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Among the many screen adaptations of Robert Louis Stevenson's novella "Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde" is a seven-minute Tom and Jerry film made by Hanna-Barbera in 1947. Here, a saucer of milk spiked with moth balls and bug powder is enough to transform an ordinary, decent soul - the mouse - into a monster. After a few sips, Jerry swells into supermouse, terrorising Tom, who normally holds the upper paw. At the end of "Dr Jekyll and Mr Mouse", Tom tries lapping up the milk - only to be reduced to the size of a fly. The pair exit with Jerry in pursuit, wielding a swatter.
The same storyline drives another cartoon of the 1940s, "Mighty Mouse Meets Jekyll and Hyde Cat", though this time it is the cat who mixes a cocktail in the doctor's laboratory, changing from cute puss into a beast with fangs and fiendish claws. There is a Daffy Duck Jekyll and Hyde, and Bugs Bunny also makes use of it. Back in the human zone, there have been Abbott and Costello and Jerry Lewis versions of Stevenson's novella. In 1925, Stan Laurel starred in Dr Pyckle and Mr Pryde, which competed with When Quackel Did Hyde of 1920. There are various pornographic adaptations, including Dr Sexual and Mr Hyde. Five separate editions of the book were issued in France in 1947, not long after the end of a different horror story. Between 1950 and 1951, Japanese publishers offered readers seven translations to choose from, including one in graphic-novel form.
"Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde" belongs to everyone who has ever referred to themselves in the third person, or cursed their own "split personality", or praised their "better nature". The poet Hugo Williams has compressed the essence into a single line - "God give me strength to lead a double life" - a plea to be in two places at once, not necessarily legitimately, without the inconvenience of a guilty conscience. Stevenson's respectable physician Henry Jekyll appears to have had a similar desire, though his appeal was not to the deity but the pharmaceutical cabinet, with disastrous results.
"Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde" (the definite article is missing from the original title) was written in about six weeks in the autumn of 1885. It was Stevenson's response to a request from the publisher Charles Longman for a ghost story for the Christmas number of Longman's Magazine, in which he gave readers a taste of his best authors. The legend put about by RLS's stepson Lloyd Osbourne has it that he wrote a draft in three days, after being awakened from a dream, then threw it into the fire when his wife Fanny, Lloyd's mother, complained that he had "missed the allegory". After a brief period of reflection, Stevenson wrote it all out again, "in another three days of feverish industry".
Lloyd was a charming teller of tales about his stepfather, but not a reliable one. Letters make it plain that Stevenson spent at least six weeks on the revision. And even if an early version really was burned - "imagine my feelings as we saw those precious pages wrinkling and blackening and turning into flames", Lloyd wrote - there still exist two full drafts of the novella.
Fanny, however, was right to stress the importance of the missing element. It clearly is an allegory: in real life, people do not split into separate selves, with different bodily characteristics and ages (Hyde is notably smaller and younger than Jekyll). But an allegory of what? Stevenson's mother Margaret, who lived for three years after the death of her son in Samoa in 1894, was touched to learn that the story had been interpreted by a Church of Scotland minister as a parable on the wages of sin, and preached as a sermon from the pulpit. Stevenson's first biographer, Graham Balfour (1901), tells us that it was also "made the subject of leading articles in religious newspapers". Stevenson might have smiled indulgently at his acceptance by the kirk many years after he had fallen out with his father over fundamental religious differences, but he would have disapproved of the simplistic reading of his story as a lesson on the perils of straying from the path of righteousness.
An equally common Victorian reading of the story was as a moral tale on the horrors of the sexual appetite unleashed. This aspect was emphasised in early theatrical adaptations, of which there were several in the decade after publication (they included Dr Freckle and Mr Snide at Dockstader's Minstrel Hall, New York, in 1887). The most popular was the one starring Richard Mansfield, which was up and running a year after the appearance of the book and continued, on one side of the Atlantic and then the other, into the next century.
In adapting the novella for the stage, Thomas R Sullivan was obliged to negotiate an inconvenient absence in the original text: it contains no women characters, apart from an anonymous housemaid and a cook. Sullivan therefore presented Mansfield with Agnes Carew as the object of Jekyll's affection - a dramatic invention indeed, since it is her father, Sir Danvers Carew, who is the most prominent victim of Hyde's violence. In a rival production, which opened in London two days after Mansfield's but was closed down by Longman in a dispute over performance rights, love interest was provided by Sybil Howell, the daughter of a clergyman who is himself an adapter's fancy. The script of a 1931 film version, directed by Rouben Mamoulian, had a barmaid called Ivy performing a striptease in front of Jekyll. In an interview reprinted in the invaluable Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde Companion, edited by Harry M Geduld, Mamoulian described the scene, which was cut from the finished movie: "She keeps throwing away the stockings, the garters, then the brassiere, the panties." In Mamoulian's view, the point of the story was that Dr Jekyll "would like to indulge in all sort of sexual excess and debauchery". Hyde, his hidden self, was brought into existence to give him licence to do so.
