Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde

Summary

Mr. Utterson, a reserved and loyal London lawyer, takes his Sunday walk with his kinsman Richard Enfield, who points out a shabby door in a by-street and tells how, at three one winter morning, he saw a small man trample a little girl and walk on. Caught and threatened, the man paid close to a hundred pounds in compensation with a cheque signed by a respected gentleman. The man's name was Hyde. Utterson is disturbed, for he holds the will of his old friend Dr. Henry Jekyll, which leaves everything to Edward Hyde and provides for Jekyll's disappearance. Dr. Hastie Lanyon, who quarrelled with Jekyll years ago over his unscientific balderdash, knows nothing of Hyde. Utterson watches the door until he meets Hyde, a pale, dwarfish man who gives everyone who sees him a sense of deformity no one can name. Jekyll, pressed at a dinner, assures Utterson that he can be rid of Hyde whenever he chooses. Nearly a year later a maid sees Hyde club to death the elderly Sir Danvers Carew, a member of Parliament, with a heavy cane. Hyde vanishes from his rooms in Soho. Jekyll produces a letter from Hyde promising never to return, but the head clerk, Mr. Guest, notices that its handwriting matches Jekyll's own, sloped differently. For two months Jekyll is sociable and devout; then he shuts himself away, and Lanyon, after some shock he will not describe, sickens and dies, leaving Utterson a sealed paper not to be opened before Jekyll's death or disappearance. One evening Jekyll's butler Poole comes to Utterson in fear: the voice in the doctor's locked cabinet is not his master's, and endless notes are sent to the chemists for a pure supply of some salt. Utterson and Poole break down the door with an axe and find Hyde, dressed in clothes far too large, dead by his own hand, with no trace of Jekyll. Two documents complete the story. Lanyon's narrative tells how, at Jekyll's urgent request, he took a drawer of powders and a phial from the cabinet and received a stranger at midnight, who mixed the draught and changed before his eyes into Henry Jekyll. Jekyll's full statement explains that, aware all his life of a double nature, he discovered a drug that gave his darker self a body of its own, younger, smaller and free of conscience. Pleasure turned to cruelty; the changes began to happen unbidden in sleep and in Regent's Park, larger doses were needed, and the murder of Carew ended any hope of control. When his last supply of the salt ran out and a new one failed, he understood that the first had been impure. He writes his confession in his last hour as Jekyll. Stevenson wrote the novella at Bournemouth in 1885; Longmans, Green published it in London on 5 January 1886, and it sold close to forty thousand copies within six months.

Top Lessons

• Respectability is not virtue

  Jekyll is honoured, charitable and outwardly devout, yet he has long hidden a desire for pleasures he thinks beneath his dignity. Rather than repent, he invents a way to sin without being seen. Stevenson shows that a reputation guarded for its own sake can become the very cloak under which vice grows.

• The illusion of control

  Jekyll tells Utterson that he can be rid of Hyde the moment he chooses, but each indulgence makes the change easier and the return harder, until Hyde appears in his sleep and in a public park. Habit, Stevenson suggests, slowly reshapes the self. The novella reads as a study of how repeated choices become a master.

• The divided self and the united person

  Jekyll concludes that man is not truly one, but truly two, and he hopes to separate the two natures so each can go its way. The experiment frees only the evil side; the good side gains nothing. The story implies that the moral struggle cannot be escaped by chemistry, only fought within one person.

• Friendship and silence

  Utterson, Lanyon and Poole are loyal men who sense something is wrong yet hesitate to pry, out of courtesy and fear of scandal. Their reticence protects Jekyll's name but leaves him alone with his secret. Stevenson's gentlemen show both the dignity and the cost of not asking.

Verified Quotes

Medical Lens

The novella is built around physicians and a drug. Jekyll is a doctor of medicine and law and a fellow of the Royal Society, Lanyon a fashionable practitioner in Cavendish Square, and their old quarrel sets conventional medicine against Jekyll's mystic and transcendental science. The transformation depends on a white crystalline salt from a wholesale chemist mixed with a blood-red tincture; it brings nausea, grinding in the bones and deadly horror, and later a single dose no longer suffices and the dose must be doubled. Readers since publication have read the story as an image of addiction: Jekyll's promise that he can stop when he chooses, his two months of abstinence followed by a fierce relapse, the spontaneous changes, and the frantic notes to the chemists for a purer supply. That reading is interpretive; Stevenson never names a real drug, and claims that he wrote under the influence of cocaine are not supported by evidence. The book also appeared amid medical interest in double or alternating personality and in degeneration, and Hyde's smaller, apelike body echoes contemporary fears of moral regression; here too any link is a reading, not a documented source. Lanyon's sleeplessness, terror and death within weeks of what he saw are a period picture of a man killed by shock. Hyde's death by poison, recognised by the smell of kernels in the cabinet, is a suicide, and the whole story raises the question of a physician who experiments on himself without restraint.

• Search for Mr. Hyde

  Lanyon tells Utterson that Jekyll began to go wrong in mind more than ten years ago and dismisses his work as unscientific.

• The Last Night

  Poole reports the repeated notes sent to wholesale chemists demanding a purer sample of a drug, and the men find Hyde dead amid the smell of kernels.

• Dr. Lanyon's Narrative

  Lanyon inventories the drawer of white salt, the blood-red liquid and the notebook of experiments, then watches the visitor drink and transform.

• Henry Jekyll's Full Statement of the Case

  Jekyll describes his first dose, its physical agonies, and the sense of lightness, recklessness and freedom from conscience that followed.

• Henry Jekyll's Full Statement of the Case

  Jekyll wakes with Hyde's hand on the sheet, needs double doses to return, abstains for two months, then relapses into the Carew murder.

• Henry Jekyll's Full Statement of the Case

  Jekyll explains that his original supply of salt was impure, that fresh supplies fail, and that he expects his last transformation.