The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is set in late Victorian London in the year 1885. London was a thriving metropolis in this period, as the capital of the world’s most significant empire and the center of Europe’s economy. Money flowed into the city from trade throughout the British empire, and the Industrial Revolution also served to enrich the city immensely.
Alongside that enrichment came significant income inequality. Despite the influx of funds, much of London’s population lived in poverty at the end of the 19th century, with limited access to water and sanitation. In many cases, the rich and poor lived side by side, making the city’s landscape itself a study in duality.
Many of the characters in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde are members of London’s then-burgeoning middle class, most working as either lawyers or doctors. Class was a cultural distinction, as well as an economic one, and the primary marking of the middle class at this time was a focus on issues of morality.
The moral expectations of the period were split along gender lines, thus matching Victorian conceptions of the nature and needs of men and women. Women were considered naturally weaker and more dependent than men, as well as implicitly domestic. There was an extreme emphasis on chastity, as well as self-sacrifice in marriage and motherhood. Men, who were considered more sexually driven than women, were not held to exactly the same standards of sexual propriety. But economic success, ambition, and strict adherence to law and tradition were expected from men. These intense moral standards are what power the obsession with reputation among the characters in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, all of whom go to great lengths to hide anything that might suggest an indiscretion or violation of moral code on the part of themselves or their friends.
The infamous London fog, which plays a significant role in this story, was the product of England’s rainy climate in combination with industrialization. The soot and smoke from factories and the coal fires that lit up London homes often gave the fog a thick, heavy texture and a dingy gray, yellow, black, or brown color (as in the story). The fog could become heavy enough to prevent travel, either by foot or by horse-drawn carriage, for days at a time. Pollution in London wasn’t meaningfully curtailed until the 20th century. Its status as a persistent obstruction made London’s distinctive fog a common symbol for moral decay and social disorder within the newly moneyed city throughout the literature of the era (particularly the works of Charles Dickens and Arthur Conan Doyle).
