Mary Reilly (26 page)

I have also taken great liberties with Mary’s punctuation and spelling. She rarely used punctuation at all and her method of capitalizing proper names was erratic, though it is interesting to note that she always failed to capitalize the word “i” and never failed to capitalize the word “Master.” She used dashes occasionally as commas and left off all possessive apostrophes. She recorded dialogue without breaks in the line or marks of any kind. All of these idiosyncrasies I have standardized for ease in reading.

I have retained, however, Mary’s habitual misuse of the verb “to be” as it seems characteristic of her voice, as is her use of the dialect “mun” for “must.” Occasional words were illegible; these I have substituted with the most logical option. Mary sometimes names places and streets with one letter followed by a dash, for example in “H__________.” I have retained this peculiarity.

Mary’s diaries break off abruptly and the last book is not like the others filled. Given the compromising situation in which she was discovered (even by contemporary standards, a domestic found late at night in her nightgown embracing her dead employer might expect repercussions), it seems probable that she did not leave Jekyll’s house with that document most vital to the Victorian servant, that passport from hardship and squalor to the haven of domestic servitude: a good “character.”
However, as Mary shows herself throughout her chronicle to be a resourceful and honest young woman, as well as a better than average servant, we can surmise that she recovered from the shock of her master’s suicide and landed on her feet in some less fantastic household.

The question of what really happened to Mary’s employer, Henry Jekyll, is not so easily resolved. It is difficult to credit Mary’s own conclusion, that her beloved Dr. Jekyll and his murderous assistant Edward Hyde were one and the same person, but not for the reasons Mary gives us: “How could one man be two, one kind, gentle, generous, the other with no care but his own pleasure and no pleasure but the suffering of his fellows?” A glance at the daily newspapers will remind us that such duplicity is not uncommon, especially among those who set themselves up as moral arbiters among us. One need only examine the lives of the wife, children and secretary of many a reformer to uncover sufficient duality of purpose to fill a column, sometimes a book. What is unexplained and incomprehensible in Henry Jekyll’s case is the physical transformation, which, if we are to believe Mary’s account, was considerable, and given Mr. Poole’s panic driven search for a certain chemical as well as Jekyll’s own remarks about his experiments, was achieved by the administration of some drug.

I propose two possible solutions. There may be others. The first is that Mr. Poole and Mr. Utterson lied about what they found in the cabinet, that they knew Jekyll had killed himself, possibly from despair over his
addiction to some drug (Edward Hyde might easily have been his supplier and have disappeared after the murder of Sir Danvers Carew, leaving Jekyll to bedevil chemists who were unable to provide him with a sufficient or pure supply) and that, in order to buy time to save Jekyll’s name, they concocted the story of the dead Hyde. This may seem farfetched, nor does it explain the reappearance of Edward Hyde the night of Jekyll’s death, but Mr. Poole and Mr. Utterson show themselves to be obsessed with the good name of Henry Jekyll, and the shock of breaking down a door to find they had themselves driven the poor man to suicide could have caused them to make up a story which, in the end, would cause more trouble than it was worth. If this was the case it would explain the movement of the boot, which Mary comments upon after Dr. Jekyll’s fall in the yard. If Dr. Jekyll and Edward Hyde were not the same person, Hyde might easily have come into the yard and moved the boot. It seems entirely within his character to play such a pointless joke.

A second possibility is that Mary is correct and that Henry Jekyll did somehow come upon a way of transforming himself into the thoroughly unrecognizable and reprehensible Edward Hyde. That this involved losing a foot or so in height, a total change of features and coloring, as well as a stripping away of the effects of age (for all who see him agree that Hyde is small and young) strains credulity, but surely Jekyll would have found the transformation of dots of light into moving pictures, which we enjoy without astonishment, equally
as incredible. The experiment, begun out of curiosity by the kindly, aging philanthropist, must then gradually have gotten out of control, requiring more and more of the chemical to effect the transformation back into Jekyll, until at last no amount would do. It does seem clear, and rather sad as well, that Jekyll closed himself up in his cabinet in a state of despair, knowing that he could no longer keep Edward Hyde at bay. To share one’s body with a dangerous criminal is not a fate anyone would willingly embrace, but to share one’s consciousness as well, which it seems was in some degree Jekyll’s unhappy condition, this must be terror indeed. The curious psychological relationship of Dr. Jekyll to Edward Hyde might be best explained by some student of human psychology adept at untangling the complex threads that so loosely knit the conscious to the unconscious. It is a mysterious connection and one that would surely repay study, for who among us has not felt at some moment the press of an unconscious desire to create havoc? Is it not the fear of this impluse that drives us to insist upon social order?

A third and final mystery which also might entertain a scholar more pertinacious than myself is the manner by which Mary’s diaries traveled from London to Bray. There are several possibilities, one of which I should mention, though only because it is bound to be raised by someone who believes, as a librarian at the British Museum assured me, that such a diary as this could not exist because housemaids in the late Victorian period were all illiterate.

We have a fair amount of evidence that this was not the case. Many such diaries have survived, as well as an account of an underhousemaid in London who published a novel, the subject of which was her employer’s family, thereby creating a scandal, and undoubtedly a good deal of anxiety in many an upper-class household. This, of course, raises a specter over the present manuscript, one which I neither endorse nor seek to discredit, and that is the possibility that the sad and disturbing story unfolded for us in the pages of Mary’s diaries is now and always was intended to be nothing less serious than a work of fiction.

The author would like to thank the many friends and colleagues who helped with the preparation of this manuscript, among them Chris Wiltz, Heather Henderson, Bill Sharpe, Ann Jones, Frank Reilly, O’Neil Denoux, Bob Hosmer, Adrienne Martin, Marianne Velmans, Fiona Burtt, Nan A. Talese, Nikki Smith, and, especially, James Ellis.