The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) (edit title/settings)

Ridiculously Simplified Synopsis edit see section history

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Summary edit see section history

Write a summary of the plot or a synopsis of this book.

Characters/People edit see section history

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• Mr. Utterson: Add a description of this character.
• Edward Hyde
• Henry Jekyll
• Dr. Henry Jekyll: A main character of the book, a victim of his own experimentation.
• Mr. Enfield
• Dr. Lanyon
• Mr. Gabriel John Utterson: Lawyer and friend of Dr. Jekyll and Dr. Lanyon. The three, Utterson, Jekyll and Lanyon, are long-time friends. They socialize together and know each other well.
• Mr. Edward Hyde: A small evil man who seems to inspire loathing in others. Not physically deformed however he leaves people with impression that something is wrong with him.
• Dr. Hastie Lanyon: A doctor and friend of Utterson and Dr. Jekyll alsso an ellderlly man. A good freind.
• Mr. Richard Enfield: Mr. Utterson's cousin.
• Poole: Dr. Jekyll's butler. very worried about him. A poor but caring man.
• Inspector Newcomen: Scotland Yard inspector.
• Sir Danvers Carew: A kind old man and member of Parliament.
• Mr. Guest: Mr. Utterson's head clerk.who can analyze any handwriting.
• Bradshaw: Dr. Jekyll's footman.

Quotes edit see section history

• “I feel very strongly about putting questions; it partakes too much of the style of the day of judgment. You start a question, and it's like starting a stone. You sit quietly on the top of a hill; and away the stone goes, starting others; and presently some bland old bird (the last you would have thought of) is knocked on the head in his own back garden and the family have to change their name. No sir, I make it a rule of mine: the more it looks like Queer Street, the less I ask.”

  Mr. Utterson

• “"If he be Mr.Hyde," he had thought, "I shall be Mr.Seek".”

  Mr.Utterson

• “I knew myself, at the first breath of this new life, to be more wicked, tenfold more wicked, sold a slave to my original evil; and the thought, in that moment, braced and delighted me like wine.”

  Dr. Jekyll

• “"O God!" I screamed, and "O God!" again and again; for there before my eyes--pale and shaken, and half fainting, and groping before him with his hands, like a man restored from death--there stood Henry Jekyll!”

  Dr. Lanyon

• “I have observed that when I wore the semblance of Edward Hyde, none could come near to me at first without a visible misgiving of the flesh. This, as I take it, was because all human beings, as we meet them, are commingled out of good and evil: and Edward Hyde, alone in the ranks of mankind, was pure evil.”

  Dr Jekyll

• “All things therefore seemed to point to this: that I was slowly losing hold of my original and better self, and becoming slowly incorporated with my second and worse.”

  Dr Jekyll

• “Strange as my circumstances were, the terms of this debate are as old and commonplace as man; much the same inducements and alarms cast the die for any tempted and trembling sinner; and it fell out with me, as it falls with so vast a majority of my fellows, that I chose the better part and was found wanting in the strength to keep it.”

  Dr Jekyll

• “And now, you who have so long been bound to the most narrow and material views, you who have denied the virtue of transcendental medicine, you who have derided your superiors--behold!”

• “I saw what I saw, I heard what I heard, and my soul sickened at it; and yet now when that sight has faded from my eyes, I ask myself if I believe it, and I cannot answer. My life is shaken to its roots; sleep has left me; the deadliest terror sits by me at all hours of the say and night; I feel that my days are numbered, and that I must die; and yet I shall die incredulously.”

• “Instantly the spirit of hell awoke in me and raged.”

• “Though so profound a double-dealer, I was in no sense a hypocrite; both sides of me were in dead earnest; I was no more myself when I laid aside restraint and plunged in shame, that when I laboured, in the eye of day, at the futherance of knowledge or the relief of sorrow and suffering.”

• “With every day, and from both sides of my intelligence, the moral and the intellectual, I thus drew steadily nearer to that truth, by whose partial discovery I have been doomed to such a dreadfull shipwreck: that man is not truly one, but two.”

