London Neighbours: <i>Vanity Fair</i> ’s ‘Gaunt House’ as a Source for <i>Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde</i>

‘Mr Utterson of Gaunt Street’ in Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1886 Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is, so to speak, a neighbour of Lord Steyne of Gaunt House on Gaunt Square in William Makepeace Thackeray’s 1848 Vanity Fair.1 The coincidence of the imagined London urban settings suggests the possibility of a broader borrowing by Stevenson from Thackeray’s novel. The two texts are undoubtedly dissimilar, the ‘sprawling, expansive plotting of [a] multi-decker’ novel like Vanity Fair very different from, as Gail Turley Houston writes, the ‘bare outlines of a horrifying occurrence, dialogue, or character’ in Stevenson’s novella, ‘bare outlines’ which leave ‘the reader to decipher meaning in the murky aftermath’.2 Nevertheless, Thackeray’s work arguably gives Stevenson a model for a sophisticated and perverse urban setting and some of its ‘horrifying’ results. ‘Gaunt House’, Chapter 47 of Vanity Fair, is one of the novel’s great set-pieces, providing a portrait of the house and its inhabitants: Lord Steyne, his wife, his two sons and their respective wives, and his grandchildren—two of the latter depicted, in Thackeray’s memorable illustration, with a brace of swords hanging over their heads (596). Thackeray’s chapter meticulously narrates the misery, humiliations, and insanity suffered by Gaunt family members under the deceptive gloss of wealth and privilege. Stevenson’s novella borrows from Vanity Fair a specific urban architecture that maps the intersection of wealth and sophistication on the one hand and corruption and scandal on the other. It also borrows and adapts Thackeray’s story of a man, Lord George Gaunt, who ends up ‘nowhere’ (595), presaging the end of Dr Jekyll himself: ‘Nowhere was there any trace of Henry Jekyll, dead or alive’ (42). Stevenson’s text echoes a key architectural feature in Thackeray’s chapter: a house fronting on a respectable, if declining, London square but with a disreputable back door. The front of Thackeray’s Gaunt House occupies ‘one side’ of ‘Gaunt Square’, the other three sides ‘composed of mansions that have passed away into Dowagerism’ and now occupied by doctors’ offices, a bank, and a social club (588). Dr Jekyll’s house similarly retains ‘a great air of wealth and comfort’, even though the neighbouring houses have ‘decayed from their high estate and [are] let in flats and chambers to all sorts and conditions of men’ (16). ‘All the world knows that Lord Steyne’s town palace stands in Gaunt Square’, says Vanity Fair’s narrator, but almost no one knows of its scandalous rear door, including—strangely—the narrator himself (588). The narrator’s information comes from, as he says, ‘my informant (Little Tom Eaves) who knows everything and who has showed me the place … A few score yards down New Gaunt Street, and leading into Gaunt Mews indeed, is a little modest back door, which you would not remark from that of any of the other stables’ (589). This ‘back door’, reports Tom Eaves, leads to the decadent ‘petits appartements’ of Lord Steyne, where wealthy men and their mistresses visit in ‘many a little close carriage’ and where card games are played with enormous stakes (589). With the narrator disavowing knowledge of such dissipation, he carefully distinguishes his voice from that of the peeping-tom-eavesdropper: ‘do you suppose, I say (the reader must bear in mind that it is always Tom Eaves who speaks) … ’ (591). Jekyll’s house also has a back door and the ‘Story of the Door’ is the starting point of Stevenson’s text. However, the connection between this back door and Jekyll’s front door remains obscure until ‘The Last Night’ when Utterson, having found Hyde’s body in Jekyll’s cabinet, discovers that ‘the cabinet communicated separately by a second flight of stairs’ with ‘the door on the by-street’ (41). At the novella’s beginning, this connection is not so much unknown as unstated. Mr Enfield tells Utterson that the man who has trampled the little girl unlocks this rear door, goes in, and comes out with a cheque for the girl’s