Jekyll's confession opens on a man born to privilege who already lived a double life before science entered it. Ashamed of pleasures his public gravity forbade, he hid irregularities behind an imperious need to seem grave. His studies in transcendental medicine convinced him that man is "truly two," and he daydreamed of housing evil in a separate body so virtue could walk untainted.
He drank the potion. Agony gave way to Edward Hyde: smaller, younger, stamped with deformity, yet welcomed in the glass as a freer self. Jekyll furnished the Soho rooms, wrote the will favoring Hyde, and indulged appetites there while telling himself only Hyde was guilty. The child Enfield saw trampled was Hyde's work, paid from Jekyll's check until Hyde opened his own bank account.
Control slipped when Jekyll woke one morning as Hyde without taking the draught, staring at Hyde's hairy hand on the bedclothes. After months of severity he relapsed; Hyde murdered Sir Danvers Carew with savage glee, then fled through Soho destroying papers. Brief remorse brought charity work, but pride in Regent's Park triggered another spontaneous change; hunted Hyde forced Jekyll to write Lanyon and watch the transformation reversed in horror.
Thereafter Hyde strengthened as Jekyll sickened: transformations came unbidden, sleep ended in Hyde's body, and the double mocked his books and father's portrait. Hyde struck a stranger who offered matches, raged in a hired hotel room, and loathed returning to Jekyll's weaker frame. Jekyll, in turn, came to see Hyde as inorganic horror knit to his flesh. Near the end only repeated draughts, taken with gymnastic effort, could hold Jekyll's face in place.
The original salt ran out; new mixtures failed. Poole's chemist hunts could not restore the formula. Writing under the last old powder, Jekyll knows the next change may be permanent and Hyde may tear these pages if transformation comes mid-sentence. Compartmentalization did not contain evil; it concentrated it until the respectable doctor and the monster shared one doomed life. Integration, not splitting, was the law he tried to cheat; this confession is his last act as Henry Jekyll before Edward Hyde inherits the pen.