• “It was on the moral side, and in my own person, that I learned to recognize the thorough and primitive duality of man; I saw that, of the two natures that contended in the field of my consciousness, even if I could rightly be said to be either, it was only because I was radically both; and from an early date, even before the course of my scientific discoveries had begun to suggest the most naked possibility of such a miracle, I had learned to dwell with pleasure, as a beloved daydream, on the thought of the separation of these elements.”

• “If each, I told myself, could but be housed in separate identities, life would be relieved of all that was unbearable; the unjust might go his way, delivered from the aspirations and remorse of his more upright twin; and the just could walk steadfastly and secure on his upward path, doing the good things in which he found his pleasure, and no longer exposed to disgrace and penitence by the hands of this extraneous evil.”

• “It was the curse of mankind that these incongruous faggots were thus bound together-- that in the agonised womb of consciousness, these polar twins should be continually struggling.”

• “All things therefore seemed to point to this" that I was slowly losing hold of my original and better self, and becoming slowly incorporated with my second and worse.”

• “Jekyll had more than a father's interest; Hyde had more than a son's indifference. To cast in my lot with Jekyll, was to die ro those appetites which I had long secretly indulges and had of late begun to pamper. To cast it in with Hyde, was to die a thousand interests and aspirations, and to become, at a blow and forever, despised and friendless. The bargain might appear unequal; but there was still another consideration in the scales; for which Jekyll would suffer smartingly in the fires of abstinence, Hyde would be not even conscious of all that he had lost.”

• “My devil had been long caged, he came out roaring.”

• “There comes and end to all thingsl the most capacious measure is filled at least; and this brief condescension to my evil finally destroyed the balance of my soul. And yet I was not alarmed; the fall seemed natural, like a return to the old days before I had made my discover.”

• “That child of Hell had nothing human; nothing lived in him but fear and hatred.”

• “I still hated and feared the thought of the brute that slept within me, and I had not of course forgotten the appalling dangers of the day before; but I was once more at home, in my own house and close to my drugs; and gratitude for my escape shone so strong in my soul that it almost rivalled the brightness of hope.”

• “The powers of Hyde seemed to have grown with the sickliness of Jekyll. And certainly the hate that now divided them was equal on each side.”

• “The change must begin in the heart,”

