On their weekly walk, an
eminently sensible, trustworthy lawyer named Mr. Utterson listens
as his friend Enfield tells a gruesome tale of assault. The tale describes
a sinister figure named Mr. Hyde who tramples a young girl, disappears
into a door on the street, and reemerges to pay off her relatives
with a check signed by a respectable gentleman. Since both Utterson
and Enfield disapprove of gossip, they agree to speak no further
of the matter. It happens, however, that one of Utterson’s clients
and close friends, Dr. Jekyll, has written a will transferring all
of his property to this same Mr. Hyde. Soon, Utterson begins having
dreams in which a faceless figure stalks through a nightmarish version
of London.
Puzzled, the lawyer visits Jekyll and their mutual friend
Dr. Lanyon to try to learn more. Lanyon reports that he no longer
sees much of Jekyll, since they had a dispute over the course of
Jekyll’s research, which Lanyon calls “unscientific balderdash.”
Curious, Utterson stakes out a building that Hyde visits—which,
it turns out, is a laboratory attached to the back of Jekyll’s home.
Encountering Hyde, Utterson is amazed by how undefinably ugly the
man seems, as if deformed, though Utterson cannot say exactly how.
Much to Utterson’s surprise, Hyde willingly offers Utterson his
address. Jekyll tells Utterson not to concern himself with the matter
of Hyde.
A year passes uneventfully. Then, one night, a servant
girl witnesses Hyde brutally beat to death an old man named Sir
Danvers Carew, a member of Parliament and a client of Utterson.
The police contact Utterson, and Utterson suspects Hyde as the murderer.
He leads the officers to Hyde’s apartment, feeling a sense of foreboding amid
the eerie weather—the morning is dark and wreathed in fog. When
they arrive at the apartment, the murderer has vanished, and police
searches prove futile. Shortly thereafter, Utterson again visits Jekyll,
who now claims to have ended all relations with Hyde; he shows Utterson
a note, allegedly written to Jekyll by Hyde, apologizing for the
trouble he has caused him and saying goodbye. That night, however,
Utterson’s clerk points out that Hyde’s handwriting bears a remarkable
similarity to Jekyll’s own.
For a few months, Jekyll acts especially friendly and
sociable, as if a weight has been lifted from his shoulders. But
then Jekyll suddenly begins to refuse visitors, and Lanyon dies
from some kind of shock he received in connection with Jekyll. Before
dying, however, Lanyon gives Utterson a letter, with instructions
that he not open it until after Jekyll’s death. Meanwhile, Utterson
goes out walking with Enfield, and they see Jekyll at a window of
his laboratory; the three men begin to converse, but a look of horror
comes over Jekyll’s face, and he slams the window and disappears.
Soon afterward, Jekyll’s butler, Mr. Poole, visits Utterson in a
state of desperation: Jekyll has secluded himself in his laboratory
for several weeks, and now the voice that comes from the room sounds
nothing like the doctor’s. Utterson and Poole travel to Jekyll’s
house through empty, windswept, sinister streets; once there, they
find the servants huddled together in fear. After arguing for a
time, the two of them resolve to break into Jekyll’s laboratory.
Inside, they find the body of Hyde, wearing Jekyll’s clothes and
apparently dead by suicide—and a letter from Jekyll to Utterson
promising to explain everything.
Utterson takes the document home, where first he reads
Lanyon’s letter; it reveals that Lanyon’s deterioration and eventual
death were caused by the shock of seeing Mr. Hyde take a potion
and metamorphose into Dr. Jekyll. The second letter constitutes
a testament by Jekyll. It explains how Jekyll, seeking to separate
his good side from his darker impulses, discovered a way to transform
himself periodically into a deformed monster free of conscience—Mr.
Hyde. At first, Jekyll reports, he delighted in becoming Hyde and
rejoiced in the moral freedom that the creature possessed. Eventually,
however, he found that he was turning into Hyde involuntarily in
his sleep, even without taking the potion. At this point, Jekyll
resolved to cease becoming Hyde. One night, however, the urge gripped
him too strongly, and after the transformation he immediately rushed
out and violently killed Sir Danvers Carew. Horrified, Jekyll tried
more adamantly to stop the transformations, and for a time he proved successful;
one day, however, while sitting in a park, he suddenly turned into
Hyde, the first time that an involuntary metamorphosis had happened
while he was awake.
The letter continues describing Jekyll’s cry for help.
Far from his laboratory and hunted by the police as a murderer,
Hyde needed Lanyon’s help to get his potions and become Jekyll again—but
when he undertook the transformation in Lanyon’s presence, the shock
of the sight instigated Lanyon’s deterioration and death. Meanwhile, Jekyll
returned to his home, only to find himself ever more helpless and
trapped as the transformations increased in frequency and necessitated
even larger doses of potion in order to reverse themselves. It was
the onset of one of these spontaneous metamorphoses that caused
Jekyll to slam his laboratory window shut in the middle of his conversation
with Enfield and Utterson. Eventually, the potion began to run out,
and Jekyll was unable to find a key ingredient to make more. His
ability to change back from Hyde into Jekyll slowly vanished. Jekyll
writes that even as he composes his letter he knows that he will
soon become Hyde permanently, and he wonders if Hyde will face execution
for his crimes or choose to kill himself. Jekyll notes that, in
any case, the end of his letter marks the end of the life of Dr.
Jekyll. With these words, both the document and the novel come to
a close.
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