lighted by a smile’. Stevenson goes on to call him ‘cold, scanty and embarrassed in discourse’. I think, and I may be wrong, that the three adjectives all fit with his speech, his discourse, rather than being his character in total. In any case, that he’s ‘scanty’ doesn’t make sense, where as being ‘scanty in discourse’ does. He clearly dislikes communicating, never speaking very much, and rarely behaving in a warm and friendly manner.

Stevenson goes on to say he is ‘backward in sentiment’. Here, he’s telling us that Utterson isn’t an emotional man who expresses his feelings. Then he continues to tell us that he is ‘lean, long, dusty, dreary’ – he sounds like a dreadful old book of some kind. They’re not all adjectives we’d use to describe a person particularly, especially ‘dusty’. He sounds like the dullest man on the planet.

Just as we wonder how we could ever find anything to like about this man through whose perspective we will see most of the events, Stevenson tacks on ‘yet somehow lovable’. Despite everything, there is something to like about him.

Having understood the ideas and the meaning of the parts, we can then think about the meaning of the whole. What’s our impression of Utterson? Why is this description relevant to what happens? Why does Stevenson tell us this here, now, at the beginning of the novel?

Firstly, it’s a buffer. We know this. We’re expecting a strange case, maybe some kind of mystery or medical anomaly or something fun, and we get a tedious description of an unfriendly guy who hates speaking. It stops us getting to the action and allows Stevenson to build tension.

But Stevenson could have started with any old buffer. He could have gone full Dickens and given us a description of the fog and how it moves around London. He could have set the scene with some description of Jekyll’s home or Utterson’s home. There are hundreds of boring ways to start a story if you want to fit in a buffer between a title with a name in it and introducing the person of that name. Mary Shelley has a character setting off to try to get to the North Pole before she introduces Victor Frankenstein. Susan Hill makes us wait an impossibly long time before we get to meet Mrs Drablow in The Woman in Black. Bram Stoker starts off with the dreary old travelogue of a young solicitor as he makes his way across Europe in Dracula.

So it’s not just that this description of Utterson is a buffer. It’s a very specific buffer. He could have chosen any kind of description, and yet he focuses on Utterson.

There are many reasons why that could be, and it’s useful to think about that. For me, I think he wants to establish this character through whose eyes we will see the events. He wants us to understand that Utterson isn’t the kind of person given to melodrama and madness. He is utterly trustworthy. He’s not a gossip, telling fireside stories. When we’re later asked to suspend our disbelief as to the dual nature of Jekyll, it’s because we trust Utterson that we can do so. When we’re asked to dislike Hyde from the start, it is because Enfield is trusted by Utterson and because we trust Utterson that we will do so. Stevenson is giving us a pen portrait of this man and making it easy for us to trust him.

I also very much like the way Stevenson builds up his character… He’s solid, serious, socially awkward, unemotional, boring and tedious… yet somehow lovable. It feels like we’re being played with. It also feels like Stevenson himself likes this character he’s created in that playfulness, telling us all his bad qualities and then admitting finally that despite all this, there’s something about him that makes him lovable.

#2 The remainder of the opening paragraph

There’s some quite curious little details crammed in here. When Utterson is safe among friends and he’s had a bit to drink, something eminently human beckoned from his eye.

What this seems like is Stevenson saying that, given good company and a bit of Dutch courage, there’s a tiny glimmer of something human about him. A tiny part of him, his eye, has some indefinably human quality. Only when he’s had a glass or two of wine, and only if he’s with good friends.

Stevenson paints a portrait of him which deepens our understanding of his being ‘backward in sentiment’. He’s not just backward in sentiment, he’s so backward in sentiment that he’s lacking in most things that make him human.

In this extremely long second sentence, Stevenson tells us that, this glimmer of ‘something eminently human’ never makes its way into Utterson’s speech, but you can see it ‘in the acts of his life’. In other words, he’s a man of actions, not of words. He IS human, after all – whatever it means to be human – but you don’t hear that in his speech, you only see it in his actions. What we’ll see is this consistently through the whole story.

What I think is interesting about this is the authenticity of Utterson: he is a man who is true to himself. He knows who he is. He is dependable in who he is. He does not like communication, and even though a drink or two and being in good company might loosen him up a little, even then when his inhibitions are down, he is is still silent and reserved. Who he is under the influence of alcohol and in good company is exactly who he is all the rest of the time.

When we’re asked to consider Jekyll later in the novella, we’re asked to consider why he wants to let loose his inner Hyde. As we learn, Hyde is very much a part of him. Being Hyde allows him to experience all aspects of his otherwise compartmentalised personality. If Jekyll keeps bits of himself boxed off, bits that can only come out under the influence of a potion he concocts, Utterson is very plainly not that man. He is who he is. There is no division between appearance and reality. Utterson’s appearance and reality are one and the same.

#3 Utterson’s drinking habits

At first we are told that Utterson, ‘when the wine was to his taste’ became more relaxed, but even then did not have some mad personality transplant. He’s reticent under the influence as well as without it. Later, it tells us that ‘he drank gin when he was alone, to mortify a taste for vintages’.

This second detail is curious. He likes ‘vintages’, by which I guess we could assume that Stevenson means good wine, brandy, whisky or port, and yet instead of that, he chooses to drink gin. In fact, he drinks gin in an almost medicinal way, to ‘mortify a taste for vintages’. What this means is that he drinks gin to kill off his desire to drink the good stuff. Unlike modern days where distilled gin is very much a fashion, in Victorian times, gin did not have the connotations of refinement and sophistication. Most gin shops in early Victorian days only had a licence for drinkers to stand up, not sit down, so it was a functional way to get drunk quickly.

We forget very often that this is a novel about addiction as much as anything else. In English cities, gin palaces and drinking had become a huge social problem, especially for the poor working class. There were many Temperance societies set up to encourage people to be more sober. Sobriety, of course, does not just mean that they weren’t drinking, but also that they were more serious and sensible. Don’t forget at the very moment Stevenson is writing The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, many football clubs were in the business of being set up by Temperance societies and churches as a way to curb Peaky Blinders type behaviour of gang violence and alcoholism. Manchester City was founded in 1880 for precisely that reason. Many football clubs were set up to occupy men and give them something to do other than spend all their time drinking.

It’s a curious detail, then, that Utterson drinks gin to put an end to his desire for good wine. What we see is that he is a sober, serious and abstemious man who refrains from indulging himself with the things he likes. Indeed, Stevenson goes on to add that Utterson enjoyed the theatre but he hadn’t been to one for twenty years. What Stevenson presents us with, then, is a man who knows what he likes and then goes out of his way to make sure he rarely indulges himself. He is a man who keeps a lid on his passions, his desires and his flaws. Later, as Stevenson opens the second chapter, he tells us that it was Utterson’s habit of a Sunday to sit down with some ‘dry divinity’ until the church clock struck midnight and then he’d go to bed ‘soberly and gratefully’. In other words, his dry religious books were so tedious and serious that when it was time to go to bed, he was ‘grateful’. Stevenson shows us a man who is not given to indulge his passions, compared to Jekyll who can’t shake his own addiction, despite telling Utterson that he is completely in control later in the novella.

That Stevenson gives us an insight into Utterson’s behaviour by describing his drinking habits is not just giving us information about what kind of man Utterson is, but also it provides us with a contrast to Jekyll, a man completely at the mercy of his “addiction”.

#4 Utterson’s acquaintances

Stevenson also presents Utterson through the company he keeps, and we’ll look in more detail at Richard Enfield another time. He tells us that Utterson had ‘an approved tolerance for others’, almost that he finds other people fascinating. While we might expect him not to enjoy company, it seems he does. We also learn that he wonders, ‘sometimes with envy’ about their ‘misdeeds’. In other words, he enjoys trying to work out what caused them to do what they did. It is his nature, Stevenson tells us, to ‘help’ rather than ‘reprove’.

This description helps set out Utterson’s later actions. When Jekyll goes wrong, Utterson will not be inclined to pass judgement. Instead, he will reach out to help. Stevenson lets Utterson explain this himself: ‘”I incline to Cain’s heresy,” he used to say quaintly: “I let my brother go to the devil in his own way.” Cain, of course, killed his brother Abel in the Bible. However, that is not what Utterson is referring to. When asked by God where Abel is, Cain asks God ‘Am I my brother’s keeper?’. That’s to say: is it my business to keep an eye on my brother and watch over him the whole time?

Utterson seems, from this anecdote, to be the kind of person not to interfere or pass judgement, but to help where he can.

Finally, Stevenson concludes this long first paragraph with a description that becomes extremely prophetic: he was ‘the last reputable acquaintance and the last good influence in the lives of going-down men’.

I think this is particularly telling because it suggests that he is often the last good person in the lives of people who are going off the rails. Later, when we see Lanyon say that he is no longer friends with Jekyll, we’re reminded of the fact that Utterson is the friend who will be there to the end, never giving up on those whose lives seem to be out of control.

#5 Stevenson’s summary of Utterson at the beginning of the first chapter

Stevenson continues to tell us that Utterson was ‘undemonstrative’ and in many ways, this makes him the ideal objective individual to accompany Jekyll in his last days, as he himself is a ‘going-down’ man. His descent is inevitable and Stevenson is marking Utterson out as the only person likely to stick around to witness this and also to be ‘the last good influence’ over him. We are told that he is ‘a modest man’ and that his friendships are ones that have stood the test of time.

His acquaintance with Richard Enfield, the character charged with giving us our introduction to Hyde, is a strange one. They are distantly related, which perhaps explains a little. Enfield is a ‘well-known man about town’. In this description, he is the complete opposite of Utterson, whose friendships are rare and forged over time. Stevenson informs us that their friendship was a curiosity to many who couldn’t understand what these two men have in common. He turns to reporting what other people think as if to consolidate his own views. When others meet them on their Sunday walks, they describe the pair as saying ‘nothing’, looking ‘singularly dull’ and that when they saw friends approaching they showed ‘obvious relief’.

Their friendship is an oddity and their relief when other people appear says a lot about how uncomfortable they feel together, yet for all that, Stevenson tells us, they count their Sunday walk as ‘the chief jewel of each week’ and that they passed up other opportunities that seemed like more fun and even passed up business to go wander about town with each other.

On the one hand, this is a plot device. We only find out about Hyde trampling the young girl because of Enfield. Also, Enfield needs to be the kind of man walking around London at four in the morning, because if he were not, he’d never have seen Hyde do it. Yet on the othr hand, I’m sure Stevenson could have constructed a character more in keeping with that of Utterson who also had a good reason to be out wandering during the small hours of the day. Wilkie Collins, for instance, creates his narrator for that purpose in The Woman in White and gives him a good excuse to be wandering about London at one in the morning. So it’s clearly important to Stevenson that these men are opposites but also that they enjoy their time together, awkward as it is for both of them.

We, of course, need Enfield to be something of a gossip. If he’s not, there’s no story of the door. We also need him to be trusted by Utterson so that we also trust his account of events and take them seriously.

#6 Utterson’s response to Jekyll’s Will

Having heard all the information from Enfield about Hyde trampling the young girl, Utterson returns home and digs out Jekyll’s will. He is in ‘sombre spirits’ and he studied it with ‘a clouded brow’. The way in which Stevenson describes Utterson is quite lovely here, the metaphorical use of ‘clouded’ as an adjective to suggest Utterson’s mood and sense of foreboding.

As we move into Chapter 2, Stevenson continues to anchor us to Utterson. We see what he sees. Stevenson also steps into Utterson’s internal world to tell us his thoughts about the will. Stevenson uses the description to tell us the will ‘offended him both as a lawyer and as a lover of the sane and customary sides of life’. In accessing Utterson’s internal thoughts, we see more than is visible from simply his words or his actions. It also allows us to build up a more personal relationship with the character and understand him more deeply.

Despite giving us some access to Utterson’s internal world, Stevenson also describes Utterson’s actions: ‘he took up a candle and went into his business room.’

He also lets Utterson air his thoughts aloud as spoken words: ‘“I thought it was madness,” he said, as he replaced the obnoxious paper in the safe, “and now I begin to fear it is disgrace.”’

Even so, there’s plenty to unpick. We have Utterson’s spoken words here, ‘”I thought it was madness,”‘ which is followed by a reporting clause, ‘he said’. Stevenson also adds Utterson’s actions to this, telling us that he ‘replaced the paper in the safe’.

The more astute of you will realise I missed a word off in that last quote. I omitted the word ‘obnoxious’ from the description of Utterson’s words.

My question is this: who does the word obnoxious belong to? Is it Stevenson’s word? Is this Stevenson who thinks it is obnoxious? Or is it Stevenson reporting what Utterson thinks about it? Despite the fact he has just shared Utterson’s speech aloud so that we can get a glimpse into what he is thinking, does Stevenson then step into Utterson’s head to tell us that he, Utterson, thought it was obnoxious? Or is it Utterson’s description?

It matters that we have this blending of authorial and character viewpoint. The fact that we don’t know clearly who this word belongs to demonstrates a kind of meshing between character and author.

Before, when Stevenson told us how Utterson returned home after his walk with Enfield, he said: ‘Mr. Utterson came home to his bachelor house in sombre spirits and sat down to dinner without relish’

These feel quite clearly Stevenson looking in on Utterson and describing how he looked and how he acted. I don’t have any trouble knowing that this is Stevenson. We’re looking in on Utterson’s world through Stevenson’s eyes.

Later, when Stevenson reports Utterson’s thoughts by spoken dialogue, we have no trouble understanding that these are Utterson’s thoughts. They may be “witnessed” by the author and committed to paper by him, but if we were in the room with Utterson, this is what we would see or hear. It’s relatively unfiltered.

But that word obnoxious could belong to Stevenson and it could belong to Utterson. The writer and the character’s thoughts blur and the lines between them are less clearly defined.

This technique, where we cannot truly say to whom an opinion-laden word belongs to the author or the character, blurs the lines between perspectives and brings Stevenson closer to Utterson. He is no longer simply an objective and unbiased observer, recording things dutifully. It is suggestive that he too is of the same mind as Utterson. He is no longer objective and unbiased. He has become partisan and subjective. Where Stevenson is usually clear about marking out Utterson’s thoughts from his own, take the line from later as an example, ‘“If anyone knows, it will be Lanyon,” he had thought.’ Stevenson indicates very clearly that these are Utterson’s thoughts.

But from time to time, Stevenson and Utterson are blended with words like obnoxious and we can no longer tell which perspective is which. The effect of this not always easy to discuss, but for me, it shows how much faith Stevenson has in this character as the anchoring viewpoint of the novella: he and Utterson are of the same mind.

#7 Utterson takes on the role of detective

Perhaps one of the most famous, or, at least, more memorable lines involving Utterson is his famous declaration:

“If he be Mr. Hyde,” he had thought, “I shall be Mr. Seek.”

What does Stevenson tell us are Utterson’s reasons for playing detective?

The first is that he thinks if he really understands Hyde, if he can truly “see” him, then he’ll understand him better: ‘If he could but once set eyes on him, he thought the mystery would lighten and perhaps roll altogether away, as was the habit of mysterious things when well examined.’

The second reason Stevenson gives, by way of describing Utterson’s internal thoughts, is: ‘He might see a reason for his friend’s strange preference or bondage (call it which you please) and even for the startling clause of the will.’

In other words, if he finds Hyde and can take a good look at him, he hopes to understand why Jekyll has left Hyde his entire estate in the event of his death or disappearance. He hopes to understand why Jekyll favours Hyde in the way that he does, or, as Utterson suspects, the reason why Jekyll may be being coerced. The word ‘preference’ is not just about liking or favouring Hyde more than others, it’s also a legal term. A preference means when a debtor (or someone who owes a debt) pays a creditor. In other words, it may not just be Utterson as a person trying to find out why Jekyll prefers Hyde, or why he likes him, but what he owes to Hyde. This legal nuance I don’t think is one we should overlook. Utterson may see the will as a way of paying a debt, and it may not suggest that he thinks Jekyll likes Hyde, but rather that he owes him something. In this sense as well we might take the term ‘bondage’ to imply a legal bond. Utterson isn’t just going at this mystery with a detective eye, but with the eye of a lawyer. It perhaps suggests that he thinks the will is about legal issues as much as it is about Jekyll liking Hyde or being indebted to him from a sense of obligation. It’s worth remembering that Stevenson had been educated as a lawyer too.

