Let me start this with a story. Take your mind to London, October of 1886. A cold night where the fog of London spills into the streets from the alleyways; the wet cobble stones shine like silver in the moonlight and the orange glow from the candle lit streetlights seems to be swallowed in the cold of the dark. A London lawyer named John Gabriel Utterson investigates some dreadfully strange occurrences between his old friend, Dr. Henry Jekyll, and the evil Edward Hyde, a vial doppelganger described as “pure evil”.

This story is about a man who, in an alternative state of mind, commits multiple murders and other atrocities. When Dr. Jekyll comes to the realization of his own guilt, suicide seems his only option to forever silence his murderous side. And yet Mr. Hyde, somehow manages to survive. He has come into his own just as the true Dr. Jekyll.

On their weekly walk, an eminently sensible, trustworthy lawyer named Mr. Utterson listens as his friend Enfield tells a gruesome tale of assault. The tale describes a sinister figure named Mr. Hyde who tramples a young girl, disappears into a door on the street, and reemerges to pay off her relatives with a check signed by a respectable gentleman. Since both Utterson and Enfield disapprove of gossip, they agree to speak no further of the matter. It happens, however, that one of Utterson’s clients and close friends, Dr. Jekyll, has written a will transferring all of his property to this same Mr. Hyde. Soon, Utterson begins having dreams in which a faceless figure stalks through a nightmarish version of London.

Puzzled, the lawyer visits Jekyll and their mutual friend Dr. Lanyon to try to learn more. Lanyon reports that he no longer sees much of Jekyll, since they had a dispute over the course of Jekyll’s research, which Lanyon calls “unscientific balderdash.” Curious, Utterson stakes out a building that Hyde visits—which, it turns out, is a laboratory attached to the back of Jekyll’s home. Encountering Hyde, Utterson is amazed by how undefinably ugly the man seems, as if deformed, though Utterson cannot say exactly how. Much to Utterson’s surprise, Hyde willingly offers Utterson his address. Jekyll tells Utterson not to concern himself with the matter of Hyde.

A year passes uneventfully. Then, one night, a servant girl witnesses Hyde brutally beat to death an old man named Sir Danvers Carew, a member of Parliament and a client of Utterson. The police contact Utterson, and Utterson suspects Hyde as the murderer. He leads the officers to Hyde’s apartment, feeling a sense of foreboding amid the eerie weather—the morning is dark and wreathed in fog. When they arrive at the apartment, the murderer has vanished, and police searches prove futile. Shortly thereafter, Utterson again visits Jekyll, who now claims to have ended all relations with Hyde; he shows Utterson a note, allegedly written to Jekyll by Hyde, apologizing for the trouble he has caused him and saying goodbye. That night, however, Utterson’s clerk points out that Hyde’s handwriting bears a remarkable similarity to Jekyll’s own.

For a few months, Jekyll acts especially friendly and sociable, as if a weight has been lifted from his shoulders. But then Jekyll suddenly begins to refuse visitors, and Lanyon dies from some kind of shock he received in connection with Jekyll. Before dying, however, Lanyon gives Utterson a letter, with instructions that he not open it until after Jekyll’s death. Meanwhile, Utterson goes out walking with Enfield, and they see Jekyll at a window of his laboratory; the three men begin to converse, but a look of horror comes over Jekyll’s face, and he slams the window and disappears. Soon afterward, Jekyll’s butler, Mr. Poole, visits Utterson in a state of desperation: Jekyll has secluded himself in his laboratory for several weeks, and now the voice that comes from the room sounds nothing like the doctor’s. Utterson and Poole travel to Jekyll’s house through empty, windswept, sinister streets; once there, they find the servants huddled together in fear. After arguing for a time, the two of them resolve to break into Jekyll’s laboratory. Inside, they find the body of Hyde, wearing Jekyll’s clothes and apparently dead by suicide—and a letter from Jekyll to Utterson promising to explain everything.

Utterson takes the document home, where first he reads Lanyon’s letter; it reveals that Lanyon’s deterioration and eventual death were caused by the shock of seeing Mr. Hyde take a potion and metamorphose into Dr. Jekyll. The second letter constitutes a testament by Jekyll. It explains how Jekyll, seeking to separate his good side from his darker impulses, discovered a way to transform himself periodically into a deformed monster free of conscience—Mr. Hyde. At first, Jekyll reports, he delighted in becoming Hyde and rejoiced in the moral freedom that the creature possessed. Eventually, however, he found that he was turning into Hyde involuntarily in his sleep, even without taking the potion. At this point, Jekyll resolved to cease becoming Hyde. One night, however, the urge gripped him too strongly, and after the transformation he immediately rushed out and violently killed Sir Danvers Carew. Horrified, Jekyll tried more adamantly to stop the transformations, and for a time he proved successful; one day, however, while sitting in a park, he suddenly turned into Hyde, the first time that an involuntary metamorphosis had happened while he was awake.

The letter continues describing Jekyll’s cry for help. Far from his laboratory and hunted by the police as a murderer, Hyde needed Lanyon’s help to get his potions and become Jekyll again—but when he undertook the transformation in Lanyon’s presence, the shock of the sight instigated Lanyon’s deterioration and death. Meanwhile, Jekyll returned to his home, only to find himself ever more helpless and trapped as the transformations increased in frequency and necessitated even larger doses of potion in order to reverse themselves. It was the onset of one of these spontaneous metamorphoses that caused Jekyll to slam his laboratory window shut in the middle of his conversation with Enfield and Utterson. Eventually, the potion began to run out, and Jekyll was unable to find a key ingredient to make more. His ability to change back from Hyde into Jekyll slowly vanished. Jekyll writes that even as he composes his letter he knows that he will soon become Hyde permanently, and he wonders if Hyde will face execution for his crimes or choose to kill himself. Jekyll notes that, in any case, the end of his letter marks the end of the life of Dr. Jekyll. With these words, both the document and the novel come to a close.

Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is the original title of a novella written by the famous Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson. The work is commonly associated with the rare mental condition often spuriously called “split personality”, where within the same body there exists more than one distinct personality. In this case, there are two personalities within Dr. Jekyll, one apparently good and the other evil; completely opposite levels of morality.

However, may I argue that the “dual personalities” interpretation is overly-simplistic? Jekyll himself notes that a person may be divided into many more than two distinct personalities — he expects that researchers in the future will discover that a person is made up of many different “selves”.  Another interpretation I may offer is the “civilized versus animalistic” approach. The description of Hyde as an almost pre-human creature and his actions that occur without thought, suggests that Hyde is more animal than man. Dr. Jekyll on the other hand, can be seen as existing in a constant state of repression, with the only thing controlling his urges being the possible consequences imposed by civilized society.

One branch of philosophy insists that human beings are ‘dual creatures’. By this is meant the animalistic side of a human being, being separate from man’s unique ability of rational thinking. This duality in humans is the not quite so obvious ‘lower level’ of meaning in Robert Louis Stevenson’s allegory The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The much more obvious, ‘higher level’ of meaning is that of a horror mystery. Stevenson puts across this duality in every human mainly through Henry Jekyll and Edward Hyde. The story also demonstrates how an innocent curiosity about our darker side of our nature can get out of hand. In all of us there is a seed of evil.

Anyone having read the book will know that Henry Jekyll turns into Mr. Hyde when having consumed a special potion. The brew awakens a dormant or hidden character; this is emphasized by a physical mutation. This physical mutation from a tall, slim, man of older age to a, younger, stronger, smaller and hairier build has an important imagery to it. The contrast between the suave, distinguished gentleman and the impulsive ‘animal’ is notable. Dr. Jekyll’s clothes do not fit Mr. Hyde; they are too small for him. Hyde therefore personifies the idea that the primitive evil is smaller, and that it can be controlled. Dr. Jekyll is a socially acceptable, repressed individual who still has a dark side. He can hide it though. Hyde on the other hand is the completely liberated.

Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde don’t represent ‘good’ and ‘evil’. The experiment described in Jekyll’s letter didn’t turn out as it was intended, which was to fully separate good and evil, with a character embodying each side. Instead, Hyde seems to personify the pure evil side of human nature. But Jekyll on the other hand, is not of pure good nature, he represents the control one has (or not!) over primitive spontaneous passions and desires. Dr. Jekyll thus symbolizes the idea of repression in a respectable individual. Hyde is completely liberated from Jekyll’s repression through the potion. He is the boundless entity that gives in to all desires. Hyde is not purely evil either, after having ‘trampled calmly’ a little, girl, Hyde himself speaks in a sincere manner and offers compensation for his acts. In that way, both sides of Jekyll are both good and evil.

The two characters also don’t make a divide between love and hate. Hyde does seem to have self-love; he dedicates himself to his egotistic desires, and in this sense seems to fulfill his need for both love and hate. Jekyll is seems more subdued, he feels both of these emotions, but has control over them. He does this in order to confirm to society. One could say that the underlying basis of this duality in Jekyll is his desire to be closer to what he feels from his ‘lesser’ self. He can’t behave the way he wants to because of the risk of the loss of his high social status, one of a respectable gentleman. In the disguise of Hyde, he can lurk around Soho and other dark, red-light districts, where he can fulfill his sinister desires, without putting his important reputation at risk.

In the last chapter Henry Jekyll claims to have control over Hyde. He says he can be rid of him when he chooses to. He is addicted to his other side nonetheless. Near the end, the reader learns that his excursions as Mr. Hyde are more and more frequent. This addiction and need to succumb to his primitive self develops into an almost complete loss of control. This is conveyed when Utterson and Enfield decide to go visit Jekyll, who has decided to close himself off completely, even from his friends and servants. Jekyll seems to be very weak at that time, reflecting his ‘weaknesses’ on controlling Hyde. He has to make his leave, because of what seems to be a ‘Hyde impulse’ he is trying to hide. He can control this impulse fully, so he has to hide away from his friends.

One could also assume that the duality in Stevenson’s novel is about a curiosity of, or the need to discover one’s primitive impulsive side. If we look at Utterson’s character, there is also this need to know about Hyde. When Mr. Enfield tells about Hyde, Utterson develops on obsession in knowing more about the mysterious dark character. He goes as far as being tempted ‘to disregard the prohibition’ of reading Dr. Lanyon’s narrative, which is only meant to be read if Dr. Henry Jekyll died or disappeared. In this way he also illustrates the existence of duality in every individual. He does restrain himself to following through his desire though, which shows that one has control over their animalistic side.

The moral of this interesting story is that which many Christians recite daily: “Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil”. One needs to be in control of their darker side of human nature, and to stop this seed of evil from growing larger. Perhaps, the moral is that we cannot control evil once unleashed. Jekyll tries to ‘use’ Hyde to give in to his temptations without damaging his social position. This spirals out of control. The cost of Jekyll’s curiosity turned out to be a deadly reversal of dominance.

There great lessons to learn from the this strange case of Dr. Jekyll. Which side of our selves will we choose to foster and which will we choose to subdue. If I have come here to learn, to subdue my passions and improve myself, it seems clear to me that I will do all I can to become a better man. Sts Matthew and Luke both commented on this point when they wrote, “No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon”. I dare argue that the God and Mammon these two saints referred to are within us; deep seeded and omnipresent. Which we choose to serve is up to us through this veil of tears. That is the great gift He lovingly trusted us with.