The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
Robert Louis Stevenson · published 1886
Stevenson's 1886 novella about a respectable London doctor and his violent alter-ego. A foundational text on duality, repression and the Victorian double life — and a 19th-century novel option on every major GCSE board.
Overview
The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is Robert Louis Stevenson's 1886 novella, told largely through the perspective of Gabriel Utterson, a London lawyer investigating the strange relationship between his respectable client Dr Henry Jekyll and a violent, ugly stranger called Mr Hyde.
The novella's central reveal — that Jekyll and Hyde are the same person — was a genuine plot twist at first publication. Stevenson constructs the narrative as a mystery, withholding the truth until Jekyll's posthumous letter in the final chapter.
The structure is unusual: most of the book is third-person from Utterson's perspective, but the final two chapters are first-person accounts (Lanyon's letter, then Jekyll's full confession). This shift from external observation to internal voice mirrors the novella's theme of the hidden inner self.
Stevenson wrote in the context of Victorian Gothic and emerging psychiatry. The novella anticipates Freud (whose work on the unconscious came a decade later) and engages with then-current debates about heredity, criminal anthropology and degeneration.
Key themes
Duality
The novella's defining theme: the idea that every person contains two selves, one socially acceptable, one repressed. Jekyll articulates this in his confession as 'man's dual nature'.
Repression and the Victorian double life
Jekyll's experiment grows from his desire to indulge socially unacceptable urges without damaging his reputation. Stevenson critiques Victorian respectability culture and the hypocrisy it produces.
Science and ethics
Jekyll is a scientist who oversteps. Lanyon, the orthodox counterpart, calls Jekyll's work 'unscientific balderdash'. The novella engages with Gothic anxieties about science unmoored from moral oversight.
Reputation
Almost every named character (Utterson, Enfield, Lanyon, Jekyll) is preoccupied with keeping reputation intact, often at the cost of truth. The conspiracy of silence between gentlemen is itself part of what enables Jekyll's experiment.
Setting and atmosphere
London is presented as a fog-bound, divided city — respectable streets concealing back doors into criminal lives. The setting is itself a metaphor for the novella's psychology.
Religion and morality
Stevenson's Calvinist upbringing shows in the framing of Hyde as a kind of devil. The novella inherits the Gothic tradition's interest in sin, salvation and damnation.
Characters
| Character | Role |
|---|---|
| Dr Henry Jekyll | Wealthy, respected London doctor. Author of the experiment that creates Hyde. Articulate, conflicted, ultimately destroyed by his own creation. |
| Mr Edward Hyde | Jekyll's violent alter-ego. Described as small, ugly, somehow deformed in a way no one can pinpoint. Tramples a child; murders Sir Danvers Carew. |
| Gabriel John Utterson | London lawyer and the novella's primary narrator. Loyal, discreet, drawn into the mystery through professional concern for Jekyll's will. |
| Dr Hastie Lanyon | Jekyll's old friend, a conventional doctor who has fallen out with Jekyll over his 'unscientific' research. Witnesses the transformation and dies of shock. |
| Mr Enfield | Utterson's cousin and walking companion. Tells the opening story of Hyde trampling a child. Embodies the gentleman's code of discreet silence. |
| Sir Danvers Carew | A respected MP whose violent murder by Hyde brings the case into public scandal. |
| Poole | Jekyll's butler. Loyal, terrified by the late-stage changes in his master. Helps Utterson break into Jekyll's laboratory. |
Context (AO3)
Stevenson wrote Jekyll and Hyde in 1886, supposedly in three days after a vivid nightmare. He famously burnt the first draft after his wife criticised the morality, then rewrote it.
The 1880s saw intense Victorian anxiety about the hidden life of the respectable city. The Jack the Ripper murders of 1888 (two years after publication) crystallised public fear of a doubled London where respectable streets concealed criminal violence — Stevenson's novella reads as eerily prescient.
Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species (1859) had unsettled the idea of fixed human nature. By the 1880s, theories of 'degeneration' suggested that civilisation could regress into savagery — a context that frames Hyde's near-simian descriptions.
The novella sits in the Gothic tradition (Frankenstein, Dracula a decade later) and prefigures Freudian psychoanalysis. Stevenson explicitly uses the language of layered selves and hidden drives a decade before Freud published his theories of the unconscious.
London itself is a Victorian character. The fog, the divided districts, the locked doors that lead from grand townhouses into squalid courtyards — Stevenson uses the geography of the city as a structural metaphor for the divided self.
Quotations to know
- "Man is not truly one, but truly two."
- "Something troglodytic."
- "The very pink of the proprieties."
- "With ape-like fury."
- "O God! I screamed, and O God! again and again."
- "It was Hyde, after all, and Hyde alone, that was guilty."
Memorise short quotations that can be redeployed across multiple essay questions.
FAQ
- Is Jekyll and Hyde a novel or a novella?
- A novella — around 26,000 words, similar in length to A Christmas Carol. The compactness is part of why it remains a popular GCSE choice.
- When does the reader find out Jekyll and Hyde are the same person?
- Not until the final two chapters (Lanyon's letter and Jekyll's full confession). Stevenson constructs the first eight chapters as a mystery from Utterson's perspective. Most modern readers know the twist in advance — Victorian readers did not.
- What does Hyde represent?
- On the literal level, Jekyll's repressed urges set free. Symbolically, the lower self that Victorian respectability tried to suppress — animality, violence, sexuality. Critics also read him as a figure of degeneration, the Darwinian fear of evolutionary regression.
- Why are descriptions of Hyde so vague?
- Stevenson deliberately makes Hyde's deformity indescribable. Every witness says he 'feels' deformed without being able to specify how. This forces the reader to do the imaginative work and prevents Hyde from becoming a fixed, manageable monster.
- Is Jekyll a victim or a villain?
- Both. Jekyll's confession treats himself as a victim of his own potion, but Stevenson is careful to show that Jekyll chose to create Hyde, chose to indulge him, and is therefore morally responsible for what Hyde does. The novella refuses to absolve him.