Utterson’s third reason for hunting down Hyde is to find out what it is about him that made Enfield take so badly to him.

#8 Utterson as witness to Mr Hyde

So far, we know that Enfield – inasmuch as we’ve been told – does not know Jekyll. When Utterson asks Lanyon if he knows Hyde, Lanyon says no. Utterson is the only character who can bear witness to both men. We later realise in the Incident at the Window that Enfield knows Jekyll, which should not surprise us given Stevenson’s description of him as ‘a man about town’, which gives us a second witness to both Jekyll and Hyde to corroborate our understanding of the two as separate individuals. However, Utterson introduces Enfield in that chapter, as if the two men had never formally met. Even so, by that chapter, we have another witness to corroborate the existence of two very separate men who do not seem to have even the slightest remarkable resemblance to one another.

This is a pivotal plot device for Stevenson, and one of the main reasons he asks us to trust Utterson: it is Utterson being convinced of Hyde as a man in his own right, in his own entity, that makes us first believe as a naive reader that Jekyll and Hyde are two distinct individuals. If we did not have a common connection between the two, it may well have been that the man Enfield describes could well have been Jekyll. That Utterson is convinced means we are convinced.

Later, of course, when we re-read the novel from a more knowledgeable viewpoint, we understand that we are misled because Utterson believes so completely in the existence of Hyde as an individual in his own right. When we look at this and explore it completely, we understand why it is so important that Hyde is asked to show his face. Had Utterson not asked this question, Hyde could have continued to have lived in the shadows. Before Utterson sees his face, the only impression we truly get of him is that he is ‘small’, comparing with Stevenson’s description of Jekyll when we meet him as being ‘large’. Hyde’s plain clothes are neither here nor there: anyone can change clothes, but nobody can become smaller. Stevenson tells us that Hyde moves with the air of a man who does not want to be scrutinised, not looking the lawyer in the face. If we’d have expected Utterson to have recognised Jekyll’s voice, he does not.

Stevenson tells us:

‘the pair stared at each other pretty fixedly for a few seconds. “Now I shall know you again,” said Mr. Utterson. “It may be useful.”’

What we learn from this is that Utterson believes completely in the existence of Hyde as an individual in his own right. There is no mention of anything in the slightest that gives us the impression that he is even slightly like Jekyll. It does not cross Utterson’s mind. Without this moment, where Utterson acts as a witness, it would be easy to see how we’ve been tricked, how Stevenson had used smoke and mirrors to deceive us, that Jekyll really was not that physically different from Hyde and it was all just a trick of the light. The fact that Utterson acts as a witness on our behalf, for the naive reader at least, convinces us of Hyde’s existence in his own right, not just as some alter ego that looks exactly like him.

#9 Utterson as witness to Dr Jekyll

Having been convinced that Hyde is an individual in his own right, as if to convince us that Jekyll is not in some strange state of metamorphosis, Stevenson then sends Utterson to meet Jekyll. Although he intervenes himself as the author to describe Jekyll, we still are limited by only seeing the world that Utterson sees. At no point does Stevenson give us more than Utterson himself experiences.

When Stevenson gets the chance to describe Jekyll, his first word in comparison to the one he’d used about Hyde is that Jekyll is ‘large’, thus dissuading the naive reader from considering that the two are one and the same.

It is not simply that they are described differently, but that Utterson (and the reader) take Jekyll at face value when he talks about Hyde in the third person. As Jekyll talks about ‘that young man’, we get no sense that there is anything that would connect them as one single individual.

We recall Stevenson’s earlier description of Utterson being ‘the last reputable acquaintance and the last good influence in the lives of going-down men’ and we take Jekyll’s plea to Utterson as a sign of their complicity. Utterson realises that Jekyll is troubled. He dislikes Hyde intensely. He believes that Hyde is blackmailing or manipulating Jekyll. Yet at the same time, when asked by Jekyll to have faith in him, Utterson is honest, saying that ‘“I can’t pretend that I shall ever like him,”’ and yet he promised Jekyll that he will ‘help’ Hyde when Jekyll is no longer there to do so. Utterson promises to do so, and given the year that passes between the end of this chapter and the beginning of the next, we realise that he has indeed given Jekyll the benefit of the doubt.

What Stevenson reveals here is a man whose friendship surpasses judgement or condemnation, a man whose true and deep friendship knows no limits. I don’t think it leaves us to wonder much as to why, by the end of the novella, it is to Utterson that Jekyll leaves his entire fortune.

#10 Utterson unfinished

Having found Hyde in Jekyll’s study and having retrieved the three documents from Poole, the truth is revealed. Having found the body of Hyde in the study, both Poole and Utterson begin a search for Jekyll’s body, both convinced of the authenticity of the two men as separate individuals. Poole is convinced that Jekyll may be buried, and Utterson thinks that he may have fled. At this point in the final chapter of our tethering to Utterson, there is no sense that Utterson understands what has been happening. It is only in retrieving the the will, the narrative of Lanyon and Henry Jekyll’s final words that the truth is revealed.

Having read the will and looked back to the body of the ‘dead malefactor stretched upon the carpet’, Utterson speaks more forcefully that he thinks Jekyll must have fled. Poole encourages Utterson to read the letter that Jekyll has written. Stevenson finishes Utterson’s narrative by saying that he is going to go home, read the documents and then call for the police, hoping to ensure that he can avoid exposing Jekyll to scandal. The story is then passed over to Lanyon for his account of what happened between Jekyll and himself, before finally giving way to Jekyll’s full statement.

The anchor of Utterson is lost and we never return to him. We never hear his thoughts. We never have his take on events. Jekyll puts his pen down at the end of his statement and that is the end of things.

I don’t know about you, but this feels a little sad for me. Utterson has served his purpose for Stevenson and is now discarded. I’d have at least liked to have had an end to Utterson’s own character arc, and yet we do not get this. I feel a little cheated by this, having invested so much in Utterson as our anchor and our focus through the vast majority of the narrative.

I’m sure it’s not absent-mindedness on the part of Stevenson that we never finish Utterson’s character arc or get any sense of conclusion, in which case, we may well ask why Stevenson chose not to complete Utterson’s own story.

This is not unusual in Gothic or epistolary fiction, though most writers finish off the character arc for their loosely-related objective narrator. Mary Shelley in Frankenstein finishes with Walpole’s decision to return to England. Walpole starts the story on a mission to get to the Arctic and by the end, he has lost all hope and optimism and has decided to return to England. Dracula finishes with a note seven years after the events in the story written by Jonathon Harker who had opened the story. It ties up loose ends and weaves them together. Perhaps Stevenson thought there were no loose ends to be tied up now that the narrative of Jekyll had been shared, but it still leaves me feeling a little cheated on behalf of Utterson, who never gets his own ending and never gets to share his own thoughts about events.

In the next post, we will explore Stevenson’s portrayal of Hyde in his novella and look at the way in which he brings him to life.

The Character as Construct: Utterson in The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde

Having spent some time in the last two posts looking at the way in which Robert Louis Stevenson constructs the character of Henry Jekyll, we now move to look at Mr Utterson, the lawyer through whose eyes and experiences we see most of the story.

The novella continues to be popular at GCSE. That said, we remain a little limited with the ways in which we can discuss the themes and characters as it seems that all there is to be said has already been said. We spend some time looking at how Stevenson has created the character in order to expand and extend our thinking. It’s important when responding to key moments or thinking about characters that we consider how they are constructed, remembering that they are created by the writer for particular purposes.

Other than Jekyll and Hyde, Utterson is perhaps Stevenson’s most well-rounded character. It is not unlikely, then, that you may find yourself tackling a question at GCSE about him.

To that end, we will spend a little time exploring how Stevenson constructs Utterson focusing mainly on our early impressions in the opening chapters of the novella.

#1 Stevenson’s choice of the name Utterson

Having given us a tantalising title about Jekyll and Hyde, Stevenson moves seamlessly into a story that doesn’t even seem to involve them – at least not immediately. Utterson is a buffer who comes between our initial expectations from the title and Enfield’s story about the door.

Stevenson often uses Utterson in this way. Ironically, in his quest for the truth about Mr Hyde, he actually gets in the way of the narrative and buffers us from those final revelations about the nature of Mr Hyde. Here, he does exactly that. Stevenson starts with an enormous description of Utterson, more words than he dedicates either to his description of Hyde or his description of Jekyll.

Why do this?

Why tell us more about a character who is very much an observer and not an integral part of the plot.

Firstly, this is because it’s Utterson’s eyes through which we view most of the story. We have to know and trust these eyes and his perspective. Although it is not a first-person narrative as we find frequently in layered gothic horrors, Stevenson still spends an enormous amount of time with Utterson. In many ways, this not only helps establish his accuracy as a narrator, but also serves to frustrate us: he gets in the way of what we want to know.

We’ve already discussed the possibilities of Jekyll’s name (or the lack of possibilities, depending on where you stand…) and whether or not you believe there’s some significance to it is really a matter of opinion. There is evidence either way. Hyde, less so. Given Utterson’s later pun on Hyde’s name and how he’ll be ‘Mr Seek’, I think we can be pretty sure that Stevenson is playing a game with Hyde’s name and that it’s no accident.

But Utterson? What does this convey?

Firstly, we need to understand the word ‘utter’ as both a verb and an adjective. We also need to consider it in terms of its history and origins, as these also shed light on the meaning.

Utter as an adjective means complete or total, absolute. It’s from this adjective that we get the adverb utterly.

Utter as a verb means to speak or make a noise with your voice.

This word is an interesting word as the meanings come from two different places. The first one, the adjective, like ‘she’s an utter diamond’, comes from Old English ut which gives us out, and uttra which gives us outer. I’m still not seeing the connection between ‘complete’ and ‘outer’ but I think if we take this sense of the word, it’s encouraging us to think of Utterson as an outsider, someone impartial who can report on the story objectively. Later, we’ll look at the other ways Stevenson also conveys this impression. Whether or not you think Stevenson went rooting through the dictionary for a word that suggested this doesn’t matter really, since he presents Utterson as a relatively objective pair of eyes through which to view the majority of the story. Using this sense of the word utter would tie in with that. You can see how words like utmost still have a sense of place. If you’re at the utmost point, you’re at the farthest point from where you were, the most out place, if you like. This helps us understand why it’s come to mean ‘complete’ or ‘absolute’, that it’s the ‘most out’ in lots of ways, the utmost or out-most.

The verb comes from the Middle Dutch for ‘to speak’. Of course, Dutch also has spreken which, like our word ‘speak’ comes from West Germanic. Yet they also have the word uiten for ‘to utter’, suggesting a more nuanced meaning. Like English, no point keeping both if they both mean exactly the same thing. Uiten itself comes from outer, and if you think about it, that makes sense too: speech comes out of us. If we want someone to speak, we might even say something like ‘come on, out with it!’ which picks up on this sense of the word.

Thus Utterson’s name is perhaps a clue to his position as an objective outsider, the ‘most complete’ man, perhaps, also. It also ties into the idea of speech and the spoken, perhaps carrying a sense that Utterson is a man of his word.

Or not.

It could just as well be the name of some guy Stevenson knew down the pub that he liked.

One of my young students who much enjoys writing stories collects surnames and first names and jiggles them together, Dickens-like, to give her characters’ names a little something more. Maybe Stevenson did the same.

#2 Stevenson’s choice of career for Utterson

Of all the jobs that Stevenson could have given to Utterson, he gives him that of a lawyer. We’ve already looked in some depth about why he chooses to give Jekyll the job that he does, and this is equally true of Utterson. He is not simply Mr Utterson at the beginning of the story: he is Mr Utterson the lawyer. Straight away, his job matters.

Like Jekyll, it can be seen as both symbolic and a plot device. Without being a lawyer, he wouldn’t have Jekyll’s will and he wouldn’t have had his first alarm bells go off. Likewise, later in the novel, his connection to Sir Danvers Carew is that Sir Danvers is carrying a letter addressed to Utterson, presumably containing some legal device. It matters, then, that he’s a lawyer. It allows certain things to happen within the plot.

Like Jekyll, there’s the possibility that his career is also used by Stevenson in a more symbolic way.

What does being a lawyer suggest about a person?

Firstly, that they’re interested in the law. Times have changed, of course, and if you watch a lot of legal dramas and read any John Grisham, you’d be forgiven for thinking that lawyers all go into it because they love power, money and breaking the law. But let’s look back to a time when people were less cynical and assume that Utterson is interested in the law because he’s morally minded, that he cares about big ideas like justice and rights, that he cares about fairness and moral rightness. It suggests a serious, fair, objective, cautious and discreet man.

That’s important.

Stevenson asks us to trust Utterson as the person through whose eyes we see the majority of the events. When we’re asked to consider crime, or bigger ideas like good and evil, Utterson is, we assume, more experienced than most. Not that there are more trustworthy professions than others, but if you’re coming to trust someone for their legal and moral view, then a lawyer seems like a natural choice.

This is the lens through which we are asked to see Jekyll. It’s important, then, for Stevenson, that we consider his principal character as being someone trustworthy, objective and not given to tall tales.

#3 Utterson’s perspective

Utterson is not the narrator. From the beginning, it’s quite clearly a third person narrative. Yet until Lanyon’s narrative and Henry Jekyll’s full statement at the end, we see what Utterson sees. We go where he goes. Stevenson anchors the reader to Utterson instead of exercising authorial free rein. Instead of fixing on Enfield to view Hyde’s trampling of the young girl, we hear Enfield tell it to Utterson, filtering it through layers.

This has two primary effects.

The first is that it acts as a plot device, meaning that much information is withheld until Stevenson chooses to reveal it. Because we are anchored to Utterson, we know what he knows, and nothing more.

Stevenson doesn’t have to do things this way. In Michael Cox’s delightful Gothic, The Meaning of Night, the novel starts like this:

After killing the red-haired man, I took myself off to Quinn’s for an oyster supper.

Stevenson could easily have started like this. First person narrative from Jekyll or Hyde’s perspective.

After swallowing the potion, my body began to shrink and I took on the persona of a man named Hyde.

Ta-dah!

Good opening, no?

Well it can be, but the mystery would shift, as it does in The Meaning of Night. Having shocked us with this open admission of random murder, the narrator goes to eat dinner. We don’t suppose he really knows who the red-headed man was, but we do know he wasn’t troubled by his conscience. We spend the rest of the novel with a different mystery: why did the narrator kill the red-headed man?

From the opening chapters, Stevenson’s mystery is a different one: Who is Hyde and what is his connection to Dr Jekyll?

You can’t do that if you start by giving us the answer.

So that’s the first purpose of anchoring us to Utterson instead of floating freely through the novel like a truly liberated third-person omniscient author who can stop in wherever he or she likes. It restricts what we know.

The second is that it plays on some well-established gothic motifs. Dracula is yet to be written. Who does Bram Stoker appoint as one of the first people to meet Dracula? Jonathon Harker, a solicitor. Coincidence, much? Who does Susan Hill use to tell her story of The Woman In Black? Arthur Kipps, a young lawyer. If you were writing a recipe for a gothic novel, having a legal-eagle narrator is one of the key ingredients. Stevenson wasn’t the first, and given Susan Hill’s novel is almost a hundred years younger than his, he’s clearly not the last.

Neither Dracula nor The Strange Case are exceptional. This epistolary style of writing a novel as a series of documents had already been established. It had not only been established but had had a fashionable peak before everyone started making a mockery of it and churning out pastiches and satires. In the epistolary, the story is told through a series of written documents, be they diaries, letters, newspaper clippings, wills or otherwise. It’s a style still used now.

The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is not truly epistolary, namely because there are only two documents at the end – that of Lanyon and Jekyll. I’ll talk about those elsewhere, I promise. But in a way, anchoring us to Utterson does similar things to an epistolary novel: it presents us with one solitary view alone, and we have not only to navigate whether we find it trustworthy or not, we also have only one piece of the puzzle at a time.

