The strange case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
Mr. Utterson, a reserved London lawyer, grows troubled by his client and friend Dr. Henry Jekyll, a respected physician who has inexplicably tied his fortune to a brutish, repellent stranger named Edward Hyde. After Hyde tramples a child and later murders a prominent gentleman, Utterson investigates the sinister bond between the two men. The truth, revealed through letters and a final confession, is that Jekyll has concocted a potion that splits his nature, allowing him to transform into Hyde and indulge his darkest appetites without conscience—until the change spirals beyond his control.
Stevenson's tale endures as a chilling study of the duality within human nature, the war between respectable virtue and hidden vice. It probes the costs of repression, the seductive ease of secret sin, and the impossibility of cleanly separating good from evil. Its very title has become shorthand for a divided self, making this a foundational work of Gothic and psychological fiction.
How it begins
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. At friendly meetings, and when the wine was to his taste, something eminently human beaconed from his eye; something indeed which never found its way into his talk, but which spoke not only in these silent symbols of the after-dinner face, but more often and loudly in the acts of his life. He was austere with himself; drank gin when he was alone, to mortify a taste for vintages; and though he enjoyed the theatre, had not crossed the doors of one for twenty years. But he had an approved tolerance for others; sometimes wondering, almost with envy, at the high pressure of spirits involved in their misdeeds; and in any extremity inclined to help rather than to reprove. “I incline to Cain’s heresy,” he used to say quaintly: “I let my brother go to the devil in his own way.” In this character, it was frequently his fortune to be the last reputable acquaintance and the last good influence in the lives of downgoing men. And to such as these, so long as they came about his chambers, he never marked a shade of change in his demeanour.
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain.