The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr HydeStudy Guide

Mr. Utterson hears about a man who trampled a child and paid the witnesses with a check signed by a celebrated doctor. Enfield told it on a Sunday walk, pointing at a door nobody respectable should use. Stevenson published the novella in 1886, after a nightmare he would not leave alone. The bargain is that the gentleman and the monster share one body, and the gentleman is the one who chose the split.

Henry Jekyll is the celebrated London doctor: charitable, grave, and so committed to looking better than other men that even his pleasures have to hide. Edward Hyde is the smaller, younger figure the potion releases, a man whose face makes strangers sweat. Gabriel Utterson is the lawyer who lets his brother go to the devil in his own way until the devil is named in a will. Dr. Hastie Lanyon is the scientific friend who broke with Jekyll over unscientific medicine and will die of what he is forced to watch. Richard Enfield tells the trampling story on a Sunday walk. Poole keeps the household and finally begs Utterson to break the cabinet door. Sir Danvers Carew is beaten to death in a by-street. The chemists cannot remake the salt that once worked. The only opponent who never leaves the page is the public face Jekyll cannot afford to lose.

Enfield watches Hyde trample a girl and take a check signed Jekyll. Utterson reads the will that leaves everything to Hyde if Jekyll disappears. At dinner Jekyll begs him to help Hyde for my sake and will not drop the subject. A maid sees Hyde beat Carew to death with a cane. Jekyll hands Utterson a letter that Guest proves is in Jekyll's own hand. For two months Jekyll is social again, then he locks the cabinet. At the window he says he dare not come down, and 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 transformation at midnight. The last chapter is the confession: man is not truly one, but truly two, and the worse half learned to stay.

Stevenson wrote the story after a nightmare, and he never treats the potion as a cute device, or Hyde as a separate species, or Jekyll's charity as proof of innocence. Reputation is a costume. Science is a lockpick. 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 how a man who cannot bear to be seen whole builds a second life, and how that second life stops asking permission. The ending does not let Jekyll blame a chemical for what happened. He writes the confession himself, in his own hand, before anyone forces the cabinet door.

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