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1. Robert Louis Stevenson
He was born in Edinburgh in 1850. He spent most of his childhood in bed cause his poor
health.
He travelled a lot in search of an ideal climate for his health: he lived in the south of
England, Germany, France, and Italy.
His father was an engineer and wished his son to follow his footsteps, but Stevenson
decided to study law, and graduated in 1875. Then he devoted himself to writing. He died
of brain haemorrhage in 1894, at the age of forty-four.
He became popular as a novelist when he published “Treasure Island” and then “The
Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde”.
He was always in conflict with his social environment, the respectable Victorian world, and
rejected his family’s Calvinist religious principles, and the love for respectability. His
manners were eccentric and he became one of the first examples of the bohemian in
Britain.
The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
This story was inspired by a nightmare he had during an illness. When he woke up, he
wrote down
what he remembered and then he developed the entire story.
The Story ->Dr Jekyll believes that man is a mixture of good and evil and carries out
experiments to separate one from the other. He eventually develops a drug that
transforms him into Mr Hyde, who rapresents pure evil. As time goes by, Hyde seems to
again power over Jekyll who cannot control the transformations. Hyde commits a cruel
murder, and, in order to avoid arrest and disgrace, Jekyll
commits suicide.
Plot->The story is told from four different narrative points of view. The first three are
acquaintances of Dr Jekyll’s: Enfield, Mr Utterson, a respectable London lawyer, and Dr
Lanyon. They reveal different aspects of the strange events in the life of their friend. At the
end, Dr Jekyll himself gives his version of events.
Setting and characters
The novel is set in London and Edinburgh. Nearly all the action takes
place at night, in an atmosphere of foggy, gloomy threat. All the characters in the story are
middle- aged professional men, belonging to middle-class Victorian powerful social
groups.
Themes
Victorian society. The novel is a subtle psychological study, and a sociological dissection of
an important aspect of the Victorian world. In fact, nearly all the characters in the story
are men of a certain class who give a rather squalid picture of society where appearance
takes priority over substance. The picture that emerges is that of a Victorian society
dominated by men who have very little tooffer to their world.
The double side of man’s soul. On a psychological point of view, the novel investigates on
the dual nature of man: the double side of man’s soul, in an everlasting conflict. Dr Jekyll
and Mr Hyde are in this way the stereotypes of people who are “good” and “evil”.
Dr Jekyll represents the “good side”. He is an idealist and philanthropist. He has lived a
virtuous life. His face is handsome, his hands are white and well-shaped, his body is
harmoniously proportioned. Mr Hyde is pure hate and evil; he is pale and dwarfish, his
hands are dark and hairy, his body gives an impression of deformity, he is small and ugly.
When Hyde achieves domination over Jekyll, the latter has two choices: he may choose a
life of crime and depravity or bring to an and the evil side of his nature, Hyde, by
committing suicide. Jekyll chooses the second solution. This means that in each of us, two
natures are at war: the good and the evil. The fight between them goes on all our lives, and
one of them must win at last. In our hands lies the power to choose. We
are, what we want most to be.

2. Oscar Wilde
Life and literary works
Oscar Wilde was raised in a racy intellectual environment that contributed to his wit and
cleverness, he was enrolled in the Trinity College, where he exhibited a deep interest in
Greek and he was even awarded a scholarship to Oxford. He came in touch with John
Ruskin and Walter Pater, thanks to whom he started approaching the philosophy of
aesthetism. In 1881 his very first collection of poems was published and controversy spread
around the figure of Oscar Wilde, whose unconventionality depicted him as a dandy, he
was even offered a lecturing in the USA.
A dandy places particular importance to physical appearance, refined language and
leisurely hobbies. He filled his works with wit and sarcasm displaying the vices of the
upper classes in his "Comedies of Manners": they reveal around characters with a
disgraceful past that face the hypocrisy of society. His popularity faded ad the father of
another young poet, named Bosie Alfed Douglas, accused him of homosexual conduct (a
serious criminal offence at the time) as Oscar Wilde was completely in love with him.
Wilde was then arrested and consequently sentenced to two years of hard labour where he
was inspired to write the works known as "Ballad of the Reading Grace" and "De
Profundis". Oscar Wilde then died in 1900 because of meningitis alone in a hotel room in
Paris.
The Picture of Dorian Gray
The novel is an extended version of a long short story printed in an American magazine, to
adapt it, Wilde had to widen the plot, increase the number of characters and mitigate all
the homosexual implications. The plot mirrors the myth of Faust, with a young man, giving
up his save for eternal youth, in this case Dorian whose portray is being printed by his
friend Basil Hallward. Dorian is persuaded by lord Henry Wotton of the priceless value of
youth, his wish for eternal youth is then granted as the picture slowly transforms into an
old wrinkled man, Dorian hides it in the attic and he even kills Basil in order to hide his
secret. At the end Dorian surrenders and stabs the portrait, which causes his own suicide.
The main themes are:
• Double life, where the dualism is represented with Dorian and the picture
• Mystery and horror
• Cult of beauty
Even though Oscar Wilde claimed in the Preface the lack of a moral, in "The Profundis" he
states that a life of excesses and gluts has always a price that must be paid at all costs,
sooner or later, and no one is excused by the cruel destiny