Richard Mansfield as Jekyll and Hyde: Theatre, Photography, and Composite Time

Richard Mansfield as Jekyll and Hyde:Theatre, Photography, and Composite Time Daniel A. Novak (bio) The cover of the Autumn 2020 issue of Victorian Studies features an image familiar enough to Victorianists to require almost no explanation. It depicts a man dressed in the clothes of a Victorian gentleman, his face looking upward and illuminated by an almost celestial light (as it turns out, electric light1) while another figure, his body almost transparent but still visible through the body in the foreground, crouches, hunched to half the man's height, wearing a sinister scowl (fig. 1). But, while well known, Henry Van der Weyde's photograph (c. 1887) of the actor Richard Mansfield playing both Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in his theatrical adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson's novel is also an image that is difficult to categorize. It Click for larger view View full resolution Fig 1. Henry Van der Weyde, photograph of Richard Mansfield playing both Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, c. 1877. Courtesy of Billy Rose Theatre Division, New York Public Library Digital Collections. [End Page 8] is a theatrical photograph, but, as David Mayer argues, like all Victorian photographs of actors, it is not a photograph of performance (227). For technological reasons, photographs of actors in costume as various characters were taken in the studio well into the late nineteenth century. What sets this image apart is that it represents a scene and a moment that could not have been performed, featuring as it does both Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde at the same time. The practice of superimposing two or more photographs—of the same person at different times, ages, and stages, or of different members of a family, or even of members of a particular social "type"—is reminiscent of the work of Francis Galton and his experiments with composite photography. Strictly speaking, however, this image is not a composite photograph but a double exposure. Susan Cook, whose essay on hidden-mother portraits appears in this forum, has linked Van der Weyde's image to narratives of double exposures in Victorian fiction, as well as the use of double exposure in Victorian spirit photography (a rich topic explored by Louis Kaplan in this forum). For Cook, the image embodies the heart of the novel's mystery. The "scandal is that the monster operates as a double exposure, not severed from Jekyll at all" (Cook 90). By contrast, Owen Clayton argues that this image should be read in the context of Francis Galton's use of composite photography, in two senses. Historically, Galton's work influenced Stevenson, who was long interested in Galton's work on heredity and even "linked the effect of foreign travel upon the individual to Galton's composite." Theoretically and visually, Galton's composites "were central to Stevenson's conception of an unstable, multiple selfhood" (Clayton 77). After all, Jekyll explicitly describes himself as a "composite" (Stevenson 85). Cook is, of course, right on the merits. Van der Weyde's image is a far less technologically ambitious double exposure. And yet, the photograph and the novel capture a paradox at the heart of Galton's project. Galton aimed to distill and make visible an essence—of race, heredity, or criminality.2 But Galton's photography often failed in its effort to distill a single, defining trait into scientific typicality and photographic visibility, instead capturing only "the common humanity that underlies" each person (Galton 135). Stevenson's novel dramatizes and theorizes both this desire and its failure. Jekyll's "beloved daydream" to separate "these elements" (Stevenson 79) turns into a nightmare. But his failure is predicted by the discoveries that drove the desire for separation in the first place. Jekyll not only admits that he is "radically both" and speculates that future researchers would find humans beings to be a "polity multifarious, incongruous, and independent denizens" (79), but he also argues that the most boring and conventional of us are inevitably "composite"; only Hyde ("alone in the ranks of mankind") embodied "pure evil" (81). Van der Weyde's photograph, then, is at once an impossible fiction—stretching the boundaries of both visual embodiment and photographic and theatrical time—and...

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