The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is Robert Louis Stevenson's masterwork of Gothic horror and psychological terror, set in the fog-drenched streets of Victorian London. At its heart, the novel is a shattering meditation on the duality of human nature — the coexistence of virtue and vice within every soul — told through the unraveling of one brilliant but tormented man. The story opens through the eyes of Gabriel John Utterson, a reserved and dutiful London lawyer who serves as our moral compass. During a Sunday walk with his kinsman Richard Enfield, Utterson hears a disturbing tale: a small, repellent man named Edward Hyde callously trampled a young girl and paid off her family using a cheque drawn on the account of the eminently respectable Dr. Henry Jekyll. Utterson is troubled further when he reviews Jekyll's will, which bequeaths all of the doctor's estate to Hyde — a man of unknown origin who inspires instinctive loathing in all who encounter him. Utterson's quiet investigation gradually gives way to something far darker. Nearly a year later, Hyde savagely murders Sir Danvers Carew, a distinguished Member of Parliament, beating him to death on a moonlit lane with a heavy cane. The crime shocks London, Hyde vanishes, and Jekyll briefly emerges from self-imposed isolation, apparently reformed. But the respite is short-lived. Jekyll retreats once more into his laboratory, growing ever more reclusive and desperate, frantically ordering pharmaceutical supplies that arrive impure and wrong. When Poole, Jekyll's devoted butler, arrives at Utterson's door in terror — convinced his master has been murdered and an impostor is lurking in the cabinet — the two men break down the laboratory door to find Edward Hyde, dead by his own hand, dressed in Jekyll's clothes. Two documents survive: the confession of Dr. Hastie Lanyon, and Henry Jekyll's full statement of the case. Lanyon's narrative reveals the traumatic night he was summoned to retrieve a mysterious drawer from Jekyll's cabinet and hand it to a midnight visitor. Before Lanyon's disbelieving eyes, Hyde drank a potion and transformed into Henry Jekyll — a spectacle so shattering to Lanyon's rationalist worldview that it broke the man entirely. He died weeks later, his soul destroyed by what he had witnessed. Jekyll's own confession provides the devastating final truth. A man of high aspirations and secret pleasures, Jekyll had long been tormented by the contradiction between his public respectability and his private appetites. His scientific experiments led him to discover that personality itself could be chemically divided. The potion gave physical form to the darkest part of his nature — a small, vigorous, cruel creature he named Edward Hyde. As Hyde, Jekyll tasted absolute freedom from conscience, indulging impulses suppressed for decades. But the balance could not hold. Hyde grew stronger with each transformation, until Jekyll began waking as Hyde without having drunk the potion. The original salt used in the formula could not be replicated; the supply dwindled. Jekyll, trapped in the body of a hunted murderer and writing his final testament in stolen moments, understood the end had come. Hyde — despised, cornered, and doomed — chose poison over the gallows. The man who sought to free himself from his dual nature was consumed entirely by his darker half. Constructed as a mosaic of perspectives — witness accounts, a dying man's letter, a dead man's confession — the novel withholds its central secret until the very end, so that the revelation lands with the force of tragedy. The horror is profoundly human: the monster was not created in spite of Jekyll's respectability, but because of it.