In brief
A London lawyer, Mr Utterson, hears from a kinsman about a small, repellent man who trampled a child at three in the morning and paid for it with a cheque drawn on a respected doctor. The same doctor, Henry Jekyll, has made a will leaving everything to this man, Edward Hyde. Utterson assumes blackmail. He watches, asks and is put off; Hyde beats an old member of parliament to death in the street and vanishes; Jekyll shuts himself away. On a wild March night his butler fetches Utterson to break down the laboratory door, and they find Hyde dying in clothes far too big for him and no trace of Jekyll. Two documents explain the rest: a friend’s account of watching Hyde drink a potion and become Jekyll, and Jekyll’s own confession.
Everyone knows the twist, which is the great misfortune of this book. It was written to be read as a mystery, and for eight of its ten chapters the man we follow has no idea what is going on.
The argument
The proverb says that Jekyll is the good man and Hyde the bad one. The book says something much nastier. Jekyll’s famous claim, “that man is not truly one, but truly two” (Full Statement), comes from a man building a defence. The clean division he dreamed of fails at the first draught. “The drug had no discriminating action”: it released his evil and left the rest as it was, so that one self was wholly evil “and the other was still the old Henry Jekyll, that incongruous compound”. There is no good half. There is Hyde, and there is the same man as before, with a new means of escape.
What Jekyll has actually invented is an alibi. “Men have before hired bravos to transact their crimes,” he writes, and he was the first to do it for his pleasures. “It was Hyde, after all, and Hyde alone, that was guilty.” He wakes with his good qualities intact and hurries to repair what Hyde has broken. “And thus his conscience slumbered.” G. K. Chesterton put the point once and for all: “The real stab of the story is not in the discovery that the one man is two men; but in the discovery that the two men are one man.”
Stevenson himself was blunt. Writing to the journalist John Paul Bocock in 1887, he said: “The harm was in Jekyll, because he was a hypocrite”. Set that beside the confession, where Jekyll insists “I was in no sense a hypocrite”, and the reader’s job becomes clear. This is the testimony of the accused. Watch the pronouns near the end, where he breaks off to say “He, I say—I cannot say, I.” At the first sight of Hyde in the mirror he said something quite different: “This, too, was myself.”
The shape of the book
Ten short chapters fall into two movements. Eight follow Utterson from outside, in the manner of a detective story with a stolid detective: the door, the search, the Carew murder, the suspicious letter, Lanyon’s collapse, the face at the window and the last night. Then the story goes back over the same ground in two sealed papers, Lanyon’s and Jekyll’s, each opened only after its author is dead.
The book never returns to Utterson. It ends in the middle of Jekyll’s last hour, with the pen going down: “I bring the life of that unhappy Henry Jekyll to an end.” We never learn what the lawyer does about a friend’s estate, a police case or the truth, a fitting ending for a book about men who keep things to themselves.
The voice
Stevenson’s prose is lean and cold on the surface, and then something comes up through it. Utterson is “lean, long, dusty, dreary and yet somehow lovable”. London is weather and street lamps: on the morning he goes to Soho, “a great chocolate-coloured pall lowered over heaven” (The Carew Murder Case). Enfield’s account of the child turns on one adverb: Hyde “trampled calmly over the child’s body”.
The prose of the confession is another thing altogether, Latinate, ornate, full of self-regard, and it should be heard as character. A man who writes of “the trembling immateriality” of the body calls his pleasures “undignified” and adds, “I would scarce use a harder term.” The grand manner is another of his disguises.
What nobody says
The book’s real London is a club of bachelors who protect one another by not asking. Utterson’s tolerance is his creed: “I let my brother go to the devil in his own way.” Enfield has a rule for such matters, “the more it looks like Queer Street, the less I ask”, and the opening chapter ends with the two men agreeing never to mention it again. Lanyon, who has seen the truth, will not tell it, and dies of it. Even with the laboratory door about to come down, Utterson’s concern is that “we may at least save his credit”.
Nor does anybody describe Hyde. “He must be deformed somewhere,” says Enfield, who has stared at him and cannot name the deformity; Utterson tries “hardly human” and “troglodytic” and gives up. Jekyll will not name his pleasures either. Readers have been filling that blank ever since. Elaine Showalter, in Sexual Anarchy (1990), read it as a fable of homosexual panic in the years after the Labouchere Amendment of 1885, and the friend John Addington Symonds wrote to Stevenson that “viewed as an allegory, it touches one too closely.” Stevenson rejected the sexual reading outright in the Bocock letter, calling Hyde the essence of cruelty and selfishness rather than of lust. The book itself supports him further than its critics usually allow: what we see Hyde do is hurt the weak, for pleasure, starting with a girl.