#4 Stevenson’s authorial intervention

Stevenson steps into the story too, so we always have to tease out whether it’s his view of things, or whether it’s Utterson’s. We always have to work out how much the author is intervening in the story, how much they step in, or how much they let the story run without them.

In other words, how much are they guiding us and telling us what to think?

Take the opening, for instance.

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 loveable.

So, it’s no Dickens with his Ebeneezer Scrooge, for sure.

Let’s just look at Dickens’ description of Scrooge to use to get an impression of the extent to which an author might step into a story and tell you exactly what they think of their characters:

Oh! But he was a tight-fisted hand at the grindstone, Scrooge! a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old sinner! Hard and sharp as flint, from which no steel had ever struck out generous fire; secret, and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster. The cold within him froze his old features, nipped his pointed nose, shrivelled his cheek, stiffened his gait; made his eyes red, his thin lips blue; and spoke out shrewdly in his grating voice. A frosty rime was on his head, and on his eyebrows, and his wiry chin. He carried his own low temperature always about with him; he iced his office in the dog-days; and didn’t thaw it one degree at Christmas.

I mean, it barely gets more authorial than this. Dickens couldn’t really intervene more to tell us exactly what he thinks of Scrooge. Not only that, it’s not just his opinion, its his crafted opinion. Look at that list of stacked adjectives there: squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching. Each two syllables, each finishing with ‘ing’, many having an almost onomatopoeic quality, all of them starting with a two or more consonant cluster: sq, wr, gr, scr, cl although not all have two distinct consonant sounds. The sounds are largely plosive or sibilant. Several of the subsequent vowels are short and hard, followed on by another plosive or sibilant sound and finishing with the ‘ing’. We’re looking at a wordsmith here, a crafter of words.

If we use Dickens as a gauge, we can see Stevenson isn’t intervening in quite so authorial a way, and neither is he quite so word-smithy. At the same time, he’s still stepping in to give us his opinion on Utterson. He starts by defining his job then his appearance: ‘a man of a rugged countenance’. The next bit is almost poetic, ‘never lighted by a smile’. Although he’s telling us that Utterson isn’t the kind of many to smile much, it’s authorial on a number of levels; firstly, because of the sense of being ‘lighted’ by a smile, suggestive and nuanced with shades of meaning; secondly, it’s a selection of what we might call a telling detail. Without telling us that Utterson is serious, considered, perhaps even unfriendly, Stevenson leaves it to us to decide what we make of him. We also need to remember, though, that of all the ways to describe a person, Stevenson has given us this detail. It’s not accidental.

From describing Utterson, he continues to step in, telling us he was ‘cold, scanty and embarrased in discourse’. From the more neutral and objective description of how he looked to a more selective description of a single behaviour onto a character summary in three words.

Stevenson continues with his list to outline all of Utterson’s other negative qualities, that he is ‘backward in sentiment; lean, long, dusty, dreary’.

We may also be wondering why Stevenson is outlining all of these. It’s partly perhaps because Utterson has a character arc of his own. When a writer gives us a dull, dreary character, what do we expect to happen?

We expect a disruption.

How will the life of a dreary and dusty man be disrupted?

Why, by giving him an exciting turn of events, of course!

Stevenson concludes his list with a disclaimer: Utterson is also ‘somehow lovable.’

I love how that ‘somehow’ sits there. Despite himself, people like him.

When we consider, then, why Stevenson starts his novella in this way, this pen portrait of Utterson delays us from the narrative we want. It’s almost as exact an opposite to Michael Cox’s The Meaning of Night. He steps in at points to intervene and to tell us what to think about Utterson, whilst at the same time leaving other bits to our imagination and our own judgement. Stevenson plays on gothic conventions to give us a reliable anchor to navigate us through at least some of the action, and he seems to desperately want us to take Utterson seriously. It’s vital that we can trust his viewpoint.

In the next post, I’ll look further at how the character of Utterson develops as the novella unfolds its tale.

10 Things We Learn About Dr Jekyll in The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde

In the previous post, we were looking at how Stevenson creates an early image of Jekyll even before we meet him in his famous 1886 novella The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.

As a popular text for OCR, Eduqas, AQA and Edexcel, having an understanding of how Stevenson creates the character of Dr Henry Jekyll will really help you access the top marks in the exam. As I take you through ten things we learn about Jekyll, we’ll keep the focus on how Stevenson is using him, and for what purpose. These ten things fall roughly in chronological order and it is worth pointing out that this is just a narrow selection of details. It’s not a definitive list of everything there is to know about Jekyll by any means.

#1 Dr Jekyll by omission and oblique reference

As we looked at in the previous post, the entire first chapter of the novella veils Jekyll in mystery and supposition. He is intimately connected to Hyde on two levels at least: the cheque handed over by Mr Hyde to the family of the girl that he trampled, and the connection that Utterson has that does not get revealed until the opening of the second chapter, namely that Hyde is the sole beneficiary in Jekyll’s will.

There are numerous references to Jekyll that we only catch if we have read the novella before or if we are extremely sensitive to the clues that Stevenson leaves.

Enfield first refers to Jekyll’s name as one he ‘can’t mention’. It’s not that he won’t mention it, but that he can’t. He is unable to. It’s not unwillingness, it’s an inability to. Yet Enfield leaves us some fairly tantalising details: it’s a well-known name and also ‘often printed’. From that we would take it to mean that Jekyll is either frequently in the newspapers or that he is frequently in scientific journals. It doesn’t say what he’s ‘often printed’ in. What we know already, however, is that Jekyll lives in a the public sphere. He is very much a man of the public. A second reading would also confirm Jekyll’s wealth, since he was ‘good’ for a cheque of £100. An inflation calculator suggests that that’s about £12000 in today’s money. Enfield alludes to Jekyll being ‘good for more than that’.

Everything in those first five lines is by allusion and suggestion. It’s an indirect reference to Jekyll. Of course, Stevenson’s ostensible reason for that is that it’s in keeping with Enfield’s deliberate desire to remain in the dark about people’s secrets and personal lives. He is a discreet and closed-lipped character perhaps with secrets of his own. Yet Stevenson also has another reason for these oblique and indirect references that do not name Jekyll directly: they contribute to the suspense.

Perhaps it’s simply human nature to want to know gossip about people?

I’m surely not the only one to read this and think, ‘Oh, just spit it out!’

If you’re telling a story about people, you might as well say who you’re talking about. Nothing’s more infuriating than those news stories that say, ‘A premiership footballer’ or ‘A well-known celebrity’ has been involved in something the newspapers have decided is sensational. I couldn’t generally care less when they name the person. All I think is Really? This is your news? Yet the moment they deliberately omit the name, I’m overcome with curiosity and an insatiable desire to find out. Once I’ve found out, I couldn’t care less again.

Stevenson uses this very popular and click-baity technique in the exact same way the tabloids and social media does today: he sharpens our appetite with the promise of juicy gossip and then refuses to name names.

The omission, then, is not only in keeping with Enfield’s and Utterson’s desires to remain private and proper men, but also to sharpen our appetite to find out more.

Nevertheless, we have a Jekyll veiled in secrecy and the theme of reputation is established early on. Both men seem determined to protect Jekyll’s reputation no matter what ‘capers’ Jekyll might have got up to in his youth that may have given Hyde the leverage with which to blackmail him. Neither want to understand the connection in the current moment, nor to get to the bottom of what Jekyll had done in the past. Their conscious and purposeful desire to ask less the more something looks like ‘Queer Street’ is deliberate. It’s about their characters, for sure, and their own propriety. It’s also a delightful way to keep us guessing as to the name of the person who wrote the cheque as well as the secrets of his youth that have potentially opened him up to blackmail.

#2 Jekyll’s early connection to Hyde

Stevenson gives us three early connections to Hyde long before we even meet Jekyll.

The first is the title, not simply The Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde but The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. The title connects them permanently and indivisibly.

Second, the fact that having trampled a young girl at four in the morning, Hyde hands over a cheque made out – or, presumably made out – by Jekyll. We should remember that Enfield never confirms that the cheque had been signed by Jekyll. Utterson supposes that it was Jekyll who’d signed it, simply because he already knew about the will and the beneficiary of it. Even so, the connection is made, if only by Utterson, whose suspicions become our own.

The third connection is then the will, as we learn at the beginning of the second chapter, where Dr Jekyll had chosen that ‘all his possessions were to pass into the hands of his “friend and benefactor Edward Hyde”‘.

For a while at the beginning of the first chapter, Hyde seems to exist without Jekyll. The connection is unclear. Then, through the series of oblique, indirect references throughout the first chapter, the connection is established. Their lives are entwined. As naive readers, we may still think of them as separate people, even though we realise there is a connection between them. As knowing readers, we understand this is because the pair really are simply two parts of the same individual. Nevertheless, Stevenson leaves us many clues that the lives of the two are entangled in more ways than we can imagine.

#3 Enfield and Utterson’s belief that Jekyll has some kind of sordid secret

Enfield’s explanation in the opening chapter is that he suspects Jekyll of ‘capers’ in his youth. He diminishes the severity of any such acts by calling them ‘capers’, suggesting them to be little more than the harmless escapades of a young man. At the same time, there exists in his mind the notion that Jekyll could have such a dirty secret in his past. He is not shocked by this idea, despite the fact he knows that the man who wrote the cheque is well-known and seen to be ‘the pink of the proprieties’.

There are many ways that we can interpret this from Enfield. Firstly, he’s a man who seems to have a few secrets of his own. For instance, what was he doing wandering about London at three o’clock on a ‘black winter morning’? Why’s he so cagey about where he’d been, calling it ‘some place’? Men with secrets are perhaps more accepting of the fact that other men may also have secrets.

Secondly, he may well just realise that public image is nothing to do with private reality, and that a person’s private reality is no business for anybody except themselves. He alludes to as much when he says it’s a rule of his not to enquire further the more ‘it looks like Queer Street’. I’d like to add that although he says this, he also seems to be an incurable gossip. After he’s said that he’s not the kind of person to enquire further if something seems a bit dodgy, he says ‘But… and continues with all kinds of details about Hyde’s home’. Stevenson, on the one hand, has Enfield declare that he’s not a nosey old gossip only to then have him go on and describe Hyde’s house as if he spent a good thirty minutes investigating it.

The third fact is that Utterson readily and quickly believes Enfield. He too states that he’s not one for gossip, telling Enfield twice that it’s a ‘good rule’ he has not to enquire further when he feels like some saucy secret might be revealed and he does the exact same thing: ‘And for all that…’ he goes on to enquire the name of the ‘damned Juggernaut’ with the cheque and asking loads of questions.

We should accept that these implied contradictions are partly to allow the plot to progress. If Enfield and Utterson are truly as tight-lipped as Stevenson establishes them to be in the opening chapter, the story would never take off. Enfield wouldn’t have mentioned the door and Utterson wouldn’t have asked the name of the person who trampled the little girl. There’d be no real story. Plus, it’s clear Utterson is a curious old busybody, wanting to find out Hyde’s secrets in order to blackmail him into not blackmailing Jekyll. Again, that’s a plot device. If he truly didn’t care about people’s dirty little secrets, he wouldn’t have said or done anything.

Yet it also points to interesting contradictions that I think are very human, not just accidents of plot. Stevenson has little need to establish them (or, at least, to try to establish them) as discreet, proper and purposely uninterested in discovering Jekyll’s secrets or the reasons Hyde might have for blackmail, but at the same time, Enfield has already threatened ‘to make a scandal’ out of Hyde’s trampling of the young girl and Utterson intends to find out what Hyde is up to so that he can blackmail him into giving up blackmailing Jekyll… Thus, we see Jekyll through the eyes of two people intent on keeping his secrets, eyes that are simultaneously happy to threaten to expose his enemy’s behaviour to the public. While we may see Enfield and Utterson as private and discreet men, at the same time they’re protective of their friend’s secrets, so convinced are they that Jekyll must have them.

If my friends have odd connections with other people, my mind doesn’t go straight to the point that my friends must have a dirty little secret and it’s the only possible reason my friend might have for hanging around with them. Stevenson shows them to accept unreservedly the fact that Jekyll must have some secrets to protect, if not his reputation. As Enfield says, ‘Blackmail, I suppose; an honest man paying through the nose for some of the capers of his youth.’

Later, Utterson will say that he fears it is ‘disgrace’ that has caused Jekyll to leave everything to Hyde in his will. Both are ready to assume there is some defect in Jekyll that has led to this connection.

#4 Jekyll’s will

The first time that Jekyll is mentioned, it’s actually in connection to his will in Chapter Two: Search for Mr Hyde. Thus, we have an early sentiment that the novella will end in Jekyll’s death. We’re also told that the will was ‘holograph’, meaning that it was written by Jekyll and signed without witnesses to prove that it was made without pressure. Normally wills are drawn up by lawyers sometimes with the help of accountants so that they meet the requirements of probate. Probate is the legal and financial aspects of dealing with property, money and possessions when someone dies. The lawyer should be able to give legal advice as to how best to do it, and the accountant may be required to give insights into the financial side. Then they’re signed by witnesses to make sure that the person to whom the will belongs is completely sane and not being taken advantage of.

The fact that the will is holographic is not meaningless. Often holographic wills are written up in a hurry and because they’re done outside of the scope of law, then there could be some implication that they were coerced or that they were written by someone who was not of sound mind.

We come to learn why Jekyll’s will is holographic: Utterson had ‘refused to lend the least assistance in the making of it.’

We also learn that, in the event of Jekyll’s death, everything he owned would pass to Mr Hyde, and there is a curious addition to state that, should Jekyll disappear for more than three months, the will should be executed too.

Already, from the beginning, Jekyll’s death is surrounded by mystery and supposition. We are even given the hint that he may not die, that he may just disappear. Reading that as a naive reader, we probably don’t make much of it. In re-reading, though, we understand why Jekyll added this explanation: there is unlikely to be a body if Hyde takes over.

This will in itself is curious though. Jekyll later explains his reasons for changing into Hyde, seeming to enjoy the freedom from moral and public constraint, being able to escape conformity. Yet Hyde wants to assume all the luxury in life that Jekyll has accumulated. We often think of Jekyll being unable to escape Hyde; Hyde is, in no small part, very much a part of him. At the same time, right from the beginning, the notion is established that Jekyll – or, at least, Jekyll’s money and lifestyle – are things that Hyde has a predilection for. He can’t escape the sensibilities of Jekyll. That’s the whole point of the will. Hyde aspires to live like Jekyll and there are elements of Jekyll – albeit the financial ones and ones to do with his accustomed lifestyle – that Hyde does not want to relinquish. Stevenson shows us that Hyde is as unable to escape Jekyll as Jekyll is to escape him.

#5 What Stevenson tells the reader via Lanyon

The whole point of multiple perspectives is to establish a veracity to the facts. Perhaps we are to doubt Enfield and Utterson as a pair of curious old gossips determined to believe that Jekyll has some kind of dirty little secret, a skeleton hidden away in a closet. This whole superficiality of public appearance and private reality is one explored often in late Victorian fiction. Although it will be published some four years later, Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray is another good example of a story taken up with the notion of public appearance disguising a private reality.

Lanyon’s view, then, helps give us a more rounded and therefore more trustworthy opinion of Jekyll.

Lanyon is at first a little reserved, saying only that he sees little of Jekyll, and then going only so far as to say that ‘it is more than ten years since Henry Jekyll became too fanciful for me.’

Stevenson has already established the reliability of Lanyon through the position of his home and practice, on Cavendish Square, just adjacent to Harley Street, still renowned for its congregation of medical expertise, although mostly these days it seems given over to plastic surgeons and cosmetic dentists who can afford the house prices and rental fees. Lanyon’s patients are ‘crowding’, again establishing him as an expert in the field.

To hear then that Jekyll began to go ‘wrong in mind’ harks back to Utterson’s earlier belief that it was ‘madness’ which was the reason for Jekyll leaving everything to Hyde, long before Utterson even had the remotest reason to suspect the authenticity of the will or the soundness of mind of the person who had written it.

