Detectives investigate the murder of a girl by Mr. Hyde. Utterson is a lawyer who learns that Dr. Jekyll had transferred all his property to this same Mr. Hyde. Utterson decides to investigate, and visits Jekyll and Dr. Lanyon, a friend of both, to learn about what happened.
Dr. Lanyon said that he had a dispute with Jekyll over the latter’s research ideas.
Utterson then goes to a building that Hyde visits, a laboratory attached to Jekyll’s home. He encounters Hyde and is amazed at how ugly the man seems, as if deformed. Hyde offers Utterson his address, but Jekyll tells Utterson not to worry about Hyde.
A year passes, nothing happens – then a servant girl witnesses Hyde brutally beat an old man named Sir Danvers Carew to death.
Utterson again visits Jekyll, who claims to have no contact with Hyde. But Utterson’s clerk remarks that Jekyll and Hyde have remarkably similar handwriting styles.
Jekyll is friendly and sociable for a few months, but then he suddenly becomes hostile and refuses visitors. Lanyon dies from a shock he received from Jekyll but left a letter for Utterson before he died. The latter was instructed to only open it after Jekyll’s death.
Soon, Utterson is visited by Mr. Poole (Jekyll’s butler). The butler claimed to hear a voice that sounds nothing like Dr. Jekyll from his laboratory, and that Jekyll has been there for weeks. Utterson and Poole deliberate over what to do – eventually they break in, only to find Hyde’s body, wearing Jekyll’s clothes – an apparent suicide.
There was also a letter from Jekyll to Utterson that promised to explain everything.
Utterson takes the letter home. First, he reads Lanyon’s letter and it revealed that his deterioration and subsequent death were caused by the shock of seeing Mr. Hyde transform into Dr. Jekyll by consuming a potion. The second letter is a testament by Jekyll – it explains how he tried to separate his good side from his dark impulses and discovered how to become a conscience free monster (Mr. Hyde).
At first, Jekyll loved becoming Hyde, he enjoyed the moral freedom that came with it. But he found out that he was turning into Hyde involuntarily while asleep, even without the potion. From that point, Jekyll wanted to stop the transformations from occurring, but one night, an urge gripped him so strongly that he rushed out and killed Sir Danvers Carew. Jekyll was horrified and tried desperately to stop the transformations – he was successful for a while, but then while sitting on a park, he turned into Hyde. This was the first time the transformation occurred without the potion and while awake.
The letter continues describing Jekyll’s cry for help. Hyde was being tracked by the police, so he had to figure out how to transform into Jekyll again, but when he drank the potion in Lanyon’s presence, the latter mentally broke down.
Jekyll then returned home, feeling more helpless as things got even more out of control. He ran out of the key ingredient that allowed him to transform from Hyde back into himself. He wrote the letter knowing that he would soon become Hyde again, permanently. He wasn’t sure if Hyde would kill others or commit suicide, but in any case, the letter marks the end of Dr. Jekyll.
Henry Jekyll’s Letter
Jekyll starts by introducing us to his background – he comes from a wealthy family, is endowed with good health, and inclined by nature to industry. He is fond of wisdom and does good among his fellowmen – he has everything going for him. His only fault is his impatient cheerfulness, but he has found it difficult to reconcile this drive with his desire to carry his head high.
Hence it came about that I concealed my pleasures; and that when I reached years of reflection, and began to look round me and take stock of my progress and position in the world, I stood already committed to a profound duplicity of me.
Many men irreverently express these pleasures, but because of Jekyll’s high ideals, he viewed them with a morbid sense of shame. It was the unrealistic nature of his expectations, rather than his faults that made him what he was – he had severed his connection with his opposite, hidden self.
In this case, I was driven to reflect deeply and inveterately on that hard law of life, which lies at the root of religion and is one of the most plentiful springs of distress. 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, than when I labored, in the eye of day, at the furtherance of knowledge or the relief of sorrow and suffering. And it chanced that the direction of my scientific studies, which led wholly towards the mystic and the transcendental, reacted and shed a strong light on this consciousness of the perennial war among my members. 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 dreadful shipwreck: that man is not truly one, but truly two.
Jekyll marched in one direction, the congruous proper path. He recognized through himself, the 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.
Dr. Jekyll figured out how to create a potion to grant him this wish – to transform into the ugly side of his nature, without remorse, and without damaging his own reputation. He reasoned that if each side could do what it wanted, he would be relieved of all torment, and would be delivered from the remorse of his upright nature – that his evil self could march forward confidently, doing whatever gave it pleasure.
At that time my virtue slumbered; my evil, kept awake by ambition, was alert and swift to seize the occasion; and the thing that was projected was Edward Hyde. Hence, although I had now two characters as well as two appearances, one was wholly evil, and the other was still the old Henry Jekyll, that incongruous compound of whose reformation and improvement I had already learned to despair. The movement was thus wholly toward the worse.
Some men have hired others to commit their crimes and protected their own person and reputation in this way. Jekyll managed to do the same, but for his own pleasure, he appeared before others with respectability, and in a moment, strip off his chains and delve into the sea of liberty.
The hatred of Hyde for Jekyll was of a different order. His terror of the gallows drove him continually to commit temporary suicide, and return to his subordinate station of a part instead of a person; but he loathed the necessity, he loathed the despondency into which Jekyll was now fallen, and he resented the dislike with which he was himself regarded. Hence the ape-like tricks that he would play me, scrawling in my own hand blasphemies on the pages of my books, burning the letters and destroying the portrait of my father; and indeed, had it not been for his fear of death, he would long ago have ruined himself in order to involve me in the ruin. But his love of me is wonderful; I go further: I, who sicken and freeze at the mere thought of him, when I recall the abjection and passion of this attachment, and when I know how he fears my power to cut him off by suicide, I find it in my heart to pity him.
He ends the letter with a realization of what will come next, he knew that it would be his last letter since he could no longer change back into himself. He suspected that Hyde would tear it into pieces if the transformation were to take place now, but he is uncertain of what will happen.
I know how I shall sit shuddering and weeping in my chair, or continue, with the most strained and fear-struck ecstasy of listening, to pace up and down this room (my last earthly refuge) and give ear to every sound of menace. Will Hyde die upon the scaffold? or will he find courage to release himself at the last moment? God knows; I am careless; this is my true hour of death, and what is to follow concerns another than myself. Here then, as I lay down the pen and proceed to seal up my confession, I bring the life of that unhappy Henry Jekyll to an end.