Complete Map

The complete map demonstrates the duality of London registered by the novel. The respectable West End sits alongside sordid Soho, making visible the spatial immediacy of the two halves. This proximity is condensed in Jekyll’s house, with its professional and gentlemanly front directly connected to the rundown ‘by-way’ at the rear and its ‘dingy neighbourhood’. Respectable London, somehow, seems to lead into places emblematic of the East End slums. The novel’s action occurs in a small, circumscribed area of inner north-west London. There are very few references to places outside the city, or – indeed – outside the immediate vicinity of the plot (seen only in metaphorical allusions to ‘Philippi’, ‘the ends of the earth, and vague ‘hillside vineyards’).

This introspection, which increases as the story progresses, displays the increasing reduction of places: the by-way becomes a court, Jekyll’s house a laboratory, the laboratory a cabinet. What happens in space also happens in the text: the spatial and linguistic multiplicity of the third-person narrative (seen in the crowded toporefs of the by-way) reduces at each narrative shift. By the end of the text – Jekyll’s cabinet and Jekyll’s narrative – this spatial variety has all but departed, with the few toporefs metaphorical and indirect.