1.
Robert Louis Stevenson’s middle name was originally ‘Lewis’, after his maternal grandfather. He changed it to Louis when he was about eighteen, and five years later dropped his second middle name, ‘Balfour’. In fact Robert’s two middle names constituted his maternal grandfather's full name.
If I enjoyed finding this out any more than I usually enjoy finding out about anyone’s names, it’s because my own middle name is Lewis, itself changed from the ‘Louise’ or ‘Louisa’ which is a traditional middle name in my mum's family. My having no sisters, it went to me, in altered form. I’m tempted to leave my middle name alone, if nothing else because of the one friend I have who sometimes calls me ‘LEWISSS’, in a ratty Inspector Morse voice.
Robert’s motivation for changing his, according to a life written by his cousin Sir Graham Balfour, was that Robert's father ‘violently disliked another person of the same name’. He adds, ‘and the new spelling was not accompanied by a change of pronunciation’.
Did it not! Which means I’ve been saying his name wrong, all this time. (Either that, or I've been saying my own middle name wrong. Another version of the name, by the way, which either of us may have ended up with, is ‘Clovis’. My stereotype of this name is that it’s an upper-class one, thanks entirely to the Saki character Clovis Sangrail.)
2.
For much of my life I’d been saying ‘Jekyll’ wrong, too, as in ‘Dr.’: it’s a venerable old Cornish and Breton surname, and it in fact rhymes with ‘treacle’, not with ‘heckle’. In modern Breton it appears in the form ‘Gicquel’. Daniel Evers at the University of Bristol has an engaging blog post about why the ‘heckle’ [mis]pronunciation may have caught on. In brief: when Spencer Tracy played Henry Jekyll, in 1941, he pronounced it to rhyme with ‘heckle’. There had only been one non-silent adaptation of the book prior to that, in 1931, starring Fredric March. He pronounced it to rhyme with ‘treacle’.
From Evers’ post:
So why did March’s pronunciation not take hold instead, given that it had a ten-year head start?
The answer lies in Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s decision to locate and destroy every print of the 1931 film that they could lay their hands on. MGM had acquired the rights to the 1931 film in anticipation of their release of Tracy’s 1941 version, and to ensure that people would watch their film, the studio deemed it necessary to rid itself of the competition. MGM’s destruction of the 1931 original essentially made it a lost film for many years (except for miscellaneous clips) until a full copy was found and restored. But in that time, Tracy’s star quality had promoted the 1941 film and taught a generation of people how to pronounce Jekyll incorrectly.
If there were, somehow, any doubt about how to pronounce Mr. Hyde, it is easily cleared up by the text itself: a joke I still can’t quite believe Stevenson put in the book, although I’m very happy he did. Our narrator, Utterson, goes looking for the man in question:
‘If he be Mr. Hyde,’ he had thought, ‘then I shall be Mr. Seek.’
3.
There is something else about this book, another not-quite-correctness which has stuck around, in print as well as in speech. Many editions get it wrong. The Penguin Popular Classics edition I’m reading from right now gets it wrong on the front cover, and gets it wrong four times on the first 3 pages inside. The word ‘wrong’ is perhaps strong for an oddity as minor as this, but it is nevertheless the case that, as published — by Longmans, Green, & Co., in 1886 — this text is called Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. As Stevenson put it into the world, this book’s title does not begin with ‘The’.
Inside the book, there are titles for the individual sections. They function as chapter or section titles but are not numbered. These titles often lack this initial definite article, as well, although they sometimes do not — those without a ‘the’, but which might have been susceptible to having one added by accident, as happened with the overall title, are ‘Story of the Door’, ‘Search for Mr. Hyde’, ‘Incident of the Letter’, ‘Remarkable Incident of Dr. Lanyon’, and ‘Incident at the Window’.
Of those that do have the definite article, ‘The Last Night’ it’s fair to say would mean something drastically different without it. ‘The Carew Murder Case’ is the second section, and the last is ‘Henry Jekyll’s Full Statement of the Case’. So Stevenson is not consistently resistant to using ‘the’ before the noun ‘case’; why would he be? It’s as if these definite articles have been carefully and selectively voided. In the case of the ‘Search for Mr. Hyde’, it’s hard to escape the sense that, as well as it being titular, there is the spectre here of an instruction, an imperative. In the case of ‘Remarkable Incident of Dr. Lanyon’ — and, most of all, of Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde — this definite article (or more particularly, its absence) has had ghosted into it some adjective, and in the case of the title, the adjective is the one which overrides and superordinates, which really does characterize everything that follows, that sheer strangeness which absolutely suffuses the entire book.
It really is though a strange book, to be repetitive but emphatic; and while I’m sure this concentration on the start of the title may feel like a pedantry, we also know that Stevenson knew what he was doing, he was so careful a craftsman — G.K. Chesterton’s aptly forensic compliment was that Stevenson could always ‘pick the right word up on the point of his pen’. So maybe you can, if you wish, choose to decide that this reduplicated manoeuvre — whereby in the place of an expected article, neutral and stabilizing, is an adjectival apparition, destabilizing and uncanny — subtly reflects in yellow light that what goes on in the story is so unsettling that it can even haunt the small-change of language out of its way.
Or, you might look at the titles, or the lists of chapter titles, of books published around the time, compare their use of articles, and decide that to read much at all into these missing articles is a nonsense. Either way, it makes me smile to see the cover of the very first publication: to look at it and notice on it that it has three distinct things on it which I and so many others have been either saying wrongly or thinking wrongly.
It somehow absolutely suits this text in particular to have turned out so glitchy, to have accrued such a handful of curious little misapprehensions over the years. If I were teaching it, in a seminar room or a classroom, and whatever wayward claims I dared to make about a few missing words, I would definitely not be able to resist repeatedly and camply using a phrase — doing a voice, even! — a phrase like, ‘but all is not quite what it seems’.