tion, or, like Jack the Ripper, in actual history?
(As "Dracula" is both the specific creation of the
novelist Bram Stoker and a nightmare figure out
of middle European history.) It is ironic that, in
being so effaced, Robert Louis Stevenson has
become immortalized by way of his private
fantasy--which came to him, by his own testi-
mony, unbidden, in a dream.

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde ( 1886)
will strike contemporary readers as a charac-
teristically Victorian moral parable, not nearly
so sensational (nor so piously lurid) as Stoker
Dracula; in the tradition, perhaps, of Mary Shelley's
Frankenstein, in which a horrific tale is
conscientiously subordinated to the author's
didactic intention. Though melodramatic in
conception it is not melodramatic in execution
since virtually all its scenes are narrated and
summarized after the fact. There is no ironic
ambiguity, no Wildean subtlety, in the doomed
Dr. Jekyll's confession: he presents himself to
the reader as a congenital "double dealer" who
has nonetheless "an almost morbid sense of
shame," and who, in typically Victorian middle-
class fashion, must act to dissociate "himself"
(i.e., his reputation as a highly regarded physi-
cian) from his baser instincts. He can no longer

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