In the annals of gothic literature, few tales are as enduring and chilling as Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case Of Doctor Jekyll And Mister Hyde. This narrative, steeped in Victorian anxieties and the burgeoning field of psychology, explores the darkest corners of human nature. What makes this story so compelling is not just the horror of transformation, but the deeply personal and insightful confession of Dr. Henry Jekyll himself. Born into privilege and driven by a desire for societal respect, Jekyll’s narrative unveils a life fractured by hidden desires and a fateful scientific curiosity that unleashes his monstrous alter ego, Edward Hyde. His own words offer a profound, if terrifying, exploration of the duality inherent in mankind, a duality that leads him down a path of moral decay and ultimate self-destruction.
From his esteemed position in society, Dr. Jekyll begins his account by establishing the inherent contradictions within his own character. He describes a natural inclination towards industry and the respect of his peers, yet confesses to a “certain impatient gaiety of disposition” that clashed with his public persona. This inherent duality forced him into a life of duplicity, concealing his pleasures and fostering a “profound double-dealer” within himself. It wasn’t the severity of his faults, he argues, but the “exacting nature of my aspirations” that carved a deep chasm between the good and evil aspects of his being. This internal conflict, a universal struggle magnified within Jekyll, became the focal point of his scientific and moral contemplations. He recognized a “hard law of life,” a constant battle between opposing forces within, a concept deeply rooted in religious and philosophical thought. Jekyll was no hypocrite, he insists; both his virtuous and shameful sides were genuine facets of his complex self.
His scientific pursuits, drawn towards the “mystic and the transcendental,” further illuminated this internal war. Jekyll’s studies led him to believe in the “perennial war among my members,” pushing him towards the radical conclusion: “that man is not truly one, but truly two.” He posits that humanity might be even more fragmented, a “mere polity of multifarious, incongruous and independent denizens.” However, his personal journey focused on the “thorough and primitive duality of man” as he perceived it within himself. He saw two natures contending for dominance in his consciousness, recognizing that he was fundamentally both, neither solely good nor solely evil. This realization birthed a “beloved daydream,” a yearning for the “separation of these elements.” Imagine, Jekyll muses, the liberation if these opposing forces could be housed in separate identities. The “unjust” could indulge their vices without burdening the “just” with shame and remorse. The “just” could pursue virtue unburdened by the temptations of their darker twin. This, he believed, would alleviate the “curse of mankind,” the constant struggle of these “polar twins” within the “agonised womb of consciousness.”
This philosophical musing took a scientific turn as Jekyll’s laboratory experiments began to offer a potential solution. He started to understand the “trembling immateriality” of the physical body, perceiving it as a “fleshly vestment” easily manipulated by certain “agents.” He discovered substances capable of “shake and pluck back that fleshly vestment,” hinting at a way to alter the very fabric of human identity. Jekyll deliberately withholds the scientific specifics, citing two reasons. First, he acknowledges the inherent “doom and burthen of our life” and warns against attempts to escape it, suggesting that such efforts only lead to “more unfamiliar and more awful pressure.” Second, he admits the incompleteness of his discoveries, foreshadowing the tragic consequences of his imperfect understanding. Nevertheless, he succeeded in creating a “drug” that could dethrone the dominant powers of his spirit, substituting his primary form with a “second form and countenance.” This new form, though different, was equally natural to him, an expression of the “lower elements in my soul.”
The decision to test his theory was fraught with peril. Jekyll was acutely aware of the “death” he risked, understanding the potent nature of a drug that could manipulate the “fortress of identity.” A slight miscalculation in dosage or timing could “utterly blot out that immaterial tabernacle” he sought to transform. Yet, the allure of such a “singular and profound” discovery proved irresistible, overcoming his initial apprehension. Having prepared his “tincture” long ago, he procured the final ingredient – a specific salt – from a wholesale chemist. On a fateful night, he combined the elements, watching them “boil and smoke together in the glass.” Fueled by a surge of courage, he consumed the potion.
