If you only know me from this website, it might not be immediately obvious that one of my favorite stories of all time is The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. If you know me from anywhere else, it…… might also not be so obvious. But if you know me from my Instagram in 2020…

First off, wow, I’m surprised you stuck around this long. Like, HUH?? I’m glad I’m that interesting. Secondly, I will just say that I genuinely miss those times. I met a lot of wonderful people through Jekyll and Hyde and related media, many of whom I still follow today (though I wish I had kept in touch with more than I did). It was the first fandom in my recent memory where I felt welcomed and like a part of something. It even spurred the creation of two of my favorite characters, who are my interpretations of Jekyll and Hyde themselves! (their ToyHouse profiles are a bit sparse right now... please dont mind that! (•᷄ᴗ•᷅ ᵕ) I'm in the process of re-writing a lot of their story right now.)

This 138-year-old story is really special to me for reasons I don’t fully understand – I guess it just so happened to be one of the things my weird little brain latched on to and didn’t let go of – but hey, everyone’s got their interests, and this story is considered a classic for a reason!

The first time I can remember seeing, hearing, or otherwise consuming something related to Jekyll and Hyde was an animatic by Ink Potts when I was young. It was their Confrontation animatic, placing Pinkie Pie in the shoes of Doctor Jekyll, set to the song Confrontation from the Jekyll and Hyde Musical (more specifically, the 1994 concept album, which is my favorite version! This is also where the mildly popular tiktok audio came from – the “I’ll live inside you forever” one).

Because the video was pony-related, 11-year-old me was immediately hooked. I even made my own speedpaint inspired by the animatic, instead with Luna and Nightmare Moon, because OBVIOUSLY I would! That’s such a them song.

Outside of that, I didn’t really delve further into the source material until February of 2020, which would have been my sophomore year of high school.

I can't clearly remember why I decided to listen to the album – chances are the animatic showed up in my YouTube algorithm again – but I checked out the book from the school library that week and read it in a single study hall period. Just like six years before, I was hooked. I went searching for more content, and then I found The Glass Scientists. Another instant obsession. God, I love this story. Sage wrote it so wonderfully, and the art is gorgeous on top of that. It has some great queer representation and really manages to get you attached to the characters. I highly recommend!

Anyways...

One of the main reasons I wanted to write this little essay was, 1) to infodump about something I really love, and 2) correct some of the misconceptions about the original story that have become so mainstream due to pop culture osmosis and decades of adaptations on top of adaptations, each film straying further and further from the original point. Just note that this is not a fully comprehensive essay or analysis and doesn't explore every interpretation in-depth, or at all. This is just something I wrote for fun, and since it’s spooky season, I decided what better time to do this than now?

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A Short History

Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, written by Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson (who also wrote Treasure Island), was first published in January of 1886 by Longmans, Green & Co. And no, that's not a typo. The original title actually did not have "The" at the front.

It was first published as a penny dreadful – also called a “shilling shocker” – which are short, serialized horror stories often sold cheaply, like for a penny (or a shilling). Luckily for Stevenson, it was immediately one of his best-selling works, reaching almost 40 thousand copies sold in its first six months.

It didn't take long for stage adaptations to pop up, with the first one being produced in Boston in 1887 by Richard Mansfield and written by Thomas Russell Sullivan. This was one of the first instances of romance being introduced to the story, and subsequent adaptations followed suit in adding female love interests.

This production was so successful that Mansfield was able to bring it to London in 1888 and saw a successful 10-week run before a certain serial killer interrupted. People were so hysterical over the Jack the Ripper murders that Richard Mansfield himself was even suggested as a suspect, simply because he did too good a job at playing Mr. Hyde to not be a murderer.

Since then, the story has had numerous adaptations in all forms, including over 120 stage and film adaptations alone, and has even inspired popular characters like Two-Face and The Incredible Hulk!

So What's it About?

Contrary to what you may assume, the story is not told from the perspective of Dr. Jekyll, but from the perspective of Gabriel John Utterson, Jekyll’s good friend and lawyer, whose primary characteristic is that he is extremely boring. No joke, the literal first line of the novella describes him as such.

"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."

_{And I'll be damned if i dont love him! He's actually my favorite character.}

The story focuses on Utterson's investigation in to the strange happenings between the respected Dr. Henry Jekyll and his mysterious and scandalous new associate Mr. Edward Hyde. Utterson is especially concerned since Dr. Jekyll has recently amended his will to leave everything in the event of his death or disappearance to Hyde (a man who, up until this point, seemingly did not exist), which looks extremely suspicious at best.

