Hyde and Seek in an Age of Surveillance

Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and the BBC’s Jekyll

Abstract

Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde depicts a world in which crimes are constantly being “overlooked”: witnessed and then ignored. Mr Utterson and his gentlemen’s network strive to maintain silence about the crimes of their fellows, yet they find their authority threatened by those on the periphery of this community, especially servants, who transmit knowledge of crime to the new authorities of the police and the law. Unlike Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, which critiques the community’s unwillingness to exorcise its inner monster, the BBC’s Jekyll suggests instead that Hyde, who in the series represents love, might be an appropriate antidote to a society governed by corporate greed and surveillance.