The immediate aftermath was a torrent of agony. Jekyll describes “racking pangs,” a “grinding in the bones,” “deadly nausea,” and a “horror of the spirit” surpassing even the sensations of birth or death. These torments, however, subsided swiftly, leaving him feeling as if he had emerged from a severe illness. A wave of “something strange,” “indescribably new,” and “incredibly sweet” washed over him. He felt “younger, lighter, happier in body.” Internally, he experienced a “heady recklessness,” a surge of “disordered sensual images,” a liberation from “obligation,” and an “unknown but not an innocent freedom of the soul.” In that instant, he recognized himself as “more wicked, tenfold more wicked, sold a slave to my original evil.” This realization, paradoxically, “braced and delighted” him, like the intoxicating effect of wine. Stretching out his hands in exhilaration, he noticed a significant change: he had “lost in stature.”
Lacking a mirror in his laboratory at the time, the full extent of his transformation remained unseen. As dawn approached, with the house still asleep, Jekyll, emboldened by “hope and triumph,” ventured to his bedroom in his altered state. Crossing the yard under the watchful “constellations,” he felt like “the first creature of that sort” to be revealed to the cosmos. He moved through the familiar corridors of his home as a “stranger,” and upon reaching his room, he confronted “for the first time the appearance of Edward Hyde.”
Jekyll shifts to theoretical explanation, emphasizing that what follows is conjecture, not definitive knowledge. He theorizes that the “evil side of my nature,” now empowered by the transformation, was inherently “less robust and less developed” than his cultivated goodness. Furthermore, his life had been predominantly “a life of effort, virtue and control,” meaning his evil impulses were “much less exercised and much less exhausted.” This, he believes, explains why “Edward Hyde was so much smaller, slighter and younger than Henry Jekyll.” Just as goodness radiated from Jekyll’s countenance, “evil was written broadly and plainly on the face” of Hyde. Evil, which Jekyll considers “the lethal side of man,” had imprinted “deformity and decay” upon Hyde’s physical form. Yet, looking at this “ugly idol in the glass,” Jekyll felt no revulsion, but rather a “leap of welcome.” He recognized Hyde as “myself,” finding him “natural and human.” Hyde, in his eyes, was a “livelier image of the spirit,” “more express and single” than the “imperfect and divided countenance” he had known as Jekyll. In this, Jekyll concedes, he was likely correct. He notes the visceral reaction Hyde elicited in others, the “visible misgiving of the flesh” in those who encountered him. He attributes this to Hyde’s “pure evil,” contrasting him with the “commingled” nature of good and evil present in all other human beings.
His contemplation in the mirror was brief, as the “second and conclusive experiment” – the return to Jekyll – remained. He needed to ascertain if he was irrevocably trapped as Hyde, a fugitive in his own home. Returning to his laboratory, he repeated the process, drinking the potion, enduring the “pangs of dissolution,” and emerging once more as “Henry Jekyll.”
That night marked a critical juncture, a “fatal cross-roads.” Jekyll reflects that had he approached his discovery with “a more noble spirit,” driven by “generous or pious aspirations,” the outcome might have been vastly different. Instead of a “fiend,” he might have become “an angel.” The drug itself was morally neutral, “neither diabolical nor divine.” It merely unlocked the “prisonhouse of my disposition,” releasing whatever resided within. At that moment, Jekyll’s “virtue slumbered,” while his “evil, kept awake by ambition, was alert and swift to seize the occasion.” Consequently, “the thing that was projected was Edward Hyde.” Thus, he now possessed “two characters as well as two appearances,” one purely evil, the other still the flawed “incongruous compound” of Henry Jekyll, whose reformation he had already deemed hopeless. The transformation, therefore, was a movement “wholly toward the worse.”
Despite this profound shift, Jekyll’s aversion to a life of pure scholarly pursuit persisted. He still craved “merrily disposed” moments, and his “undignified” pleasures became increasingly problematic as he aged and his public standing grew. This internal conflict fueled the temptation of his newfound power. The ability to transform into Hyde offered an escape, a way to “doff at once the body of the noted professor, and to assume, like a thick cloak, that of Edward Hyde.” He initially viewed it as “humourous,” meticulously planning his double life. He established the Soho residence for Hyde, hiring an “unscrupulous” housekeeper. He informed his staff in the square about Mr. Hyde’s access and authority, even making appearances as Hyde to familiarize them with his second persona. He drafted the will that so troubled others, ensuring financial continuity should anything befall Dr. Jekyll. “Thus fortified, as I supposed, on every side,” he began to exploit the “strange immunities of my position.”
