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.

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

“Your master seems to repose a great deal of trust in that young man, Poole,” resumed the other musingly. “Yes, sir, he does indeed,” said Poole. “We have all orders to obey him.”

Mr. Utterson had already quailed at the name of Hyde; but when the stick was laid before him, he could doubt no longer; broken and battered as it was, he recognized it for one that he had himself presented many years before to Henry Jekyll.

“I have buried one friend to-day,” he thought: “what if this should cost me another?”

that man is not truly one, but truly two.

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.

And hence, as I think, it came about that Edward Hyde was so much smaller, slighter and younger than Henry Jekyll. Even as good shone upon the countenance of the one, evil was written broadly and plainly on the face of the other.

I had now two characters as well as two appearances, one was wholly evil, and the other was still the old Henry Jekyll,

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.