The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde

This is the book that gave English the phrase 'Jekyll and Hyde', and it earns it: a tight, fog-bound horror story about the respectable man who wants a private room for his appetites. Read it for the pleasure of a mystery told backwards, for Victorian London at its most claustrophobic, and for a confession that still asks whether goodness is real or just a costume. Anyone who has ever kept a secret side will feel seen and unsettled.

1. 1

   Act 1

   The Story of the Door

   Gabriel John Utterson, a reserved London lawyer, takes his customary Sunday walk with his cousin Richard Enfield, a well-known 'man about town', when they stop before a dreary two-storey house in a busy quarter — a house with no windows, only a door. The door makes Enfield tell a story he has been keeping. Months earlier, at about three in the morning, he watched a small, malevolent-looking man named Edward Hyde deliberately trample a young girl at a street corner and walk calmly over her body. Enfield collared him, and with the girl's family and onlookers forced Hyde to pay £100 to hush the scandal. Hyde led Enfield to that very door, went inside, and returned with ten pounds in gold and a cheque for the rest — signed by a highly reputable gentleman, later revealed to be Dr Henry Jekyll. The cheque was genuine, which is what haunts Enfield: the respectable doctor and the vile criminal share money, if nothing else. Pressed to describe Hyde, Enfield fails. 'He is not easy to describe. There is something wrong with his appearance; something displeasing, something down-right detestable... I never saw a man I so disliked, and yet I scarce know why.' He refuses to dig further: 'the more it looks like Queer Street, the less I ask.' Utterson goes home and re-reads Jekyll's will, which leaves everything to Edward Hyde in the event of Jekyll's death or 'disappearance or unexplained absence'. Fearing blackmail, he resolves to see Hyde's face and goes to bed with 'a great curiosity' to do so.

2. 2

   Act 2

   The Search and the Murder

   Utterson consults Dr Hastie Lanyon, an old friend of both men, who dismisses Jekyll's recent science as 'unscientific balderdash' and has never heard of Hyde. So Utterson stakes out the disused door at night and confronts Hyde himself — small, deformed, and giving his address in Soho with unsettling politeness. When Utterson sees his face, he feels 'disgust, loathing and fear' he cannot explain: 'God bless me, the man seems hardly human! Something troglodytic, shall we say?' He warns Jekyll, who turns pale and insists, 'the moment I choose, I can get rid of Mr Hyde', admits a great interest in the young man, and makes Utterson promise to let the matter drop and carry out the will. At a dinner party two weeks later, Jekyll begs again: 'I beg of you to let it sleep.' Then, nearly a year later, in October, the story turns murderous. A maidservant watching from a window near the river sees Hyde beat an elderly gentleman, Sir Danvers Carew, MP, to death with a heavy walking-stick under a full moon, clubbing him down with 'ape-like fury' and trampling the body. On Carew's corpse the police find a letter addressed to Utterson and half a broken stick — one Utterson gave Jekyll years before. With the maid's description, he leads Inspector Newcomen of Scotland Yard to Hyde's Soho rooms, where they find the other half of the cane, a burnt cheque-book, and signs of a luxurious, disordered life. Hyde has vanished.

3. 3

   Act 3

   The Closing Doors

   Utterson visits Jekyll, who shows a letter apparently from Hyde, apologising and promising departure, and swears, 'I swear to God I will never set eyes on him again. I bind my honour to you that I am done with him in this world.' But Utterson's head clerk, Mr Guest, compares the handwriting with an invitation in Jekyll's hand and finds them identical except for the slope — the same hand, slanted the opposite way. Jekyll has forged a letter for a murderer. Utterson locks it in his safe. For two months Jekyll is his old sociable, charitable self; then in early January he shuts his door against everyone. Utterson calls on Lanyon and finds him visibly dying, his face marked by 'a look of terror and of doom', refusing to speak of Jekyll: 'I am quite done with that person... henceforward I am to all intents and purposes dead.' Lanyon dies within a fortnight, leaving Utterson a sealed envelope marked 'not to be opened till the death or disappearance of Dr Henry Jekyll'. On a later Sunday walk, Utterson and Enfield see Jekyll at his laboratory window, 'like some disconsolate prisoner'; he says he would like to come out but cannot, then a look of 'abject terror and despair' seizes his face and he slams the window shut. In early March, Poole the butler comes to Utterson in distress: for a week the voice in the locked cabinet has not been his master's but Hyde's, crying for a drug. 'For God's sake, have mercy!' the voice cries. Poole believes his master was murdered eight days ago. They fetch an axe and break down the door.

