As the summer ends, I thought I’d brush up on some steam-age science fiction: Jekyll and Hyde, Around the World in 80 Days, and Picture of Dorian Gray. First up: man and beast!

“It was thus rather the exacting nature of my aspirations than any particular degradation of my faults, that made me what I was, and, with even a deeper trench than in the majority of men, severed in me those provinces of good and ill which divide and compound man’s dual nature.”

Jekyll and Hyde is of course well known to most of us, even if that’s from watching the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. The original text though has some interesting differences. Modern characterization tend to show Hyde as large and brutal, almost an ogre of a man: he has served as inspiration for Batman’s Two-Face and the Hulk. In the original, though, he is significantly smaller than Jekyll, representing the fact that Jekyll’s life had been mostly good, not evil. Instead of intimidating size, all who see him report that he gives ‘an impression of deformity without any nameable malformation.’

Perhaps more profoundly, the original text focuses on the psychology of a clash between good and evil within a person. In many ways, it is the story of the fall: a man’s descent into evil, as he gradually loses control of his darker side until his only escape is suicide. Jekyll himself notes though that there are many sides to a man, and good and evil represents only two: indeed, Hyde may be evil, but Jekyll is by no means good, suggesting a duality may be overly simplistic.

The need to bite back comments or restrain ourselves from impulsive action is hardly a stranger to any of us, I suspect. Though satisfying in the short run, such decisions are rarely desirable in the long. For Jekyll, though, the problem is more acute: Hyde himself has no such restraints, but a single lapse for Jekyll in succumbing to the transformation leads to many transgressions. Though less obvious for the rest of us, we often face a similar problem: once we have succumbed once, we develop an attachment to the behaviour, and may never be free of it. Abstention, to paraphrase Samuel Johnson, may be superior to moderation.