The people
Henry Jekyll
Henry Jekyll is rich, honoured, sociable and fifty. His pleasures were not at first monstrous, as he says himself; what shaped him was the need to look grave in public. “I chose the better part and was found wanting in the strength to keep to it” is the truest sentence he writes, and it could be spoken by any addict, a reading several critics have pressed.
Edward Hyde
Edward Hyde is “pale and dwarfish”, younger and smaller than Jekyll, since this side of him has been less used. The films made him a hulk. Stevenson’s monster is a little man with a cold fury and a great love of life, and Jekyll, of all people, ends by pitying him.
Gabriel Utterson
Utterson, the reader’s stand-in, is loyal, unimaginative and decent, and his decency is complicit: he spends the book guarding a reputation. “I shall be Mr. Seek,” he thinks, the one joke of his life.
Hastie Lanyon and Poole
Lanyon, who called Jekyll’s science “unscientific balderdash”, sees the change and is destroyed by it. Poole, the butler, knows his master’s voice and body better than the lawyer does.
The women
The women are nearly invisible but they matter: a trampled child, the maid who witnesses the murder from her window and faints, a landlady with “an evil face, smoothed by hypocrisy”, a woman Hyde strikes in the street. Stage and film versions added a love interest almost from the start, because the original has none.
How it was made
Stevenson wrote it in the autumn of 1885 at Skerryvore, his house in Bournemouth, an invalid confined to bed by lung haemorrhages. By his own account in “A Chapter on Dreams” (1888), a dream gave him the transformation and the idea of the voluntary change becoming involuntary. Fanny Stevenson remembered waking him from it and being told off for interrupting a fine bogey tale. Her son Lloyd Osbourne recalled a first draft done in about three days. Fanny criticised it for missing the allegory, and the family story is that Stevenson burned it and began again, though scholars debate the burning.
The idea was older. As a young man he had written a play, later reworked with W. E. Henley, about Deacon Brodie, the Edinburgh cabinet-maker and councillor who burgled by night. Longmans published it as a shilling paperback in January 1886, with Scribner’s in New York a few days ahead.
Readers and critics
It sold slowly until a favourable notice in The Times on 25 January 1886, and then close to 40,000 copies in six months. It was preached on in pulpits. Vladimir Nabokov taught it at Cornell as a phenomenon of style, drew a diagram showing Hyde lodged inside Jekyll, and refused to read it as parable or allegory; the lecture is in Lectures on Literature (1980). Later readers have found fear of degeneration after Darwin in Hyde’s “ape-like fury”.
Afterlives
Richard Mansfield’s stage version opened in Boston in May 1887, with a transformation done in front of the audience, and it added the romance almost every version has kept. It closed in London in 1888, during the Ripper panic. There have been well over a hundred stage and film versions since, among them John Barrymore’s silent of 1920, Rouben Mamoulian’s of 1931 with Fredric March, who won an Oscar, and Victor Fleming’s of 1941 with Spencer Tracy. Others turn it about, such as Valerie Martin’s novel Mary Reilly (1990), told by a housemaid and filmed in 1996. And “Jekyll and Hyde” itself has entered the language, mostly to mean something the book denies, a person with a good side and a bad one.
How to read it
- Read it in one sitting. It takes about two hours.
- Read as if you did not know. Follow Utterson’s theories of blackmail and forgery, and notice how good the misdirection is.
- Cross-examine the confession. Mark every place Jekyll shifts from “I” to “he”, and ask whom each shift protects.
- Use a good edition. The Norton Critical Edition prints the text with Stevenson’s letters on the book and a selection of criticism.
Read next
- James Hogg, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824). The great Scottish double, also told first by an editor and then by the guilty man himself.
- Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (1818). The earlier scientist who cannot bear the being he has made.
- Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890). The same bargain four years later, with a portrait in place of a potion.
- Emma Tennant, Two Women of London: The Strange Case of Ms Jekyll and Mrs Hyde (1989). The story retold with women in the leading roles, in the London of the 1980s.