The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

Summary

What if you could separate the good in yourself from the evil?

A respectable London doctor believes he has found a way. He mixes a potion in his laboratory one night, drinks it down, and feels his bones grinding, his flesh transforming. When he looks in the mirror, a stranger stares back—smaller, younger, twisted with malice. This creature is everything the doctor has suppressed. Every dark impulse. Every forbidden desire.

Dr. Henry Jekyll has become Mr. Edward Hyde.

This is The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

A Door in a Dingy Street

Robert Louis Stevenson published this novella in 1886, and it became an instant sensation. The story captured something the Victorians felt deeply but rarely acknowledged: the terror of the divided self, the monster that lives within respectable society.

We begin not with Jekyll, but with his lawyer and friend, Mr. Utterson. Utterson is the opposite of sensational—cold, dry, austere. He drinks gin when alone to mortify his taste for finer wines. He hasn’t been to a theater in twenty years. He is, in short, the most respectable man imaginable.

One Sunday, walking with his kinsman Enfield, Utterson passes a sinister door in an otherwise cheerful street. Enfield tells him a disturbing story: he once saw a man trample a young girl in the street and walk on without remorse. The man’s name was Hyde, and when cornered, he produced a check signed by a famous, respected doctor—a man whose name Enfield won’t speak.

Utterson knows that name. It appears in the will he holds for his friend Dr. Jekyll—a will that leaves everything to Edward Hyde in the event of Jekyll’s death or “disappearance.”

Something is very wrong.

The Search for Mr. Hyde

Utterson becomes obsessed with finding Hyde. He haunts the dingy door, waiting. When they finally meet, Hyde is exactly as disturbing as Enfield described—small, pale, somehow deformed without any visible deformity. Everyone who sees him feels an instinctive revulsion, a chill in the marrow. Utterson himself feels it: “There must be something else. The man seems hardly human.”

Jekyll, when confronted, dismisses Utterson’s concerns. He can be rid of Hyde whenever he wishes, he says. The matter is private. Please let it rest.

Then comes murder.

Nearly a year later, an elderly gentleman named Sir Danvers Carew is beaten to death with a walking stick on a London street. A maid witnesses the crime from her window: a small man, overcome with sudden fury, clubbing the old man to the ground and trampling his body. The murderer’s name is Hyde. The walking stick belonged to Jekyll, a gift from Utterson himself.

Hyde vanishes. Jekyll swears he is done with the creature forever. He produces a letter from Hyde promising to disappear. He seems relieved, even transformed—more sociable, more charitable than he has been in years.

But Utterson notices something odd. Jekyll’s handwriting and Hyde’s are strangely similar—identical, except for the slant.

Dr. Lanyon’s Terror

For two months, Jekyll seems to recover. He hosts dinners, sees friends, does good works. Then, suddenly, his door closes. He refuses all visitors. He confines himself to his laboratory.

Utterson visits their mutual friend, Dr. Lanyon, hoping for answers. He finds a dying man. Lanyon has received a shock so profound that it is killing him. He will not speak of Jekyll—cannot bear to hear the name.

“Some day, Utterson, after I am dead, you may perhaps come to learn the right and wrong of this. I cannot tell you.”

Within two weeks, Lanyon is dead. He leaves Utterson a sealed letter, with instructions not to open it until Jekyll dies or disappears.

That word again: disappears.

The Last Night

One evening, Jekyll’s butler, Poole, arrives at Utterson’s door in a state of terror. Something is wrong at the house. The master has locked himself in his cabinet for days. He sends notes demanding a particular chemical compound, but every sample Poole brings is rejected as impure. The voice behind the door doesn’t sound like Jekyll anymore.

“That thing was not my master,” Poole tells Utterson. “Master’s made away with.”

Together, they break down the cabinet door with an axe. Inside, they find Hyde’s body on the floor, still twitching, a crushed vial in his hand. He has taken poison. But Hyde is wearing clothes far too large for him—Jekyll’s clothes.

Of Jekyll himself, there is no trace.

On the desk, they find three documents: a new will leaving everything to Utterson, a letter telling him to read Lanyon’s narrative, and a sealed packet containing Jekyll’s full confession.

What Lanyon Saw

Lanyon’s letter describes a night when he received a desperate plea from Jekyll. Following precise instructions, Lanyon broke into Jekyll’s cabinet and retrieved a drawer containing chemicals and a notebook. At midnight, a visitor arrived to collect them: a small, repulsive man who mixed the chemicals into a potion and drank it.

What happened next destroyed Lanyon’s peace forever.

The creature convulsed, swelled, and transformed. Before Lanyon’s eyes, Edward Hyde became Henry Jekyll.

“O God!” Lanyon screamed. “O God!” For there stood Jekyll—pale, shaken, groping like a man risen from the dead.

What Jekyll confessed to him that night, Lanyon could not bring himself to write. But the horror of it killed him.

Jekyll’s Full Confession

Jekyll’s statement is the heart of the story. He explains everything.

He was born with a dual nature—not unique to him, but felt with particular intensity. He loved respectability and position, but he also craved pleasures that a respectable man could not openly pursue. This conflict tortured him. He felt like two people trapped in one body.

His scientific research led him to a discovery: a drug that could separate these two natures. When he first drank the potion, he felt his bones crack, his flesh remake itself. He looked in the mirror and saw Edward Hyde—smaller, younger, because Jekyll’s evil side had been less exercised and therefore less developed than his good.

“Evil was written broadly and plainly on the face of the other. And yet when I looked upon that ugly idol in the glass, I was conscious of no repugnance, rather of a leap of welcome. This, too, was myself.”

Jekyll set up Hyde with a house in Soho, introduced him to the servants as a friend with full liberty, and drew up a will to protect his alter ego. Then he began his double life.

The Loss of Control

At first, Jekyll controlled the transformations. He could drink the potion, become Hyde, indulge his darkest impulses, then drink again and return to respectability. Hyde felt no guilt. Jekyll could wake the next morning with his conscience clean.

But Hyde was growing stronger.

The trampling of the child. The murder of Sir Danvers Carew. Hyde’s pleasures turned monstrous. And then came the morning Jekyll woke as himself—and looked down at his hand to see the lean, hairy knuckles of Hyde.

He had transformed in his sleep.

From that point on, the balance shifted. It took larger doses to suppress Hyde. The transformations came without warning. Jekyll tried to choose his better nature, but the temptation proved too strong. In Regent’s Park, sitting on a bench in the sunshine, he felt the change coming—and suddenly he was Hyde, a wanted murderer, hunted by all of London.

He barely escaped. He wrote to Lanyon, arranged for his chemicals to be delivered, drank the potion under Lanyon’s horrified gaze, and fled home.

But now the drug required constant renewal. He could stay Jekyll only through continuous effort. And then, finally, the worst blow: his supply of the salt ran out. Every batch he purchased failed to work. Some unknown impurity in the original had been essential to the transformation.

Jekyll was trapped.

The Final Hours

In his last hours, Jekyll writes his confession knowing that Hyde will soon take over completely. When that happens, Hyde will either destroy the document or be captured and hanged for murder. Either way, Jekyll’s story will end.

“This is my true hour of death, and what is to follow concerns another than myself.”

The two natures that Jekyll tried to separate could never truly be divided. Hyde was not Jekyll’s opposite—he was Jekyll’s shadow, the part of himself he tried to disown. By giving that shadow its own body, Jekyll didn’t purify himself. He created a monster with no conscience, no restraint, no connection to the humanity that Jekyll still possessed.

“I hazard the guess that man will be ultimately known for a mere polity of multifarious, incongruous and independent denizens,” Jekyll writes. We are not one self but many. The tragedy is not that we contain darkness, but that we pretend we don’t.

What It Means

Stevenson wrote Jekyll and Hyde in a white heat—three days for the first draft, three more to rewrite it after his wife criticized the original. The story spoke so directly to Victorian anxieties that it sold forty thousand copies in six months.

On the surface, this is a tale about science gone wrong, about the danger of tampering with nature. But the deeper horror is psychological. Jekyll doesn’t create Hyde from nothing. He liberates something that was always there—the part of himself that respectable society forced him to hide.

Every character in the story values reputation above all else. Utterson never asks questions because he dreads scandal. Enfield won’t name names. Jekyll destroys himself rather than confess his experiments. Victorian London runs on hypocrisy: the appearance of virtue matters more than virtue itself.

Hyde is what happens when that hypocrisy becomes unbearable. He is the return of the repressed. He is the violence that civilized men pretend they don’t feel.

The most disturbing detail in the story is this: everyone who meets Hyde feels instinctive revulsion, but no one can explain why. He seems deformed, but his features are normal. He is hateful, but no one can name the nature of his deformity.

That’s because Hyde is recognition. When people look at him, they see something they know—something they’ve felt in themselves. And they recoil.

We are all Jekyll and Hyde. The only question is whether we acknowledge it.