Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde: Summary & Analysis

Robert Louis Stevenson Gothic / Horror Novella

Published 25 September 2026 · Updated 25 September 2026

Summary of The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde

The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is an 1886 novella by Robert Louis Stevenson about Dr. Henry Jekyll, a respected London physician who develops a potion allowing him to separate his good and evil impulses into two distinct identities — his own, and the smaller, violent, amoral Edward Hyde. As Hyde commits increasingly serious crimes, including murder, Jekyll finds himself losing control over the transformations, eventually unable to prevent his darker self from taking over entirely, leading to his suicide as the only way to destroy Hyde for good.

Plot summary

Stevenson tells much of the story from the perspective of Jekyll's lawyer, Gabriel Utterson, building the novella's suspense around the mystery of Hyde's identity and his connection to the respectable Jekyll before revealing the full truth in Jekyll's own final confession.

Beginning

Lawyer Gabriel Utterson investigates a disturbing figure named Edward Hyde, who trampled a young girl in the street and who holds a strange power over Utterson's friend, the respected Dr. Henry Jekyll, having been named as the sole beneficiary of Jekyll's will. Utterson grows increasingly suspicious of Hyde and of Jekyll's unusual insistence on protecting him, despite Hyde's evident cruelty and the unease he inspires in everyone who encounters him.

Rising action

Hyde's crimes escalate, culminating in the brutal, unprovoked murder of a prominent gentleman, after which he disappears entirely, and Jekyll appears to return to his normal life and habits, resuming his friendships. But Jekyll then withdraws suddenly into complete isolation, refusing visitors, and his servant reports strange behavior suggesting someone other than Jekyll now occupies his laboratory.

Ending

Utterson and Jekyll's friend Dr. Lanyon force their way into Jekyll's laboratory and find Hyde's body, dead by suicide and wearing Jekyll's clothes. Two documents left behind reveal the full truth: Lanyon's account of having witnessed Jekyll transform into Hyde before his eyes, and Jekyll's own written confession, explaining that he created a potion to separate his moral and immoral impulses into two bodies, that Hyde grew stronger and harder to control with each transformation, and that, unable to stop involuntary transformations into Hyde and facing exposure and capture, Jekyll took his own life as the only way to end Hyde's existence as well.

Characters & setting

Stevenson withholds the full explanation until the novella's final chapters, structuring the story as a mystery whose solution recontextualizes everything that came before.

Dr. Henry Jekyll

Jekyll's desire to indulge his private, immoral impulses without damaging his public reputation drives his fatal experiment, and his gradual loss of control over the transformations dramatizes how thoroughly the darker self he tried to isolate ultimately consumes him.

Edward Hyde

Hyde represents the unrestrained, amoral aspect of Jekyll's own psyche given physical form and freedom from social consequence, growing progressively stronger and more dominant the more he is indulged, until he threatens to overwhelm Jekyll entirely.

Gabriel Utterson

Utterson's investigation provides the reader's access point into the mystery, his loyalty to Jekyll and mounting suspicion of Hyde structuring the novella's slow revelation of what is actually happening to his old friend.

Themes, symbols & analysis

Stevenson never fully separates Jekyll's guilt from Hyde's crimes, suggesting that Hyde was never a wholly separate being but an expression of capacities already present within Jekyll himself.

The duality of human nature

The novella's central argument is that every person contains both moral and immoral impulses in uneasy coexistence, and Jekyll's experiment, rather than resolving this tension by separating the two, instead reveals how inseparable and mutually dependent they actually are.

The dangers of scientific hubris

Jekyll's belief that he can safely isolate and control his darker nature through scientific experimentation proves catastrophically wrong, aligning the novella with a broader Victorian anxiety about science overreaching moral and natural limits.

Repression and Victorian respectability

Hyde's freedom to act without social consequence, contrasted against Jekyll's carefully maintained public respectability, has made the novella a lasting commentary on the psychological costs of rigid Victorian social conformity and repression.