Character Analysis
Dr Henry Jekyll
Jekyll is a wealthy, respected doctor who appears to be a model Victorian gentleman. He is “a large, well-made, smooth-faced man of fifty, with something of a slyish cast perhaps, but every mark of capacity and kindness.” The word “slyish” is crucial — even in this positive description, Stevenson hints at something hidden. Jekyll’s tragedy is not that he is evil but that he is human: he contains both good and evil and cannot accept this duality. His experiment is an attempt to be respectable and indulge his desires — to have it both ways without moral consequences.
Jekyll is ultimately a tragic figure. His flaw is not vice but the desire to escape moral accountability. He wants to sin without guilt, to be Hyde without being Hyde’s consequences. His confession reveals genuine self-knowledge (“I was in no sense a hypocrite”) but also self-deception (“the moment I choose, I can be rid of Mr Hyde”). The gap between his self-knowledge and his self-deception is what destroys him.
Jekyll has genuine self-knowledge (“both sides of me were in dead earnest”) but also dangerous self-deception (“the moment I choose, I can be rid of Mr Hyde”). He understands his duality intellectually but cannot control it practically. This makes him a tragic figure: he sees the truth but cannot act on it. His experiment is an attempt to cheat morality, and it destroys him.
Mr Edward Hyde
Hyde is described through other characters’ reactions because Stevenson never gives a detailed physical description. He is “pale and dwarfish,” gives an “impression of deformity without any nameable malformation,” and provokes instant revulsion. His violence escalates from cold indifference (trampling the child) to savage fury (the Carew murder). Hyde represents the id — the selfish, instinctive part of human nature freed from conscience.
Utterson is described as “austere with himself” — he suppresses his own pleasures (he drinks gin to mortify his taste for wine, and has not visited a theatre for twenty years). He represents the ideal Victorian gentleman: loyal, discreet, and restrained. But his very discretion is part of the problem. He suspects something is wrong with Jekyll for months but does not ask the right questions because Victorian propriety forbids intrusion into another gentleman’s private affairs.
Utterson also functions as the reader’s proxy: we discover information as he does. His rational, legal mind makes him a trustworthy guide, but his Victorian restraint means he cannot see what is right in front of him. Stevenson uses Utterson to show how respectability itself becomes an obstacle to truth.
Lanyon dismissed Jekyll’s work as “unscientific balderdash” before the events of the novella. He represents conventional Victorian science — empirical, cautious, and unwilling to explore dangerous territory. When he witnesses the transformation, the shock kills him. Lanyon is Stevenson’s comment on the limits of the conventional Victorian worldview: it can function only as long as certain truths remain hidden. Once exposed, it shatters.
Lanyon and Jekyll are foils: Jekyll pushes beyond accepted boundaries while Lanyon stays safely within them. Both are destroyed — Jekyll by his recklessness and Lanyon by the truth he refused to consider. Stevenson suggests there is no safe position: ignoring human duality is as dangerous as confronting it.
Each character represents a different response to duality: Jekyll (attempts to separate good and evil), Hyde (evil without conscience), Utterson (refuses to look too closely), Lanyon (destroyed by the truth he cannot accept). Together, they explore the Victorian dilemma: how do you live with the knowledge that civilised people contain primitive impulses?