The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde Study Guide

Characters

• Gabriel John UttersonGabriel John Utterson, Jekyll's lawyer and friend, who breaks into the cabinet with Poole and finds a new will naming him in place of Hyde.First appears: Story of the Door
• Mr Richard EnfieldUtterson's cousin, who has found out that the door is a back way into Jekyll's house, and who shares the horrified glimpse of Jekyll at his window.First appears: Story of the Door
• Edward HydeThe evil side of Jekyll's nature, given its own smaller, younger body by Jekyll's drug, and in the end impossible to keep down.First appears: Story of the Door
• GThe girlA child of eight or ten whom Hyde tramples in the street at night; she is more frightened than hurt.First appears: Story of the Door
• EDThe Edinburgh doctorThe dry, unemotional doctor the girl had been sent to fetch, who turns sick and white with the desire to kill Hyde.First appears: Story of the Door
• Dr Henry JekyllIn his own statement, a proud man who hid his pleasures behind a respectable face, created Hyde with his drug, and lost control until his own self was slipping away for good.First appears: Search for Mr. Hyde
• Dr Hastie LanyonDr Hastie Lanyon, whose written account reveals the shock that broke him: he watched Hyde turn into Jekyll.First appears: Search for Mr. Hyde
• PPooleJekyll's butler of twenty years, frightened enough to fetch Utterson at night and brave enough to break down the cabinet door with an axe.First appears: Search for Mr. Hyde
• MThe maidA maid servant who, from her moonlit window, sees Hyde beat an old gentleman to death, recognises him as a man who once visited her master, and faints.First appears: The Carew Murder Case
• DCSir Danvers CarewA Member of Parliament and a client of Utterson's, whose murder stirs up great public feeling.First appears: The Carew Murder Case
• INInspector NewcomenThe Scotland Yard officer on the Carew case, eager for the credit, who is sure he will catch Hyde at the bank.First appears: The Carew Murder Case
• OWThe old womanAn ivory-faced, silver-haired old woman with an evil face and excellent manners, who answers the door at Hyde's house in Soho and is openly glad he is in trouble.First appears: The Carew Murder Case
• GMr GuestUtterson's head clerk and trusted confidant, an expert in handwriting, who notices that Hyde's letter and a note from Jekyll are in almost the same hand.First appears: Incident of the Letter
• BBradshawJekyll's nervous footman, sent with a boy to guard the laboratory door while Utterson and Poole break in.First appears: The Last Night

Chapter summaries

1. Story of the Door

   Utterson is dry, serious and hard on himself, yet slow to judge others and loyal to old friends such as his relative Enfield, whose company he enjoys on silent Sunday walks. Enfield points out a neglected door, out of place in a bright, prosperous street, and tells how a small man calmly trampled a young girl in an empty street in the dead of night. Everyone who saw the man loathed him, even a calm Edinburgh doctor, and together they forced him to pay the girl's family a hundred pounds. The money came from behind the door, partly as a cheque signed by a famous and respectable man, and Enfield suspects blackmail. The man's name is Hyde, and Enfield cannot say quite what is wrong with his looks, only that he seems deformed. Utterson reveals that he already knows the name on the cheque, and the two men agree never to mention the story again.

2. Search for Mr. Hyde

   Enfield's story sends Utterson to his safe and to the will of his friend Dr Henry Jekyll, which leaves everything to Edward Hyde and hands Hyde Jekyll's place if Jekyll disappears for more than three months. Now that Hyde's name is linked to Enfield's story, Utterson fears the will points not to madness but to disgrace. Dr Lanyon has never heard of Hyde, and his scorn for Jekyll's "unscientific balderdash" shows that Jekyll's ideas have gone far beyond what his old colleague can accept. Kept awake by nightmares of Hyde crushing children and standing over his sleeping friend's bed, Utterson haunts the door until Hyde comes, and the meeting fills him with a disgust he cannot explain. Poole confirms that Hyde has a key and comes and goes by the laboratory. Utterson decides that Jekyll must be paying for some sin of his wild youth, and fears that Hyde may grow impatient to inherit.

3. Dr. Jekyll Was Quite at Ease

   Jekyll is first seen in person as a large, handsome, kindly man of fifty, at ease among his reputable friends. He laughs off the will and dismisses Lanyon as a "hidebound pedant" who objected to his "scientific heresies". At the name of Hyde, though, he grows pale, his manner turns incoherent, and he calls his position "very strange" and something that "cannot be mended by talking". He turns down Utterson's offer of help, says he can be rid of Hyde whenever he likes, and begs him to let the matter sleep. Then he asks Utterson to promise to help Hyde and get him his rights if Jekyll is gone, and Utterson reluctantly agrees. The short scene shows two gentlemen who prefer silence to scandal, and a respected man under some pressure he will not explain.

