Strange language of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde'

: Stevenson’s variation of prepositions and articles and idioms gives the reader the philological pleasure of interpreting a strange but perfectly understandable text. His unusual use of single ‘lexical words’ adds another pleasure: participation in the creation of meaning. Stevenson, rebelling against language fixed by authority, creates new meaning freely and poetically through context. In JH the creation of meaning, however, is often deliberately impeded, creating the ambiguous or opaque language that gives the disoriented reader moving through the text an experience similar to that of Utterson as he tries to interpret and understand events in the story.