The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde

Stevenson presents Hyde as frightening not only because he is violent but because his violence is sudden, pointless and pleasurable¹ – it erupts from nowhere and seems to belong to something pre-human. Yet the novel's final revelation is more disturbing still: Hyde is not an outsider at all, but a part of the respectable Dr Jekyll, and so a part of the Victorian gentleman.

The extract builds horror through contrast. The victim is ‘aged and beautiful’ with ‘white hair’, connotations of innocence, dignity and even holiness, while Hyde is introduced only as ‘another and very small gentleman’. His smallness is significant²: across the novel Hyde is described as stunted, which suggests that the evil side of Jekyll has been less exercised and so is less developed. Calling him a ‘gentleman’ is ironic, since his behaviour destroys every gentlemanly code, but it also hints at the truth that he is literally a gentleman in disguise.

Stevenson then shows violence erupting from almost nothing. Hyde ‘answered never a word’ and listened with ‘ill-contained impatience’, and the phrase ‘all of a sudden’ marks a shift in pace. The metaphor ‘a great flame of anger’ and the string of present participles – ‘stamping’, ‘brandishing’, ‘carrying on’ – create a frantic rhythm. The parenthesis ‘(as the maid described it)’³ reminds us that we are receiving the scene second-hand: like much of the novel, Hyde's evil is filtered through witnesses, which keeps him mysterious and makes the reader piece together the truth, as Utterson must.

The most frightening language is animalistic. Hyde attacks ‘with ape-like fury’, a simile that would have alarmed readers in 1886, a generation after Darwin's⁴ On the Origin of Species (1859). Many Victorians feared ‘degeneration’ – the idea that humans might slide back towards a more primitive state – and Hyde embodies that fear. The verbs ‘clubbed’ and ‘trampling’ are brutally physical, and the metaphor ‘hailing down a storm of blows’ turns him into a natural force with no conscience. The auditory detail that the bones were ‘audibly shattered’ and the grotesque image of the body that ‘jumped upon the roadway’ give the scene a horrifying realism, before the maid's fainting provides a final reaction for the reader to share.

This scene escalates the novel's first act of violence. In Chapter 1 Enfield describes Hyde trampling a young girl ‘like some damned Juggernaut’, an image of an unstoppable machine. There the violence was cold; here it is frenzied, showing that Hyde is growing stronger. The repetition of trampling links the two attacks⁵ and suggests a pattern rather than an accident.

Throughout the novel, Hyde also frightens because he cannot be defined. Everyone who sees him feels a deformity they cannot name, and Utterson declares that if he ever read ‘Satan's signature upon a face’, it is on Hyde's. He is called ‘troglodytic’, linking him again to primitive cave-dwellers. Poole describes him jumping ‘like a monkey’ in Chapter 8. These shifting descriptions turn Hyde into a mirror for each character's fears.

The final chapter reveals the source of this violence. In ‘Henry Jekyll's Full Statement of the Case’ Jekyll admits that ‘man is not truly one, but truly two’⁶ and that, after a period of self-restraint, ‘my devil had been long caged, he came out roaring’. He confesses that he felt ‘glee’ while beating Carew. The violence of the extract is therefore Jekyll's own repressed desire, released by a respectable man who hid his pleasures behind the strict codes of Victorian society. Stevenson's real horror is not a monster from outside, but the suggestion that a Hyde lives inside every outwardly respectable gentleman.

Stevenson's London is not a neutral backdrop but an extension of the novel's central idea¹: just as Jekyll hides Hyde, the city hides its darkness behind respectable fronts and a shifting screen of fog. Settings in the novel are deliberately divided and obscured, so that the reader, like Utterson, can never see clearly.

The fog in this extract is presented as an active, hostile force. The ‘chocolate-coloured pall’ that ‘lowered over heaven’ is funereal – a pall covers a coffin² – and it blocks out the sky, suggesting a world cut off from God or moral clarity. Military metaphors³ (‘charging and routing these embattled vapours’) turn the weather into a battlefield, mirroring the war between good and evil inside Jekyll. Even the cab ‘crawled’, a verb that makes progress towards the truth slow and uncertain.

Stevenson repeatedly uses images of shifting light. Utterson sees ‘a marvellous number of degrees and hues of twilight’; it is morning, yet it looks ‘like the back-end of evening’. Time itself seems confused. The simile ‘like the light of some strange conflagration’ suggests fire and destruction, and the adjective ‘lurid’ carries connotations of both glaring colour and sensational, shocking events – exactly the kind of crime the investigation concerns. When a ‘haggard shaft of daylight’ breaks through, even daylight is personified as exhausted and sickly. The structure of the long sentence⁴, broken by semicolons and the repeated ‘here… there… here’, imitates the flickering, fragmentary glimpses that are all anyone gets of Hyde.

The description of Soho suggests that Hyde's home matches his nature. The ‘mournful reinvasion of darkness’ personifies night as an invader, and the climax of the sentence – ‘like a district of some city in a nightmare’ – moves the setting from realism into Gothic dreamscape, reminding us that Utterson has already dreamed of Hyde moving through a city of lamps. The second paragraph's list (‘a gin palace, a low French eating house… many ragged children huddled in the doorways’) reflects respectable Victorian anxieties about poverty, drink and foreignness in parts of London. Stevenson presents these through Utterson's prejudiced eyes⁵: the word ‘blackguardly’ is the lawyer's judgement. The fog then ‘settled down again’ and ‘cut him off’, so the revelation is immediately withdrawn: the truth can be glimpsed but not held.

Across the novel, settings are divided in the same way as Jekyll himself. In Chapter 1 the by-street ‘shone out in contrast to its dingy neighbourhood, like a fire in a forest’, but its smart shop fronts are interrupted by ‘a certain sinister block of building’ with no windows, only ‘a blind forehead of discoloured wall’ and a door ‘blistered and distained’. The personification of the building as a blind face, scarred and neglected, prepares us for Hyde. The twist is that this door belongs to Jekyll's own house: its back entrance leads to his laboratory, while the front, on a square of handsome old houses, has an ‘air of wealth and comfort’. One building with two faces⁶ is the clearest symbol of the novel's duality.

This divided geography may draw on Stevenson's Edinburgh, a city split between the elegant New Town and the crowded Old Town, and it reflects the double lives that Victorian respectability encouraged. Interior settings deepen the threat: Jekyll's cabinet, reached through a former dissecting theatre, links him to the dangers of science that tampers with the body.

Finally, in ‘The Last Night’, Stevenson uses weather to build suspense: it is ‘a wild, cold, seasonable night of March’ with a pale moon ‘lying on her back as though the wind had tilted her’. The image of a toppled moon suggests a world knocked off balance. Throughout, then, setting does more than create atmosphere: it embodies the idea that respectable surfaces conceal darkness, and that the truth, like Soho in the fog, is only ever half seen.