Jekyll highlights the unprecedented nature of his actions: “Men have before hired bravos to transact their crimes, while their own person and reputation sat under shelter. I was the first that ever did so for his pleasures.” He could maintain the facade of “genial respectability” in public, then “strip off these lendings and spring headlong into the sea of liberty” as Hyde. His disguise was “impenetrable,” offering complete “safety.” “Think of it—I did not even exist!” he exclaims. Escape was as simple as retreating to his laboratory, mixing and consuming the draught. “Edward Hyde would pass away like the stain of breath upon a mirror; and there in his stead, quietly at home… a man who could afford to laugh at suspicion, would be Henry Jekyll.”
The “pleasures” Hyde sought were initially “undignified,” though Jekyll hesitates to use harsher terms. However, under Hyde’s influence, they quickly devolved into the “monstrous.” Returning from these excursions, Jekyll was often “plunged into a kind of wonder at my vicarious depravity.” He describes Hyde as a “familiar that I called out of my own soul,” a being “inherently malign and villainous.” Hyde’s actions were purely self-serving, deriving “bestial avidity” from inflicting pain, “relentless like a man of stone.” Jekyll was “aghast” at Hyde’s deeds, yet the unique circumstances “insidiously relaxed the grasp of conscience.” It was “Hyde, after all, and Hyde alone, that was guilty.” Jekyll remained untainted, seemingly waking “again to his good qualities unimpaired.” He even attempted to “undo the evil done by Hyde,” further easing his conscience into a state of “slumber.”
Jekyll refrains from detailing the “infamy” he “connived at,” focusing instead on the “warnings and the successive steps with which my chastisement approached.” He mentions a single incident: an act of cruelty towards a child that provoked the anger of a passerby, whom he later recognized as Utterson’s kinsman. The doctor and the child’s family intervened, and Jekyll briefly feared for his life. To quell their “just resentment,” Hyde was forced to write a cheque in Henry Jekyll’s name. This close call was easily circumvented by opening a separate bank account for Edward Hyde and forging a signature, which Jekyll believed placed him “beyond the reach of fate.”
Approximately two months prior to Sir Danvers Carew’s murder, Jekyll experienced a disturbing event. Returning from a late-night excursion as Hyde, he awoke the next day in his own bed with “odd sensations.” Despite recognizing his familiar surroundings in the square, a persistent feeling insisted he was not where he seemed to be, but rather in Hyde’s Soho room. Dismissing it as a psychological illusion, he was about to drift back to sleep when his eyes fell upon his hand. The hand of Henry Jekyll, “large, firm, white and comely,” was replaced by a hand “lean, corded, knuckly, of a dusky pallor and thickly shaded with a swart growth of hair.” It was “the hand of Edward Hyde.”
He stared at it for what felt like “half a minute,” paralyzed by “stupidity of wonder,” before “terror woke up in my breast as sudden and startling as the crash of cymbals.” He leaped from bed and rushed to the mirror. The reflection confirmed his horrifying reality: “Yes, I had gone to bed Henry Jekyll, I had awakened Edward Hyde.” Panic seized him. How could this be explained? More urgently, how could it be remedied? Morning was well advanced, servants were awake, and his transforming drugs were in the cabinet, a perilous journey through the house in his altered form. Concealing his face would be futile given the change in stature. Then, a “sweetness of relief” washed over him as he remembered his servants were accustomed to Hyde’s presence. He hastily dressed in clothes too large for Hyde, passed Bradshaw, who recoiled in surprise at seeing “Mr. Hyde at such an hour and in such a strange array,” and within ten minutes, Dr. Jekyll was restored, sitting down to a “feint of breakfasting” with a “darkened brow.”