Lanyon speaks without explanation, dismissing Jekyll’s work and belief as ‘unscientific balderdash!’. He references a famously loyal friendship and states that Jekyll’s beliefs would have put a wedge between even the most loyal of friends.

Stevenson then presents Utterson’s internal thoughts, telling us that this was ‘somewhat of a relief to Mr Utterson’, and seeing that it was just some scientific dispute as might drive a wedge between many. Though it’s probably hard to get your head around, academia is beset by disputes. It was one reason, for instance, that Darwin held off publishing his theories about evolution, because he was concerned about how it would be received in the academic community. No doubt some of Darwin’s colleagues and accomplices would have dismissed the origin of species as ‘unscientific balderdash’.

Even so, Stevenson paints a picture of Jekyll as being an outsider in the scientific community. It makes sense when we meet Jekyll to see Stevenson describe the location of his home, since Stevenson is using it as a shorthand way of saying that Jekyll is an outlier in the scientific community. He’s using Lanyon as a foil for Jekyll, allowing us to contrast Lanyon’s clear reputation and respectable position in the scientific community to contrast with that of Jekyll.

#6 Jekyll’s home

In fact, given the gap filled by Utterson’s return home and then his meeting with Mr Hyde, the next mention we have of Jekyll is the description of his home.

Stevenson plays on some very gothic themes in his description. The houses are ‘ancient’ and yet ‘handsome’ in the square where Jekyll lives. Gothic novels often use the home as a symbol of the family itself. The first gothic novel is widely held to be Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto in which a piece of the castle itself falls off and actually kills the heir to the Otranto family’s fortunes. As a result of in-breeding, many aristocratic lines had had and would continue to have both physical and mental health issues that would dog the families and lead to degeneration. Work on genetics in Victorian times was beginning to show this, and where marrying your cousins had been a fairly well-established habit (Darwin married his cousin, for example) it was falling out of practice simply because eventually, it was leading to problems in reproduction as well as a family full of physical ailments (like the haemophilia that ran through the Russian family lines) and mental ailments (that had been evident in some earlier British family lines). The decaying gothic family home pre-dates this, and there was no science at the time to support Walpole’s use of the decaying family home to reflect the degeneration of family lines into insanity or poor health, but it was a well-established theme. Charlotte Brontë takes advantage of this in Jane Eyre with her madwoman in the attic, and Edgar Allan Poe uses the home as a symbol of the self time and time again in his stories, from The Fall of the House of Usher right through to others like Ligeia.

Stevenson takes advantage of this ‘haunted house = haunted individual’ cliché when he reveals that, unlike Lanyon with his respectable home in the middle of the esteemed medical epicentre of London, Jekyll lives in an albeit ‘handsome’ house in a square off a bystreet and then goes on to elaborate by saying that they were ‘for the most part decayed’ and degenerating in themselves, occupied by people of a less respectable standing in society, from the good – map-engravers and architects – to the bad – shady lawyers and agents of obscure enterprises.

Jekyll’s home is remarkable in that it was not split up into rented-out rooms or apartments, and it ‘wore a great air of wealth and comfort’, suggesting respectability. However, Stevenson continues by saying that ‘it was now plunged in darkness except for the fan-light’, suggesting a shadowy side to this.

We really only see what Stevenson is doing if we’re conscious of the ways in which the writers of gothic novels used architecture to reflect the family and the individuals occupying the home and if we compare it to where he quite deliberately places Lanyon, geographically speaking. This gives us the ability to compare the two men side by side and to notice the small and subtle clues that Stevenson gives us that something is not quite the same when it comes to seeing the home of Jekyll in comparison to the home of Lanyon.

#7 Utterson’s reflections in ‘Search for Mr Hyde’

Utterson’s first attempt to meet Dr Jekyll is a failure: Jekyll has gone out. We’ve already explored the ways in which both Enfield and Utterson seem disposed to think of Jekyll having some kind of dark secret, and what Utterson learns from Poole seems only to convince him further that this is the case. Utterson learns that Hyde has a key to the dissecting room and that Jekyll has given his servants ‘orders to obey’ Hyde. The fact that Hyde comes and goes by the laboratory would perhaps be telling in itself.

Firstly, it tells us that Hyde is not a respectable guest, coming and going by the front door. It also tells us that there is some intimacy between Hyde and Jekyll. As to the nature of that relationship, Stevenson lets the reader’s imagination do the work. Some have suggested a personal relationship between the two, since homosexuality was illegal at the time and blackmail was easy when men of a certain social standing were involved. We come back once again to Oscar Wilde as an example. Others have suggested a more nefarious relationship based on dark science. Lanyon hints at as much when he says Jekyll’s beliefs were ‘unscientific balderdash’. The backdoor laboratory and dissecting room brings to mind both Victor Frankenstein and also the graverobbers Burke and Hare. It’s not an accident that it’s the laboratory that Hyde enters and leaves by. After all, the house is very much Stevenson’s construct.

In a way, whatever secret Utterson thinks Jekyll is hiding is unimportant. He seems, though, to quickly accept that Jekyll has such a secret: ‘He is in deep waters!’

Utterson sees that Jekyll is out of his depth, to continue the water metaphor. He thinks he is unable to deal with Hyde. Thus, Utterson’s motivation to seek out Hyde’s secrets is seemingly based on his desire to protect Jekyll. Yet Utterson also sees that Jekyll has the potential for less proper behaviour himself: ‘he was wild when he was young’ and that whilst this might be ‘a long while ago’, ‘there is no statute of limitations’ on wild behaviour. Utterson uses this legalistic metaphor to say there is no time limit on being wild, whatever ‘wild’ might entail. For Utterson, there is no reason Jekyll shouldn’t have returned to whatever ‘wild’ behaviour he exhibited in his youth.

Utterson is remarkably circumspect about whatever Jekyll got up to in his youth. Partly this is a plot device. Since we don’t know, we’ll read on in the hopes of finding out answers. Also, it’s authorial licence: Stevenson doesn’t have to tell us that Jekyll liked a night out on the town or burgled people’s homes as a youth because it’s irrelevant to the plot. It also adds a layer of mystery. Yet these are Utterson’s own thoughts. These are his internal speculations. Clearly Utterson would have an idea about what such wildness as a youth might have involved, but it’s as if he can’t even bring himself to say it – even to himself. That in itself is interesting and there are many reasons why Utterson wouldn’t be able to even describe whatever Jekyll’s ‘wild’ behaviour had been, not least the reasons shared previously.

Even so, Utterson is convinced: ‘it must be that;’. He calls it ‘the ghost of some old sin, the cancer of some concealed disgrace’.

There’s an irony as I’ve mentioned before that Utterson, in wanting to protect whatever ‘old sin’ might be the cause for Hyde to blackmail Jekyll, decides to find out Hyde’s ‘black secrets’ in order to expose him.

#8 Stevenson’s description of Jekyll in Chapter 3, ‘Dr Jekyll Was Quite At Ease’

Having made us wait even longer to meet Jekyll in the flesh, Stevenson now reveals him. We should think about why we wait so long to meet Jekyll, and scrutinise the text carefully in terms of understanding who the words belong to in the description we receive. As always, we remember we are seeing Jekyll through the lens of Utterson.

The first thing we learn in this chapter is that Jekyll is defined by his company here: his ‘old cronies’ are all ‘intelligent, reputable men’. Stevenson makes it clear that we’re seeing through Utterson’s eyes when he tells us that ‘Mr Utterson so contrived that he remained behind after all the others had departed.’

We can, of course, only know this because Stevenson tells us Utterson’s internal machinations. We see his internal thoughts and motivation. Yet then Stevenson pulls out of Utterson’s internal world and comments on the character from an authorial perspective: ‘Where Utterson was liked, he was liked well’, which don’t seem to be Utterson’s own words but those of some vague authorial voice.

It’s in this vague authorial voice that we receive our first description of Jekyll: ‘a large, well-made, smooth-faced man of fifty’. First, it’s worth stopping a moment to recall two popular contemporary views, that of phrenology and that of good breeding or eugenics.

Phrenology is a pseudo-science. Here, a phrenologist would feel the shape of a person’s head and make judgements about their intelligence, their secretiveness, their propensity for violence, their conscientiousness and so on. Each area of your skull and forehead had significance, and lumps and bumps in one area were reported to mean this or that type of personality. Thus, his smooth face speaks to an even personality.

Phrenology aside, many scientists such as Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton truly believed that ‘good genes’ (the ‘eu’ in eugenics means ‘good’) were reflected in good health, good looks, intelligence and so on. Although we would have to wait some time to discover DNA, the ideas of inherited qualities was not new. Indeed, Shakespeare’s sonnets are one place where we find the poet telling the recipient of the poems to go on and have children to pass on their good qualities. Cattle breeding hit monstrous proportions in the Victorian age, and even refinements in selection of crop seed meant that humans were busily trying to ‘improve’ the stock of crops, fruit trees, cattle, hens, sheep, dogs, rabbits, pigeons… you name it.

It wasn’t a great leap to realise that humans could also have ‘improved stock’ if they came from healthy, intelligent families.

Yet the Victorians were also obsessed (and Galton especially) with the notion of degeneracy or the corruption of those genes, how ‘good genes’ could go wrong.

Thus, when we read this first description of Jekyll, we should read it through the lens of the Victorians with their notions that physique and appearance reflected inner qualities. If you were ugly, small, mis-formed, misshapen, and a whole host of other qualities besides, you were probably of inferior stock and had some pretty poor behaviours too. In the 20th century, social psychology would add some fascinating insights into what we believe about appearance and personality being linked, but Stevenson is still working in Victorian times where, if you looked good, you probably were good. Thus, we cannot read this first description of Jekyll without understanding this.

#9 Stevenson’s descriptive hints that there is more to Jekyll than meets the eye

Stevenson continues with his vaguely authorial intervention to tell us that Jekyll had ‘something of a slyish cast’ perhaps. This phrase is buried inside an enormous sentence and perhaps doesn’t go as noticed as other bits. 27 words precede this phrase, and 24 follow it. The author is effectively burying the clause inside other information. This phrase is sandwiched between a description of his appearance, how he is ‘large, well-made, smooth-faced’ and has ‘every mark of capacity and kindness’ as well as a ‘sincere and warm affection’ for Utterson.

If you removed that clause about the slyish cast, the sentence would be overwhelmingly and entirely positive. Still, we have this small blemish, this small indication that there is something not quite perfect about Jekyll. Stevenson gives us the impression that Jekyll has something cunning and deceitful about him, and then tempers this description with ‘perhaps’. As the author, he can make a character’s features as definite as he likes, and yet he hedges three times: something of a slyish cast perhaps. Stevenson could have been more definitive: ‘he had a sly look about him’. Yet he first makes it more vague and ill-defined, something, as if he can’t quite define exactly what it was that made Jekyll seem cunning or deceitful, and then he adds ish to the word ‘sly’, again making it less well defined. The final way in which he adds a layer of the undefined to the phrase is with the adverb ‘perhaps’ to suggest possibility rather than anything definite or certain. It’s a particularly useful phrase to explore in terms of how the writer is creating an effect. Stevenson really works to blur and soften the effects of this phrase in quite intriguing ways.

We should also ask ourselves to whom these words belong, and I think it’s pretty clear these are Stevenson’s own words as he steps in to describe Jekyll.

#10 What we learn through Jekyll’s first lines of dialogue

Jekyll dismisses Utterson’s concerns straight away. Stevenson tells us that ‘a close observer might have gathered that the topic [of the will] was distasteful; but the doctor carried it off gaily.’

Immediately, his first actions establish a man who feels one way and behaves another. This is the first time we have seen him come to life within the novel, and we are given the indication that he is concealing something, thinking one way and behaving another.

He dismisses Utterson’s concerns and also forces us to reconsider what we learned about him from Lanyon, dismissing Lanyon as a ‘hide-bound pedant’. What he means here is that Lanyon is limited in his learning just as a book is limited by its cover. Lanyon can no more push the boundaries of what he knows and understands than the sentences in a book can push their way out from the cover.

Stevenson’s first dialogue for Jekyll suggests him to be a forthright and honest man. He makes no attempt to disguise or conceal how he feels about Lanyon, knowing well he is a friend still of Utterson’s. We see this through his interjection of ‘you needn’t frown’. We realise that in many ways, Lanyon and Jekyll are foils for one another since Lanyon had done exactly the same thing, launching into a dismissal of Jekyll’s scientific views and practices as ‘unscientific balderdash’ just as Jekyll dismisses him as a ‘hide-bound pedant… an ignorant, blatant pedant’.

Stevenson shows us something else, too… something that Utterson picks up on. Utterson realises that Jekyll is diverting the conversation from the will onto something else entirely. Utterson is described as ‘ruthlessly disregarding the fresh topic’.

Where Jekyll had waxed lyrical about Lanyon, he becomes tight-lipped about Hyde. He begins to speak ‘a trifle sharply’ to Utterson when he is forced to continue about the will, and when Utterson says that he has been ‘learning something of young Hyde’, there is a marked change in both how Jekyll looks and how he speaks: he ‘grew pale to the very lips, and there came a blackness about his eyes’ and when he speaks, he starts by saying, ‘I do no care to hear more’. We understand now that Stevenson’s purpose in setting this discussion after a ‘pleasant dinner’ with ‘five or six old cronies’ – the juxtaposition allows us to realise Jekyll’s deception more clearly.

Stevenson goes on to extend, deepen and then reveal Jekyll’s narrative more deeply as the novella continues. What you see here is the way in which Stevenson establishes many things without even giving us very much of Jekyll himself.

Since we see things very much through the lens of Utterson, in the next post, we’ll be looking in more depth at what Stevenson tells us about the lawyer and how he portrays him.

The Character As Construct: Dr Jekyll in The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde

Having spent a couple of months exploring narrative writing, we move back to preparing for GCSE English Literature, looking specifically at Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.

Whether you are studying for Pearson Edexcel, AQA, Eduqas or OCR, having a good understanding of how the characters are constructed and for what purpose the writer uses them can really help you hit the high marks in the exams. Rather than looking at the character as if they are in some way alive, taking this approach helps you focus on what the writer is doing: how they created the character and for what purpose. Being able to speak about the writer’s techniques and purpose is one way to really show that you understand the text.

Today we have a look at one of the two titular characters in Stevenson’s chilling classic The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. I’m going to take you through five points from early in the novella that should help you think about how Stevenson is working.

#1 The title itself

Stevenson, like many writers, gives us a cryptic title and then doesn’t go on to tell us very much at all about the character until much later in the novel. In itself, the title is interesting as it not only gives a nod to the genre, sounding much like a scientific monograph or a paper from a scientist, but also perhaps picking up on other early texts in the detective genre. Although Conan Doyle was yet to publish his first Sherlock Holmes stories (1887), where J&H predates Holmes by a year, other writers such as Wilkie Collins had already taken a foray into the world of the strange and the mysterious with his two stories The Moonstone and The Woman in White. Stevenson owes much to Collins, who also made use of the ‘whodunnit?’ with red herrings, strange appearances, mysteries and the epistolary novel. Epistolary novels were not new to Collins, either, seeing as it had enjoyed a fad in the 18th century, died a death in the early 19th century but really found a home with the gothic. It wouldn’t be right to mention episotolary novels without mentioning Frankenstein, coming almost a century before J&H, and Dracula, which comes after it.

The epistolary style allows for easy multiple narration and stories that eventually come together like jigsaw pieces. Thus, when we see the title, it gives us some clue as to Stevenson’s game. J&H isn’t really epistolary, but it borrows a lot from it. We’ll explore this more when we look at structure. However, we already have many expectations about the story from the title.

Firstly, we may have to think why Stevenson decides on a doctor as the career for Jekyll. Firstly, it’s a plot device. If you’re going to be some kind of mad scientist who can bring out your inner demon, then you’d better be good with chemicals. We have the same in Dr Victor Frankenstein. So, being a doctor is a plot device. It wouldn’t make much sense if Jekyll was a moneylender like Scrooge.