4. 4

   Act 4

   The Full Statement

   Inside the cabinet lies Edward Hyde, dead by poison, twitching, dressed in clothes far too large for him — Jekyll's clothes — a crushed phial in his hand, a mirror nearby. On the table: a new will naming Utterson heir, and a note directing him to read Lanyon's letter first. Lanyon's letter tells of the night of 9 January, when a note in Jekyll's hand begged him to fetch a drawer of chemicals and wait for a midnight caller. The caller was Hyde, a troglodytic figure in enormous clothes, who mixed a draught that turned from purple to green and smoked, and asked, 'Will you be wise? will you be guided?' — promising his sight would 'be blasted by a prodigy to stagger the unbelief of Satan'. Hyde drank, and became Henry Jekyll before Lanyon's eyes. 'My life is shaken to its roots,' Lanyon wrote; the shock killed him. Then Jekyll's own confession: born rich, with an 'impatient gaiety of disposition' hidden behind an earnest exterior, he concluded man is 'not truly one, but truly two' and brewed a drug to separate the natures. In the mirror he saw Edward Hyde — 'younger, slighter', 'tenfold more wicked', pure evil, alone in mankind. He rented a Soho house for Hyde and enjoyed a double life — until one August night he woke as Hyde without taking the drug. After Carew's murder he swore off, relapsed once, and Hyde 'came out roaring'. In January he transformed involuntarily in Regent's Park, trapped, hunted. The special salt ran out; new batches failed. He wrote his confession as the door came down: 'I bring the life of that unhappy Henry Jekyll to an end.'

• GGabriel John UttersonA reserved, upright London lawyer and Jekyll's old friend, who digs into the mystery despite his own rule of not asking questions. He survives to read the truth he spent the book dreading.
• DDr Henry JekyllA wealthy, fifty-year-old doctor with a slyish cast, desperate to separate the vices his reputation forbids. His experiment works — and then his evil half stops needing permission.
• MMr Edward HydeJekyll's transformed self: small, deformed, 'pure evil', and free of guilt. He tramples a girl, murders an MP, and finally outlives his maker.
• RRichard EnfieldUtterson's cousin, a well-known 'man about town', who witnessed Hyde trample the girl and tells the story of the door. He believes in not asking questions on Queer Street.
• DDr Hastie LanyonAn old friend who scoffed at Jekyll's 'unscientific balderdash' — until Hyde transformed before his eyes. The shock kills him within a fortnight.
• PPooleJekyll's faithful butler, who hears his master's voice change and fears murder. He fetches the axe that breaks the mystery open.
• SSir Danvers CarewAn aged, kindly MP, beaten to death by Hyde with Jekyll's cane. His murder turns a private shame into a manhunt.
• MMr GuestUtterson's head clerk, whose sharp eye for handwriting proves Jekyll forged Hyde's letter. His discovery costs Utterson his last comfortable assumption.

The door without windows

The broken walking-stick

The mirror

The salt

The sealed envelope

The ending refuses a clean verdict. Jekyll, writing as Hyde with Utterson and Poole breaking in, does not know whether the creature will be hanged or will kill himself, and declares it no longer matters to him: his consciousness is fading, and whatever fate awaits is Hyde's alone to endure. That final dissociation is the horror — the man who wanted to split himself in two ends by disowning the half that survives. One reading is moral: vanity and hypocrisy, not science alone, brought him down, so the death is the price of wanting sin without stain. Another is darker and more modern: if Jekyll and Hyde were always the same self, then the confession's fading 'I' suggests the self was never single to begin with, and Jekyll's whole life was the costume. The line 'I bring the life of that unhappy Henry Jekyll to an end' lands because it is written in the voice of a man already half gone — the document we finish is the last thing Jekyll ever does, and even he is not sure who finished it.

1. 1.Is Jekyll a victim of his experiment or of his hypocrisy? Use his confession's admission of 'careless and unscrupulous vanity' to weigh whether the potion caused his downfall or merely revealed it.
2. 2.Compare Utterson and Lanyon as two models of Victorian restraint: one refuses to ask questions and survives, the other demands proof and dies of the answer. What does the book conclude about curiosity?
3. 3.Trace the loss of control through the involuntary transformations — in sleep in August, awake in Regent's Park in January — and argue whether the novella reads better as a moral allegory or as a study of addiction.

Read it if you've ever suspected the most dangerous person in the room is the one with the best reputation. It's short, it's foggy, and it will make you side-eye every respectable man you know.

FAQ