Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

Reading List 2025 - Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

1st Book Finished - 2025

I have finished my first classic book of the year, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, by Robert Louis Stevenson.

Around here, we are big fans of Robert Louis Stevenson. When my children were young, we read through his book of poems, A Child's Garden of Verses. Later, we dug into Treasure Island and Kidnapped. While we love adventure stories, we don't read much science fiction. However, last year, I acquired Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and it has been sitting quietly on my shelf waiting for me.

Opening Line: "Mr. Utterson the lawyer was a man of rugged countenance, that was never lighted by a smile; cold, scanty and embarrassed in discourse; backward in sentiment; lean, long, dusty, dreary, and yet somehow lovable" (9).

The story is told from the point of view of "Mr. Utterson, the lawyer" (9). The entire opening paragraph, which is dedicated to describing Mr. Utterson, contains the following lines, a few of my favorite from the book:

"But he had an approved tolerance for others; sometimes wondering, almost with envy, at the high pressure of spirits involved in their misdeeds; and in any extremity inclined to help rather than to reprove. 'I incline to Cain's heresy,' he used to say quaintly: 'I let my brother go to the devil in his own way.' In this character it was frequently his fortune to be the last reputable acquaintance and the last good influence in the lives of down-going men" (9).

We learn with Mr. Utterson about a mysterious Mr. Hyde, who gives those he encounters 'the creeps'. This small, odd man seems to be hatred made manifest. We also learn about a dear friend and close acquaintance of Mr. Utterson, a local doctor, Mr. Jekyll. Somehow these two men, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, who are so very different, are known to one another. But how?

Spoiler Alert: Stop here, if you want to read the book for yourself and don't want to know the ending.

Eventually, Mr. Utterson learns that Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde are actually one and the same person. How? Through some strange mixture concocted by Dr. Jekyll. But why did he make and ingest this physic? The answer to this question is the central idea of the book. Dr. Jekyll was "driven to reflect deeply and inveterately on that hard law of life which lies at the root of religion" (59):

"It was on the moral side, and in my own person, that I learned to recognise the thorough and primitive duality of man; I saw that, of the two natures that contended in the field of my consciousness, even if I could be rightly said to be either, it was only because I was radically both; and from an early date, even before the course of my scientific discoveries had begun to suggest the most naked possibility of such a miracle, I had learned to dwell with pleasure, as a beloved day dream, on the thought of the separation of these elements" (59).

And here is how Dr. Jekyll explains how Mr. Hyde came into being:

"That night I had come to the fatal cross-roads. Had I approached my discovery in a more noble spirit, had I risked the experiment while under the empire of generous or pious aspirations, all must have been otherwise, and from these agonies of death and birth I had come forth an angel instead of a fiend. The drug had no discriminating action; it was neither diabolical nor divine; it but shook the doors of the prison-house of my disposition; and, like the captives of Philippi, that which stood within ran forth. At that time, my virtue slumbered; my evil, kept awake by ambition, was alert and swift to seize the occasion; and the thing that was projected was Edward Hyde. Hence, although I had now two characters as well as two appearances, one was wholly evil, and the other was still the old Henry Jekyll, that incongrous compound of whose reformation and improvement I had already learned to despair. The movement was wholly toward the worse" (62-63).

I thoroughly enjoyed Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. I have never been a science fiction fan, but the idea of the book was one with which every man struggles. Dr. Jekyll wanted a solution to the two identities at war within himself: good and evil. Unfortunately for him, the one that lived inside himself, evil, was the one that "ran forth".