Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
Robert Louis Stevenson (1886)
“A Victorian lawyer investigates his friend's disturbing new associate — and unravels the most famous split personality in literature.”
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Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
Robert Louis Stevenson (1886) · 96pages · Victorian · 7 AP appearances
Summary
London lawyer Gabriel Utterson investigates the sinister Mr Hyde, who has a strange hold over his respectable friend Dr Henry Jekyll. After Hyde murders a Member of Parliament and then disappears, Jekyll seals himself in his laboratory and refuses all visitors. The mystery resolves in the last two chapters through a pair of posthumous letters: Jekyll has been using a chemical compound to transform himself into Hyde — his repressed, evil alter-ego — and has lost control of the transformation. Unable to stop becoming Hyde, Jekyll takes poison. Hyde dies with him.
Why It Matters
Published January 1886, it sold 40,000 copies in six months in Britain and 250,000 in the United States within the first year. It was immediately adapted for the stage and became one of the defining cultural texts of late Victorian anxieties about human nature. It gave English the phrase 'Jekyll ...
Themes & Motifs
Diction & Style
Register: High formality throughout — legal and medical registers dominate, with Gothic intrusions of fear-vocabulary when characters encounter Hyde
Narrator: Third-person close-third for most of the novella, anchored to Utterson's professional perspective — then shifting to ...
Figurative Language: Moderate but precise
Historical Context
Victorian Britain — 1886, late Victoria, height of empire and bourgeois respectability: Jekyll and Hyde is a Victorian anxiety machine. Darwin had placed evolution's mechanism inside every human body; the civilized man now knew he contained the brute. Atavism — the fear that individua...
Key Characters
Talking Points
- Jekyll insists that Hyde is 'pure evil' and a separate self — but the confession reveals that Hyde is Jekyll's suppressed desires amplified. Who is responsible for Carew's murder: Jekyll, Hyde, or the Victorian society that demanded Jekyll suppress half of himself?
- Utterson suspects the truth early in the novel and does not act on it. Is this loyalty, cowardice, professional ethics, or something else? What would have changed if Utterson had confronted Jekyll directly in Chapter 3?
- Stevenson never specifies what Jekyll's 'pleasures' are — the private sins that Hyde allows him to indulge. Why the vagueness? What does this ambiguity allow the reader to do that specificity would prevent?
- Hyde is described as giving 'an impression of deformity without any nameable malformation.' Why is it important that Hyde's evil cannot be located in a specific physical feature?
- The novel uses multiple narrators: Utterson's third-person account, Lanyon's first-person letter, Jekyll's first-person confession. How does the shift in narrators change what we know and how we feel about what we know?
Notable Quotes
“It was a man trampling calmly over the child's body and left her screaming on the ground.”
“There is something wrong with his appearance; something displeasing, something downright detestable. I never saw a man I so disliked, and yet I sca...”
“Mr Hyde was pale and dwarfish; he gave an impression of deformity without any nameable malformation.”
Why Read This
Because it is 96 pages and one of the most efficiently constructed mystery-horrors in English literature — every chapter moves, nothing is wasted, and the twist is genuinely surprising the first time and genuinely disturbing on re-read when you se...