Shortly after Mansfield’s play opened, several East End London prostitutes were murdered by a serial killer nicknamed Jack the Ripper.
Playwright Richard Mansfield produced a stage version of Dr. Stevenson’s text describes how hidden desires have always existed in a seemingly perverted civilization. In 1890, William Booth, the founder of the Salvation Army, claimed that England needed rescuing from its continually degenerating condition since its citizens were gradually turning into “ population trodden with drink, steeped in vice, eaten up by every social and physical malady” (quoted in Stevenson, 183). Several Victorian social critics maintained that inner-city London dwellers were a debased life form living in junglelike conditions analogous to those in Africa. Jekyll’s desired liberty is perhaps caused by the restricted lifestyle that bourgeois cultural codes imposed on English society. Although Jekyll prefers living the life of “the elderly and discontent doctor” (84), he cannot control his urge for “the liberty, the comparative youth, the light steps, leaping impulses, and secret pleasures” that the Hyde persona offers him. Hyde’s numerous rampages include trampling a young girl and murdering the prominent English politician Sir Danvers. Hyde alter-ego may represent an uncontrollable subconscious desire driven by anger and frustration toward an oppressive English class structure. The potion that Jekyll develops causes an unexplainable transformation into the violent Mr. Jekyll is a seemingly placid character whose often-debated scientific research has nonetheless gained him respect amid his peers. Hyde debates the conflict between good and evil and the correlation among bourgeois values, urban violence, and class structure. Hyde, both as portrayed by Fredric March in Rouben Mamoulian’s film Dr.
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