LONDON, LATE 19TH CENTURY

The setting in both of Stevenson's novella and Hatcher's adaptation takes place in London in the 1880s. If Paris is known as "the city of light," Victorian London might be called "the city of gloom." "A combination of coal-fired stoves and poor sanitation made the air heavy and foul-smelling," says one on-line historical guide to the city. Another source notes that, "Both the rich and the poor had to contend with the evil air around the city. 

Every surface was coated with soot from the use of coal. New buildings being constructed of Portland stone didn't stay pristine for long. The air people breathed was often foggy with the smoke from coal fires."

This is the city of darkness captured in the fiction of Dickens and Conan Doyle, where Scrooge makes his solitary way through the fog to his ghost-infested house, and where Sherlock Holmes hails a cab on a murky street in pursuit of a master criminal fleeing through the shadows. And two years after the publication of Stevenson's story London became, in real life, the city stalked by Jack the Ripper, another denizen of the smoggy night.

Like Jekyll and Hyde, Victorian London presented contradictory faces to the world. It was simultaneously the seat of a global imperial and financial power and the site of some of the world's most wretched slums. As Dickens shows us in Bleak House, it was the city both of Sir Leicester Dedlock and of the homeless street sweeper, Jo. With a population that grew six-fold during this period-from one to six million-it presented a vast spectrum of social life, exhibiting everywhere across the urban landscape-Jekyll-and-Hyde-like- the polarities of the