Why this book

Since Stevenson dreamed this tale in 1886, 'Jekyll and Hyde' has meant a person split between good and monstrous halves. But the book itself is stranger and sadder than the phrase — a confession of a good man who wished to sin without shame.

The Story

Our guide through the mystery is Mr Utterson, a dry, trustworthy London lawyer. One Sunday his cousin describes a night he witnessed: a small, sinister man calmly trampled a little girl in the street, and a horrified crowd seized him in fury.

To buy off the furious crowd, the little man slipped through a battered door and returned with gold and a cheque — signed, astonishingly, with the honoured name of a great physician, Dr Henry Jekyll. So the riddle took root: why should a good man's money shield a monster?

That name troubled Utterson, for he was Jekyll's lawyer and held a strange will: should the doctor die or vanish, everything passed to one Edward Hyde. Utterson feared the sinister man was blackmailing his friend, so he resolved to find Hyde himself.

Now, Henry Jekyll was no villain in the world's eyes. He was a large, handsome man of fifty, wealthy and beloved, famous for his charities and his science. That such a man should bind his fortune to a brute like Hyde was a riddle no friend could solve.

Night after night Utterson watched the mean door until Hyde appeared. He stopped him, and Hyde snarled his address before slipping inside — yet every witness felt the same nameless disgust, a deformity of the soul that none could quite describe.

Utterson could not say what made Hyde so hateful — some crookedness that lay deeper than any scar. Riding home, he thought of his friend's strange will and shuddered, certain that this creature meant Jekyll nothing but ruin.

Alarmed, Utterson dined with Jekyll and begged to help. But the doctor only smiled and grew tense, insisting his affair with Hyde was private and that he could be rid of the man the moment he chose. He asked one thing: that Hyde's rights be honoured.

For a year all was quiet. Then, one moonlit night, a maid at her window watched Hyde meet a gentle old gentleman, an aged member of Parliament named Sir Danvers Carew. Without warning Hyde flew into an ape-like rage and clubbed the old man to death with his cane.

The broken cane was Jekyll's own gift, so Utterson led the police to Hyde's rooms. They found signs of hasty flight — ashes, a burnt cheque-book, half the ruined cane — but Hyde himself had utterly vanished, and no reward could raise a trace of him.

Utterson hurried to Jekyll and found him pale but strangely relieved. The doctor swore he was finished with Hyde forever and showed a farewell letter in which the murderer vowed never to return. Comforted, Utterson took the letter — until his clerk noticed something chilling.

The clerk compared the note with an invitation in Jekyll's own hand: the two scripts were the same, merely sloped differently. It seemed the respected doctor had forged the letter to cover a murderer. Utterson's blood ran cold, but he kept the dreadful secret.

For two bright months Jekyll seemed reborn — open-handed, at peace, dining with friends and doing good. Then, as suddenly as a slammed shutter, he refused all visitors and locked himself away, and Utterson's knocks went unanswered at the familiar door.

Seeking answers, Utterson visited their old friend Dr Lanyon and found him a dying man, aged by terror in a single week. Lanyon would not hear Jekyll's name, saying only that he had suffered a shock he could not survive, and soon he died.

Lanyon left Utterson a sealed packet, marked not to be opened until Jekyll too was dead. Days later Utterson glimpsed Jekyll at his laboratory window; they spoke a moment, then a look of abject horror froze the doctor's face and the window crashed shut.

One foggy night Jekyll's old servant Poole burst in on Utterson, white with fear. For a week, he said, his master had shut himself in the laboratory, weeping and crying out, sending desperate orders to every chemist in the city for some pure drug he could not find.

They hurried back and crept to the cabinet door. The voice pleading within was thin and strange — not Jekyll's at all. Poole was certain his master had been murdered days ago, and that whatever now paced inside, wearing his master's absence, had no right to breathe.

So they took an axe to the door. Inside, sprawled in clothes far too large for him, lay Edward Hyde, still twitching, a crushed phial in his hand and the reek of bitter almonds on his lips — poisoned by his own hand. Of Jekyll there was no sign.

On the desk lay two papers that would explain everything: a new will leaving all to Utterson, and Jekyll's full confession. Trembling, Utterson carried them home with Lanyon's sealed packet, and by lamplight the whole strange truth at last unfolded.

Lanyon's letter told of a midnight summons: at Jekyll's plea he had fetched a drawer of chemicals and waited. A shrunken, loathsome stranger crept in, mixed a steaming draught, and drank. Before Lanyon's eyes the man swelled, reshaped, and became Henry Jekyll. The sight broke him.

Jekyll's own confession reached back to the root. From youth he had lived a double life — outwardly good and honoured, secretly hungry for pleasures he was ashamed to name. He came to believe that man is not one, but two: a war of good and evil housed in a single body.

So he laboured to divide them. At last he brewed a drug that loosed his darker self into a body of its own — Edward Hyde, younger and smaller, because the evil in him had lived less and grown less. As Hyde he could sin freely, then wake as Jekyll, untouched and safe.

At first the freedom intoxicated him. As Hyde he felt young, wicked and light, plunging into secret cruelties that Jekyll would have shrunk from. Yet each dawn returned him to his respectable self, and he told himself the guilt belonged to Hyde alone.

But the more he indulged, the stronger Hyde grew. One morning he woke in his own bed as Hyde, without the drug — the evil half was seizing control. Terrified, after the murder of Carew he swore off the potion and struggled to live as a good man once more.

Then the terror struck in broad daylight. Sitting calmly on a park bench, at ease and thinking kindly thoughts, he felt the sickening shudder seize him — and looked down to see the lean, corded hands of Hyde. In the open city he had become the hunted murderer.

Worse, each turning back now demanded a stronger dose of the drug. Then the final blow fell: his stock of the strange salt ran out, and no fresh batch would work. The original, he realised, had held some unknown impurity he could never find again.

Now the drug was failing for the last time, and soon he would be Hyde forever — hunted, and bound for the gallows. So, as Jekyll, in his final hour of himself, he laid down his pen. Whether Hyde would face the rope or take his own poison, Jekyll would never know.

What it means

And so the mystery closes. Stevenson's warning is not that a monster lived next door, but that he lived within a good and gentle man. As he wrote, 'man is not truly one, but truly two' — and the evil we deny and refuse to own does not die. It only grows, until it wears our face.

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