Chapters 5-8: The Unravelling
Chapter 5: The Incident of the Letter
After the Carew murder, Utterson visits Jekyll. He finds Jekyll in his cabinet — the private room behind his laboratory — looking “deathly sick.” Jekyll claims he has received a letter from Hyde, promising never to return. Jekyll tells Utterson the relationship is over. But when Utterson’s clerk, Mr Guest, compares Hyde’s letter with a sample of Jekyll’s handwriting, he discovers the two are almost identical. Utterson is horrified: “Henry Jekyll forge for a murderer!” He suspects Jekyll is covering for Hyde, but the real explanation — that they are the same person — is far worse than anything Utterson can imagine.
Stevenson uses this chapter to tighten the mystery. The matching handwriting is a crucial clue, but Utterson’s rational mind cannot make the impossible leap to the truth. His reaction reveals the limits of Victorian rational thinking: some truths are too terrible for the logical mind to accept.
Chapter 6: Remarkable Incident of Dr Lanyon
Time passes. Hyde has vanished. Jekyll appears reformed — sociable, generous, and devout. For two months, he seems like his old self. Then, suddenly, Jekyll withdraws entirely. He refuses visitors. Utterson visits Dr Lanyon, hoping for information, and is shocked by what he finds.
Lanyon is a changed man. He looks as if he has received a death sentence: his face is pale, he has visibly aged, and his manner is one of deep, unshakeable terror. He declares that he has had a shock and will never recover: “I have had a shock, and I shall never recover. It is a question of weeks.” When Utterson mentions Jekyll, Lanyon reacts violently, refusing to hear his name. Something has happened between them that has destroyed Lanyon’s health and their friendship forever.
Lanyon dies shortly after this chapter. He leaves a sealed letter for Utterson, not to be opened until after Jekyll’s death or disappearance. Lanyon’s death is caused not by physical injury but by the psychological horror of what he has witnessed. Stevenson uses Lanyon’s fate to show that confronting the truth about human duality can be fatal — some knowledge destroys.
Lanyon and Jekyll represent opposing approaches to science. Lanyon is a conventional doctor — cautious, empirical, and grounded in accepted knowledge. Jekyll pushes beyond these boundaries, exploring what he calls “transcendental medicine.” Lanyon had earlier dismissed Jekyll’s work as “unscientific balderdash.” The irony is devastating: Lanyon’s rational worldview cannot survive contact with the truth. When he finally witnesses Hyde transform into Jekyll, the sight destroys him. Stevenson implies that Victorian rationalism is a fragile defence against the darker realities of human nature.
Chapter 7: Incident at the Window
This is the shortest chapter in the novella. Utterson and Enfield pass Jekyll’s window during another walk. They see Jekyll sitting by the open window, looking like a prisoner. He begins to talk to them, and for a moment it seems normal. Then “the smile was struck out of his face and succeeded by an expression of such abject terror and despair” that Utterson and Enfield can only walk away in silence, deeply shaken.
Stevenson never explains what happens in this moment. The reader later understands that Jekyll was beginning to transform involuntarily — Hyde was emerging without the potion. The horror is intensified because it happens in broad daylight, in a respectable setting, witnessed by two gentlemen who cannot comprehend what they have seen. Their reaction — walking away in appalled silence — is itself a comment on Victorian repression: faced with something terrible, they choose not to speak of it.
Chapter 8: The Last Night
Jekyll’s butler, Poole, arrives at Utterson’s house in a state of terror. He believes his master has been murdered and that Hyde is locked in the cabinet. For a week, a voice from behind the locked door has been crying out for a particular chemical, sending servants on frantic errands to pharmacists across London — but every sample is rejected as impure. Poole has heard the voice change: “Have I been twenty years in this man’s house, to be deceived about his voice?”
Poole and Utterson break down the door with an axe. Inside, they find Hyde’s body on the floor, still twitching, with a crushed phial of cyanide in his hand. He has killed himself. Jekyll is nowhere to be found. On the desk lie three documents: a new will naming Utterson as beneficiary, a short note, and a thick sealed packet containing Jekyll’s full confession.
The breaking down of the cabinet door is the novella’s climactic moment. Throughout the story, doors have symbolised the barrier between the respectable exterior and the hidden truth. When Utterson and Poole smash through, they are literally breaking through the wall of secrecy that has protected Jekyll’s double life. What they find — Hyde’s body, not Jekyll’s — is the final mystery, resolved only in the last two chapters.
Poole is a servant, not a gentleman, and his role in the climax is significant. He crosses social boundaries by going to Utterson’s house and insisting on action. His loyalty to Jekyll overrides Victorian class conventions. Poole’s terror is physical and visceral — he weeps, his face is white, and he can barely speak. Stevenson uses Poole’s raw emotion to contrast with Utterson’s controlled, rational approach. It is Poole, not Utterson, who drives the action: he provides the axe, he identifies the changed voice, and he forces the confrontation. The servant sees the truth more clearly than the lawyer.
The chapter is structured as a thriller. Stevenson builds suspense through the sound of footsteps pacing behind the locked door (“weeping like a woman or a lost soul”), the desperate search for the chemical, and the moment when Poole describes seeing the creature in the corridor — small, masked, and crying out. The reader’s heart races alongside Utterson’s. By the time the door is broken down, the tension is almost unbearable.