Quotes from The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde

“Man is not truly one, but truly two.”

Jekyll's central claim, written in his final statement. Most readers reduce the novella to a thesis about good and evil; Stevenson is more specific. Jekyll's two are not virtue and vice but the respectable self and the appetitive self, both already present, both his. The horror of the book is not that a good man turns evil, it is that a respectable man discovers there was no good one to begin with.

“I learned to recognise the thorough and primitive duality of man; I saw that, of the two natures that contended in the field of my consciousness, even if I could rightly be said to be either, it was only because I was radically both.”

Two sentences later. The key phrase is radically both. Jekyll is not haunted by an evil twin, he is reporting a fact about his own constitution. Stevenson, writing in 1886, is anticipating Freud by twenty years: the respectable Victorian gentleman is held in being by suppression, and the suppressed material does not vanish, it waits for a chemistry that lets it out.

“I had now two characters as well as two appearances; one was wholly evil, and the other was still the old Henry Jekyll, that incongruous compound of whose reformation and improvement I had already learned to despair.”

Jekyll explaining the split's asymmetry. Hyde is wholly one thing; Jekyll remains the mixed creature he always was. Stevenson is making a precise moral observation: refining out the evil left a pure evil, but it did not leave a pure good. The mixed Jekyll, who could despair of his own improvement, is what virtue actually looks like, and the novella mourns its loss in detail.

“He must be deformed somewhere; he gives a strong feeling of deformity, although I couldn't specify the point.”

Enfield describing Hyde at the opening of the novel, before any reader knows who Hyde is. Stevenson's choice not to specify is deliberate. Hyde is morally legible at sight but physically vague: every witness senses something wrong and none can describe it. The novella is, among other things, an essay on how Victorian respectable culture tried to read character off the body, and how badly the reading works.

“I felt younger, lighter, happier in body; within I was conscious of a heady recklessness, a current of disordered sensual images running like a mill race in my fancy.”

Jekyll's first transformation into Hyde, written from inside. Notice that the experience is pleasurable: younger, lighter, happier. Stevenson is writing the appeal of the double life, not the punishment of it. The novella's argument is moral precisely because it concedes that being bad feels good first; if it did not, the story would be a fable, not a tragedy.

“I, who sicken and freeze at the mere thought of him, when I recall the abjection and passion of this attachment, and when I know how he fears my power to cut him off by suicide, I find it in my heart to pity him.”

Jekyll near the end, writing of Hyde. The pivot is the verb pity. Jekyll cannot kill himself without killing Hyde, and that is the part Hyde fears. Stevenson is making the dark suggestion that the worst part of us has its own will to live, separate from ours, and dependent on us. The horror is not that Hyde is a monster; it is that he is, in a small way, ours to keep alive.

“If he be Mr Hyde, I shall be Mr Seek.”

The lawyer Utterson, whose pun marks one of the only moments of levity in the book. The line is also a quiet declaration of method: Utterson is going to investigate not for justice but for a friend, in the discreet way Victorian gentlemen handled scandal. Stevenson uses the pun to flag that respectability has its own gravity; Utterson keeps the secret long after he knows it is dangerous.

“I make it a rule of mine: the more it looks like Queer Street, the less I ask.”

Enfield's rule for handling moral oddness in the city. Queer Street is Victorian slang for trouble, particularly financial or sexual. The rule is the novella's social engine: respectable men maintain respectability by agreeing not to look closely. Hyde can do what he does in London because the city's gentlemen have a policy of looking away.

“Hide-and-seek had played its part in the days of his youth; and now once more it was to be played in earnest.”

Stevenson's narrator turning the children's game into the novella's procedural. The pun on Hyde is not subtle; Stevenson means it. Adult life in the novel is hide-and-seek with the parts of yourself, and friends, and city, that cannot be admitted. The game is older than Hyde, and the seeking, even when sincere, is shaped by the rules of polite play.

“I bring the life of that unhappy Henry Jekyll to an end.”

Jekyll's last sentence in the novella. Notice what it does and does not concede. He calls himself unhappy, not evil. He calls his life to be ended, not his soul. Stevenson, who was raised Calvinist, is refusing the consolation of damnation; Jekyll has been a divided man, has tried a chemistry to fix the division, has failed, and the only resolution available is to stop. It is one of the bleakest endings in nineteenth century English fiction.

“I, when I had the freedom of the keys to my own life, hesitate to take it back?”

Earlier on the same page. Jekyll is questioning whether he is willing to die in order to be rid of Hyde. The freedom of the keys is the phrase to notice: Jekyll thought the experiment was about freedom, and discovers that freedom of self extends to the question of whether to keep oneself alive. The novella is a brief, devastating essay on what happens when the keys turn out to lock as easily as they unlock.