The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

About this book

Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is a short novel by Robert Louis Stevenson, published in January 1886. It concerns a respected London doctor, a brutal stranger who seems to have some hold over him, and the lawyer who tries to find out what the connection is. The book sold very well in its first months and the phrase “Jekyll and Hyde” passed into everyday English within a few years as a name for anyone with two contradictory sides.

Because the twist is now common knowledge, the book is often assumed to have none. In fact Stevenson built it as a mystery, and reading it as the first readers did, following the lawyer’s inquiries without knowing the answer, shows how carefully it is put together. The horror comes less from what Hyde does than from the gradual understanding of what Jekyll has done to himself.

The story

Gabriel Utterson, a dry, reliable London lawyer, hears from a friend about an ugly incident: a small man named Edward Hyde trampled a child in the street at night and then paid off the family with a check drawn on the account of Dr. Henry Jekyll, a well-known and well-liked physician. Utterson is troubled because he holds Jekyll’s will, which leaves everything to this same Hyde in the event of Jekyll’s death or disappearance.

Utterson assumes blackmail and sets out to find Hyde and warn his friend. Jekyll refuses to discuss it. Over the following months Hyde is connected to a worse crime, Jekyll’s behavior grows erratic, and another old friend, Dr. Lanyon, suffers a shock from which he does not recover. The final chapters consist of two documents, Lanyon’s account and Jekyll’s own statement, which explain what Utterson has been circling.

Themes and historical context

Stevenson wrote the book in Bournemouth in 1885, during a period of poor health. It appeared at a moment when London’s middle class was preoccupied with respectability, and the novel takes that preoccupation as its subject. Jekyll’s problem, as he describes it, is that his position requires him to conceal ordinary appetites; Hyde is his attempt to satisfy them without consequence. The book has been read as a study of hypocrisy, of addiction, of repressed sexuality, and of the dangers of scientific ambition, and it supports all of these readings without settling on any.

The setting matters. Stevenson’s London is a city of fog, gaslight, locked doors, and back entrances, where the fine house on the square connects to a shabby laboratory on the lane behind it. The geography of the two doors is the book’s central image.

The novel belongs to a group of late-Victorian stories about doubles and hidden selves, and it was published two years before the Whitechapel murders of 1888, with which it was soon associated in the public mind. It has been adapted for stage and screen more often than almost any other book of its period.

Who should read it

At around 26,000 words, it is a novella that can be read in a single sitting. The prose is dense in places, with long sentences and a formal, legal cadence that matches Utterson’s character, but the chapters are short and the structure is clear. It is a good introduction to Stevenson for adult readers and a standard text for students of gothic fiction.