Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde

• 1. Introduction

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  Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde begins not with a monster, but with a lawyer on a Sunday walk. Gabriel John Utterson, a reserved London solicitor, passes a battered door on a side street and hears a story that will haunt him for the rest of the novella. His cousin Richard Enfield witnessed a man named Edward Hyde deliberately trample a young girl after a minor collision in the street, and then produce a cheque signed by one of the city's most respected physicians to keep the matter quiet. That physician was Dr Henry Jekyll, Utterson's old friend. Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson published this story in 1886, and within six months close to 40 thousand copies had sold in Britain alone. By 1901, the book had moved over 250,000 copies in the United States. The phrase "Jekyll and Hyde" entered everyday speech as a description of someone with an outwardly good but sometimes shockingly evil nature. What drove Stevenson to this story, how it was written in a feverish burst in the seaside town of Bournemouth, and why it has generated over 120 stage and film adaptations are questions worth sitting with.

• 2. The Double Life Behind the Story

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  William Brodie gave Stevenson his first glimpse of the divided man. Brodie was a Scottish cabinet-maker, deacon of a trades guild, and Edinburgh city councillor who ran a secret life as a burglar to fund his mistresses and gambling addiction. While still a teenager, Stevenson wrote a script for a play about Brodie, later reworked with W. E. Henley and produced for the first time in 1882. A second real-world figure reached closer to home. Eugène Chantrelle was an Edinburgh-based French teacher, a friend of Stevenson's, who was convicted and executed for the murder of his wife in May 1878. Chantrelle had poisoned her with opium and was believed to have committed other killings in France and Britain, allegedly offering victims a favourite dish of toasted cheese and opium at supper parties. According to author Jeremy Hodges, Stevenson attended the trial throughout and, as the evidence emerged, found himself, in Hodges's words, "'aghast before the acts of Edward Hyde'." Stevenson also maintained close friendships with men navigating socially suppressed identities, including Horatio Brown, Edmund Gosse, and John Addington Symonds. Symonds read the finished novella and wrote to Stevenson that, viewed as an allegory, it touched him too closely.

• 3. The Dream and the Burning

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  In his 1888 essay "A Chapter on Dreams," published in Scribner's in January of that year, Stevenson described racking his brain for days over a plot before a single dream delivered him three scenes and what he called "the central idea of a voluntary change becoming involuntary." His wife Fanny Stevenson recalled being woken in the small hours by cries of horror from her husband. When she shook him awake, he snapped at her: "Why did you wake me? I was dreaming a fine bogey tale." She had roused him at the moment of the first transformation scene. His stepson Lloyd Osbourne later wrote that the first draft took no longer than three days, describing the feat as almost unbelievable. Stevenson, confined to bed at the time from a haemorrhage, produced a manuscript that Fanny annotated in the margins. Her central observation was that he was writing what was really an allegory as if it were a plain story. What followed is one of the more disputed moments in literary history. In one account, Stevenson called her back to the bedroom, showed her a pile of ashes, and explained he had burned the manuscript to prevent himself from salvaging it, forcing a complete restart. In another version, he threw the draft into the fire in a fit of anger after she criticized it and then, having calmed himself, admitted she was right. Scholars have found no direct factual evidence for the burning, but it remains part of the novella's history. Stevenson rewrote the story in three to six days in Bournemouth, a southern English seaside town where he had settled in 1884, partly because his stepson was at school there and partly for the mild climate and the scent of its resinous pine trees.

• 4. Utterson and the Mystery He Unravels

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  Gabriel John Utterson is described in the novella as a measured, emotionless bachelor who is nonetheless believable, trustworthy, and genuinely likeable. He is not without his own guilt: he is quick to investigate others' downfalls, and Stevenson suggests this curiosity is itself a form of indulgence that Utterson tries to suppress by living as a recluse. The investigation he undertakes unfolds across months. A year after Enfield's account of the trampled girl, a maid witnesses Hyde beat Sir Danvers Carew, a Member of Parliament and another of Utterson's clients, to death with a cane in an October street. The police bring Utterson to Hyde's apartment in Soho, where they find the other half of the broken cane, which Utterson recognises as a gift he had given to Jekyll. Hyde has vanished. Jekyll produces a note allegedly written to him by Hyde, but the handwriting is so close to Jekyll's own that Utterson suspects Jekyll forged it. For two months Jekyll appears almost rejuvenated, socialising freely, but in early January he stops receiving all visitors. Dr Hastie Lanyon, a mutual friend who had disagreed with Jekyll's scientific ideas as too fanciful, then dies of shock after witnessing something he cannot bring himself to describe publicly. In late February, Utterson catches Jekyll at a laboratory window; Jekyll slams it shut and vanishes. In early March, Jekyll's butler Poole, who has served him for many years, goes to Utterson in alarm. Together they break down the laboratory door and find Hyde's body grotesquely draped in Jekyll's clothes, with the scene suggesting suicide.