His appetite was nonexistent. This “inexplicable incident,” this “reversal of my previous experience,” felt like a “Babylonian finger on the wall,” spelling out his impending doom. He began to contemplate the “issues and possibilities of my double existence” with renewed seriousness. The Hyde aspect, “much exercised and nourished,” seemed to be growing stronger. Hyde’s body felt “grown in stature,” with a “more generous tide of blood.” Jekyll sensed a “danger that… the balance of my nature might be permanently overthrown, the power of voluntary change be forfeited, and the character of Edward Hyde become irrevocably mine.” The drug’s efficacy had fluctuated before; early on, it had failed entirely, requiring increased dosages on subsequent occasions. These inconsistencies had been minor shadows on his “contentment.” Now, in light of this morning’s transformation, he realized a crucial shift: “whereas, in the beginning, the difficulty had been to throw off the body of Jekyll, it had of late gradually but decidedly transferred itself to the other side.” All signs pointed to the same conclusion: he was “slowly losing hold of my original and better self, and becoming slowly incorporated with my second and worse.”
Faced with this terrifying prospect, Jekyll recognized the need to choose between his two selves. They shared memories, but other faculties were “most unequally shared.” Jekyll, the composite being, experienced Hyde’s pleasures and adventures with both apprehension and “greedy gusto.” Hyde, however, was indifferent to Jekyll, viewing him merely as a refuge, like a “mountain bandit remembers the cavern in which he conceals himself from pursuit.” Jekyll felt a paternal concern for Hyde, while Hyde displayed a son’s indifference. Choosing Jekyll meant abandoning the “appetites which I had long secretly indulged and had of late begun to pamper.” Choosing Hyde meant sacrificing “a thousand interests and aspirations,” becoming “despised and friendless.” The bargain seemed unequal, yet another factor weighed in: Jekyll would suffer the “fires of abstinence,” while Hyde would be oblivious to any loss. Despite the extraordinary circumstances, Jekyll recognizes the timeless nature of this internal conflict, comparing it to the temptations faced by any “trembling sinner.” And like many, he “chose the better part and was found wanting in the strength to keep to it.”
He opted for the life of the “elderly and discontented doctor,” surrounded by friends and “cherishing honest hopes,” bidding farewell to the “liberty, the comparative youth, the light step, leaping impulses and secret pleasures” of Hyde. This choice, however, was not entirely resolute. He retained the Soho house and Hyde’s clothes, stored in his cabinet. For two months, he adhered to his decision, living a life of unprecedented “severity” and enjoying the “compensations of an approving conscience.” But the initial alarm faded, the “praises of conscience” became commonplace, and “throes and longings” for Hyde’s freedom began to torment him. Finally, in a moment of “moral weakness,” he once again mixed and consumed the transforming draught.
Jekyll reflects on the nature of vice, comparing his situation to a drunkard who ignores the physical dangers of his addiction. He, too, had underestimated the “complete moral insensibility and insensate readiness to evil” that characterized Hyde. It was this very insensibility that became his punishment. “My devil had been long caged, he came out roaring.” Even as he drank the potion, he sensed a “more unbridled, a more furious propensity to ill.” This intensified evil manifested in the brutal murder of Sir Danvers Carew. Jekyll insists that “no man morally sane could have been guilty of that crime upon so pitiful a provocation.” He acted with the irrationality of “a sick child may break a plaything.” He had “voluntarily stripped myself of all those balancing instincts” that restrain even the worst individuals. In his case, “to be tempted, however slightly, was to fall.”
“Instantly the spirit of hell awoke in me and raged.” With “a transport of glee,” he “mauled the unresisting body,” reveling in each blow. Only when “weariness had begun to succeed” did a “cold thrill of terror” pierce his delirium. He recognized his life was “forfeit” and fled the scene, consumed by a “divided ecstasy of mind,” glorying in his crime yet fearing the “avenger.” Hyde, humming a song, compounded the draught and drank it, “pledged the dead man.” Before the transformation pangs subsided, Henry Jekyll, “with streaming tears of gratitude and remorse,” fell to his knees, lifting his hands to God. “The veil of self-indulgence was rent from head to foot.” He saw his life in its entirety, from childhood innocence to the “damned horrors of the evening.” He was overwhelmed by “hideous images and sounds,” desperately seeking solace in prayer. As the intensity of remorse waned, it gave way to “a sense of joy.” The problem of his conduct was solved. “Hyde was thenceforth impossible.” He was now confined to his “better part,” embracing the restrictions of “natural life” with “willing humility” and “sincere renunciation,” locking away the path to Hyde and destroying the key.