family. Enfield names the man with the key Mr Hyde, but he suppresses other knowledge. He notices the name and address of ‘the person that drew the cheque … he lives in some square or other’, but does not name him (‘I make it a rule of mine: the more it looks like Queer Street, the less I ask’) and then he and Utterson ‘make a bargain never to refer to this again’ (8, 9, 10). With no gossiping Tom Eaves in this narrative, ‘Queer Street’ knowledge is for a time suppressed. The rear door in both texts is the entryway for vice and scandal that come to infect the whole house. In Vanity Fair, for example, Tom Eaves reports on the ‘frightful’ ‘humiliations’ suffered by the pious Lady Steyne, who, ‘in her own house’, ‘had to submit to many a private indignity’ (591). Readers of Strange Case only gradually learn of the relationship between the back-door ‘brute’ Hyde and the ‘more upright twin’ Jekyll; even in ‘Henry Jekyll’s Full Statement of the Case’, he initially prevaricates, for example, calling his ‘pleasures … (to say the least) undignified’, before admitting that his ‘pleasures … in the hands of Edward Hyde, … soon began to turn toward the monstrous’ (64, 53, 56, 57). Stevenson’s text turns the screw, so to speak, on the scandal and cruelty associated with Gaunt House’s rear door, making it in Jekyll’s house the entryway for outright brutality—Hyde.3 Vanity Fair does not represent Strange Case’s ‘thorough and primitive duality of man’ (53); however, the story of George Gaunt, Lord Steyne’s son, anticipates aspects of the Jekyll-and-Hyde plot. A diplomat, Gaunt is like Jekyll, privileged, accomplished, and with an illustrious career. But ‘of a sudden, rumours arrived of the secretary’s extraordinary behaviour’; ‘It was something queer, people whispered. His grandfather was so’ (595). Gaunt is then ‘gazetted’ to a diplomatic post in ‘Brazil’, but ‘“Brazil,” said one gossip to another, with a grin—“Brazil is St. John’s Wood. Rio de Janeiro is a cottage surrounded by four walls, and George Gaunt is … invested … with the order of the Strait Waistcoat”’ (595). Suffering from a ‘taint of the blood’, Gaunt effectually disappears: ‘he never returned from that Brazil expedition—never died there—never lived there—never was there at all. He was nowhere; he was gone out altogether’ (595). The absent Gaunt persists as a dreadful spectre, haunting his children with an ‘awful ancestral curse’ and his father with the ‘horrid bedside ghost’ of family madness (596) ‘Brazil is St. John’s Wood’ is almost as dislocating a phrase as Jekyll’s ‘I was not where I was’, the latter spoken when he wakes as Hyde in the elegant bedroom fronting on the city square (58). The ultimate disappearance of Jekyll is foreseen from almost the beginning of Strange Case, its possibility inscribed in his will—to the ‘indignation’ of his lawyer Utterson—and in Dr Lanyon’s letter ‘again were the idea of a disappearance and the name of Henry Jekyll bracketed’ (11, 30). Both Hyde and Jekyll are associated with disappearance; after the murder of Danvers Carew, ‘Mr Hyde had disappeared … as though he had never existed’, and Jekyll himself briefly celebrates his own vanishing: ‘Think of it—I did not even exist!’ (28, 56). Disappearance here is qualitatively different than Gaunt’s disappearance in Vanity Fair, of course, but as in Thackeray’s novel, intimates are haunted by one who marks a threatening otherness within the self: Utterson’s ‘imagination’ is ‘enslaved’ by the image of the ‘human Juggernaut’ Hyde and Lanyon dies in the grip of ‘the deadliest terror’ that sits beside him ‘at all hours of the day and night’ (13, 50). Stevenson’s plot extends Thackeray’s realist one, pushing the limits of sophisticated pleasures and urban decadence and tracing how knowledge comes to be disavowed. Enfield’s ‘the more it looks like Queer Street, the less I ask’ could almost be a motto derived from the equivocating narrator of the ‘Gaunt House’ chapter. That chapter is only an interlude in Thackeray’s long novel, but it suggestively anticipates aspects of the perverse and cruel urban world of Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.

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