Being an Outsider in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and The Fifth Child

In Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and in The Fifth Child an outsider is

progressively released into the existing society destroying peace and

goodness as it comes

The two books are about a person being released into the good and kind

society around them, then they destroy it bit by bit. Both of the

stories have characters that are similar, yet they still have their

differences. The differences they have are reflected in the societies

they live in. Considering that the books are written 100 years apart

from each other, these differences are simple to spot for the reader.

For example, social aspects of both books are very different. In 'Dr

Jekyll and Mr Hyde', the wealthy were extremely rich, and poor people

found it hard to scrape enough money together to get a daily meal.

This is a contrast to 'The Fifth Child', where David and Harriet are

middle class, despite having a large house. This is also shown by the

fact that the 'middle class' is Lessing's book and not Stephenson's,

where people lived in their house on the outskirts of London, as

Harriet and David do. This is different to Jekyll and Hyde, where

Stephenson generally describes inner-city London.

In Jekyll and Hyde, class and gender was judged a lot. In this book,

women were considered inferior to men. Women, if mentioned, act in an

uncontrollable, hysterical fashion. Stephenson writes:

"As we were pitching it in red hot, we were keeping the women off him

as best we could, for they were as wild as harpies."

And then:

"At the horror of these sights and sounds, the maid fainted"

This inferiority of women is also expressed by their occupations. The

only mentioning of a woman working is a maid, which is a menial job

compared to Jekyll, who is a d...

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...ics of doctors involving cloning and medicine. This arises

from Jekyll losing control of Hyde, as Hyde gets stronger and

stronger.

In my opinion, I will find the fifth child most memorable. This is

because I find the language more simple to understand, and the issues

more modern. Stephenson's book, Jekyll and Hyde, has words that I have

never come across before; meaning that reading it was quite slow.

Also, when something happens, Stephenson describes what other people

think of it. For example, Enfield says:

"It was nothing to hear, but it was hellish to see."

Lessing usually describes exactly what happened and rarely puts an

opinion into what she writes:

"They ran upstairs to find that Paul had put his hand in to Ben

through the cot bars, and Ben had grabbed the hand and pulled Paul

hard against the bars, bending the arm deliberately backwards."