Novella: Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

Overview

Robert Louis Stevenson's 1886 novella unfolds as a mystery set in fog-wreathed Victorian London, tracing the moral and psychological fracture within a celebrated physician. The narrative is filtered through the perspective of Mr. Utterson, a sober lawyer and friend to the esteemed Dr. Henry Jekyll, whose reputation is imperiled by his association with a sinister figure named Edward Hyde. What begins as a legal curiosity about a strange will becomes an inquiry into the nature of identity, conscience, and the seductive pull of transgression.

Plot

Utterson first learns of Hyde when his cousin Mr. Enfield recounts a nocturnal incident: a small man brutally tramples a young girl and, to settle the outrage, produces a check bearing Dr. Jekyll’s signature. Troubled by Jekyll’s will that leaves everything to Hyde in the event of death or disappearance, Utterson begins watching the door to the shabby Soho address through which Hyde slips like a shadow. When he finally encounters Hyde, he is repulsed by the man’s inexplicable air of deformity and malignity, a presence that seems to offend more than the senses.

Months pass before a greater scandal erupts. Sir Danvers Carew, a respected gentleman, is murdered in a London street, bludgeoned with a heavy cane that Utterson recognizes as a gift he once gave Jekyll. With the police, Utterson traces evidence to Hyde’s rooms, which are hastily abandoned. In the aftermath, Jekyll appears renewed, assuring Utterson that he is rid of Hyde. Yet the reprieve is brief. Dr. Lanyon, an old friend estranged by scientific disagreement, becomes gravely ill after witnessing some unspeakable event. Jekyll withdraws from society, sending desperate notes to his butler Poole for a particular chemical salt and refusing to be seen.

When weeks of isolation culminate in panic, Poole implores Utterson to break into the laboratory. They force the door and find Hyde dead by poison, dressed in Jekyll’s clothes, with no sign of the doctor. On Jekyll’s desk lies a will now favoring Utterson and a sealed packet of documents, which promise to explain the mystery once Lanyon’s letter is read.

Epistolary Revelations

Lanyon’s narrative describes a clandestine meeting in which he receives a locked drawer from Jekyll’s cabinet and a request to fetch it for a strange client. At midnight, Hyde arrives, mixes a potion from the powders inside, and drinks. Before Lanyon’s horrified eyes, Hyde metamorphoses into Jekyll, confirming that the two men are one. Lanyon’s health fails under the shock.

Jekyll’s own confession traces the origins of his experiment. Fascinated by the duality of human nature, he devised a drug to separate his respectable self from his darker impulses. The result was Hyde, smaller, freer, and morally unencumbered. At first, Jekyll exulted in the liberty to indulge vice without tarnishing his public face. But Hyde grew bolder, culminating in Carew’s murder. Jekyll resolved to renounce Hyde, only to find the transformations occurring spontaneously, without the potion. When his supply of the original, impure salt ran out, he could not reproduce the effect with new batches, suggesting some unknown impurity had made the formula work. Trapped as Hyde and hunted for murder, he chose suicide over the gallows.

Themes and Structure

The novella marries a detective framework with a final pair of confessional documents, shifting from external observation to interior revelation. Its portrait of a split self indicts the rigid moral facades of Victorian society, suggesting that repression feeds clandestine desire. Stevenson transforms the city’s geography into moral topography, the respectable front of Jekyll’s house and the sordid back entrance to the laboratory mirror the divided soul within. The enduring power of the tale lies in its spare, uncanny logic: evil, once indulged and given a body, proves more vigorous than the good that tried to master it.