4. The Carew Murder Case

   The murder is told through a maid who watches from her window by moonlight: a gentle, courteous old man stops to speak to Hyde, and Hyde, for no reason she can see, flies into a rage and batters him to death with "apelike fury". The victim is Sir Danvers Carew, a man of high position, and the crime startles all London. Utterson knows the murder weapon, a cane he once gave Jekyll, and leads Inspector Newcomen through a thick brown fog to Hyde's house in Soho. Among squalid streets, Hyde's rooms turn out to be furnished with luxury and taste, but they have been ransacked, papers have been burned, and the other half of the cane is behind the door. The inspector is sure of catching Hyde at the bank, yet Hyde has no traceable family, has never been photographed, and those who saw him agree only on a haunting sense of deformity.

5. Incident of the Letter

   For the first time Utterson is taken through the old dissecting theatre, now cluttered with chemical apparatus, to Jekyll's private cabinet, where his friend sits by the fire looking deathly sick. Jekyll swears he will never see Hyde again and insists Hyde is safe and will never be heard of, though he will not say how he can be so sure. When Utterson asks whether Hyde dictated the will's clause about disappearance, Jekyll nods, and he seems more worried about his own good name than about Hyde. Utterson is relieved by Hyde's letter until Poole tells him that no letter was handed in that day, so it may have come by the laboratory door or even been written in the cabinet. Over a bottle of old wine, with fog smothering the city outside, Guest, an expert in handwriting, notices that the letter and a dinner invitation from Jekyll are written in almost the same hand. Utterson locks the note away, horrified at the thought that his friend has forged a letter to shield a murderer.

6. Remarkable Incident of Dr. Lanyon

   Despite large rewards, Hyde has disappeared, though stories of his cruelty and vile life come out, and Jekyll leaves his seclusion: he entertains his friends, does good works and becomes known for religion. On 8 January Utterson and Lanyon dine with him as in the old days, but within days Jekyll's door is shut to all visitors. Lanyon, suddenly aged and terrified, says he has had a shock he will not survive and regards Jekyll as dead. Jekyll writes that he has brought on himself "a punishment and a danger that I cannot name" and asks Utterson to respect his silence. Lanyon dies within weeks, leaving a sealed document that links Jekyll's name with disappearance, just as the will did. Bound by professional honour, Utterson locks it away unread, and calls less and less often on the friend who now lives shut up in his cabinet.

7. Incident at the Window

   The shortest chapter returns to the door and the Sunday walk where the story began. Enfield now knows the door belongs to Jekyll's house, and Utterson, uneasy about his friend, steps into the court to look up at the windows. Jekyll sits at one of them "like some disconsolate prisoner", saying he is very low and dare not come out. Moments later his smile is replaced by "abject terror and despair" and the window is thrust down. The two men leave in silence, and all Utterson can say is "God forgive us". Stevenson tells us only what the men felt, and neither of them puts it into words.

8. The Last Night

   On a wild March night Poole brings Utterson to Jekyll's house, where the frightened servants huddle together in the hall. Poole's evidence mounts up: a voice that is not his master's, notes demanding a pure sample of some drug, and a glimpse of a small masked figure "like a monkey" among the crates. Utterson first tries to explain it all as an illness that deforms Jekyll, but at last agrees that Hyde must have killed Jekyll and be hiding in the cabinet. When the voice begs for mercy, they break in and find a quiet, cosy room with tea laid out and Hyde's body still twitching on the floor. They search the whole building but find no trace of Jekyll, alive or dead, and the door to the bystreet is locked, its key broken and rusty. In the cabinet they find a pious book scrawled with blasphemies in Jekyll's hand, a new will naming Utterson in place of Hyde, and a note, dated that day, directing Utterson to Lanyon's narrative and Jekyll's own confession.

9. Dr. Lanyon’s Narrative

   The story switches to the sealed account Lanyon left for Utterson. A desperate letter from Jekyll asked him to break into the cabinet, take a certain drawer, and give it at midnight to a man sent in Jekyll's name. Lanyon, sure his colleague was insane, obeyed, examined the white salt, the blood-red liquid and the notebook of experiments, and loaded a revolver. The small, repulsive visitor, in clothes far too large, mixed the drug and offered Lanyon a choice: let him leave, or witness something to "stagger the unbelief of Satan". Lanyon chose to see, and watched the man turn into Henry Jekyll. What Jekyll told him afterwards so horrified Lanyon that he will not write it down, except that the visitor was Hyde, the murderer of Carew. Hyde taunts Lanyon's material view of science, but Lanyon describes both the transformation and Jekyll's confessed moral corruption as sources of his horror.

10. Henry Jekyll’s Full Statement of the Case

    Jekyll's statement explains the mystery from the inside. A proud man with an "impatient gaiety of disposition", he hid his undignified pleasures behind a grave public face and came to believe that "man is not truly one, but truly two". He describes Hyde as "pure evil" and theorises that this body is smaller, slighter and younger because his evil side had been less exercised. Jekyll's good name kept him safe while Hyde's pleasures turned monstrous, from cruelty to a child to the savage murder of Carew. The change had already once come on its own in his sleep; after the murder Jekyll swore off Hyde, but it came again unbidden on a bench in Regent's Park, and then whenever he dozed. His salt ran out, new supplies failed because, he believes, the first had held some unknown impurity, and he wrote this statement under the last of the old powders. He ends unsure whether Hyde will die on the scaffold or find the courage to release himself, saying that what follows concerns "another than myself".

Key quotes