In Kultur der Renaissance in Italien (1860) Burckhardt states that humanism is “the discovery of the world and of man” and that the Renaissance was above all else an epoch of spiritual individualism. There Burckhardt conceives a distinctive interaction between political and military requirements and secular individualism. Jacob Burckhardt, in his investigations of the emergence of the modern society as we know it today, locates the answer in the sovereign Italian cities of the fifteenth-century. Later in the nineteenth century the word humanism was to be employed by cultural historians like Georg Voigt and Jacob Burckhardt in their examination of the revival of the Greco-Roman civilisation – a “Renaissance”, whose humanistic “new learning” had been promoted by the umanisti.

the teachers and translators of ancient Latin and Greek texts, had been a secular one, dealing with man, man’s nature and man’s faculties. This syllabus was to be advocated by the umanisti of the early Renaissance and known as the studia humanitatis. The word humanism was invented so as to describe the educational model, whose curriculum of studies had been known since the Middle Ages. “Humanism,” which today covers an extensive range of possible connotations, was coined in Germany in the early nineteenth century.

Both stories, nevertheless, as they question the humanist concept of the self, express doubts regarding the existence of a unified self and ultimately they appear to deny the unique and individual nature of man. While Jekyll and Hyde does not go beyond the Romantic issues of the dualistic notion of man, Dorian Gray anticipates the notion of multiplicity of the self in its treatment of the dichotomous relationship between life and morals versus art, appearance versus reality, and aesthetic and hedonistic self-cultivation versus the Victorian norms of utilitarian social responsibility. Both Stevenson and Wilde re-employed facets of the literary doppelganger motif as a means of depicting the “secret life” of the divided self. Particularly the issue of the doubles and psychological dualism became a central theme. With these developments in mind it is little wonder that the notion of the self became an increasing popular subject matter in the literature of the nineteenth century. As the matter of the self was being scrutinised by many sections of society, I shall give an overview of the centrifugal forces at work during the Victorian era. I shall, nevertheless, attempt to give a definition of the nineteenth century meanings of humanism and its concept of the self.ĭuring the nineteenth century the effects of the industrial revolution, the investigations in medicine, psychology and social science and the strict etiquette of decorum of the middle-classes were to challenge the humanist concept of the dignity and individuality of man. The very word “humanism”, nevertheless, presents a problem as it cannot be definitively pinned down, which in turn has led to the development of and allegiance to many concepts and theories. To come to terms with what is meant by the humanist concept of the self it is necessary to have an understanding of the concept of humanism. In my examination of the humanist concept of self under strain, I shall concentrate on how both stories express the uncertainty of the self as a unified entity and what notions of the self they propose. Hyde and Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray.

While tracing and examining how the Victorians came to doubt the validation of the humanist concept of the unified self, this thesis shall analyse the different concepts of the self proposed in the literary stories of Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Despite the fact that the notion of the humanist concept of the self was a nineteenth century invention, the technical improvements brought about by the industrial revolution, and discoveries made in the different fields of science were to make the Victorians revaluate their concept of the self. During the pervasive uneasiness of the Victorian era, the humanist concept of the unified self was put under strain.

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