to mortify a taste for vintages

Another Jekyll and Hyde fan recommended I get the meticulously annotated “The Essential Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” so I got it for Christmas. It’s lovely!

It points out all the subtext. All of it! It catches onto fairly subtle running themes that I will gleefully take and run with, notably the connection between Jekyll’s potion and wine. I’ve been toying with the idea of Jekyll being a ‘high-functioning alcoholic’, a subtype of alcoholism that is fascinating me right now and seems to have duality sewn right into its heart. (I am like a Victorian in that I like to take the complexities of the human mind and categorize it into a list of observable disorders.)

For Jekyll this means that he is very very good at hiding his addiction. He drinks very little socially (which takes some effort) but spends long long nights drinking alone and perhaps blubbering to Rachel. But if there’s even the slightest chance that someone might be watching him, he does his best to cultivate an air of being put together and on top of things, with perhaps the slightest frosting of thoughtful brooding. You bet he’s spent a good long time in front of a mirror making sure that’s EXACTLY what it looks like.

Also it should be noted he drinks the fancy stuff. For some reason, everyone in that book does.