Presentation 1

• Dr.
Henry Jekyll - A respected doctor and friend of both Lanyon, a fellow

physician, and Utterson, a lawyer. Jekyll is a seemingly prosperous man, well
established in the community, and known for his decency and charitable works.
Since his youth, however, he has secretly engaged in unspecified dissolute and
corrupt behavior. Jekyll finds this dark side a burden and undertakes experiments
intended to separate his good and evil selves from one another. Through these
experiments, he brings Mr. Hyde into being, finding a way to transform himself in
such a way that he fully becomes his darker half.
• Mr. Edward Hyde - A strange, repugnant man who looks faintly pre-human. Hyde
is violent and cruel, and everyone who sees him describes him as ugly and
deformed—yet no one can say exactly why. Language itself seems to fail around
Hyde: he is not a creature who belongs to the rational world, the world of
conscious articulation or logical grammar. Hyde is Jekyll’s dark side, released from
the bonds of conscience and loosed into the world by a mysterious potion.
• Mr. Gabriel John Utterson - A prominent and upstanding lawyer, well respected in
the London community. Utterson is reserved, dignified, and perhaps even lacking
somewhat in imagination, but he does seem to possess a furtive curiosity about the
more sordid side of life. His rationalism, however, makes him ill equipped to deal
with the supernatural nature of the Jekyll-Hyde connection. While not a man of
science, Utterson resembles his friend Dr. Lanyon—and perhaps Victorian society at
large—in his devotion to reasonable explanations and his denial of
the supernatural. Read an in-depth analysis of Mr. Gabriel John Utterson.
• Dr. Hastie Lanyon - A reputable London doctor and, along with Utterson, formerly
one of Jekyll’s closest friends. As an embodiment of rationalism, materialism, and
skepticism, Lanyon serves a foil (a character whose attitudes or emotions contrast
with, and thereby illuminate, those of another character) for Jekyll, who embraces
mysticism. His death represents the more general victory of supernaturalism over
materialism in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Read an
in-depth analysis of Dr. Hastie Lanyon
• .
• Mr. Poole - Jekyll’s butler. Mr. Poole is a loyal servant, having worked for the
doctor for twenty years, and his concern for his master eventually drives him to
seek Utterson’s help when he becomes convinced that something has
happened to Jekyll.
• Mr. Enfield - A distant cousin and lifelong friend of Mr. Utterson. Like Utterson,
Enfield is reserved, formal, and scornful of gossip; indeed, the two men often
walk together for long stretches without saying a word to one another.
• Mr. Guest - Utterson’s clerk and confidant. Guest is also an expert in
handwriting. His skill proves particularly useful when Utterson wants him to
examine a bit of Hyde’s handwriting. Guest notices that Hyde’s script is the
same as Jekyll’s, but slanted the other way.
• Sir Danvers Carew - A well-liked old nobleman, a member of Parliament, and a
client of Utterson.
• Themes
• Themes are the fundamental and often universal ideas explored in a literary work. The Duality of Human Nature
• Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde centers upon a conception of humanity as dual in nature, although the theme does not emerge fully until the last chapter, when the
complete story of the Jekyll-Hyde relationship is revealed. Therefore, we confront the theory of a dual human nature explicitly only after having witnessed all of
the events of the novel, including Hyde’s crimes and his ultimate eclipsing of Jekyll. The text not only posits the duality of human nature as its central theme but
forces us to ponder the properties of this duality and to consider each of the novel’s episodes as we weigh various theories.
• Jekyll asserts that “man is not truly one, but truly two,” and he imagines the human soul as the battleground for an “angel” and a “fiend,” each struggling for
mastery. But his potion, which he hoped would separate and purify each element, succeeds only in bringing the dark side into being—Hyde emerges, but he has
no angelic counterpart. Once unleashed, Hyde slowly takes over, until Jekyll ceases to exist. If man is half angel and half fiend, one wonders what happens to the
“angel” at the end of the novel.
• Perhaps the angel gives way permanently to Jekyll’s devil. Or perhaps Jekyll is simply mistaken: man is not “truly two” but is first and foremost the primitive
creature embodied in Hyde, brought under tentative control by civilization, law, and conscience. According to this theory, the potion simply strips away the
civilized veneer, exposing man’s essential nature. Certainly, the novel goes out of its way to paint Hyde as animalistic—he is hairy and ugly; he conducts himself
according to instinct rather than reason; Utterson describes him as a “troglodyte,” or primitive creature.
• Yet if Hyde were just an animal, we would not expect him to take such delight in crime. Indeed, he seems to commit violent acts against innocents for no reason
except the joy of it—something that no animal would do. He appears deliberately and happily immoral rather than amoral; he knows the moral law and basks in
his breach of it. For an animalistic creature, furthermore, Hyde seems oddly at home in the urban landscape. All of these observations imply that perhaps
civilization, too, has its dark side.
• Ultimately, while Stevenson clearly asserts human nature as possessing two aspects, he leaves open the question of what these aspects constitute. Perhaps they
consist of evil and virtue; perhaps they represent one’s inner animal and the veneer that civilization has imposed. Stevenson enhances the richness of the novel
by leaving us to look within ourselves to find the answers.
• The Importance of Reputation
• For the characters in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, preserving one’s reputation emerges as all important. The prevalence of this value system is evident in the way that
upright men such as Utterson and Enfield avoid gossip at all costs; they see gossip as a great destroyer of reputation. Similarly, when Utterson suspects Jekyll first
of being blackmailed and then of sheltering Hyde from the police, he does not make his suspicions known; part of being Jekyll’s good friend is a willingness to
keep his secrets and not ruin his respectability. The importance of reputation in the novel also reflects the importance of appearances, facades, and surfaces,
which often hide a sordid underside. In many instances in the novel, Utterson, true to his Victorian society, adamantly wishes not only to preserve Jekyll’s
reputation but also to preserve the appearance of order and decorum, even as he senses a vile truth lurking underneath.

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• Dr.

Henry Jekyll - A respected doctor and friend of both Lanyon, a fellow

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