Jekyll, Hyde and the Servant Problem

Much as Jekyll and Hyde will discuss the protagonists’ involvement with sex workers, I’m thinking I should also devote a small section to discussing Jekyll’s household staff.

In the Stevenson novel, Poole the butler is loyal to Dr. Jekyll but it’s a professional relationship, not a personal. At the climax, he’s terribly worried because his employer is apparently locked in his laboratory with the murderous Edward Hyde — indeed, Poole fears Jekyll has already been killed. Eventually he and Utterson the solicitor break into the lab, find Jekyll gone and Hyde dead. We then shift to Utterson reading Jekyll’s confession. What Poole thought or felt about all this does not come up. That fits with the Victorian perception of servants.

As Lucy Lethbridge recounts in SERVANTS: A Downstairs History of Britain From the Nineteenth Century to Modern Times, the master-servant relationship in Victorian times was complicated. The employer and their family lived in intimate closeness to the servants — a valet or a lady’s maid would routinely help men and women to get dressed, for instance — yet there was as little emotional intimacy as possible. Ideally the servants were omnipresent but invisible, speaking only when necessary; some of the McMansions of the day were designed with a warren of corridors that let the staff carry out their backbreaking workday with as little contact with the upper classes as possible. That’s not to say they didn’t sometimes develop bonds of affection or closeness, but it wasn’t the norm, and many servants had to endure crappy food and crappy living spaces (though in many cases better than their lives as urban or rural poor would have allowed). When the 20th century offered better jobs — or even crappy jobs that allowed more freedom — domestic service staff dwindled and became increasingly hard to find (if this topic interests you at all, this is an excellent book).

One of the things I mentioned writing about Attack of the 50-Foot Woman in The Aliens Are Here was that the lead character’s butler isn’t an employee but a lifelong family retainer who’s watched over her since childhood. This is a common refrain in 20th century fiction: Alfred was Bruce Wayne and Batman’s right hand, then eventually rebooted to be a family retainer who cared for him after his parents’ death. Jarvis, Tony Stark’s butler, eventually took on a similar role in Tony’s life.

My friend Ross describes this as “confusing status and contract” — if someone takes care of you, cooks you dinner, draws your bath, well obviously they must like you, right (The same thing happens with sex workers — the fantasy that even though they’re doing it for the money, they’re really into you)? I also wonder if it doesn’t reflect that few of us, even if we can afford it, live with domestic servants. It’s easy to romanticize something you don’t experience on a daily basis.

The point I’m getting to is that I can see in a lot of the Jekyll and Hyde films. Poole vanishes from the novel and plays no role at the finish of the 1920 John Barrymore film. In the 1932 Fredric March film he has a much stronger connection with Jekyll. In the opening scene he’s nudging Jekyll out the door to be on time for his lecture; Jekyll is bantering cheerfully back. At the end, when Hyde turns back into Jekyll, deceased, the film closes with Poole sobbing over his master. He cared, he really cared.

This isn’t true of all movies, not even of all the movies set in the Victorian era. But it is true of several of them, Mary Reilly in particular. It’s worth noting.