(If you want a more detailed, but very entertaining summary of the plot, check out Overly Sarcastic Production's video on the novella. Its a great watch!)

The story is a slow build up to what would have been an insane twist at the time -- that Jekyll and Hyde are the same person. Nowadays, everyone and their mother already knows the twist. “Jekyll and Hyde” has even become a phrase used to describe a “split personality” or someone with “...an outwardly good but sometimes shockingly evil nature.” x

I think this is where part of the confusion lies. The watering-down of the concept into a “split personality” often leads people to falsely believe that Jekyll and Hyde are two separate consciousnesses – a man’s good side and his evil personality that takes over against his will.

This is not true.

In reality, there is no Hyde. The serum does not create a second personality; it simply changes Jekyll’s physical body. Hyde is just the name that Jekyll gives to the body he inhabits when he drinks his serum – It’s essentially a chemically-induced mask. Hyde only behaves differently because, as Hyde, Jekyll can do whatever he wants without fear of social repercussions or damage to his reputation (which was a very important thing to Victorians). In more modern words, think of Hyde as Jekyll’s anonymous burner account he uses to start arguments on Twitter.

In his confession letter, Jekyll repeatedly refers to himself in the first person when describing things Hyde had done. He even directly refers to Hyde as a disguise, and in fact, more than once, says that Hyde may even be closer to his “truest self” than Jekyll.

"And yet when I looked upon that ugly idol in the glass, I was conscious of no repugnance, rather of a leap of welcome. This, too, was myself."

"In my eyes [Hyde's appearance] bore a livelier image of the spirit, it seemed more express and single, than the imperfect and divided countenance I had been hitherto accustomed to call mine."

The further we get in his letter, the more he starts to refer to his Jekyll and Hyde identities as two different consciousnesses, with his tone becoming more dissociative. He even separates his present self as the “narrator” from the two. He seems to almost delude himself into believing that his actions were not his and instead those of another man, which contradicts everything he says near the beginning of the letter, showing the reader just how frantic and delusional he has become over the course of writing it. This also leads me to one of my biggest points:

Henry Jekyll is not meant to be a good person.

Who is Dr. Jekyll?

“...he now sat on the opposite side of the fire—a large, well-made, smooth-faced man of fifty, with something of a slyish cast perhaps, but every mark of capacity and kindness…”

Dr. Henry Jekyll, M.D., D.C.L., L.L.D., F.R.S., etc, as we’re introduced to him, is by all accounts a moral and decent older man around 50. There’s little indication he’s anything but until we meet Dr. Lanyon, one of Jekyll and Utterson’s oldest mutual friends, who briefly mentions how it’s been close to ten years since he last spoke to Jekyll, since he started to go “wrong in the mind,” and started researching “unscientific balderdash.”

It isn’t until the final chapter that we get any real elaboration. Jekyll explains that he has always struggled to balance his public persona and the behavior that was expected of him with his true desires and real self. He’s spent most of his time presenting a false persona to the public, so much so that it becomes impossible to tell his private self from his public self. Ever since he was young, he's struggled with certain “unsavory desires” he's tried to conceal and ignore.

The novel never explicitly states what these urges and impulses were, so it’s really left up to the imagination, and considering Victorian standards of decency, they could have been anything from a slightly lustful thought here and there to literally fantasizing about mass murder.

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

Jekyll states that his goal was to separate the good and evil halves of man so that each could go on to live their lives unfettered by the other. By separating these two facets of a person, he hoped to eliminate the pain and suffering caused by the contradicting desires of someone’s good and evil qualities. He was aware of the dangers of his experiment and knew very well that he could die by drinking an untested formula meant to tamper with the soul, but he was too blinded by his ambition that he had to see it through. He attributes his lopsided results – Jekyll remaining unchanged and Hyde being the culmination of his repressed and “evil” desires – to the mental state he was in when he drank the potion for the first time. He says that perhaps if he had more noble and less selfish intentions, it may have worked as he had hoped it would.

Who is Mr. Hyde?

“Mr. Hyde was pale and dwarfish, he gave an impression of deformity without any nameable malformation, he had a displeasing smile, he had borne himself to the lawyer with a sort of murderous mixture of timidity and boldness, and he spoke with a husky, whispering and somewhat broken voice”

Edward Hyde is described multiple times by multiple characters; all descriptions differ slightly, but they do have one thing in common: he is very unsettling to look at.

“Mr. Hyde had numbered few familiars—even the master of the servant maid had only seen him twice; his family could nowhere be traced; he had never been photographed; and the few who could describe him differed widely, as common observers will. Only on one point were they agreed; and that was the haunting sense of unexpressed deformity with which the fugitive impressed his beholders.”

