The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

by Robert Louis Stevenson

Mr. Utterson the lawyer was a man of a 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.

austere

“I let my brother go to the devil in his own way.”

His friends were those of his own blood or those whom he had known the longest; his affections, like

ivy, were the growth of time, they implied no aptness in the object.

gaiety

sordid

“Did you ever remark that door?” he

“It is connected in my mind,” added he, “with a very odd story.”

I knew what was in his mind, just as he knew what was in mine;

apocryphal,

damnable

Hyde.”

There is something wrong with his appearance; something displeasing, something down-right detestable. I never saw a man I so disliked, and yet I scarce know

why.

He began to go wrong, wrong in mind; and though of course I continue to take an interest in him for old sake’s sake, as they say, I see and I have seen devilish little of the man.

he thought the mystery would lighten and perhaps roll altogether away, as was the habit of mysterious things when well examined.

At least it would be a face worth seeing: the face of a man who was without bowels of mercy:

“If he be Mr. Hyde,” he had thought, “I shall be Mr. Seek.”

“You will not find Dr. Jekyll; he is from home,”

apropos,

troglodytic,

pede claudo,

contrived

gaiety.

“I am painfully situated, Utterson; my position is a very strange—a very strange one. It is one of those affairs that cannot be mended by talking.”

I will tell you one thing: the moment I choose, I can be rid of Mr. Hyde. I

accosted

trifling;

The old gentleman took a step back, with the air of one very much surprised and a trifle hurt; and at that Mr. Hyde broke out of all bounds and clubbed him to the earth.

trampling his victim under foot and hailing down a storm of blows, under which the bones were audibly shattered and the body jumped upon the roadway. At the horror of these sights and sounds, the maid fainted.

insensate

grave countenance

conflagration;

This was the home of Henry Jekyll’s favourite; of a man who was heir to a quarter of a million sterling.

connoisseur;

Only on one point were they agreed; and that was the haunting sense of unexpressed deformity with which the fugitive impressed his beholders.

baize;

“Utterson, I swear to God,” cried the doctor, “I swear to God I will never set eyes on him again. I bind my honour to you that I am done with him in this world. It is all at an end. And indeed he does not want my help; you do not know him as I do; he is safe, he is quite safe; mark my words, he will never more be heard of.”

“Henry Jekyll forge for a murderer!” And his blood ran cold in his veins.

Mr. Hyde had disappeared out of the ken of the police as though he had never existed.

that that evil influence had been withdrawn, a new life began for Dr. Jekyll.

It was unlikely that the doctor should fear death; and yet that was what Utterson was tempted to suspect.

“I do not blame our old friend,” Jekyll wrote, “but I share his view that we must never meet. I mean from henceforth to lead a life of extreme seclusion; you must not be surprised, nor must you doubt my friendship, if my door is often shut even to you. You must suffer me to go my own dark way.

I have brought on myself a punishment and a danger that I cannot name.

If I am the chief of sinners, I am the chief of...

Within there was another enclosure, likewise sealed, and marked upon the cover as “not to be opened till the death or disappearance of Dr. Henry Jekyll.”

stringent

inscrutable

disconsolate