Characters: Jekyll and Hyde
Dr Henry Jekyll
Jekyll is a wealthy, respected doctor and scientist. He is “a large, well-made, smooth-faced man of fifty” who hosts dinner parties and donates to charity. He represents the ideal Victorian gentleman: moral, successful and generous.
But Jekyll harbours a secret. In his “full statement,” he confesses that he always felt a duality within himself. He describes “those provinces of good and ill which divide and compound man’s dual nature.” He was not a hypocrite in the usual sense — he genuinely wanted to be good. But the pressure of Victorian respectability meant he had to suppress his desires entirely, rather than finding a healthy balance.
Jekyll does not create Hyde to be evil. He creates Hyde to experience freedom — to indulge his “undignified” pleasures without risking his reputation. The tragedy is that separating good from evil makes both sides more extreme.
Jekyll’s story follows a classic tragic pattern. His hamartia (tragic flaw) is his belief that he can control the experiment. At first, he transforms voluntarily and enjoys the freedom. Then Hyde grows stronger. The transformations become involuntary. Finally, the potion stops working, and Jekyll is trapped as Hyde permanently. His suicide is the only escape.
Stevenson suggests that repression is the true cause of Jekyll’s downfall. If Victorian society had allowed Jekyll to express all sides of himself, he would never have needed the experiment.
Mr Edward Hyde
Hyde is Jekyll’s alter ego — the physical embodiment of everything Jekyll represses. He is described as small, pale, and giving an impression of deformity. Characters who encounter him feel instinctive disgust but cannot explain why.
Hyde’s appearance is deliberately vague. Stevenson uses words like “troglodytic,” “ape-like” and “hardly human” to suggest he is less evolved than a normal person. This connects to Victorian fears about degeneration — the idea that humanity could evolve backwards.
Hyde is smaller than Jekyll because, as Jekyll explains, his evil side had been “much less exercised” — suppressed for years. This physical detail reinforces the idea that repression stunts part of the self rather than eliminating it.
Hyde’s violence escalates throughout the novella. He tramples a child (Chapter 1), murders Sir Danvers Carew with “ape-like fury” (Chapter 4), and becomes increasingly uncontrollable. Each act is more extreme than the last. Stevenson uses this escalation to show that evil, once released from restraint, does not stay moderate — it grows.
Crucially, Hyde feels no guilt. Jekyll describes him as “pure evil.” This distinguishes Hyde from Jekyll, who does feel remorse but uses the separation of identity to avoid taking full responsibility.
The Relationship Between Jekyll and Hyde
Jekyll and Hyde are not simply “good” and “evil.” Jekyll himself is not entirely good — he created Hyde out of selfish desire for freedom. And Hyde is not a separate person but a part of Jekyll that has always existed. The novella’s central argument is that everyone contains both good and evil, and that trying to deny this makes things worse.
Even in his final confession, Jekyll refers to Hyde in the third person: “He, I say — I cannot say I.” He tries to maintain the fiction that Hyde is a separate being. But this is self-deception. Jekyll created Hyde, enjoyed being Hyde, and is ultimately destroyed by Hyde. They are the same person.
Stevenson uses this self-deception to criticise Victorian society more broadly. Just as Jekyll refuses to acknowledge his darker self, Victorian society refused to acknowledge the poverty, vice and cruelty that existed beneath its respectable surface.