Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

by Robert Louis Stevenson

Babylonian finger

so many references

and it fell out with me, as it falls with so vast a majority of my fellows, that I chose the better part and was found wanting in the strength to keep to it.

I was still cursed with my duality of purpose; 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.

Hyde in danger of his life was a creature new to me; shaken with inordinate anger, strung to the pitch of murder, lusting to inflict pain.

He, I say—I cannot say, I. That child of Hell had nothing human; nothing lived in him but fear and hatred.

It was no longer the fear of the gallows, it was the horror of being Hyde that racked me.

I still hated and feared the thought of the brute that slept within me, and I had not of course forgotten the appalling dangers of the day before; but I was once more at home, in my own house and close to my drugs; and gratitude for my escape shone so strong in my soul that it almost rivalled the brightness of hope.

At all hours of the day and night, I would be taken with the premonitory shudder; above all, if I slept, or even dozed for a moment in my chair, it was always as Hyde that I awakened.

The powers of Hyde seemed to have grown with the sickliness of Jekyll.

Hence the ape-like tricks that he would play me, scrawling in my own hand blasphemies on the pages of my books, burning the letters and destroying the portrait of my father; and indeed, had it not been for his fear of death, he would long ago have ruined himself in order to involve me in the ruin. But his love of life is wonderful; I go further: I, who sicken and freeze at the mere thought of him, when I recall the abjection and passion of this attachment, and when I know how he fears my power to cut him off by suicide, I find it in my heart to pity him.

About a week has passed, and I am now finishing this statement under the influence of the last of the old powders. This, then, is the last time, short of a miracle, that Henry Jekyll can think his own thoughts or see his own face (now how sadly altered!) in the glass.

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 was tubercular during most of his adult life, a kind of invalid. “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was written in bed, at Bournemouth on the English Channel, in 1885 in between hemorrhages from the lungs,” as Vladimir Nabokov tells us in his Lectures on Literature.

“Hunted, houseless,” he kills himself, and thus destroys Hyde, the monkey man. Virtue wins, and we have a completed history, if you trust Jekyll's account.

November 13, 1850,

SCORPIO - i'm expecting lots, bestie

The kindly author of Jekyll and Hyde went down to the cellar to fetch a bottle of his favorite burgundy, uncorked it in the kitchen, abruptly cried out to his wife, “What's the matter with me, what is this strangeness, has my face changed?”—and fell to the floor.