This evening, I read a thread on Twitter which presented an interpretation of Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde which I fear is all too frequent. Utterson was seen as a repressed Victorian gentleman who would do well to admit honestly, as does his old friend Jekyll, that he has a darker side to his nature. According to this interpretation, we should see human nature as Jekyll does: ‘not truly one, but truly two’. In other words, we should be ready to give up hope of achieving any kind of integrity, any kind of self-discipline. Virtues such as temperance are to be scorned as mere hypocrisy….
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