class. A Marxist would say that the negative identification of Mr. Hyde with the lower classes is an ideological mystification or misting over of reality. The upper classes are falsely being taught in this novel to associate the attributes of poverty with moral evil.

In Victorian England, lower-class people were often shorter than those from the upper classes because of poorer diets. Bread rather than protein was the staple of the working class diet. As we see in plays such as George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion, written a few years after Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, working class people were, however, often understood as genetically inferior to the upper classes and were associated with criminal and deviant behaviors.

Mr. Hyde adheres to the way upper-class Victorians often perceived the lower classes. As the upper-class Mr.Enfield says,

There is something wrong with his appearance; something displeasing, something downright detestable. I never saw a man I so disliked, and yet I scarce know why. He must be deformed somewhere; he gives a strong feeling of deformity, although I couldn’t specify the point.

The lawyer Mr. Utterson has a similar reaction to Hyde but describes him more specifically as a lower-class person:

He was small and very plainly dressed and the look of him, even at that distance, went somehow strongly against the watcher’s inclination

Mr. Hyde, in contrast, is taller and more easy for men like Mr. Utterson to relate to as an equal.

By having a man who looks lower-class, the embodiment of evil, Stevenson reinforces false notions of the upper classes as morally superior. In fact, a Marxist would say, the evil associated with lower-class people is the fault of the capitalist system for oppressing, exploiting, and degrading the workers.

Marxist literary criticism comes from Karl Marx. Karl Marx was a famous nineteenth-century economist and political theorist. With Friedrich Engels, Marx wrote the Manifesto of the Communist Party. In this text, Marx and Engels encourage the working class to overthrow the ruling class and to create a classless society not centered on capitalism.

In Das Kapital, Marx, on his own, discusses the predatory nature of capitalism. He examines the drawbacks of capitalism in such detail that his study encompasses three separate volumes. Taking into account Marx’s focus on class and economics, Marxist literary criticism tends to view a work of literature through class and economic interests.

Throughout his writings, Marx presents the bourgeoisie as a rapacious, predatory group that will eventually consume itself. It’s possible for a Marxist literary critic to apply this particular self-destructive class critique to Robert Louis Stevenson’s novella. Perhaps Dr. Jekyll’s transformations into the nefarious Mr. Hyde represents the Marxist belief that the ruling class will run out of things to plunder and start plundering themselves.

Another way to apply Marxist criticism to Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde would be to examine Marx’s thoughts on how capitalism alienated people from their true being. For Marx, capitalism separated the worker and the ruler from their human nature and turned them into a machine, a slave, or a monster. A Marxist critic could argue that Jekyll turns into Hyde as a way to reacquaint himself with his human instincts. Conversely, another Marxist critic might argue that Jekyll morphs into Hyde to reveal the corrupt foundation of the ruling class.

Karl Marx analyzed the economic and political aspects of many societies, as well as human nature. He asserted that classes in a society divide the population and are inherently unequal. He also said that there will always be a struggle between classes of society, which causes alienation and violence eventually.

Marx despised capitalism and believed that only those at the top benefit in a capitalistic society. Marx argued that the working class deserve the right to be respected as much as the elite, since the workers provide the majority of the wealth and production for a society.

Marx also declared that a devastating aspect of capitalism is that workers become alienated from many aspects of life, being reduced to empty beings which just produce without much connection to others.

In The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, the violent struggle that was constantly at play between the two characters can be representative of the continual class struggle in a society. One can analyze how the two characters/personalities (in one man) represent a clash of classes in one society, beginning with the name distinctions.

The name of Dr. Jekyll alone provides the reader with rank, education, and class. If one is a doctor, it is presumed he or she is smart, wealthy, distinguished, socially mobile, and generally respected or admired. Dr. Jekyll fit this description, and he lived in a nice area of London in a home with servants. Others do not suspect Dr. Jekyll of any crimes because of his class standing. Consider how Jekyll represents the wealthy class in Marx’s social structures.

Then, consider the name of Mr. Hyde. His name does not provide any rank or distinguishing information from any other English man. His name is ordinary. The character of Mr. Hyde can represent the poor, downtrodden, repulsive class of society which is commonly outcast or alienated from the upper class. Mr. Hyde is grotesque in appearance and is rejected by those who come in contact with him. He lives in an apartment in isolation. Hyde, like Marxist workers, becomes empty and frustrated with his inability to connect with society. Hyde also represents Marx’s belief that crime will ultimately occur if inequality and injustices continue to occur in society without remedy.