Scarica Robert Louis Stevenson - Life and works e più Dispense in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON was born in Edinburgh in 1850. Because of his poor health, he spent most of his childhood in bed and tutored at home, under the influence of his family’s Calvinism. He took up Engineering at university, but he didn’t finish his studies. At this point of his life, Stevenson began travelling —> to escape his social environment, represented by the Victorian society; he lived in Germany, France and Italy. For his attitude and his manners, Stevenson began one of the first example of bohemian in Britain, rejecting the principles of religion and respectability. He graduated in Law, in 1875, and decided to devote himself to writing. While the years passing by, his health conditions were progressively worse, so he moved to Australia, where he died of a brain haemorrhage, in 1894. The strange case of dr. Jekyll and mr. Hyde —> published in 1886, the story for this novel, famously came to Robert Louis Stevenson in a dream and, according to his stepson, he wrote the first draft of the book in just 3 days. We begin in the 1° chapter, with a conventional 3°person narrator, telling us about Mr. Utters on and his cousin, Mr. Enfield, that usually walk together around London. During one of these walks, Enfield tells Utterson that one night he saw something very concerning: a man and a girl were running through the street, when the man trampled the girl underfoot. To get out of trouble he agrees to pay money to the family of the girl, and do this thanks to a cheque, signed by a rich and respectable man: Dr. Jekyll. Utterson, who is a lawyer, begins to question the odd behaviour of Jekyll and finds out that he has recently altered his will —> that now states that in the event of the Dr’s death, mr. Hyde (the man who jumped off the girl) should be the only beneficiary. At this point, Utterson is obsessed by this disturbing character and the story almost turns in a police investigation. The final 2 chapters of the book are letters. Thanks to them, Utterson discovers the horrific truth: his friend has created a potion able to release his evil side, represented by mr. Hyde, but at some point, things just got out of hand. At the end of the book, in fact, Jekyll writes his letter as a confession, and we understand that he is going to kill himself to prevent Hyde from causing any more damage. • Setting, themes and symbols. The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is a fascinating product of Victorian England. In this era of scientific and technological progress and of the rapid expansion of the British Empire, many writers began to doubt the ideals of progress and civilisation. Indeed, the setting of this book is important to truly understand the message that the author tried to vehiculate. So, the story takes place in the London of the 1870s. At that time the city had a double nature, which reflected the hypocrisy of Victorian society, and that is also the best representation of the struggle between to opposing forces: Good and Evil. In fact, the old town areas are the domain of Hyde, dark, scary and filled with violence, while dr. Jekyll’s version of London is much cleaner and comfortable. Stevenson's novel offers a vivid portrait of the conditions of many Victorian cities: the radical changes brought by industrialisation transformed cities into magnets for people coming from the countryside in search of work. This massive displacement of people had enormous effects on the urban setting of most British cities, which started to be plagued by problems such as poverty, bad air quality, and crime.