The next day brought news of the murder investigation, confirming Hyde’s culpability and the victim’s high public standing. It was not just a crime, but a “tragic folly.” Jekyll admits he was “glad to know it,” welcoming the “terrors of the scaffold” as reinforcement for his better impulses. “Jekyll was now my city of refuge.” Any glimpse of Hyde would bring swift and certain retribution.
He resolved to “redeem the past,” and his resolve yielded “some good.” He dedicated himself to relieving suffering, leading a quiet, almost happy life for months. He genuinely enjoyed this “beneficent and innocent life,” but his “duality of purpose” remained. As the initial penitence faded, the “lower side of me, so long indulged, so recently chained down, began to growl for licence.” He had no intention of resurrecting Hyde, the very thought filled him with “frenzy.” Instead, he succumbed to temptation “in my own person,” falling as an “ordinary secret sinner.”
“There comes an end to all things.” This final lapse destroyed the precarious balance of his soul, though he initially felt no alarm, viewing it as a “return to the old days.” It was a pleasant January day in Regent’s Park. He sat in the sun, indulging in “the animal within me licking the chops of memory,” while his “spiritual side” remained dormant, promising future repentance. He rationalized his actions, comparing himself favorably to others. But at that moment of “vainglorious thought,” a “qualm came over me, a horrid nausea and the most deadly shuddering.” These sensations passed, leaving him faint. As the faintness subsided, he became aware of a shift in his thoughts, a “greater boldness, a contempt of danger, a solution of the bonds of obligation.” Looking down, he saw his clothes hanging loose on his “shrunken limbs,” and the “corded and hairy” hand on his knee. “I was once more Edward Hyde.” Moments before, he was respected, wealthy, secure; now, he was “the common quarry of mankind, hunted, houseless, a known murderer, thrall to the gallows.”
His reason wavered but did not completely fail. He notes that as Hyde, his faculties seemed “sharpened” and his spirits “more tensely elastic.” Hyde, not Jekyll, rose to meet the crisis. His drugs were in his cabinet, but how to reach them? The laboratory door was locked. Entering through the house meant certain capture by his servants. He needed help, and Lanyon came to mind. But how to reach and persuade him? How could an “unknown and displeasing visitor” convince the esteemed physician to break into Dr. Jekyll’s study? Then, he realized one aspect of Jekyll remained: “I could write my own hand.” This sparked an idea, illuminating his path forward.
He adjusted his ill-fitting clothes, hailed a hansom cab, and went to a Portland Street hotel. The driver’s barely concealed amusement at Hyde’s appearance ignited “devilish fury,” quickly suppressed. At the inn, his “black countenance” intimidated the staff into silent obedience. He ordered a private room and writing materials. Hyde, facing mortal danger, was a new entity: “shaken with inordinate anger, strung to the pitch of murder, lusting to inflict pain.” Yet, he was also “astute,” mastering his fury to compose two crucial letters – one to Lanyon, the other to Poole. He ensured their registered posting, then spent the day by the fire, consumed by fear, dining alone with the waiter visibly trembling. As night fell, he ventured out in a closed cab, driven aimlessly through the city streets. “He, I say—I cannot say, I.” This “child of Hell” was devoid of humanity, driven solely by “fear and hatred.” Suspecting the driver’s growing suspicion, he dismissed the cab and continued on foot, an “object marked out for observation,” through the nocturnal crowds. “These two base passions raged within him like a tempest.” He hurried through less frequented streets, muttering to himself, counting the minutes until midnight. A woman offered him a box of lights; he struck her and she fled.
When he regained consciousness at Lanyon’s, his friend’s horror “perhaps affected me somewhat,” but it was insignificant compared to his own “abhorrence” of the preceding hours. “A change had come over me. It was no longer the fear of the gallows, it was the horror of being Hyde that racked me.” He vaguely registered Lanyon’s condemnation and returned home, collapsing into bed. He slept deeply, plagued by nightmares, but awoke “shaken, weakened, but refreshed.” He still loathed Hyde and feared the dangers of the previous day, but being home, near his drugs, brought “gratitude for my escape,” almost eclipsing his fear.