Hyde is a blunt, rude, and oftentimes aggressive man who, contradictorily, can show a startling level of coolness in tense and volatile situations. He fills whoever looks at him with unease and general discomfort, for reasons they cannot pinpoint, and seems to be almost supernaturally impossible to describe properly.

When Jekyll describes becoming Hyde for the first time, the first thing he says is that he feels more alive than he ever has before. This new form feels familiar and natural to him, and, like stated earlier, might even be closer to his true self than his Jekyll identity was. While his appearance seems uncanny to others, he seems to feel at home with it.

He theorizes that the reason Hyde seems to leave whoever sees his face unsettled and disturbed is that he’s half of a person – normal human beings are a mix of good and evil, whereas “Edward Hyde, alone in the ranks of mankind, was pure evil.”

Jekyll acknowledges countless times in his statement that he was fully conscious of the things he was doing as Hyde and that Hyde’s desires were fully his. He accepts that he is wholly both halves of his person, both good and evil.

“I was in no sense a hypocrite; both sides of me were in dead earnest; I was no more myself when I laid aside restraint and plunged in shame, than when I laboured, in the eye of day, at the furtherance of knowledge or the relief of sorrow and suffering.”

Hyde, to reiterate, is not a separate personality. Hyde is simply Jekyll minus restraint. When he becomes Hyde, Jekyll simply releases his inhibitions and feels the rain on his skin (no one else, save for Hyde, can feel it for him). He has no reason to keep up his façade of propriety and moral righteousness when in this form, so he simply doesn’t.

In the end, Dr. Jekyll is a naive, cowardly man who, blinded by his hubris and lust for knowledge, ultimately creates the instrument of his own downfall in an attempt to selfishly indulge in his shameful desires.

The Meaning Behind the Text

In short, the story is not about a good man who drinks a potion that turns him into an evil man; it is about a bad man who drinks a potion to do bad things without consequences. I think this interpretation is closest to Robert Louis Stevenson’s original intentions.

the duality of man

His point was to reveal the uncomfortable truth that even the most upstanding, respectable, and well-intentioned person could truly, behind closed doors, be abhorrent and evil, that we are all capable of violent and sinister impulses, that evil is not something we become, but something that is already housed within us.

The morality of the era, which encouraged suppressing and shaming the most basic of human impulses, was destructive to society at large. The novella was a critique of Victorian social roles and class division; Jekyll represents the proper and good-natured high society, and Hyde represents the corrupt and debaucherous lower-class citizens of London. The two characters together embody the social fears of moral corruption and depravity that every man and woman could theoretically fall victim to. The thought that those two types of people could be one in the same would have been disturbing to a Victorian audience.

It could also be seen as a statement on how far we as humans would go under the impression of anonymity. Anonymity is tempting – people weaponize it all the time, and I’m certain you have probably taken advantage of anonymity in some capacity in the past – I know I have.

Potential Inspirations

One of Stevenson's inspirations for Dr. Jekyll may have been a friend of his, French teacher Eugene Chantrelle, who was convicted and executed for murdering his wife for her life insurance policy. Chantrelle, who, on the outside, seemed to lead a normal life, poisoned his wife with opium and was suspected of having murdered others in the past in the same way. RLS was actually present in the courtroom during his trial, and this experience no doubt put the idea for J&H in his head, or at least formed the beginnings of it.

Another inspiration for the character of Dr. Jekyll was Deacon William Brodie, a Scottish cabinet-maker, locksmith, and city council member who led a secret life as a burglar to pay for his mistresses and gambling addiction. He created wax molds of his client’s keys to use later – his reputation as a skilled locksmith led him to work in some of the richest and thus best-to-rob houses in Edinburgh. Stevenson essentially confirmed this in an interview in 1887, where he said the dream that inspired the story involved a man “being pressed into a cabinet, when he swallowed a drug and changed into another being,” then stating that he had an original Brodie cabinet in his bedroom at the time.

Addiction

A second interpretation of the story is that it is a metaphor for addiction. I think this one is rather easy to see – perhaps it’s the most straightforward of all the interpretations. It kind of goes hand in hand with the previous one: that a normal person, after ingesting a certain “concoction,” (drugs or alcohol) can become destructive and violent, almost like a monster.

Jekyll, when under the influence of his potion, feels a certain high and chases after it, and the more he feeds Hyde, the more he wants to. When he goes cold turkey, he falls into something very similar to withdrawal symptoms – it’s textbook addiction. Anyone who has struggled with addition will understand. Stevenson could have also been drawing from personal experience here – while it is never stated whether he had a problem with cocaine, he confessed at one point to having used it in the past to treat his chronic illnesses.

