Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (Grades 9–1) York Notes

The idea of the ‘double’ is important in the book. Dr Jekyll makes a potion that divides up the good and bad parts of him. The bad part of him then gets out of control and Mr Hyde does things that Jekyll is ashamed of. He says ‘I could have screamed aloud’ after Hyde killed Carew.

Here, Dr Jekyll explains that he always felt he lived a double life because he was a respectable doctor most of the time, but kept hidden from people. He says he had ‘faults’ and ‘irregularities’. This means he did things that were embarrassing or bad. He realised both the good bits and the bad bits were really part of him, but he still tried to split them up. It looked like a good idea at first, because he could live a normal life but he could also have fun being Mr Hyde, which no one knew about. Then it started to go wrong when Hyde trampled on a child and murdered Carew.

Jekyll is honest in saying that both the good and the bad were equally part of him. He was not really a bad person pretending to be good, or really a good person who sometimes acted out of character. He says he was not a hypocrite, which is a person who believes one thing but does another.

Jekyll and his friend Lanyon argue about what Jekyll is doing. Lanyon is a proper scientist, who likes definite things and real experiments. He thinks Jekyll’s type of science is silly, and not really scientific. He goes a bit over the top in deciding not to talk to Jekyll any more, but after we learn that he saw Hyde transform into Jekyll it’s more understandable that he doesn’t want to have anything to do with him. This idea of the two types of science is another kind of double in the book. The book was written when people were very interested in science and in ghosts, so it would be easy to mix them up. That probably made this an exciting story for people at the time.

By taking his potion, Jekyll makes his problem worse. Now he doesn’t just feel like he’s two people, he really is two people. He needs two houses. It would be better if he got two sets of clothes, too, because Jekyll’s clothes are too big for Hyde. But then he keeps changing into Hyde without wanting to, so the bad part of him is getting stronger and bigger.

At the end of the passage, Jekyll calls his fate as a ‘dreadful shipwreck’ which is an example of an image. He sees himself as a ship sailing the sea, but he has been wrecked – destroyed by his experiment. Stevenson’s family made their money building lighthouses, which are there to prevent shipwrecks. Stevenson travelled by sea a lot in his life, and he also wrote stories set on ships, such as Kidnapped and Treasure Island, so this image is about something he is knows about.

The whole book really is about the double because Hyde is Jekyll’s double, but just the bad side of him. Jekyll doesn’t really understand what he’s done until this bit of the book, when it has all gone wrong. Then he says it’s actually OK to have two parts.