Stepping into the courtyard after breakfast, enjoying the “chill of the air,” he was again seized by the “indescribable sensations” of transformation. He barely reached his cabinet before “raging and freezing with the passions of Hyde.” This time, it required a “double dose” to revert to Jekyll. Tragically, only six hours later, the pangs returned, necessitating another dose. “In short, from that day forth it seemed only by a great effort as of gymnastics, and only under the immediate stimulation of the drug, that I was able to wear the countenance of Jekyll.” At any moment, day or night, the “premonitory shudder” could strike. Sleep, even a brief doze, inevitably led to awakening as Hyde. Under this constant “impending doom” and self-imposed sleeplessness, Jekyll became “a creature eaten up and emptied by fever, languidly weak both in body and mind,” consumed by “the horror of my other self.” But when he succumbed to sleep or the drug’s effects wore off, he would “leap almost without transition… into the possession of a fancy brimming with images of terror, a soul boiling with causeless hatreds, and a body that seemed not strong enough to contain the raging energies of life.” Hyde’s power grew as Jekyll weakened. The hatred between them was now mutual and intense. For Jekyll, it was “a thing of vital instinct,” a revulsion at the “full deformity of that creature” who shared his consciousness and mortality. Beyond this shared existence, Jekyll viewed Hyde as “something not only hellish but inorganic.” “This was the shocking thing; that the slime of the pit seemed to utter cries and voices; that the amorphous dust gesticulated and sinned; that what was dead, and had no shape, should usurp the offices of life.” And this horror was “knit to him closer than a wife, closer than an eye,” caged within his flesh, struggling to be born, usurping his life in moments of weakness. Hyde’s hatred for Jekyll was different, driven by “terror of the gallows,” forcing him into “temporary suicide” and a return to his subordinate role. He resented this necessity, Jekyll’s despair, and the revulsion he inspired. This resentment fueled his “ape-like tricks,” defacing Jekyll’s books, burning letters, and destroying his father’s portrait. Only his “love of life,” his fear of death, prevented him from complete self-destruction to drag Jekyll down with him. Yet, Jekyll admits, “I find it in my heart to pity him,” recognizing the “abjection and passion of this attachment” to life.
“It is useless, and the time awfully fails me, to prolong this description.” Jekyll asserts that no one has ever suffered such torments, yet even to these, “habit brought—no, not alleviation—but a certain callousness of soul, a certain acquiescence of despair.” His punishment might have continued indefinitely, but for the “last calamity” that severed him from his own identity. His supply of the original salt, never replenished, began to dwindle. He ordered a fresh supply and mixed the draught. “The ebullition followed, and the first change of colour, not the second.” He drank it, but “it was without efficiency.” He reveals that he has had London “ransacked” in vain. He is now convinced that his initial salt supply was “impure,” and this “unknown impurity” was the key to the draught’s efficacy.
“About a week has passed, and I am now finishing this statement under the influence of the last of the old powders.” This, he declares, is the final time, barring a miracle, that Henry Jekyll will think his own thoughts or see his own face, now “sadly altered,” in the mirror. He must conclude his writing quickly, for only “great prudence and great good luck” have protected it from destruction. If the transformation seizes him mid-writing, Hyde will tear it apart. But if time passes after he sets it aside, Hyde’s “wonderful selfishness and circumscription to the moment” might save it from his “ape-like spite.” “And indeed the doom that is closing on us both has already changed and crushed him.” In half an hour, when he “again and forever reindue that hated personality,” he knows he will be “shuddering and weeping in my chair,” listening with “strained and fearstruck ecstasy” to every sound of menace in his “last earthly refuge.” “Will Hyde die upon the scaffold? or will he find courage to release himself at the last moment? God knows; I am careless; this is my true hour of death, and what is to follow concerns another than myself.” “Here then, as I lay down the pen and proceed to seal up my confession, I bring the life of that unhappy Henry Jekyll to an end.”