Homosexuality

A less-supported theory, very loosely based in reality but nonetheless possible, was that the story was an allegory for homosexuality. RLS took the name Jekyll from a friend of his, Reverend Walter Jekyll (younger brother to horticulturalist Gertrude Jekyll), who was almost certainly gay. Another of his friends, John Addington Symonds, who was also gay, said that when the story was “viewed as an allegory, it touches one too closely.” The lack of prominent female characters or love interests, and the very close relationship between Utterson and Jekyll may have had a hand in popularizing this interpretation.

This theory seems to be debunked by Stevenson himself, however. In a letter to the New York Sun, he wrote that Hyde was not “...a mere voluptuary. There is no harm in a voluptuary and … none—no harm whatever—in what prurient fools call ‘immorality.’” Whether he meant sexuality in general, or was even thinking of homosexuality when writing the letter, we might not know; but while not what he had intended, it doesn’t make this interpretation any less meaningful to those who connect with it.

Conclusion

Whatever the true point of the story may be, whether it’s one or the other, or all at once, Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde still stands as one of the most popular stories in all of English literature and one of the most influential stories in modern pop culture.

Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde isn’t a story about two men locked in an eternal struggle for control, but instead a depiction of one troubled soul divided against itself. It serves as a reminder to us all that what we perceive as good and evil are not separate concepts, but are intrinsically woven together and inseparable; one cannot exist without the other. When Jekyll tries to get rid of his darker half, he doesn’t free himself — he destroys himself. The story endures to this day because it dares to speak a truth most of us would rather ignore: that Hyde isn’t a stranger lurking in the shadows, but rather a reflection waiting in the mirror.

“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."

Afterword

If this piqued your interest in any way, I would highly encourage reading the original story yourself! It’s a relatively short read at only 140 pages, give or take, depending on the copy you pick up. Project Gutenberg, the oldest digital library, has a copy on their website for free if you’d rather read it digitally. If you prefer physical books like I do, go support your local library! There’s a very, very high likelihood that they carry this book (I would be shocked if they didn’t!). Barnes and Noble also sells a few different copies, which is where I got mine.

And even if after all that, you still have no interest in this story, I'm glad you took the time to at least read my rambling and to _{This is the copy that I own! I think the Barnes and Noble leatherbound series covers are gorgeous. (the gold is metallic!)} learn a little bit more about one of the most popular works of horror fiction in all of literary history.

I'm really glad some of you seemed interested in this when I posed the idea not too long ago -- it makes me happy to know y'all would let me ramble about my special interest and enjoy (??) reading about it. I genuinely would LOVE to hear your thoughts, if you have any, about Jekyll and Hyde and if you think I missed any important points of discussion. Please leave a comment below if you do!! ♡

Related Links

YouTube video essays

• Halloween Special: Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde - OSP breaks down the story in a fun and super easy-to-understand way. Helped me understand the story fully after I finished reading it for the first time.
• What People Get Wrong About Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde - a FANTASTIC analysis video by Zorse, which was part of the reason I had the idea to write this essay in the first place!
• The Bizzare Truth Of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde - focuses less on the story iteslf and more on the creation of it, its inspirations, and its meanings.

Films/other adaptations

• Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931) - widely considered the best film version - with Frederich March.
• Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1920) - in full on Wikipedia - with John Barrymore
• Old Time Radio Classics Radio Adaptation - a good listen, if a bit long! Drastically changes the story, but still enjoyable. You might also recognise the theme sting :)
• The Glass Scientists Webcomic - a fun and fresh take on the story. more lighthearted but still punches you in the gut sometimes
• The Search for Henry Jekyll Webcomic - another great comic adaptation that has a darker and more serious tone

Musical Bootlegs

• Jekyll & Hyde Pre-Broadway tour (1995) - a little rough, but a full bootleg of the musical. This version's with Robert Cuccoli, who is my second personal favorite actor for the show
• 1997 Version - a different performace and a little easier to watch, still with Cuccoli
• 1994 Concept Album - the full concept album on the Internet Archive. My favorite version, with Anthony Warlow. (it's also on spotify!)
• Jekyll & Hyde German Production (2008) - with Chris Murray. If you know the songs and the story but not the actual German language, it's still easy to follow. This cast is absolutely amazing!
• Jekyll & Hyde Broadway (2000) - With Rob Evan
• Jekyll & Hyde Broadway (2001), Rob Evan - filmed as a practice run for Hasselhoff's version
• Jekyll & Hyde Broadway (2001), David Hasselhoff - ah, yes. the infamous Hasselhoff version