The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

by Robert Louis Stevenson

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.”

the lawyer dreaded to behold the contents. “I have buried one friend to-day,” he thought: “what if this should cost me another?”

“That is just what I was about to venture to propose,”

Poole, here, and I are going to force our way into the cabinet. If all is well, my shoulders are broad enough to bear the blame.

The scud had banked over the moon, and it was now quite dark. The wind, which only broke in puffs and draughts into that deep well of building, tossed the light of the candle to and fro about their steps, until they came into the shelter of the theatre, where they sat down silently to wait. London hummed solemnly all around; but nearer at hand, the stillness was only broken by the sounds of a footfall moving to and fro along the cabinet floor.

There was never a day when, if you had said to me, ‘Jekyll, my life, my honour, my reason, depend upon you,’ I would not have sacrificed my left hand to help you.

Lanyon, my life, my honour, my reason, are all at your mercy; if you fail me to-night, I am lost.

by the neglect of one of them, fantastic as they must appear, you might have charged your conscience with my death or the shipwreck of my reason.

My life is shaken to its roots; sleep has left me; the deadliest terror sits by me at all hours of the day and night; and I feel that my days are numbered, and that I must die; and yet I shall die incredulous. As for the moral turpitude that man unveiled to me, even with tears of penitence, I can not, even in memory, dwell on it without a start of horror.

Certain agents I found to have the power to shake and pluck back that fleshly vestment, even as a wind might toss the curtains of a pavilion.

I have been made to learn that the doom and burthen of our life is bound for ever on man’s shoulders, and when the attempt is made to cast it off, it but returns upon us with more unfamiliar and more awful pressure.

I hesitated long before I put this theory to the test of practice. I knew well that I risked death; for any drug that so potently controlled and shook the very fortress of identity, might, by the least scruple of an overdose or at the least inopportunity in the moment of exhibition, utterly blot out that immaterial tabernacle which I looked to it to change.

I do not suppose that, when a drunkard reasons with himself upon his vice, he is once out of five hundred times affected by the dangers that he runs through his brutish, physical insensibility; neither had I, long as I had considered my position, made enough allowance for the complete moral insensibility and insensate readiness to evil, which were the leading characters of Edward Hyde. Yet it was by these that I was punished. My devil had been long caged, he came out roaring.

and as the first edge of my penitence wore off, the lower side of me, so long indulged, so recently chained down, began to growl for licence.

I am now persuaded that my first supply was impure, and that it was that unknown impurity which lent efficacy to the draught.

The birth of Edward Hyde

for if my narrative has hitherto escaped destruction, it has been by a combination of great prudence and great good luck.

Should the throes of change take me in the act of writing it, Hyde will tear it in pieces; but if some time shall have elapsed after I have laid it by, his wonderful selfishness and circumscription to the moment will probably save it once again from the action of his ape-like spite.

Here then, as I lay down the pen and proceed to seal up my confession, I bring the life of that unhappy Henry Jekyll to an end.

Stevenson’s health declined in the 1880s, but his work flourished. He wrote Treasure Island while bedridden with a likely case of tuberculosis, and followed up with The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

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