ABSTRACT
When Isabella Beeton laid down her prohibition against servant speech in her manual of 1861, she offered an unusual departure from the age’s stereotypical construction of the chattering servant.1 Beeton’s silent servant is male, and his obsequious discretion is offered to a master, rather than a mistress. More than twenty years after Mrs. Beeton, we fi nd ourselves in the world of the bachelor household with Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, where the mistress is an absence. Poole and Jekyll, like Crusoe and Friday before them, or Bertie Wooster and Jeeves who followed after, are a dyad, working always in close collusion together, affi rming a social and psychic isolation that renders their masculine domesticity at once prestigious and perverse. A sterile elitism of class and gender prevails in the Jekyll household over which Poole presides. The redundancy of the feminine in Jekyll and Hyde blurs demarcations that affi rmed the doctrine of separate spheres that prevailed more unequivocally, earlier in the Victorian Age. Disorder seems inevitable in this homosocial world where public and private sphere are rendered indistinguishable from each other. In the JekyllHyde domicile-with its laboratory, study, dining room, and drawing room-home and workplace overfl ow, merging into a single, common, indeterminate space.