• 5. The Science of Self-Destruction

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  Jekyll's own letter, read by Utterson after the discovery, lays out what happened. Jekyll describes holding himself to strict moral standards in public while privately indulging in unstated vices and struggling with shame. He created a serum intended to separate the evil within him from the respectable self the world saw. In doing so, he transformed into Hyde, a figure described as smaller, younger, cruel, remorseless, and entirely uncaring toward others. Initially he controlled the transformations with the serum. Then, one night in August, he became Hyde involuntarily in his sleep. He resolved to stop but, in a moment of weakness, drank the serum again. Hyde, his desires having been caged for so long, killed Sir Danvers Carew. After that murder, Jekyll tried harder to resist, but in early January he transformed while fully awake and far from his laboratory, with the police hunting Hyde as a murderer. To get back, Hyde wrote to Lanyon in Jekyll's handwriting, asking him to retrieve chemicals. Lanyon watched Hyde mix the chemicals, drink the serum, and become Jekyll. The shock of that sight was what killed Lanyon. As the involuntary transformations increased in frequency, Jekyll required ever larger doses to reverse them. Eventually the supply of a specific salt used in the serum ran out, and new batches prepared from fresh stock failed to work. Jekyll speculated that the original ingredient had contained some impurity that was essential to the process. In his final letter, he wrote that he no longer knew whether Hyde would face execution or take his own life, and that it no longer concerned him, because his own consciousness was fading.

• 6. Themes the Victorians Recognised

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  Vladimir Nabokov, in his discussion of the novella, argued that reading it as a simple "good versus evil" story is misleading, because Jekyll himself is not, by Victorian standards, a morally good person in all respects. The interpretation that caught the widest critical attention was the Victorian anxiety over public respectability and private desire. Stevenson's Soho, with Hyde's loft full of evidence of a depraved life, and the respectable Georgian streets of a gentlemen's London, map precisely onto what one reading describes as the 19th century's fundamental dichotomy of "outward respectability and inward lust." Scholars applying Sigmund Freud's framework, introduced in 1920, read Hyde as the id driven by primal urges, Victorian society as the superego, and Jekyll as the rational ego balancing between them. When Jekyll transforms, the ego is suppressed and the id runs free. The novel was also written at the moment when the Labouchere Amendment criminalised homosexuality in Britain; some scholars read Hyde as the repository of all desires Jekyll could not name. There are things Jekyll confesses to doing as Hyde that he was too embarrassed to admit even in his final letter, and Lanyon refuses to speak publicly of what he witnessed, sparing Jekyll the full weight of scandal. A separate strand of interpretation reads the novella through Darwin: Hyde is described as more primitive and less developed than Jekyll, and Stevenson was writing at a time when many Victorians feared that evolution implied the possibility of regression into something more ape-like and bestial. Some critics also connect the duality to Edinburgh itself, Stevenson's birthplace, a city split between its old medieval section of dark crowded slums and the modern Georgian area of wide spacious streets.

• 7. From Shilling Shocker to Global Stage

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  The American publisher Scribner's issued the book on the 5th of January 1886, four days before the UK edition appeared from Longmans. Scribner's initial print run was 3,000 copies, only 1,250 of them bound in cloth. In Britain the book was priced at one shilling and sold alongside what were known as "shilling shockers" or penny dreadfuls. Shops did not initially stock it until a review appeared in The Times on the 25th of January 1886. After that notice, sales accelerated rapidly. Stevenson's biographer Graham Balfour, writing in 1901, attributed the book's success less to any perception of its literary merit than to the "moral instincts of the public." It was read by people who ordinarily never read fiction and was quoted from pulpits in religious papers. The first stage adaptation followed immediately after publication. Richard Mansfield bought the rights from Stevenson and worked with Boston author Thomas Russell Sullivan on a script. The resulting play added female characters and a romantic subplot to the originally male-centred story. The first performance took place at the Boston Museum in May 1887. Its lighting effects and makeup for the transformation scenes horrified audiences. After a successful 10-week run in London in 1888, Mansfield was forced to close the production because the hysteria surrounding the Jack the Ripper murders led London newspapers to name even stage murderers as possible suspects. A 1990 musical was later created by Frank Wildhorn, Steve Cuden, and Leslie Bricusse. The audio recording tradition alone has drawn readers including Tom Baker, Christopher Lee, John Hurt, Ian Holm, and Richard E. Grant.