Secondly, we bring a mixed back of suppositions and stereotypes to doctors. There’s all the healing and mending, fixing and curing. We expect them to be good people, pursuing the wellbeing of mankind. They slot right in there to the ‘caring’ professions. Yet we also realise that when doctors and nurses go wrong, they wield an enormous amount of power. Many people forget that the world’s allegedly most prolific serial killer was a doctor. We also have the hangover from the grave diggers Burke and Hare in 1828 Edinburgh who murdered sixteen people to sell the bodies to an anatomist named James Knox. On the one hand, doctors are good, trustworthy people, and on the other, we suspect they know the secrets to life and death. Not that Stevenson would have known this, but when several clinical studies have been conducted into the views and behaviour of various medical professionals, surgeons quite often rank highly on scores of psychopathy. Lots of TV programmes from House to Holmes play on this, where surgeons turn out to be psychopaths. Having to make life-or-death decisions, holding people’s lives in your hands, being respected a consummate professional in a complex field like neurosurgery… and you’ve got a field that many would argue needs people who don’t empathise with other humans like the rest of us might.

So as soon as someone says ‘Doctor’, many different, complex and sometimes contradictory thoughts are triggered in our brain as to how we feel about that profession. Stevenson’s readership, perhaps desperately awaiting the publication of his novel slightly later than the December deadline that had been promised, would have been keyed into these ideas perhaps much more than we are, given The Body Snatcher preceded Strange Case by a couple of years. In that tale, the delightfully named Dr Wolfe Macfarlene plays a more central role than Knox had in the gravedigger murders in Edinburgh some sixty years before. Where we’re perhaps expecting doctors to be ethical, caring individuals, Stevenson’s original audience would have been fully prepared for the ‘doctor-gone-wrong’. As Robert Mighall argues in his introduction to the Penguin version of the tale, we might want to consider Dr Wolfe Macfarlene as the literary ancestor to Jekyll.

Nevertheless, doctors (on the whole – serial killers, resurrectionists and fictional bodysnatching murderers aside!) are respectable members of the community. By choosing a doctor – a learnéd, rational man of science – Stevenson could be showing us that the potential for regression and evil is within all of us, even those of us who seem least likely to be taken by it.

Like it or not, these things are awakened in us too. Do we expect Jekyll to be the good guy or the bad guy? Before we even open the novel, we’re thrown into a minefield to navigate our own suppositions.

#2 Jekyll’s name

You don’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to work out that Stevenson likes playing with names. We’ll explore Hyde’s name in the next post. What do you make of the name Jekyll from your first impressions?

Firstly, it’s clearly a contrivance of a sort. It’s purposeful. The J starts us off with a soft sound, but the E is short and hard. This is then followed Kyll. Now most of us are going to say Jeck-ull I would imagine, rather than Je-Kill. It is, of course, a real name. It was the name of a famous landscape gardener, Gertrude Jekyll. It was also the surname of her brother Walter who was a friend of Stevenson.

So is Stevenson just paying a nod to his friend in naming his character after him?

Others have speculated that it’s a combination of ‘Je’, French for I, and ‘kyll’ – meaning clear and obvious. I kill. Is Stevenson hiding a huge clue in his main characters family name? Perhaps, then, we should be thinking of pronouncing it a little like zhuh-keel. Stevenson, of course, was Scottish, so perhaps we should be pronouncing it the Scottish way Jee-kull as Daniel Evers argues here. He suggests it should rhyme with treacle and not heckle. Does it matter? Evers argues that it does. If you watch British gardening programmes (Do you??!) you’ll hear Walter’s sister referred to as Gertrude Jee-kull, not Gertrude Jeck-ul. Yet if you watch American gardening shows, she’s called Gertrude Jeck-ul. Evers explains that the 1941 film version of the novella is perhaps the reason we might all be calling him Dr Jeck-ul and not Dr Jee-Kull.

Maybe we shouldn’t get so hung up on the meaning and sound of the name after all.

#3 Taking Jekyll in two readings: the naive and the knowing

You, dear reader, are most likely taking this in post-reading. You’ve probably read it already. If you haven’t, read it and make a note of your expectations, but do not read any further until you have because there are going to be significant spoiler alerts that will ruin your reading. If I were teaching this to an entire class once more, I’d be thinking of taking down students’ thoughts about what they already know and expect – since it’s a well-known story – and I’d want to document the journey of the naive reader as they come to realise the connection between Hyde and Jekyll.

It’s easy to forget that once this story was new to us, and we came to the story having no idea what Jekyll does and his relationship to Hyde. When we re-read, we do so with knowing eyes.

We need to keep these two readings in our mind:

What would a naive reader think?

What does the knowing reader know?

This should influence our reading.

It’s very much in keeping with the theme of appearances and reality. What we understand from our first reading of Strange Case, right up to Chapter 9, is changed forever by our understanding. We can’t go back when we know what we know. When we know the reality, we see through the appearances. We should also consider our suspicions and how we view the world largely through Utterson’s eyes. If Utterson is convinced of their distinct and separate reality, then we are too. His suspicions are our suspicions. Because we trust Utterson, it alters our first understanding of Jekyll. We too believe he may be being pressured or blackmailed by Hyde. Those are very deliberate clues placed there by Stevenson to deceive us.

Once we see the writer’s deception, we see what he is doing. Like a magician whose hand has been revealed, we come to see how we’ve been played. Yet we do need to appreciate how it is for the naive reader, and the somewhat delicious process of having suspicions which then turn out to be wrong.

#4 The lenses through which we see Jekyll

As soon as we get into the novella, we’re seeing the world through Utterson’s eyes. We’ll explore how Stevenson creates this experience when we look at the character of Utterson and also when we look at the opening as part of the sequence about key moments.

Yet we also see Jekyll through others’ eyes too – through the eyes of his servants, through the eyes of Lanyon, and finally, in his own voice.

This too is part of Stevenson’s deception of the reader. Why does he leave Jekyll’s account to last? Like a jigsaw, each piece falls into place, giving us more insight into what happened, but it’s only when Lanyon’s piece falls, followed by Jekyll’s own letter, that we truly see things as they are.

For the majority of the novella, however, we have to remember that our view of Jekyll comes via the eyes and thoughts and experiences of the construct of Utterson, in turn through the pen of Stevenson. There are layers that we need to navigate, and in order to truly understand Jekyll, we have to understand Stevenson and his craft as well as understanding this intermediary layer of Utterson that he fixes between us and his central character.

Had, for instance, Stevenson decided to position Lanyon as the main narrative lens, things would appear very differently. It’s worth thinking about how these lenses affect what we know, what we think and what we believe about Jekyll.

We also need to remember the respective professions of Utterson and then Lanyon. Utterson is a lawyer, and his narrative is constructed through a legal and moral lens. Lanyon is a doctor, and his narrative is presented through a medical lens. We view Jekyll first from the position of his character and soul, and then from the position of his body and his physical being. We also see Jekyll first through the lenses of outsiders and then through a relative insider, and then through the lens of Jekyll himself, all through the lens of Stevenson himself.

Complicated!

#5 Framing our understanding of Jekyll through his connection to Hyde and unnamed references to him in the opening of the novella

Despite being mentioned in the title, Jekyll is then abandoned during the first chapter, where the narrative focuses on Hyde. There is a long focus on Enfield and Utterson and the door mentioned in the chapter title even before Hyde is mentioned. Stevenson establishes the characters of Utterson and Enfield before letting Enfield tell his tale about a child getting trampled on at four in the morning by some ‘damned Juggernaut’ of a man. Although when re-reading allows us to see that the cheque that Hyde presents has been made out by Jekyll, his name is not mentioned, and a naive reader would not be aware of this clue about ‘another man’s cheque’. Enfield tells us that he ‘can’t mention’ the name on the cheque. This in itself is interesting as we wonder why Enfield can’t mention Jekyll’s name.

Later, Enfield tells us that the unnamed person is ‘very well known’ and ‘often printed’. Again, only in re-reading might we have any clue at all that this refers to Jekyll. Enfield’s first suspicion is that the name is forged but the cheque is cashed.

Enfield seems shocked because the name on the cheque is that of someone who is ‘the very pink of the proprieties’, meaning that Jekyll is extremely conventional and proper – even though a naive reader may not have any idea that Enfield is indeed referring to Jekyll. He suggests there is no-one more moral or more proper than the person whose name is on the cheque. Enfield continues to say that he is ‘celebrated too’, meaning that he is well-known. There is a curious detail that makes it worse for Enfield, that the person who signed the cheque does ‘what they call good’. This turn of phrase is very interesting. On the surface, the person to whom he is referring is clearly charitable, a benevolent person involved in doing acts of public service, whatever ‘doing good’ might entail. Yet the way he phrases it is quite odd: who are ‘they’? Why does this way of expressing it make it seem as Enfield himself doesn’t think there’s anything ‘good’ about it?

There are many moments of curiosity established in the first chapter, and there are many mysteries which go unanswered. We’ll explore these mysteries in future posts, of course.

Perhaps our mystery most connected to Jekyll is why Enfield refuses to name him: ‘a name I cannot mention’, ‘a name at least very well known and often printed’. The person that ‘drew the cheque is the very pink of the proprieties, celebrated too, and (what makes it worse) one of your fellows who do what they call good.’

Enfield’s explanation for the fact that the ‘damned Juggernaut’ who trampled on the child had a cheque that turns out be from Jekyll is rooted in blackmail. He supposes that the person who’d given our hellish thug a cheque was ‘an honest man paying through the nose for some of the capers of his youth.’

Enfield and Utterson both talk around ‘the person’, the ‘drawer of the cheque’, referring to him obliquely, sometimes using pronouns like ‘he’ and ‘his’

Stevenson names Hyde first, when Utterson asks Enfield to share it.

The name of Hyde is significant enough because that gives Utterson the information he needs to know who wrote the cheque. It is one of his clients. For the naive reader, we may suspect Jekyll, but we do not know for sure. However, Utterson is in possession of information that the naive reader is not. Indeed, someone re-reading is also in possession of that information too. It is Jekyll. Yet he still goes unnamed. Utterson says he knows ‘the name already’.

Without mentioning any names, they agree never to talk on the topic again. With that, as a naive reader, we would still have no clue who had signed the cheque. It’s only in Chapter Two, ‘Search for Mr Hyde’, that Jekyll is first mentioned, and only in connection to his will. From the very start, Jekyll is seen only in terms of his connection to Hyde as we may puzzle as to their connection. Once we suspect that it is Jekyll, like Enfield, we too might consider it to be as a result of blackmail, and that someone of Jekyll’s good character can hardly have other reasons to be connected to Hyde. Still, we view Jekyll through Enfield and Utterson. For the former, he can only believe that it relates to some event in Jekyll’s youth, implying that Jekyll is above reproach now. For the latter, he too wishes not to speak of things, almost as if by speculating as to the nature of the relationship between the two would be to bring it to life. They’re both prepared to believe ill of Mr Hyde, yet cannot believe ill of Dr Jekyll.

What we see, then, is a Jekyll through Stevenson – who wants to create narrative tension and leave his big reveal as long as he can – and a Jekyll seen through the eyes of two men determined to ignore the potential of Jekyll having done wrong, if not determined to see the good in him.

We’ll come back in the next post once again to Jekyll. If anything, Stevenson has gone some way to create a character who seems free of any impropriety. That phrase from Enfield: ‘the very pink of the proprieties’ and the concept of impropriety are already central to understanding Jekyll. This is a novella about correctness in public, about standards of honesty, manners and decency. Impropriety is the act of being improper. We start with two characters who cannot quite believe that Jekyll could do anything improper at all.

Improving Writing at GCSE: How to Create Telling Details

Given the weighting for narrative, creative or imaginative writing for GCSE English Language, many students are keen to boost their marks when it comes to story writing. Whether that’s writing your own stories about your own experiences, or creating imaginary worlds for fictional characters, focusing on your skills can really improve your grade. Given that narrative writing is worth up to 25% of your final GCSE grade, it’s really worthwhile investing in your creative skills. Also, I tend to find that even though some students struggle to come up with a plot, creative writing is less painful than comprehension or revising literature texts.

Today we focus on creating telling details. When we create what writers call ‘telling details’ we’re in the business of finding those details and descriptions that ‘speak’. They can be similes, metaphors, descriptions, actions… any word, phrase or sentence can become a telling detail. They’re the ones that can tell a story in themselves. Telling details are usually pretty unusual. I won’t go as far as to say they are unique, because nothing in writing is unique, but they are unusual. They stand out in their very unordinariness.

Telling details speak to the personal, the unique, the essence of an experience.

We’re going to have a look at five ways that you can create telling details in your own stories so that you can add them to your own stories.

#1 Go for objects

The objects about us speak volumes. If you’re building description, rather than just some bland scene that’s exactly the same as the other half million students’ details, it can be helpful if you look for objects that stand out and tell a story in themselves.

Previously we looked at Anthony Doerr’s delicious story The Deep, and he uses some beautiful telling details to describe the salt mine workers:

His mother operates a six-room, underinsulated boardinghouse populated with locked doors, behind which drowse the grim possessions of itinerant salt workers: coats the colors of mice, tattered mucking boots, aquatints of undressed women, their breasts faded orange.

There’s so many unusual and unique details in here. The description of the boarding house is specific: it’s got six boarding rooms and it’s underinsulated. Just that combination together makes it unique. Think of telling details a bit like a combination lock or a PIN. 1 on its own is not unique. 1-7 is more unusual. 1 – 7 – 8 is more unusual still. 1 – 7 – 8 – 5 is even more unusual. When we start putting objects together, we make these details into telling details.

You don’t have to do this in a single sentence as Doerr does. It’s a great list of three items there, the unusual simile to describe the coat colours, the boots, the aquatints of women.

Having coats and boots doesn’t ‘speak’ much, but the aquatints do, as they speak to a male-only life, devoid of women or of female company, a lonely life, and, from the age of the aquatints, a life the men have been living for a long time.

Say for instance I was trying to write a description of my Nana and her flat, I can use this combination lock approach of putting three or four details together to make her unique.

She’s a fading image in my mind now as each day takes her further from me: her pearl lipstick expertly applied, the sometimes stubborn set of her chin, the faint mist of Chanel and her violet eyes that always smiled despite her sadness.

She’s made of a combination of parts. Just a reminder, too, to consider how you organise those parts… it was a conscious decision to leave the sadness to last.

It’s also useful not just to have details but to drill down into them. It’s not just lipstick, it’s pearl lipstick. It’s not just pearl lipstick, it’s pearl lipstick expertly applied. This is not an excuse for a stack of adjectives a mile long.

These then become telling details, because they reveal things about her without telling us directly. I’m hoping you picked up on how glamorous my nana is with her expertly applied lipstick and her Chanel, and how hard she tries to be cheerful. If I were going to go on and you were going to ask me the one feature that is unique about my Nana, it is most certainly her stubborn chin. Whenever you see the stubborn chin, you know you are getting nowhere. My sister also has that stubborn chin.

You can also do this with rooms and spaces:

Little is left of her here now: the jar of unopened caramels, a dish of Murano glass cherries, the ghost of her smell, a discarded china coffee cup.

#2 Be specific

There’s a lot to be said for leaving things to the imagination of your reader. That’s fine. But from time to time, a telling detail that anchors the reader in the specific can be just lovely. Thinking back to my last example, the cherries are not just glass cherries, they are Murano glass. The air wasn’t just perfumed around her, it smelt of Chanel.

Choose what you want to be specific about, though.

Besides my mother’s empty chair, a half-read book, her discarded glasses, a bag of knitting.

In this sentence, I could be quite specific about four things: the chair, the book, the glasses, the knitting.

Let’s see:

Besides my mother’s empty rocking chair…

Ok, makes her sound ninety-seven, especially with the knitting.

Besides my mother’s empty club chair…

That just sounds wrong.

Besides my mother’s empty bergère…

Ok, this goes back to the contrived words we were talking about in previous posts, where the examiner may feel they have to go and look up what a bergère looks like and then get cross because they got disrupted and it interrupted the narrative… it’s silly and pretentious.

Besides my mother’s empty wingback…

Who even knows what that is?!

So choose what you want to be specific with. Whatever kind of chair it is doesn’t matter.

