Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde

Robert Louis Stevenson · 1886

Premise

A respected London doctor discovers a drug that separates the evil side of his nature into a second body and identity, letting him indulge his hidden desires without shame; the story is told through his friends' attempts to understand the man who seems to have a hold over him, and it asks what happens to a person who tries to divide their nature rather than govern it.

This guide discusses the whole plot, including the ending.

The main ideas

Every person contains both good and evil impulses. Pretending otherwise does not remove the evil but hides it.
Respectability can be a mask. A reputation for virtue gives the wish for concealment a strong motive.
Separating the self, so that one part can sin without the other bearing the consequences, is a fantasy that ends in the bad side taking over.
Indulged impulses grow stronger with use.
Some secrets are kept by a whole social circle, which prefers not to look.
The search for the truth about another person can be a search into what we fear in ourselves.

Duality

Robert Louis Stevenson published Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde in 1886. Its central idea comes at the end, in Henry Jekyll's written confession. He had come to recognize, he writes, "that man is not truly one, but truly two." He had lived a respectable life of science and charity, but he also had appetites for pleasures he concealed, and the gap between his public and private selves troubled him.

His experiment was an attempt to separate the two. If each side could be housed in its own identity, the good could live without the burden of the bad, and the bad without the restraint of conscience.

The drug produced Edward Hyde, a figure who embodied only Jekyll's evil side. Because that side had been less exercised, Hyde was smaller and younger than Jekyll, and something in his appearance filled people with instinctive loathing.

Implication: a person's dark impulses are part of them. The question is not whether they exist but how they are faced and governed.

The mystery

The story begins not with Jekyll but with his friend and lawyer, Gabriel Utterson. Utterson hears from his relative Richard Enfield of a man who trampled a young girl in the street at night, then bought off her family with a cheque signed by a respected name. The man was Hyde; the name was Jekyll's.

Utterson already holds Jekyll's will, which leaves everything to Hyde in the event of Jekyll's death or disappearance. He suspects blackmail. "If he be Mr. Hyde," he thinks, "I shall be Mr. Seek."

The narrative proceeds through documents and witnesses, and readers learn the truth only at the end, as Utterson does. Stevenson structures the story as a detective mystery whose solution is a psychological one.

Implication: when a respectable person seems bound to a disreputable one, the bond may be closer than it appears.

The gentlemen's silence

Utterson and his circle are men of reputation who avoid scandal. Utterson's principle, he says, is to let his brother go to the devil in his own way. Enfield's rule is that the more a thing looks like trouble or scandal, the less he asks.

Their discretion protects Jekyll for a long time. They suspect something shameful, and they choose not to inquire too closely, preferring to preserve appearances. Dr Hastie Lanyon, a former friend who broke with Jekyll over his unorthodox science, is the only one to see the full truth, when Hyde transforms back into Jekyll in front of him. The shock destroys his health, and he dies.

The mechanism is that a society that values respectability above all will protect its members' secrets, because exposing one threatens everyone's.

Implication: when everyone in a circle avoids a question, ask what the silence is protecting.

The growth of Hyde

At first Jekyll controls the transformations, taking the drug to become Hyde and again to return. Hyde's pleasures, never fully described, become steadily more brutal. One morning he wakes in his own bed to find that he has become Hyde without taking the drug. Two months later, Hyde beats to death an elderly member of Parliament, Sir Danvers Carew, in the street, in a fit of rage witnessed by a maid.

Jekyll resolves to give Hyde up and for a time succeeds, returning to sociability and good works. But the involuntary changes return. One day, sitting on a bench in Regent's Park, he finds himself transformed into Hyde again. The doses needed to return to Jekyll grow larger.

The mechanism is that an impulse indulged freely, without the restraint of conscience, gains strength each time, until it no longer needs permission.

Implication: habits of indulgence that seem controllable at first can become the stronger part of a person.

The end

Jekyll's supply of the salt used in the drug runs out, and new supplies do not work. He realizes that the original batch must have contained an unknown impurity that made the transformation possible. He cannot reproduce it.

Trapped as Hyde for longer and longer periods, Jekyll locks himself in his laboratory. His servant Poole, alarmed by the voice behind the door, fetches Utterson, and they break in. They find Hyde dead, having taken poison, wearing clothes far too large for him. Jekyll's confession, left for Utterson, explains everything.

The confession ends as Jekyll seals it, knowing the next transformation may be permanent: in laying down the pen, he writes, he brings the life of the unhappy Henry Jekyll to an end.

Implication: the attempt to escape one side of oneself completely ends not in freedom but in the loss of the self.

Where it falls short

Its account of evil is abstract. Hyde's pleasures are left vague, so the story says more about concealment and its consequences than about what evil is.
Its world is almost entirely male. Women appear only as victims or witnesses, so the respectable society it examines is shown from one side.
It draws on Victorian ideas linking evil to physical appearance. Hyde's evil shows in his small, deformed and almost animal look, an assumption rooted in theories of degeneration that science has since rejected.

Crime and Punishment — another story of a man who believes he can step outside morality and discovers he cannot.
American Psycho — a modern figure whose respectable surface conceals a murderer.
The Laws of Human Nature — the case for confronting one's dark side rather than repressing it.