Examiner's Notes
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Read from Chapter 9 (Doctor Lanyon's Narrative) ‘He sprang to it’ to ‘you who have derided your superiors – behold!’ (pages 54–5). At this point in the novel, Dr Jekyll, transformed into Mr Hyde, reveals his experiment.
Starting with this moment in the novel, explore how Stevenson presents the relationship between Lanyon and Hyde in The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde.
Write about:
- how Stevenson presents the interaction between Lanyon and Hyde in the extract
- how Stevenson presents the relationship between Lanyon and Jekyll/Hyde in the novel as a whole.
Hyde has come to Lanyon’s house to pick up the chemicals Lanyon has collected from Jekyll’s laboratory. Jekyll doesn’t know who Hyde is and he immediately dislikes him. This is the usual thought of people seeing Hyde for the first time. So at the start of the passage, Lanyon doesn’t like Hyde and Hyde is desperate - he is frightened as he is grating his teeth and looking ‘ghastly’.
Lanyon tells Hyde to ‘Compose yourself’, meaning to calm down. Hyde changes a bit as soon as he has the chemicals. Lanyon is interested in the chemicals and describes those for a paragraph, so we don’t really see how Hyde is behaving or seeming then. When he starts talking again he has got cocky, and starts to be rude to Lanyon. He uses fancy language that is more like Jekyll’s language. He seems to make it sound bad whatever Lanyon chooses: if he doesn’t watch Hyde’s transformation, he’s missing out on something amazing, but if he does watch it’s because of the ‘greed of curiosity’. ‘Greed’ is a bad thing, so he makes it sound like Lanyon can’t control himself.
Hyde warns Lanyon that what he sees next won’t be good. It will ‘blast’ his sight, and will be so astonishing that even Satan would find it hard to believe. But Lanyon doesn’t listen to the warning because he doesn’t really believe Hyde. Hyde is pleased that Lanyon has decided to watch - he says ‘It is well’. This is mean because it is going to be bad for Lanyon.
In the rest of the story, Jekyll and Lanyon are enemies. They used to be friends but they have fallen out and don’t talk to each other any more. Lanyon has told Utterson that he regards Jekyll as dead. In this part, Hyde is rude to Lanyon, even though Lanyon has gone to get the chemicals he wanted. Hyde is really Jekyll’s alter ego but Lanyon doesn’t know that yet. Hyde is continuing Jekyll’s fight with Lanyon, but Lanyon doesn’t know that because he doesn’t know who Hyde is. So the passage carries on the relationship between the two men in the rest of the story, except that Lanyon doesn’t know it.
After this, Lanyon is horrified by seeing Hyde change into Jekyll and then hearing what Jekyll tells him (which he doesn’t tell us). He says his life is ‘shaken to its roots’ and he will die soon. Effectively, Jekyll and Hyde have killed him by letting him see the transformation and then explaining it all. So they have beaten Jekyll’s enemy. It’s too hard a punishment just because Lanyon didn’t agree with Jekyll over science. Because Hyde is so evil, though, he is willing to do this to prove that he (Jekyll) was right all along.