Setting and the Gothic

London is often buried in fog. On the morning after the Carew murder, ‘a great chocolate-coloured pall lowered over heaven’ (Chapter 4). A pall is the cloth over a coffin, so the fog suggests death.

In the fog, Soho seems ‘like a district of some city in a nightmare’ (Chapter 4).

The fog hides things and confuses people, just as the truth about Jekyll is hidden. It is an example of pathetic fallacy: the weather reflects the mood of mystery and moral darkness.

Doors appear throughout the novel, as barriers between the public and the hidden self.

• The novel begins with a story about a door, ‘blistered and distained’ (Chapter 1), with no bell or knocker. Hyde has a key and uses it to vanish.
• Jekyll locks himself away behind the door of his private room.
• In Chapter 8, Utterson and Poole break that door down with an axe to find the truth.

Doors in the novel are symbols of secrecy, and the climax comes when one is finally forced open.

Jekyll's house has two faces, like its owner.

• The front is in a square of handsome old houses. It ‘wore a great air of wealth and comfort’ (Chapter 2): the respectable doctor.
• The back is the laboratory, once used as dissecting rooms, reached through the shabby door on a side street. Hyde comes and goes this way.

Hardly anyone realises the two buildings are joined. The house is a physical picture of Jekyll's duality: a respectable front, with something sinister hidden behind it.

Much of the action happens at night, in empty streets. Enfield describes walking ‘Street after street and all the folks asleep’ (Chapter 1) before he sees Hyde trample the girl.

The Carew murder happens under the moon, and the last night, when Utterson goes to Jekyll's house, is ‘a wild, cold, seasonable night of March’ (Chapter 8).

The deserted, lamplit streets create a lonely, threatening atmosphere, where anything could happen unseen.