I could be specific about the book, though, and even about what she was knitting…

Besides my mother’s empty chair, ‘Bleak Times’ half-read, her discarded glasses, an unfinished half-knitted bobble hat in navy blue.

Don’t these details tell you more about her? My mother is the kind of person with a million half-finished projects as she’s so busy. She doesn’t knit, by the way. If you can’t think of a detail, you can always make it up. My Nana is presented for you in all her reality, from the lipstick to the cherries, as I’m using my own memories to create her for you. My mum doesn’t even have a chair. She has a sofa. She wouldn’t read Bleak House and she wears her glasses all the time and is extremely careful with them because they cost a lot of money. You don’t have to be truthful.

Telling details speak. Their specificity anchors the reader in the reality of the person and grounds them.

#3 Choose things that tell a story

One of the most lovely details from Doerr’s short story is the aquatints because it tells a story of the lonely life of the character. In John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, one of the characters has a tattered dictionary that speaks to his difference from the other characters who are barely literate. He has a copy of the California civil code for 1905. These two details are so telling. Why, of all the books in the world, did the character have these two books?

Because Steinbeck knew these two books would speak for themselves.

Again, you need to be sparing where you use them. They have to be important. You can’t just slam them in randomly.

She’s a fading image in my mind now as each day takes her further from me: her Avon True Colour Ultra Satin lipstick in carnation pink, expertly applied, the sometimes stubborn set of her chin, the faint mist of Chanel and her violet eyes that always smiled despite her sadness.

That just ruins it, doesn’t it? Did it even matter that it was Avon True Colour Ultra Satin lipstick in Carnation?

No. It doesn’t speak. It doesn’t tell us anything of her character. I don’t even know if that’s her lipstick. I just found it online and it looked a bit like one she might wear. In fact, I think she wears Boots N° 7 but who knows?

It matters that it’s pearl, because she’s very ‘pearly’ with her white hair. It matters that it’s not matte or ordinary, because pearl lipstick tells us about her. It matters that it’s expertly applied, because that tells us about her too. I could have added something about trembling hands if I wanted to emphasise that she’s had 75 years of putting lipstick on and she does it almost by memory despite age.

Being oddly specific where the detail doesn’t speak just makes the description sound really awkward and contrived.

It mattered, though, that it was Chanel perfume. I was going to add N°5 as Chanel make a lot of perfumes, but it sounded wrong. Too specific, perhaps. But it’s a brand of perfume that’s perhaps a bit traditional and old-fashioned, belonging to another age. If you’re old enough to know who was described with violet eyes, you might also pick up on that too. Marilyn Monroe famously wore Chanel N°5 and Elizabeth Taylor famously had violet eyes. Older readers might get those references to golden era film stars from years gone by.

This is also where I needed to think about my audience. I could have written:

She’s a fading image in my mind now as each day takes her further from me: her pearl lipstick expertly applied, the sometimes stubborn set of her chin, the faint mist of Chanel N°5 and her Elizabeth Taylor eyes that always smiled despite her sadness.

If you’re 15 years old and reading this wondering who Elizabeth Taylor is, it’s unhelpful for you. It’s annoying. It causes a disconnect between you and the text, the character and the writer. It needles, just that little bit. In fact, it’s not much different from the bergère chair.

In other words, when you choose things that tell a story, make sure they are things that tell a story you are sure the reader knows. In one story, one of my students had written he came out of the shadows like a final boss. I shared this with some teacher friends and we liked it, though we puzzled over its meaning. A final boss? Ok. It was nice, and it was unusual, but it took one of my gaming teacher friends to explain to us that the final boss is the big villain at the end of a computer game where you’ve defeated loads of lesser villains before. Then it sank in! It only made sense because we luckily had a gamer among us who knew that vocabulary. Remember you’re not always writing to an audience of your peers and rather than explain details, leave them out. Imagine if the student had written he came out of the shadows like the last villain in a beat ’em up video game who is always more powerful than all the other opponents you’ve faced so far.

If you’re having to slip into Wikipedia-mode just to make sure it makes sense, leave it out. In fact, if it’s an important telling detail that you really think is vital to describe that scene or character, go ahead and stick it in. If I have to go and look it up, fine.

#4 Be specific with your stuff from time to time

When we have things in our story, it helps to be specific especially if those details have an almost symbolic value.

Let’s take birds, for instance.

We had in the previous post a lovely detail from Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising where the snow fell thin and apologetic, so I’m going to amend this and build on it for a description.

The snow fell sparsely and sorrowfully. A robin hopped across the lawn leaving a neat row of prints behind.

Here, I went for a robin. I could have gone for a solitary crow, a magpie, a dove, a sparrow… all of these birds speak. They all carry associations with them. It speaks more than a bird hopped across the lawn leaving a neat row of prints. It’s more careful.

You can do the same with trees and plants.

The evening sun bathed the village in golden light. Hollyhocks in lipstick shades of mauve and pink and magenta flagged wearily against walls and picket fences.

You can see here that I got specific with my plants. You don’t have to be a gardener to write about daisies or dandelions or roses.

I also got a little specific about my colours, but I tried not to mix them up with other flowers. I could have said Hollyhocks in lipstick shades of fuchsia and cherry and rose but that wouldn’t have been as good because I’m using other flowers to compare my flower colours to… kind of mixed up.

Being specific with what you describe can work really nicely as a telling detail. As before, it’s nice when description is flexible enough for us to visualise it ourselves without being too prescriptive, but at the same time, it’s nice to have some details that pin it down.

If you’ve ever watched the movie of a book you’ve read and you’ve been disappointed by the casting, this is no doubt because the author has either left the character description fairly loose and woolly, and what you imagine in your own mind’s eye then ends up very different from what you see. You are clearly not old enough to remember the Robert Redford casting of Jay Gatsby compared to the much-superior casting of Leonardo di Caprio, but the Leo version matched much better that image I had in my mind’s eye of how Gatsby should be. Not in looks, perhaps, but in personality.

Other times, the writer has been fairly specific and then the actor cast doesn’t match your view at all. I’ll never recover from the tiny Tom Cruise casting himself as the man mountain that is supposed to be Jack Reacher. It was just wrong.

Nobody’s going to be making films out of your GCSE submission (well, probably not…) but if you paint a mix of defining details and specific details, you’ll create a much more telling image.

#5 Zoom in and develop a detail here and there

Another way you can use your telling details is to build on them a little. Sometimes, it’s quite lovely when a detail tells a story off the page, or it hints at another story in itself that is yet to be told. What is also quite lovely is when a writer takes a moment to embellish and embroider a detail that they want us to focus in on. For instance, let’s take the description of my mother’s empty chair.

Besides my mother’s empty chair, ‘Bleak Times’ half-read, her discarded glasses, an unfinished half-knitted bobble hat in navy blue.

I’ve got several details I can build on here, most notably ‘Bleak House’ and the bobble hat.

Besides my mother’s empty chair, ‘Bleak Times’ half-read, her discarded glasses, an unfinished half-knitted bobble hat in navy blue. It seemed to me that every time I visited, the bobble hat had only ever grown by a line or two, and that my nephew was going to be ninety-seven by the time my mother finished it.

See how that detail about the bobble hat then just opens up?

Besides my mother’s empty chair, ‘Bleak Times’ half-read, her discarded glasses, an unfinished half-knitted bobble hat in navy blue. The supermarket receipt marking her progress in the book never seemed to move much from week to week and I wondered why she persevered.

Here, the detail about the book opens up too.

Both tell us a story about the character. What they say is almost up to the reader. Does my mother not care about how cold my nephew’s head is, or does she hate knitting? Is she busy? The reason, I leave to you.

Likewise with the Bleak House supermarket receipt. I leave it to you to work out whether she’s reading it because it’s a classic and she thinks she should rather than the kind of books she’d really enjoy? Is she not bothered because it’s boring? Would she love to read it but she finds it hard going? Would she love to read it but she doesn’t have time?

Opening up your details just by spending another sentence or so on them not only helps you develop your ideas, but it also helps you embellish the details you want us to focus in on.

Having spent a good couple of months on narrative writing, in the next post, I’m going to turn to Robert Louis Stevenson’s novella The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde helping you prepare for GCSE English Literature.

Improving Writing Skills at GCSE: Punctuation that Tells a Story

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been taking you through all the ways that you can improve your narrative writing for GCSE. Since it’s a universal task across all the exam boards and since it’s a high-stakes skill carrying a lot of marks, it’s worth spending some time to get it right.

Today we look at punctuation. It’s something I’ve covered in a lot of depth, having looked at ways to use all kinds of punctuation marks across the two writing tasks. Today, we look specifically at punctuation in narrative writing and how it can be used to tell a story.

One of the most depressing things to see as I open a piece of writing is a list like this:

.,?!:;…-“”()

All it tells me is that I’m about to read something that is written as a vehicle to get in a load of punctuation marks because that’s how the candidate feels marks are awarded.

The more you use, the more marks you get, right?

This comes back to my previous post about vocabulary, and how the chief examiner for AQA used that term ‘contrived’. All contrived means in this sense is artificial, used deliberately in an unrealistic way rather than appearing spontaneously. Punctuation often suffers the same fate as linguistic devices: because it can be reduced to a mnemonic of sorts, students go into the exam, slap down a checklist and tick each one off as they go.

Yet writing like this never gets high marks.

What readers are looking for is the right mark in the right place.

I’m looking for candidates who understand that punctuation can be as much a part of the story as the words themselves. They control the pace, the musicality, the style. They speed things up. And then, when you are in desperate need of taking a while, in need of lingering a little to allow your reader to catch their breath, your punctuation and the structure of your sentence do all the heavy lifting, stretching the sentence out in order to delay, to deliberate, to pontificate.

It’s not about using ALL the punctuation.

Nor is it even about using all the punctuation correctly.

It’s about using punctuation for deliberate narrative effect.

Punctuation, after all, is not just some add-on. It’s not an after-thought. It is – or, at least, it should be – an integral part of your writing.

Here are five ways you can use punctuation more effectively in your narratives, using them to tell a story.

#1 Think of the overall effect before you commit yourself to paper

Are you trying to go for a tense mood? A terse narrative style? Or are you planning on waxing lyrical and releasing your inner poet as you uncover a moment of beauty within the story? Are you in need of making something startling and striking?

Are you trying to slow your reader down or speed them up?

Before you even start to write, it’s a good idea to consider whether you want it to be fast or slow, at the very least.

Of course, with punctuation, it’s hardly as if you can map out your entire story before you start, but even in the planning stages, you can include some notes for yourself. Think of your plan almost as a musical conductor’s notes. Do you want it to be adagio or allegro? Slow or bright? Are you building to a crescendo or a cliffhanger?

Punctuation is all about mood.

In Dark Matter by Michelle Paver, she creates many scenes of suspense and tension. Look at the terse, tense, sharp, staccato sentences here:

I wake to darkness and dead cold.

In the instant of waking I know that I am perceiving what cannot be – and yet it is. I am awake and I see it, it is real. Through the doorway I see it. It is standing in the main room looking out of the north window. It’s inside.

Now it’s turning towards me. I feel its rage. Its malevolence crushes me to my bunk.

I fumble for my torch. Can’t find it. Can’t get untangled from the sleeping bag. I knock over the chair besides me. Glass shatters. A stink of paraffin.

Here, there is a tense and dischordant mood. Paver is not just using punctuation to create that mood. Her vocabulary and her sentences also help create that effect. All things come together.

I have no idea if Paver made a very conscious decision with her punctuation. It can become very instinctive to good writers, because they don’t even think about the effect. Yet before she wrote, she knew no doubt that she was building up to the final crescendo. The three tools that she has in her toolkit – punctuation, sentences and vocabulary – all create both the mood and the pace.

Before you commit your next sentence to paper having just written the last, it’s useful to think about whether you need to go fast or slow, at the very least.

#2 Start simple

If there’s one skill that makes a huge difference, it’s knowing where and how to use full stops and commas. As you can see from the passage above, these are really the most frequent of the punctuation you will use. A good writer can arguably get by with nothing other than full stops, commas and the occasional apostrophe. In his book The Road, Cormac McCarthy uses little other than full stops and apostrophes as you can see in the opening here:

When he woke in the woods in the dark and the cold of the night he’d reach out to touch the child sleeping beside him. Nights dark beyond darkness and the days more gray each one than what had gone before. Like the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world. His hand rose and fell softly with each precious breath. He pushed away the plastic tarpaulin and raised himself in the stinking robes and blankets and looked toward the east for any light but there was none.

It’s worthwhile focusing on the components of a sentence and understanding where and when to use a sentence fragment, and for what purpose. You can’t divorce punctuation from sentences and structures. Both Paver and McCarthy use very little other than full stops, and both use fragments, but they feel right.

I know that must seem like a strange thing to say about sentences, that they ‘feel’ right, but the real truth is that there are no hard and fast rules about where fragments are to be used and where they are not.

#3 Add speech

We’ve considered the use of dialogue in narrative in another post. The good thing about dialogue is that speech punctuation and the punctuation of reporting clauses is either/or. That’s to say it’s either right or it’s not. There are few moments of punctuation like that. For instance, in copying out both Paver’s and McCarthy’s examples, there were places I would have put a comma. In fact, I put commas in and had to delete them – it was instinctive and habitual. That’s not to say I’m right and they’re wrong, but that there are few hard and fast rules about commas.

Speech punctuation is either right or wrong. On the whole. It gives the examiner or the reader a chance to see that you can master stuff where there are rules. In fact, whether someone knows how to punctuate speech is a real barometer for me about their skills.

We already know that speech serves many narrative purposes, so it’s something that can easily go in to your essay.

You may notice before that I said that speech punctuation is either right or wrong on the whole. McCarthy’s book is a very good example of how we can punctuate speech differently. Did you know, for instance, in French, that they use angled quote marks and dashes to introduce speech? « » takes the place of “”, and a dash is often used to introduce a speaker too.

– Stay where you are! Do nothing! Don’t make a move.

That can work in English too, and you’ll find writers using a dash to mark new speech – and no speech marks at all! How frightful is that?!

German speech marks look like this: „…“, as do a whole host of other languages.

Even in English, there are times when rules are broken, particularly by certain writers for effect. Consider McCarthy’s speech here:

The boy turned in the blankets. Then he opened his eyes. Hi, Papa, he said.

I’m right here.

I know.

Does that mean McCarthy would fail his GCSE English Language? Well, the speech is clear and it’s also spartan for effect, so… I’d argue that it’s highly effective. Would I experiment in the exam? Perhaps not. There are times to play it safe just so that the examiner realises you are capable of following the rules. It’s not always obvious that students are breaking rules especially when there are many others who simply don’t know the rules yet.

#4 Get your apostrophes and hyphens right

With most stories, once you’ve got your full stops and commas right, you may find that you don’t actually need a much wider range of punctuation. One thing that even McCarthy needs, however, is an apostrophe in he’d. Like speech marks, both the omissive and the possessive apostrophe are either right or they’re wrong, so it’s worth brushing up on them. The real tell-tale for me is whether a student knows that its means ‘belonging to it’ and it’s means ‘it is’ or ‘it has’. Students who know this rule don’t make that mistake. I was 24 years old and I’d got through GCSEs, A level English Literature and a degree in English Literature before my uncle pulled me up on this error. I know plenty of people whose intelligence and writing I esteem and who haven’t quite got the it’s/its thing right yet…

Hyphens are the other one that are almost either/or. There is some changing shifts as cultures change and words like ward-robe morph into wardrobe and people forget there was ever a hyphen there. Even McCarthy in his punctuation-bare novel uses a hyphen from time to time, half-inch even when he runs others together like oilbottles and trashdrum which you’d probably think of as two separate and distinct words that don’t even need a hyphen. So, again, not hard-and-fast rules, but more-or-less rules. Even if I don’t find speech in a story – perfectly normal in a one-character story, by the way – then full stops, commas, apostrophes and hyphens tend to be the normal, reliable features of narratives.