Stevenson deplored the attempts to plumb his divided hero's psychology in the various theatrical productions. In a private letter to the editor of the New York Sun in 1887, written from the Adirondacks, where he had gone for the sake of his health, he dismissed Mansfield's portrayal as an offshoot of modern society. Hyde, Stevenson insisted, "is no more sexual than another". He was certainly not, "Great Gods! a mere voluptuary", though there was "no harm" in that. "But people are so filled full of folly and inverted lust, that they can think of nothing but sexuality."
There are many other allegorical interpretations of the story. Elementary Freudianism sees Jekyll as embodying the ego (rational), Hyde the id (instinctive). Jekyll has been seen as a drunk, a drug addict, a pederast, a closet homosexual. In an excellent introduction to the Edinburgh University Press edition of the novella, Richard Dury ranges over a variety of possible readings, noting that of several "socially condemned activities" that Hyde is associated with, "veiled allusions to homosexuality are particularly frequent". The double life of Jekyll and Hyde can be seen as parallel to "the necessarily double life of the Victorian homosexual". Even though Stevenson may not have intended leaving them, there are suggestive markers throughout the text: the suspected blackmail of Jekyll by his "young man", his "favourite"; the "very pretty manner of politeness of Sir Danvers Carew" when approached in the street - terms that may have denoted forbidden liaisons to a Victorian readership. The hidden door by which he enters Jekyll's house is the "back way", even "the back passage". It happens that the year of composition, 1885, was the year in which an amendment to an act of parliament made homosexual acts between men a criminal offence.
The most popular allegorical reading in our own day suggests that, although the action is set in Soho, the atmosphere is really that of Edinburgh, capital of Scotland and RLS's birthplace. In this view, the moral focus of the story is the Scottish character, burdened by dual nationality (Scottish and British), caught between two tongues (Scots and English), its instinctive spontaneity repressed by a Calvinistic church - the very church that once came between Stevenson and his father, and caused a split in the family. Edinburgh is a city starkly divided into two: the foggy old town up on the hill, once the site of colourful crimes such as bodysnatching and of public hangings in the Grassmarket; and the splendid New Town to the north, on the other side of the then newly laid railway tracks. In Glasgow, where I grew up, the common perception of Edinburgh was of a cloudy inner life (old town) shielded by a genteel exterior (New Town). It was - how could you avoid saying so? - a Jekyll-and-Hyde sort of place.
The reclaiming of Stevenson's most famous work as a Scottish fable has a modern feel to it in this era of aspirationally independent Scotland, but it was suggested as early as 1915 by an American, Clayton Hamilton, who believed that the story might be "conceived as happening among the gloomy doorways and narrow wynds of the Scottish capital". GK Chesterton went further, stating that "Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde", though "presented as happening in London", was "very unmistakably happening in Edinburgh" - which is plausible, but unmistakably not the case. If Stevenson had wanted to set his story in Edinburgh, rather than the streets of Soho, he could have done so; if he had intended it to be read as a Scottish story, he would have made it one. After all, he had written plenty of others. He had even written an early study of the split personality in the form of a play, Deacon Brodie or the Double Life, in collaboration with his friend WE Henley. It is based on the career of William Brodie, who lived in Edinburgh's old town in the late 18th century, and was one of its more colourful criminals. In Stevenson and Henley's play, Brodie is a respectable cabinet-maker and deacon of the Incorporation of Wrights and Masons by day. At night he dons a mask and burgles the houses of well-to-do Edinburgh citizens. In 1788, the deacon was caught and hanged on a scaffold that had been designed according to his own technical specifications.
It is, of course, possible to think of "Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde" as a study of the Scottish character - or of any of the other topics mentioned. All are reasonable suggestions, and most can be supported to some extent by textual evidence. The author himself (not necessarily the most reliable guide) stated that the central problem was Jekyll's hypocrisy. In his letter to the New York Sun on the subject of Mansfield's sexual interpretation, he wrote that it was Jekyll's "selfishness and cowardice" that had let out the beast Hyde, "not this poor wish to have a woman".
Above all, however, Stevenson was against simplicity. He might have agreed with Fanny that his original attempt had "missed the allegory", but he did not wish to have the allegory rigidly defined. "Everything is true," he told Sidney Colvin, "only the opposite is true too; you must believe both equally or be damned." Jekyll is a true type, but no more so than Hyde; truer than either is Jekyll-and-Hyde, that combination we all recognise. As Stevenson's friend the poet and folklorist Andrew Lang recalled: "He told me once he meant to write a story about a fellow who was two fellows, which did not, when thus stated, seem a fortunate idea." They are often the best ones.
• Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, directed by Rouben Mamoulian, is at the BFI, London SE1 until December 30. Box office: 020 7928 3232.
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