When Mr. Utterson, a London solicitor, learns that his old friend Dr. Jekyll has secretly bequeathed everything to the detestable Mr. Hyde, he embarks on an investigation that leads from fog-shrouded doorways to murder and finally to a terrible revelation: Jekyll has been chemically transforming himself into his own darker counterpart, only to find that Hyde grows stronger with each emergence while the drug that sustains him slowly fails. The consequences of playing God with one's own soul unfold with relentless inevitability toward a conclusion where neither self survives intact.
Would the doctor be wise and let him leave with the glass? Or would curiosity command him to stay and witness something that would blast his sight and stagger the disbelief of Satan? Lanyon, having come too far to turn back, chose to remain.
Hyde raised the glass and drank. A cry tore from him; he reeled, clutched the table, and seemed to swell. His face blackened, his features melted and altered. Lanyon sprang back against the wall, arms raised against the prodigy, screaming to God. Where Hyde had stood, Henry Jekyll now swayed—pale, shaken, half-fainting, groping like a man restored from death.
What Jekyll told him in the next hour, Lanyon could not bring himself to write. His soul sickened; sleep abandoned him; deadly terror sat with him at all hours. He knew he would die soon, shaken to his roots, yet still half-incredulous. One fact alone he would state: the creature who had entered his house that night was Edward Hyde, hunted throughout England as the murderer of Sir Danvers Carew.
Then came Jekyll’s own confession. Born to fortune and endowed with talent, he had seemed guaranteed an honorable future. Yet from early manhood he had concealed his pleasures behind a grave public countenance, creating a profound duplicity. He was no hypocrite—both sides were earnest—but the division between his aspirations and his indulgences cut deeper than in most men.
His scientific studies, tending toward the mystic and transcendental, illuminated this inner war. He concluded that man is not truly one but truly two—perhaps even a “polity of multifarious denizens.” The separation of these elements became his cherished daydream: if each nature could be housed in a separate identity, life would be relieved of all that was unbearable.
Jekyll discovered that certain agents could shake and pluck back the fleshly vestment, as wind tosses curtains. He compounded a drug that could dethrone the ruling nature and substitute another form—one no less natural because it expressed the lower elements of his soul. He hesitated, knowing he risked death, but the temptation of discovery overcame fear.
Late one accursed night, he drank the potion. Grinding pain, deadly nausea, and spiritual horror seized him. Then the agony subsided, and he felt strangely renewed—lighter, younger, filled with a heady recklessness and a solution of the bonds of obligation. He knew himself to be more wicked, and the thought delighted him.
Venturing to his bedroom, he saw Hyde’s face for the first time: smaller, slighter, younger than Jekyll, with evil written broadly upon it. Yet he felt no repugnance—only welcome. This, too, was himself, more “express and single” than his divided former countenance. Hyde, alone among mankind, was pure evil.
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