#5 Let your punctuation tell a story in itself from time to time

Punctuation has meaning. Dashes speak to haste and disruption, chaos and interruption. Colons tell us that explanation will follow; semi-colons tell us that the idea is connected inextricably to ideas in the sentence just before. Ellipsis allow things to drift…

A well-chosen dash, colon, semi-colon or use of ellipsis can be very evocative, telling a tale in itself.

Think about that first sentence from Dark Matter by Michelle Paver:

In the instant of waking I know that I am perceiving what cannot be – and yet it is. That dash does a lot of story-telling. It shows that disconnect, that jarring hiatus between the narrator realising that what they are seeing is not possible, and yet it exists anyway. Dashes interrupt and suspend the sentence momentarily. Think about how it would inform someone reading the sentence aloud:

In the instant of waking I know that I am perceiving what cannot be [pause for dramatic effect] and yet it is

It tells that story of the writer’s internal state of mind, having to reconcile the possible and the impossible and struggling to do so.

Semi-colons are not just for lists. Please, please don’t put a shopping list into your story just to show you can use colons and semi-colons. All it shows is that you have no idea what’s appropriate and what’s not.

Here’s a beautiful example from Joseph Conrad:

Darkness oozed out from between the trees, through the tangled maze of the creepers from behind the great fantastic and unstirring leaves; the darkness mysterious and invincible; the darkess scented and poisonous of impenetrable forests.

Here, the semi-colons are used to build this sentence where the ideas connect one to the next and where they are layered upon one another. The semi-colons allow the ideas to connect, so they are not disrupted in the same way that a full stop or a dash would do. At the same time, they give more structure and shape to the sentence, pegging down those clauses rather than letting them float about like commas would do.

When it comes to your punctuation, then, you need to do more than simply showing competence and that you can use punctuation in the right place. Better candidates are beginning to play around with sentences, to shape them and to use punctuation to marshall the words within them. In other words, the best candidates are using punctuation purposefully rather than just planting it thoughtlessly.

In the next post we’ll build on what we have here and we’ll look at how writers use punctuation for effect.

Improving Writing Skills at GCSE: Choosing the Perfect Word for the Moment

Many students at GCSE struggle to get the marks they want on the narrative writing question. Given that this question is worth up to 25% of your final grade, it makes sense to make sure that you’re polishing your writing skills and brushing up on the things that will make a difference.

One of the problems in the last five years has been that many students have interpreted the need for ambitious and extensive vocabulary to mean that they need to bring out the most contrived words they can come up with. For that reason, they’re desperate to design a platform on which their words can sit. Candidates are so desperate to squeeze in a jocular or a jocund or a petrichor that they’re inventing places to put words like this in. This is what AQA’s chief examiner describes as being ‘contrived’. In other words, you’re going in with 10 words that you consider to be ambitious and extensive, and you’re so determined to put them in that it doesn’t even matter if they really fit.

If you don’t know what jocular and jocund mean, if you have no idea what petrichor is, well done. You’ve escaped this trap so far. I’m pretty sure the last time I read jocular it was in Billy Bunter or some other book from the 1920s and I’m absolutely sure that the first time I came across the word petrichor was in an exam in 2017 when a student had used it from a list they’d found on the internet. I had to look it up.

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not illiterate or even semi-literate. I’ve been working my way through Thackeray this year. I’m only doing it because I feel like I should and I’d much rather dive back into Dickens or romp through my trashy hard-boiled detective fiction. I read about 200 books a year and I’d never come across the word petrichor once. Google Ngrams tells a very interesting story about all three of these words enjoying a resurgence in recent years – no doubt driven by someone somewhere deciding they should drag back words last popular in the 1820s to ‘improve’ their vocabulary, or to pick up scientific words used by marine biologists in the 1960s and stick them in some cheesy romance.

If I have to stop to find some word that you’ve used (the smell of rain wouldn’t do??!) then it disrupts the flow. I’m fully on board with the chief examiners who are tired of students across boards using such contrived words.

Words don’t have to be complex to be perfect. Today, the best word I read in a story was sneer. It was so utterly perfect in the context. Sneer isn’t a hard word or a tough word. It was just the right word at the right time.

Having an extensive vocabulary simply means you have a wide enough vocabulary to pick from so that you have alternatives and you can make choices. Having an extensive vocabulary means that, under exam conditions, without a thesaurus, you have options.

What it doesn’t mean is using words that your examiner will have to go and look up.

Let’s have a look at some examples:

#1 Clare Chambers Small Pleasures

Jean’s bicycle, a solid, heavy-framed contraption that had come down, like most of her possessions, through generations of the Swinney family, was leaning against the railings.

I love Clare Chambers’ style: all her stories have so many untold stories within them. We’ll explore these more when we look at ‘telling details’ in a future post in a couple of weeks.

Chambers could have said:

Jean’s bicycle was leaning against the railings.

You might be thinking I like the word contraption best. Confession: I like it very much. But it is that little word solid sitting there that tells a story of its own. In fact, it tells us a lot about Jean as a character. The bike has a solidity and a dependability about it. It tells us not only about itself but about the character of Jean. Of all the bicycles Chambers could have given her character, it’s a solid contraption not a modern racer, not a thousand-pound-machine, not a sleek and elegant bicycle, but a solid, heavy-framed one. The word contraption is of course beautiful in itself, conveying images of something unnecessarily complicated and intricate, perhaps impossible to truly understand.

Adjectives do a lot of the heavy lifting when you’re choosing the perfect word, but don’t think you need to rely on consolidated, estimable or veracious when solid will do perfectly what you need it to do.

#2 Barbara Pym An Academic Question

Margaret Maynard was waiting to greet her guests with a suitable word for each one. She was a tall, splendid woman with red-gold hair, wearing a green pre-Raphaelite kind of dress which now looked surprisingly up-to-date.

This description from Barbara Pym is also quite delightful. Not for the splendidness or the dress, but for the perfect words hiding in plain view. She has a ‘suitable’ word for each guest, telling us so much about her respectability and how in tune she is with people. Consider how it would have been if she’d had a sharp word for each guest or a mischievous word for each. She could have had an attentive word or a waspish word for each one. Splendid is of course just perfect, given the magnificence of this woman, but it’s the little word surprisingly that also betrays the narrator. The narrator seems catty and not to like Margaret Maynard much at all. Or, perhaps, just marvelling that something old-fashioned had now come back into fashion. It tells us much about the narrator and we’d have to have more from the narrator to really decide in which sense it was meant.

Going over the top with your adverbs can make a piece of writing just horrible, but the right adverb in the right place can really convey a sense of the narrator’s thoughts.

#3 Anita Brookner Hotel du Lac

From the window all that could be seen was a receding area of grey. It was to be supposed that beyond the grey garden, which seemed to sprout nothing but the stiffish leaves of some unfamiliar plant, lay the vast grey lake, spreading like an anaesthetic towards the invisible further shore, and beyond that, in imagination only, yet verified by the brochure, the peak of the Dent d’Oche, on which snow might already be slightly and silently falling.

So many perfect words here, from the receding area of grey, that beautiful sprout and the lovely simile about how the grey spreads like an anaesthetic. You can see here that she uses grey three times, the receding area of grey, the grey garden and the vast grey lake.

One of my students asked me this morning whether a reader would know if she’d used a word repeatedly for effect or whether they’d just think you had an impoverished vocabulary. I think Brookner answers that perfectly. If you can use spreading like an anaesthetic in one part, I think we realise you’re using grey for effect. I’d say that, for an unfamiliar reader, it’s worth making things deliberately obvious rather than just going for a couple of repetitions. If you’re onto your third or fourth repetition, it’s clear what you’re doing.

Look at this one example from one of my lovely 10-year-old students:

Avery Ronaldson was staring dumbfounded at the mess that lay before her. On one path there were four overturned bins, three unwelcome “presents” from what looked like a dog and one of the new saplings trampled on. This was exactly the behavior she expected from people. No regard for the rules whatsoever! And after she had so recently added a new, bigger sign to the entrance!   RULES: NO BALL GAMES, NO ALCOHOL, NO SMOKING, NO  LITTERING, NO HIDE AND SEEK, NO BANANAS, NO EGG SANDWICHES, NO FOLD-UP CHAIRS.

This is what it read in big brown letters on a big piece of Amazon cardboard painted red.

From that delightful dumbfounded to the delicious unwelcome “presents” to the lovely new, bigger sign and then the big brown letters on a big piece of cardboard. Avery is cheap, frustrated and probably rather disturbed. Look at how my student used big, though. From the bigger sign, that tells us there used to be a sign there that was smaller, but that clearly wasn’t quite enough, right through to the big brown letters and the big piece of cardboard.

This is not because she doesn’t know other words. It’s a pattern. That, my lovely readers, is showing signs of being grade 6ish.

I confess, however, it is the the presents from ‘what looked like a dog’ that really tickled me. It’s so simple yet it’s so authentic. My student’s not only channelling Avery Ronaldson, whoever she may be, but she’s creating the authentic voice of the character.

Perfect words reveal the character as much as describe a scene.

#4 Anita Shreve The Weight of Water

I cut the engine of the small boat I have rented and put my fingers into the water, letting the shock of the cold swallow my hand.

Nothing exciting or flashy here, but look at that perfect swallow, how the cold turns into a being with intentionality at that moment, as well as just taking her hand in whole. It’s just right.

Words don’t have to be fancy to work. Here, it’s a simple word for an action we perform all the time. Using it for the cold gives us such a vivid image, along with the phrase letting the shock of the cold which tells us much about the character’s motivation.

Using verbs and personification carefully needn’t take a lot of effort. You can get a lot of mileage out of a very simple daily verb like breathing, blinking or swallowing;

#5 Susan Cooper The Dark is Rising

Carrying on with the theme of personification, you can see a couple of absolutely perfect words here:

The snow lay thin and apologetic over the world.

I love that word apologetic there – just so right. I can imagine straight away that the snow feels very guilty for not having given the children in the story a better show.

Later, she goes on to say:

All the broad sky was grey, full of snow that refused to fall.

Oh! The idea that the snow might simply refuse to fall, that it’s stubborn or shy, hesitating. Just joyful.

What you can see from these five brief examples is that the perfect word is one that carries with it a whole novel of meanings or ideas. It opens up before you in your mind and tells more than all the others. Whether you are using nouns, verbs, adjectives or adverbs, you can so much with a word.

How you do this is easy: write less. Rehearse your sentences before you commit them to paper. Stop depending on frivolous, ill-placed words that say only one thing – that they have been chosen to impress – not because they are right. If anything, spend more time reading poems. Most of the poets in your anthology are easily accessible, and many modern poets from Simon Armitage to Carol Ann Duffy use words so perfectly and so precisely that they don’t need novels to do it in. Don’t overlook the beauty of simple words that do their job expertly, and don’t feel like you should prefer the flashy to the fitting.

In the next post, I’ll take you through ways in which you can make better use of your punctuation when writing narratives. You can, of course, prepare by reading this post about the glory of the semi-colon and this one about how punctuation contributes to your mark at GCSE.

Improving Writing Skills at GCSE: How to use Flashbacks in Narrative

With narrative writing often worth up to 25% at GCSE, it’s a real skill to master. In the past ten posts, I’ve been taking you through some ways to improve the kind of marks you’ve been getting at GCSE. Whether you’re doing CIE, Pearson Edexcel, OCR, Eduqas or AQA, being able to write imaginatively can really help boost your grade.

Today we look at one skill that falls outside our usual purview of tinkering with vocabulary, taking a look at a structural feature that can really impress your readers. Most of us forget about structure when we’re writing. Perhaps, if we’re lucky teachers, a GCSE student might give a nod to a cliffhanger or a plot twist. One technique can really, really make a difference, not only to the exposition of our narrative but to the feel of the text.

In mark schemes, there’s usually some kind of requirement for students to do something like this:

Make effective use of structural features

This one, taken from AQA, is a descriptor for the kind of marks that would normally lead to a Grade 6 or 7, all things considered.

Are you making effective use of structural features?

Sticking a flashback in where appropriate can certainly be one way of doing that.

Flashbacks can be really easy to do. There are several things you can do to make sure that if you use them, you’re doing so effectively.

#1 Choose where to place them

Obviously flashbacks don’t really belong at the beginning of a story… that’s just your usual timeline and barely qualifies as a flashback. A flashback is taking the reader back in time from the present moment. Technically, then, you could put them at the beginning as long as you pointed out that the moment the character is thinking back to, or the moment the narrator is describing, are moments that happened earlier. Using my time travel story from yesterday, I’m going to use that to show you how I could think about flashbacks.

For example, we could start:

She finally peered through the void as the fabric of this new world turned from mist to material.

It wasn’t quite what she’d expected. Discussions with the company psychologist had prepared her somewhat for the baffling moments when the brain tried to make sense of what had been and what is now. Virtual Reality training had given her some idea of how disorientating it could be. But nothing had quite prepared her for the moment where the future would appear out of the mist, not pixels this time, not digital ghosts, but reality.

Now…

You can see that the opening of the story places the character in a new world and then the flashback goes some way to explaining it. The detail about the company psychologist is helpful because it tells us who she is: she’s no doubt an adult, and no doubt working. It also explains a little bit about how she’s leaped forward, with the ‘what is now’ and the ‘future would appear out of the mist’. It gives the sense that she had trained and prepared for this moment.

We also shift back with the verbs from the simple past of ‘peered’ and ‘turned’ to the pluperfect ‘had prepared… had given… had prepared…’

Then the word ‘now’ reorients us in the present moment.

So can you start with a flashback? Well, not in the first words perhaps. Nevertheless, a flashback early on in the story can really explain a lot. It sure beats she’d risen early that morning for her trip into the future.

Flashbacks can very easily happen at the end, even as a cliffhanger, particularly if the character is getting a warning.

Let’s say I was thinking about how to end this story, using a flashback as a cliffhanger (you see what I did there? Two for one!)

As she stepped out side the bubble of the time void, reaching out through its gelatinous barrier, Marguerite’s voice echoed in her mind, spanning five hundred years.

“Don’t break the seal of the void… we’ll never be able to get you back…”

It’s not my best ending, that’s for sure! Still, it flashes back to earlier points in the off-page narrative and it ends the story with a beginning.

Openings and endings might not seem like the most obvious places for flashbacks, but they can also come in the middle of the narrative too. They help fill in the gaps. I’m using the descriptive passage I wrote in the last post as an example just to give me a frame on which to build my flashback along with the opening sentence above:

I finally peered through the void as the fabric of this new world turned from mist to material.

The air was thick with the odour of motor oil and the tangy, coppery scent of old blood, a sharp and foul smell of perfect efficiency. I looked up, slack jawed, unable to understand what had become of the place I knew, my brain slow to assimilate to the change in time, sluggishly trying to make sense of a world at once familiar and yet unknown. The city unfolded, expanded, reproduced, replicating and multiplying in a thousand slashes of titanium blades. Daggers of buildings reached up and severed the sky, puncturing the dense mass of clouds that loomed overhead. A storm threatened. The clouds squatted uncomfortably, corpulent and leaden, over a city forged from glass, from obsidian, from steel. A city where everything moved with a neat automaticity, with the shush of pistons and the gush of hydraulics, with the methodical hum of cylinders and gaskets. A city that had become one mechanised, entire whole, where everything moved in ordered synchronicity.

Earlier, in a time that seemed both moments ago and eons ago, I’d gone through the mandatory psychological training from the company.

“We want you to understand that the hardest bit of vaulting will be assimilating what your senses tell you and what your brain makes of it… it takes a while for it to all mesh. We’ve given you the neural implants to boost neuroplasticity, but it still takes time for them to lay down pathways and make sense of it all.”

The psychologist’s voice had droned on and I’d lost focus. All I wanted was the vault. Nothing but that. It was what I’d spent my whole life wishing for: the chance to ride Time itself.

The neural implants seemed to be doing their job rewriting the universe as I knew it, and suddenly I was caught up by a gust of pressurised air and a musty scent of rust.

Here, you can see a bit more of the story and a more delayed flashback. The main thing to consider is what you’re using the flashback for. Here, I’m using it for two purposes. The first is to give you the back story. The second is to delay the narrative. You remember it was a story about people from two different backgrounds? She’s going to see a person who looks like someone she knows, someone who calls her name, someone she knew from the lab, and then step out into a world from which she can never return to her real present. The story might actually involve two flashbacks, then, or even three. I think that’s kind of appropriate for a time travel story, anyway.