Setting & Locations edit see section history

• London
• Soho
• England

First Sentence edit see section history

Table of Contents edit see section history

Themes & Symbolism edit see section history

• The Duality of Human Nature: Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde centers upon a conception of humanity as dual in nature, although the theme does not emerge fully until the last chapter, when the complete story of the Jekyll-Hyde relationship is revealed. Therefore, we confront the theory of a dual human nature explicitly only after having witnessed all of the events of the novel, including Hyde’s crimes and his ultimate eclipsing of Jekyll. The text not only posits the duality of human nature as its central theme but forces us to ponder the properties of this duality and to consider each of the novel’s episodes as we weigh various theories.Jekyll asserts that “man is not truly one, but truly two,” and he imagines the human soul as the battleground for an “angel” and a “fiend,” each struggling for mastery. But his potion, which he hoped would separate and purify each element, succeeds only in bringing the dark side into being—Hyde emerges, but he has no angelic counterpart. Once unleashed, Hyde slowly takes over, until Jekyll ceases to exist. If man is half angel and half fiend, one wonders what happens to the “angel” at the end of the novel.Perhaps the angel gives way permanently to Jekyll’s devil. Or perhaps Jekyll is simply mistaken: man is not “truly two” but is first and foremost the primitive creature embodied in Hyde, brought under tentative control by civilization, law, and conscience. According to this theory, the potion simply strips away the civilized veneer, exposing man’s essential nature. Certainly, the novel goes out of its way to paint Hyde as animalistic—he is hairy and ugly; he conducts himself according to instinct rather than reason; Utterson describes him as a “troglodyte,” or primitive creature.Yet if Hyde were just an animal, we would not expect him to take such delight in crime. Indeed, he seems to commit violent acts against innocents for no reason except the joy of it—something that no animal would do. He appears deliberately and happily immoral rather than amoral; he knows the moral law and basks in his breach of it. For an animalistic creature, furthermore, Hyde seems oddly at home in the urban landscape. All of these observations imply that perhaps civilization, too, has its dark side.Ultimately, while Stevenson clearly asserts human nature as possessing two aspects, he leaves open the question of what these aspects constitute. Perhaps they consist of evil and virtue; perhaps they represent one’s inner animal and the veneer that civilization has imposed. Stevenson enhances the richness of the novel by leaving us to look within ourselves to find the answers.
• The Importance of Reputation: For the characters in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, preserving one’s reputation emerges as all important. The prevalence of this value system is evident in the way that upright men such as Utterson and Enfield avoid gossip at all costs; they see gossip as a great destroyer of reputation. Similarly, when Utterson suspects Jekyll first of being blackmailed and then of sheltering Hyde from the police, he does not make his suspicions known; part of being Jekyll’s good friend is a willingness to keep his secrets and not ruin his respectability. The importance of reputation in the novel also reflects the importance of appearances, facades, and surfaces, which often hide a sordid underside. In many instances in the novel, Utterson, true to his Victorian society, adamantly wishes not only to preserve Jekyll’s reputation but also to preserve the appearance of order and decorum, even as he senses a vile truth lurking underneath.
• Violence Against Innocents: The text repeatedly depicts Hyde as a creature of great evil and countless vices. Although the reader learns the details of only two of Hyde’s crimes, the nature of both underlines his depravity. Both involve violence directed against innocents in particular. In the first instance, the victim of Hyde’s violence is a small, female child; in the second instance, it is a gentle and much-beloved old man. The fact that Hyde ruthlessly murders these harmless beings, who have seemingly done nothing to provoke his rage and even less to deserve death, emphasizes the extreme immorality of Jekyll’s dark side unleashed. Hyde’s brand of evil constitutes not just a lapse from good but an outright attack on it.
• Silence: Repeatedly in the novel, characters fail or refuse to articulate themselves. Either they seem unable to describe a horrifying perception, such as the physical characteristics of Hyde, or they deliberately abort or avoid certain conversations. Enfield and Utterson cut off their discussion of Hyde in the first chapter out of a distaste for gossip; Utterson refuses to share his suspicions about Jekyll throughout his investigation of his client’s predicament. Moreover, neither Jekyll in his final confession nor the third-person narrator in the rest of the novel ever provides any details of Hyde’s sordid behavior and secret vices. It is unclear whether these narrative silences owe to a failure of language or a refusal to use it.Ultimately, the two kinds of silence in the novel indicate two different notions about the interaction of the rational and the irrational. The characters’ refusals to discuss the sordid indicate an attribute of the Victorian society in which they live. This society prizes decorum and reputation above all and prefers to repress or even deny the truth if that truth threatens to upset the conventionally ordered worldview. Faced with the irrational, Victorian society and its inhabitants prefer not to acknowledge its presence and not to grant it the legitimacy of a name. Involuntary silences, on the other hand, imply something about language itself. Language is by nature rational and logical, a method by which we map and delineate our world. Perhaps when confronted with the irrational and the mystical, language itself simply breaks down. Perhaps something about verbal expression stands at odds with the supernatural. Interestingly, certain parts of the novel suggest that, in the clash between language and the uncanny, the uncanny need not always win. One can interpret Stevenson’s reticence on the topic of Jekyll’s and Hyde’s crimes as a conscious choice not to defuse their chilling aura with descriptions that might only dull them.
• Urban Terror: Throughout the novel, Stevenson goes out of his way to establish a link between the urban landscape of Victorian London and the dark events surrounding Hyde. He achieves his desired effect through the use of nightmarish imagery, in which dark streets twist and coil, or lie draped in fog, forming a sinister landscape befitting the crimes that take place there. Chilling visions of the city appear in Utterson’s nightmares as well, and the text notes thatHe would be aware of the great field of lamps of a nocturnal city. . . . The figure <of Hyde> . . . haunted the lawyer all night; and if at any time he dozed over, it was but to see it glide more stealthily through sleeping houses, or move the more swiftly . . . through wider labyrinths of lamp-lighted city, and at every street corner crush a child and leave her screaming.In such images, Stevenson paints Hyde as an urban creature, utterly at home in the darkness of London—where countless crimes take place, the novel suggests, without anyone knowing
• Jekyll’s House and Laboratory: Dr. Jekyll lives in a well-appointed home, characterized by Stevenson as having “a great air of wealth and comfort.” His laboratory is described as “a certain sinister block of building … <which> bore in every feature the marks of profound and sordid negligence.” With its decaying facade and air of neglect, the laboratory quite neatly symbolizes the corrupt and perverse Hyde. Correspondingly, the respectable, prosperous-looking main house symbolizes the respectable, upright Jekyll. Moreover, the connection between the buildings similarly corresponds to the connection between the personas they represent. The buildings are adjoined but look out on two different streets. Because of the convoluted layout of the streets in the area, the casual observer cannot detect that the structures are two parts of a whole, just as he or she would be unable to detect the relationship between Jekyll and Hyde.
• Hyde’s Physical Appearance: According to the indefinite remarks made by his overwhelmed observers, Hyde appears repulsively ugly and deformed, small, shrunken, and hairy. His physical ugliness and deformity symbolizes his moral hideousness and warped ethics. Indeed, for the audience of Stevenson’s time, the connection between such ugliness and Hyde’s wickedness might have been seen as more than symbolic. Many people believed in the science of physiognomy, which held that one could identify a criminal by physical appearance. Additionally, Hyde’s small stature may represent the fact that, as Jekyll’s dark side, he has been repressed for years, prevented from growing and flourishing. His hairiness may indicate that he is not so much an evil side of Jekyll as the embodiment of Jekyll’s instincts, the animalistic core beneath Jekyll’s polished exterior.
• Homosexuality: This book came out the same year as the Crown of England recognized a law that made Sodomy and Homosexuality illegal in the United Kingdom. Until the last book of the novel, if you look at it through the lens of a first time reader who has never heard of the story before, you can see it is implied that Dr. Jekyll might be involved in a homsexual affair with Edward Hyde.

