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.

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

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.

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

that was the haunting sense of unexpressed deformity with which the fugitive impressed his beholders.

With every day, and from both sides of my intelligence, the moral and the intellectual, I thus drew steadily nearer to that truth, by whose partial discovery I

have been doomed to such a dreadful shipwreck: that man is not truly one, but truly two.

even if I could rightly be said to be either, it was only because I was radically both;

I knew myself, at the first breath of this new life, to be more wicked, tenfold more wicked, sold a slave to my original evil; and the thought, in that moment, braced and delighted me like wine.

This, as I take it, was because all human beings, as we meet them, are commingled out of good and evil: and Edward Hyde, alone in the ranks of mankind, was pure evil.

All things therefore seemed to point to this; that I was slowly losing hold of my original and better self, and becoming slowly incorporated with my second and worse.