#2 Signpost them clearly to the reader

When you’re moving backward and forwards on a timeline, you need to be able to signal that to the reader, otherwise it’s confusing. One way to do that is just with a new paragraph.

You should of course use a new paragraph for a change in time, because that’s what new paragraphs do.

You can use temporal markers to signal a shift in time. Earlier is just one example. Previously sounds a bit like a TV catch-up line, Previously on LA Law… or whatever. Formerly can work quite nicely within a sentence.

This space had formerly been the quadrangle in the hospital. It had…. blah blah blah.

Once can also work quite nicely, and the same with long ago, especially if you are trying to recreate childhood times or a childhood story.

Once, she had dreamed of vaulting Time. Her mother had always said that she’d been fascinated by Time Leaps right from the moment she could read. She’d spent years in the library researching, lost in dusty books and meaningless words.

* * * * *

Once, long ago, she’d caught sight of the Company logo, asking her mother what it meant.

“It’s where brave chrononauts vault into the future,” her mother had explained. She had no idea what chrononauts were, but she felt a change in her destiny map out before her from that moment. It was at precisely that moment that her future path had changed course.

Once you’ve got your flashback, no matter how long it runs for, you move back into the present moment and you mark that with another temporal marker to help your reader find their feet on the timeline. Now is usually the easiest way to do that.

#3 Use your tenses clearly

It’s tough writing narratives in the present tense and many students slip into the past tense, ruining the effect of their work. However, if you are using the present tense, you’d slip back into the past perfect tense:

I finally peer through the void as the fabric of this new world turns from mist to material.

The air is thick with the odour of motor oil and the tangy, coppery scent of old blood, a sharp and foul smell of perfect efficiency. I look up, slack jawed, unable to understand what has become of the place I know, my brain slow to assimilate to the change in time, sluggishly trying to make sense of a world at once familiar and yet unknown. The city unfolds, expands, reproduces, replicating and multiplying in a thousand slashes of titanium blades. Daggers of buildings reach up and sever the sky, puncturing the dense mass of clouds that loom overhead. A storm is threatening. The clouds squat uncomfortably, corpulent and leaden, over a city forged from glass, from obsidian, from steel. A city where everything moves with a neat automaticity, with the shush of pistons and the gush of hydraulics, with the methodical hum of cylinders and gaskets. A city that has become one mechanised, entire whole, where everything moves in ordered synchronicity.

Earlier, in a time that seems both moments ago and eons ago, I’d gone through the mandatory psychological training from the company.

“We want you to understand that the hardest bit of vaulting will be assimilating what your senses tell you and what your brain makes of it… it takes a while for it to all mesh. We’ve given you the neural implants to boost neuroplasticity, but it still takes time for them to lay down pathways and make sense of it all.”

The psychologist’s voice had droned on and I’d lost focus. All I’d wanted was the vault. Nothing but that. It was what I’d spent my whole life wishing for: the chance to ride time itself.

Now, the neural implants seem to be doing their job rewriting the universe as I know it, and I’m suddenly caught up by a gust of pressurised air and a musty scent of rust.

You can see why this can be tough, because you’ve got the present moment (in the futuristic city) and the flashback, marked by the past perfect had … and you’ve also got the dialogue which is in the present tense as well. It takes some verbal dexterity to manage the leaps. I also felt like I needed to add a temporal marker to make it more obvious.

You can also stick to the simple past and the past perfect, using the past perfect to move you back further in time, just as you read in the previous version of this example.

#4 Find your flashback trigger

Don’t just slap in a flashback because you think it will impress the examiner, your reader or a teacher. Flashbacks need purpose. They also need a reason. There should be a trigger for the flashback, something that causes the character to remember the past or to go back into their past. Here, my trigger is a structural one: I want to separate you, the reader, from this moment and from seeing the person who’s going to cause her to leave the protective void. If I didn’t have something between the two things to separate them, it’d be a bit rubbish and the story would be over really quickly.

Girl goes back in time > girl sees former lab assistant who she was in love with (or whatever) > girl steps out of the protective void knowing she can never return.

Often, the trigger for a flashback will be a structural one, where you want to put a breathing space between two actions. If she arrived and instantly decided to stay, that’d be a tedious story indeed. She arrives, she processes stuff, AND THEN she sees the lab assistant who’ll cause her to step out of the void. It’s more controlled and distinct.

You should also include a trigger that brings the flashback to an end. Flashbacks should be brief. As you can see from my examples, sometimes they’re as much as a single line of dialogue. At other times, they are as long as two or three paragraphs.

#5 Use your flashback purposefully

The flashback should add depth to your story. It should explain things. Here, the flashback I’ve used explains why the character can’t understand the world she’s arrived in yet. It’s also going to explain why she can’t get her head around seeing her former co-worker.

The worst things at GCSE are those which are forced and contrived. Don’t just stick it in for no reason. Use it to add layers to your story. You can use it to explain aspects of the plot, but equally you can use it to add depth to characters. In the character arc I wrote about the graffitiing vicar, I used a flashback to explain why he’d turn to graffiti, showing him in church with only a sleeping parishioner. In the location-based narrative I wrote, I’d used a flashback to give reason to what she was doing there. Flashbacks are not just good for depth and exposition, but for making character motivations make sense.

Although you would naturally use flashbacks more sparingly in longer stories, they’re the perfect device for short stories. They take some skill to handle, which is why they can be a really good way to showcase your skills, but they are a great way of meeting requirements for structural effects.

In the next post, we explore the quest for the perfect word. Using vocabulary judiciously is a skill in itself and one we will explore in more detail.

Improving Writing Skills at GCSE: How to Master Figurative Language

Narrative writing is a central feature of all the major GCSE exam boards, and getting it right can be a crucial step in getting yourself the grades you want. Many students work under the illusion that you can’t revise for GCSE English Language. That’s not true, and one thing you can do to help you on your way to the grades you want is to make sure you get lots of practice. There simply isn’t time in school to practise writing ten or so stories, so this is a really productive use of time.

Plus, many students enjoy writing stories, even if they feel they have little to say. Hopefully the four plot structures I gave you earlier will give you some ideas.

• Location-based plots
• Enquiry-based plots
• Character-based plots
• Event-based plots

Figurative language means any language that goes beyond the literal. Things like personification, metaphors and similes are all what we’d consider to be figurative devices. It can also include the sounds of words – something that interests me a great deal.

You may think that when exam boards ask you for linguistic devices or figurative devices that they are just setting hoops for you to jump. It feels like you really should put some of these imaginative skills to work simply because someone told you that they were a way to impress your examiner. Using figurative devices to create an image seems to be just one of those things you feel like you should do to get the marks you want.

This misses out the vital function of figurative language, which is to add meaning and clarity to a piece of writing. It adds colour and flavour. Figurative language is the flourish. It’s the icing on the cake. Coming back to our theme running right through this series on narrative writing, it’s got to be the right thing at the right moment. We’re not just putting a ticklist of devices we think we should use to get good marks. We’re using them because they help us convey an idea. They make our writing richer at that moment in time.

The key to good figurative language to consider where you want to embellish first. It’s actually a good idea to do that in your plan, so that it gives you time to think about it. At those moments in the story, we’re going to slow right down and consider what we want to do.

We also have to remember that we can go in three ways:

Similes to suggest that something was similar, that it was like. We need to work around a point of comparison. If you’re wise about your similes, you’ll consider more than one point of comparison.

Metaphors to suggest something so intensely that it became. Similes help the reader understand the unfamiliar, to imagine what something was like. Metaphors do the same, but they are much stronger: it wasn’t like, it was.

Personification brings the inanimate to life and gives it motivation. The shadows are no longer just shadows, they are monsters with hands and bad intentions. They creep and they steal, they hide and they pounce. We can do this with the truly inanimate, like curtains, and we can do it with plants and animals.

One thing that tends to get overlooked when writing is the sound of the words. Obvious alliteration just for the sake of it is a clear no-no, but done purposefully, it can be really lovely. As I shared in the post about conscious crafting, using echoes in words can be a really lovely way to bring the sound of them to life. Repeated ‘ing’ or ‘d’ sounds at the end of words, repeating the structure and the shape of the words, or using sounds to reflect the moment are all ways you can do that in your own exam narrative.

#1 Start when you plan

I think one thing that leads to bad writing is banging things in out of place just because you feel like you should. I don’t think it’s very much better when you’re under pressure and you’re trying desperately to think of a simile or a metaphor in the moment. No wonder we end up chasing things like hawks and lions and tigers simply because we feel like we should and yet we’re in exam mode and we’re panicking.

One of the best ways to change this method of working is to think about where you want to embellish as you plan.

By way of an example, I’m going to take AQA’s June 2017 narrative: write a story about two people from very different backgrounds.

First I start by generating some ideas. I’m kind of taken by sci-fi/fantasy rather than some terribly Dickensian meeting of upper class twits and lower class peasants, or some loosely autobiographical moment about me meeting foreign people on my travels. There’s a wonderful book by Connie Willis called the Doomsday Book about a woman who goes back in time to plague times. I’m thinking, not unlike HG Wells and his time machine, that I might want to go forward, or, more likely, be visited by someone from the future. Who cares about likelihood though? I think I’m going to step into a bionic future. Since it’s a location-based plot, I’m going to step in, see stuff, then leave.

In lots of ways, I’m kind of glad I won’t have to write this though I kind of think I should.

Plan:

Step out of machine/void > describe setting > short flashback to my own dystopian world > meet a person > connect for one moment > get taken back into the machine/void

I can see the parts where there is going to be more action and tension towards the end, perhaps even some dialogue. The second and third section will be where it’s ripe for more poetic treatment.

When I’m writing a short descriptive paragraph, I like to start with a non-visual element first – the smell of the place. Then I’m going to describe the city I’ve landed in. I’m going to describe skyscrapers and grey tarmac, a bleak world under a stormy sky. For now, this is all I need.

#2 Think about the overall mood or effect that you want to create

Start with your big idea. For mine, I want it to be cold, hard, metallic and uninspiring. I want to give the reader the idea that there is no individuality, nothing unique, no marks and no blemishes. It’s sterile and pristine, but it’s without personality. I also want to give it a sense of danger.

I need not just visual metallics but also the sounds and the smell of metal.

I want to favour metallic sounds and crisp, sharp words. Plosives and hard sibilance will take priority over fricatives or liquid sounds. I want a sense of the repeated, so using repeated numbers of syllables in the words will also give it a sense of mechanisation and repetition rather than variety.

I need similes and metaphors that suggest machinery.

I absolutely don’t want to animate the city, but I do want to fill it with a sense of threat and menace. Therefore, any personification I use is going to be involved in creating intentionality rather than in creating movement.

#3 Go slow when writing more consciously

Your entire passage doesn’t need to be rich with imagery. Sometimes, that can be quite horrendous to read. You don’t want lots of figurative detail in your action or dialogue, so you’ll save time and effort on those moments. When we write, we don’t spend the same amount of time on each section. For instance, right now, where I feel comfortable explaining, my typing speed is much faster than in the previous section where I was reflecting and thinking about what I would include.

It does mean, though, that I will need to slow down when crafting these bits: they won’t be as smooth as when I’m writing dialogue or action.

#4 Rehearse the sentence before you commit it to paper

Much as I like to encourage my students to edit as they finish, nothing is worse than a very heavily edited text where there are lines upon lines crossed out and it’s almost unreadable. I’m not very good at thinking about the sentence before I put it down on paper, so I use pencil for that and rub it out as I write over it, or I practise on a part of the exam paper elsewhere and clearly mark it as notes.

I do that terrible thing with my students of asking them to read their texts aloud once written. You can hear accidental repetition or clashing sounds, as well as finding the bits that are pleasing. Of course, in the exam, you can’t do this, but it is important to think of how the sentences sound. Read aloud in your head, at least.

#5 Stop thinking of sentences as separate blocks

There can be a tendency for writers to think of each sentence in turn. Simile runs on to simile runs on to simile. Ideas can be mixed up and don’t have a sense of the whole. In one, there might be similes about fabrics, in the next metals… it’s disjointed and unhelpful. Carry your ideas from one sentence into the next and take ideas forward.

#6 Write!

The air was thick with the odour of motor oil and the tangy, coppery scent of old blood, a sharp and foul smell of perfect efficiency. I looked up, slack jawed, unable to understand what had become of the place I knew, my brain slow to assimilate to the change in time, sluggishly trying to make sense of a world at once familiar and yet unknown. The city unfolded, expanded, reproduced, replicating and multiplying in a thousand slashes of titanium blades. Daggers of buildings reached up and severed the sky, puncturing the dense mass of clouds that loomed overhead. A storm threatened. The clouds squatted uncomfortably, corpulent and leaden, over a city forged from glass, from obsidian, from steel. A city where everything moved with a neat automaticity, with the shush of pistons and the gush of hydraulics, with the methodical hum of cylinders and gaskets. A city that had become one mechanised, entire whole, where everything moved in ordered synchronicity.

When I look back at it, I should find a cohesive whole. I’m not very much a fan of spotting semantic fields in the reading sections of GCSE papers, simply because all they ever do is contribute to a cohesive whole, yet here, semantic fields are our tools. I start with motor oil and pick up the automaticity towards the end, followed by the pistons and other mechanical parts, ending by telling you about the mechanisation of this futuristic city.

Lots of times, I found myself pairing sounds, from the short e and the f of perfect efficiency that are almost reversed. I chewed over a few other adjectives to describe the efficiency, moving from flawless and mechanised or impeccable before settling on perfect because it just sounded better with efficiency to my ear. I also had the unexpected contrast of the sharp and foul smells, those short and odious sounding words, with the perfect efficiency, which worked not least because the words were contrary in sound but also in meaning. I didn’t think that people would expect a sharp and foul smell to lead into perfect efficiency.

I haven’t done any similes. It is too powerful an experience to rely on saying things are ‘like’ or ‘as’ something else, but it’s packed with metaphors, from the leaden clouds and the daggers of buildings. Clearly, clouds aren’t really made of lead and buildings aren’t really daggers.

I relied a lot on intention, the looming clouds and their discomfort and the buildings that severed the sky. All the movement I wanted, I wanted that to be mechanised and robotic, not full of intention.

I was also playing around with the sounds of the words, the three-syllable list of unfolded, expanded, reproduced and then the four-syllable pattern of replicating and multiplying, to give you that sense of a city that seemed to grow. I didn’t, however, want anything organic-sounding about the city.

Where I had choices of words, I opted for the hardest sounding ones. The buildings puncture and sever the sky. I chose short monosyllabic words with short vowel sounds in places, in dense mass, echoing the ‘s’ sound at the end of both.

I used semi-onomatopoeic words in places, and fully onomatopoeic words in others with the shush, gush and hum of the machinery.

No examiner or reader in the world is going to sit and unpick the passage in the way that I’ve just done here, which is a timely reminder to make your figurative devices obvious yet to aim for that perfect balance of making them not that obvious that they make the reader cringe with the awkwardly visible intentionality of it all.

Of course, you may also be thinking that it’s impossible to produce writing like this consistently and under pressure. It is. I agree. These ideas are ones I was working on last night with a student and ones I’ve recycled.

Recycling things you’ve polished to perfection in practice is vital. You can’t generate ideas like this under pressure. Do them and keep re-using them. You may very well be sick and tired of them. Your teacher may be wondering if there’s ever a chance of you creating something new. Your examiner or your reader will think your work is the work of a master who just came up with those amazing ideas on the spot. This is another reason why practising creative writing can really help. Think of it in the same way you would practise your trick shots for scoring a goal… you don’t practise them on the pitch during an actual match. Neither do you expect to just produce the perfect trick shot in the heat of the moment. You practise off the pitch, out of the spotlight, so that they come naturally when it comes to doing it in the exam.

In the next post, I’ll be looking at a structural device that can really give you a boost in the exam: the flashback. Don’t forget to sign up if you want emails to your inbox.