Series & Lists edit see section history

Authors & Contributors edit see section history

1. Robert Louis Stevenson (Author)

First Edition edit see section history

Classification edit see section history

• Copyright Status: Public Domain
• Library of Congress: PR5485
• Dewey: 741.5973

Notes for Parents edit see section history

This is a work of horror, so some scenes may be too intense for young readers, especially ones who don't enjoy horror

Subjects edit see section history

• Books › Science Fiction & Fantasy › Science Fiction
• Books › Literature & Fiction › Classics
• Books › Literature & Fiction › World Literature › Scottish
• Books › Literature & Fiction › Authors, A-Z › ( S ) › Stevenson, Robert Louis

Links to Supplemental Material edit see section history

• Project Gutenberg: Freely available online and e-book versions of the text.
• Librivox: Free audio book read by David Barnes, Total running time:03:08:25
• Librivox: Free audio book read by Kristin Hughes, Total running time: 2:49:52

Movie Connections edit see section history

• Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1920) (IMDb): Silent movie with John Barrymore in the main roles.
• Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1920) (IMDb): Silent movie with Sheldon Lewis in the main roles.
• Der Januskopf (1920) (IMDb): Reputedly lost, F.W. Murnau's adaptation of the novella.
• Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931) (IMDb): Fredric March in the main roles.
• Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1941) (IMDb): Spencer Tracy, Ingrid Bergman and Lana Turner in the main roles.
• The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1950) (IMDb): Alan Judd and Desmond Llewelyn in the main roles.
• The Two Faces of Dr. Jekyll (1960) (IMDb): Paul Massie and Christopher Lee in the main roles.
• The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1968) (IMDb): Jack Palance and Denholm Elliott in the main roles.
• Dr Jekyll & Sister Hyde (1971) (IMDb): Ralph Bates and Martine Beswick in the main roles.
• Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1973) (IMDb): A musical featuring Kirk Douglas, Susan George and Stanley Holloway.
• Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1980) (IMDb): Starring David Hemmings, Diana Dors and Ian Bannen.
• Jekyll & Hyde (1990) (IMDb): A horror featuring Michael Caine, Cheryl Ladd, Ronald Pickup and Joss Ackland.
• Dr. Jekyll and Ms. Hyde (1995) (IMDb): A comedy starring Sean Young, Tim Daly, Jeremy Piven and Harvey Fierstein.
• Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (2000) (IMDb): A martial-arts version with Adam Baldwin in the main roles.
• Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (2003) (IMDb): A TV movie starring John Hannah in the main roles.
• Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (2008) (IMDb): A TV movie starring Dougray Scott, Krista Bridges and Tom Skerritt.

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