That passage doesn’t indicate any particular vice – just that he has several. It’s always been a problem for filmmakers and for comic book adaptations (like Classics Illustrated), because they have to SHOW Jekyll being evil, but they have to figure out exactly how. Several versions (especially the Reuben Mamoulian/Fredric March version) suggest that Jekyll is engaging with dance hall girls and maybe prostitutes. That would seem evil enough (and unmentionable enough in Victorian times).
My Classics Illustrated version shows him committing violent crimes and stealing money – that’s not only believable, it’s supported by the book. Jekyll has no restraints or compassion. The first we see of him, he’s deliberately and unrepentantly running over a child. The crime that brings the police down on him is the uimpulsive murder of Sir Danvers Carew. So clearly one vice is absolute unbridled vio;lence. (Which, of course, the original graphic version of The League opf Extraordinary Gentlemen played to the full)
You ccan suspect others. Heck, Drugs made Jekyll what he was, so it would be no surprise to find him using drugs (some folks have suspected that cocaine abuse was what suggested the whiole idea). Adaptations show Jekyll guzzling alcohol in low joints.
But it’s telegraphed a bunch of times. Stephen King did a very good breakdown of the Apollonian/Dionysian thing going on in Jekyll/Hyde in his book Danse Macabre. Stuff like the proper, lovely facade of Jekyll’s house on a nice street where he enters and exits, compared to the seedy, nasty, neglected brownstone on a dangerous back alley that is Hyde’s domicile (but that are front and back of the same building).
I always thought that the book talked about his vice being liquor and women.
Sounds like he’s been reading Kim Newman. Newman’s a British horror author who’s written some alternative versions of classic horror novels.
In one he wrote a new ending for Jeckyll and Hyde in which they were two seperate people and the “secret” revealed at the end of the book was that Hyde was Jeckyll’s gay lover. In another, he wrote about Morris being a vampire who was Dracula’s secret ally. The unusual thing about these stories was that Newman didn’t rewrite the earlier parts of the books - he used scenes and quotations that had actually existing in the original works and re-interpreted them to support a new ending.
You mean that Hyde has no restraints or compassion. The question is, what relatively mild vice of Jekyll (one that many a man would have “blazoned”) gets magnified into the extreme misbehavior of Hyde. I took it to involve the keeping of mistresses or prostitutes, which a rake might boast about (to other men at least) in Victorian times, but which Jekyll could not abide in himself.
It has always been my impression that his “secret” vice was precisely what was described in the quoted text as “impatient gaiety”. He wanted to be the life of the party–the guy cracking jokes, buying rounds for the house, and generally doing all sorts of fun things that aren’t conducive to maintaining an air of dignity. Yes, he probably wanted to score with some pretty girl, too (or guy, although I don’t think the text supports that). Unfortunately for his peace of mind, he got instilled with enough Victorian priggery that he was ashamed of partying, so when and if he did cut loose, he hid it (and was probably too worried to enjoy it as much as he wanted).
Hyde, of course, took a much darker turn. He was impulsive and devoted to his own pleasures with no regard for others, let alone for appearances. He didn’t just represent the “vice” that Jekyll was concerned about, he represented every selfish impulse Jekyll might experience.