The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr HydeStudy Guide

Enfield points his cane at a blistered door on a Sunday walk. He tells Mr Utterson about a small man who walked over a child at three in the morning. The man paid the witnesses with a cheque. The name on the cheque belonged to a famous doctor, a man known for doing good. The bank cashed it. Nobody called it a fake. Almost nobody uses that door except Hyde. Enfield will not ask who lives behind it. He says the more a thing looks like trouble, the less he asks. Stevenson published the story in 1886, after a nightmare he would not leave alone. The cheque already holds the turn. The gentleman and the monster share one name. The gentleman is the one who chose the split.

Henry Jekyll is the famous London doctor. He gives money to the poor and looks serious in every room. He works so hard at looking better than other men that even his pleasures have to hide. Edward Hyde is the smaller, younger man the potion lets out. His face makes strangers sweat. People feel he is deformed, but they cannot say where. Gabriel Utterson is Jekyll's lawyer. He lets his brother go to the devil in his own way, until that devil is named in a will as Hyde. Dr Hastie Lanyon once shared Jekyll's science. He broke the friendship over medicine he would not call science, and he will die of what he is forced to watch. Richard Enfield is the cousin who tells the trampling story and then asks Utterson not to ask more. Poole keeps the house for years, then begs the lawyer to break the cabinet door. Sir Danvers Carew dies in a side street under Hyde's cane. The chemists cannot remake the salt that once worked. The only enemy who never leaves the page is the public face Jekyll cannot afford to lose.

Enfield sees Hyde walk over a girl and take a cheque signed Jekyll. Utterson already knows the name on the cheque. The two men still shake hands on a promise never to speak of the story again. Then Utterson goes home and reads the will that leaves everything to Hyde if Jekyll disappears. At dinner Jekyll begs him to help Hyde for my sake. He will not drop the subject. A maid sees Hyde beat Carew to death with a cane. Jekyll hands Utterson a letter that is supposed to come from Hyde. Guest proves the hand is Jekyll's own. For two months Jekyll is social again. Friends take the good weeks as proof the trouble has passed. Then he locks the cabinet. At the window he says he dare not come down. His face changes before the friends can look away. Poole and Utterson break the door and find Hyde dead in Jekyll's clothes. Lanyon has already watched the change at midnight. The last chapter is the confession. Man is not truly one, but truly two. The worse half learned to stay.

Stevenson wrote the story after a nightmare. He never treats the potion as a toy. He never treats Hyde as another kind of creature. He never treats Jekyll's charity as proof of innocence. Reputation is a costume. Science is a way to pick a lock. Friends who should have asked harder questions accepted a will, a letter, and two months of good behaviour. What remains is not a sermon against appetite. It is a picture of a man who cannot bear to be seen whole. That man builds a second life. The second life stops asking permission. The ending does not let Jekyll blame a chemical. He writes the confession himself, in his own hand, before anyone forces the cabinet door.

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