Jekyll and Hyde: Multiple Facets of Victorian Literature
A few hours ago I finished reading The Strange Cae of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson. Those of you who read my blogs often know of my general distaste for Victorian prose. Hark ye! Stevenson is SO MUCH BETTER than other Victorian prose. Not just that, he's more than able to compete for a spot among my favorite authors.
His sentence structure (i.e. length and complexity du jour) was indeed Ciceronian at times. But he pulled it off with a clean, tidy logic that is unparalleled in my experience of Dickens or Eliot. He used a narrator which was on the border between a close omniscient and a distant/head-hopping close third. More often than not, changing POV mid-scene gets under my skin, but Stevenson did it gently and clearly, at appropriate times and with minimal intrusions, so I never minded even when I noticed. His characters were believable and well rounded and interesting. My only complaint about Jekyll and Hyde in particular was the structure/sequence of the thing: the whole narrative for the first 3/4 or more is told mostly from the POV of people surrounding Jekyll's Lawyer and old friend, Mr. Utterson or Utterson himself. There is a fabulous scene where Utterson and Jekyll's butler, Poole (who's marvelous, btw) break down the door to Jekyll's 'cabinet' (office off the laboratory), they find Hyde dying on the floor and ... and then there are letters. Excellent climax ... and then the last (in my fine print/large page edition) 15 pages of the story are first person narratives in the forms of Letters, last accounts of a Doctor who actually witnessed the change from Hyde to Jekyll and from Jekyll himself ... which read effectively suicide notes. Interesting to the last, but I so would have ordered it in some way so that the last scene was the death of Hyde rather than the observant remarks of Jekyll. It was, however, still an excellent read.
In less interesting news: I bought a new flash drive tonight. I like them small, because I'd start to get even more nervous about the idea of losing the things if they got much bigger (since I don't store music and the like on them). Hence, the new one is 2 gigs just like the last one. The last one I bought over four years ago, and I'm fairly sure I paid around $25 for it. For the same two gigs as my old one, I paid a whopping $9. The mind boggles about what that indicates about the advance of technology.
New World Design words today: 1475. Total World Design words: 5851. Out of an estimated 32000 words (which I'm beginning to think might be kind of low) 18% Done!