The Short Answer
Here is the short answer to how Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde ends. Henry Jekyll and Edward Hyde are one man. A drug lets him switch. At the end, the drug stops working, he can no longer turn back into Jekyll, and the book leaves him writing his last page as himself. Full spoilers ahead, so stop here if you have not finished. I read all ten chapters, the last two in full, and I will tell you what the text says, and where it goes quiet.
The Count That Matters
Before the ending, one number. By my count the first eight chapters run to fifteen thousand, eight hundred and seventy-six words, out of about twenty-five and a half thousand. That means the secret is held back for the first sixty-two percent of the book.
Then the last two chapters tell you everything, in two documents. That is why the ending feels so sudden. It is a mystery that stops, and hands you the answer in someone else’s handwriting.
The Cabinet
Let me set the scene. It is a March night. Poole has told Utterson that the thing in Jekyll’s cabinet is not Jekyll. They break down the red door with an axe. It takes five blows.
Inside, the room looks quiet. A fire, a kettle, tea things laid out. On the carpet lies a man, still twitching. It is Hyde, in clothes far too large for him, with a crushed phial in his hand and a smell of kernels in the air. Utterson reads it as a self destroyer. Those are his words. That is the book’s only description of how Hyde dies, and it is a guess by a lawyer.
Where Is Jekyll
They search every closet and the cellar. Cobwebs have sealed the cellar door for years. There is no trace of Jekyll, dead or alive. The key to the back door lies on the flagstones, broken and rusty.
The book never describes a body for Henry Jekyll. Here is my reading, and it is an opinion. There is no second body to find, because by the book’s own logic the man on the floor is the same man. Utterson does not understand that yet.
The Two Documents
Utterson takes a will from the desk, with his own name where Hyde’s used to be, and a note. The note says that by the time he reads this, Jekyll will have disappeared. It tells him to read Lanyon’s narrative first, and then the confession.
Lanyon’s narrative is the proof. A small man drinks a mixture in front of him, and turns into Henry Jekyll. Lanyon says he will die incredulous, and he does.
Jekyll’s statement is the explanation. He believes man is two. He made a drug to split the two, and he got Hyde. For a long time Jekyll could change back by drinking again. Then he began to wake up as Hyde without drinking. After Hyde killed Carew, Jekyll locked the door, and for months he lived well. And then, sitting on a bench in Regent’s Park in January, he changed without it.
Why the Drug Stopped
This is the part people ask about. Why did it stop? Jekyll says the salt he had was running low, and the new batches did not work. He had sent chemists all over London, in vain. His conclusion is that the first supply had an unknown impurity, and that this impurity made the draught work.
Notice that this is his theory. He says he is persuaded. The book does not say whether he is right. The note Poole shows Utterson, begging for the old sample because the new one is impure, matches this.
Who Killed Hyde
So who killed Hyde? Look at what the confession gives us. Jekyll writes that Hyde is afraid of the gallows, and that Hyde fears Jekyll’s power to cut him off by suicide. He asks, will Hyde die upon the scaffold, or will he find courage to release himself at the last moment? He says he does not know.
Then Utterson finds the body with the crushed phial and the smell of kernels. The book never shows the moment. My reading, and it is an opinion, is that the man on the carpet took his own life, because there was nowhere left to go. But the text does not say whether it was Jekyll or Hyde who lifted the phial. That is the point of the ending.
Small Mysteries
A few small things people ask. Why did the key look rusty? Jekyll says that after the murder he locked the door and ground the key under his heel. The broken, rusty key by the street door fits that, though the book does not make the link. That is my guess.
Why was the new will not destroyed? Utterson wonders about it. Jekyll says Hyde hated him and played ape-like tricks, scrawling blasphemies in his books and burning his letters. The pious book Utterson finds in the cabinet, annotated with startling blasphemies in Jekyll’s own hand, fits that. But the book gives no direct answer.
And what happens to Utterson? Nothing. The last chapter is a document. We never go back to the lawyer’s study, and we never learn what he does with it.
Lanyon’s Midnight
Since this is the proof, here it is in order. A registered letter from Jekyll tells Lanyon to rescue a drawer from the cabinet, and bring it home. In the drawer are some powders, a red liquid in a phial, and a notebook of dates, mostly one line each. One entry says double, about six times. One, very early, says total failure, with three exclamation marks.
At midnight a small man in oversized clothes arrives. He mixes a few drops of the liquid with a powder. The mixture changes colour, to purple, then to green. He offers Lanyon a choice, to leave, or to see. Lanyon stays. The man drinks, his face seems to melt, and Henry Jekyll stands there. That is the moment the book finally tells us.
Clues You May Have Missed
Go back and the clues are everywhere. The signature on the first cheque is real. The will gives everything to Hyde, and Hyde has a key to the laboratory door. Jekyll swears he can be rid of Hyde the moment he chooses. The note from Hyde has almost the same handwriting as Jekyll’s, and Jekyll says it was handed in, but Poole says nothing came. Hyde was never photographed. Utterson even dreams of a figure that has no face.
And at the window, in chapter seven, Jekyll’s smile is struck off his face in the middle of a sentence. In my reading, that is a change coming on, in public, between two men standing in a courtyard.
Jekyll’s Choice
There is one more beat in the confession that explains the ending. Jekyll tells us he had to choose between his two lives. If he stayed Jekyll, he would die to the old appetites. If he stayed Hyde, he would be despised and friendless. And Hyde would not even be conscious of what he had lost.
He chose Jekyll. He says that he chose the better part, and was found wanting in the strength to keep to it. He kept the house in Soho and Hyde’s clothes, and two months later he drank again. That is what the book is really about. Not a potion, but a man who chose well once and then left the door unlocked.
The Final Hour
After the park, Hyde takes over. Jekyll writes that he can only wear his own face with the drug, and that he falls asleep as Hyde. Hyde hates him, and Jekyll, in turn, finds in his heart a pity for Hyde. Then the salt runs out.
He says he is writing his last pages under the last of the old powders. Half an hour from now, he says, he will become Hyde forever. He does not tell us whether the scaffold or the phial waits. The page ends, and that is the ending.
What It Means
Here is my reading, and it is an opinion. The ending is not about a monster. It is about a respectable man who did not want to be seen, and who built a way to be someone else without paying for it. Jekyll says men have hired bravos to commit their crimes, but he was the first to do it for his pleasures, with himself as the hired man. The price was his own identity.
Jekyll’s last words are about the end of Henry Jekyll’s life, not the end of Hyde’s. He writes in his final lines that he is bringing the life of that unhappy Henry Jekyll to an end. The book stops there. It leaves you with the pen set down, a sealed envelope, and a lawyer who finally has to know.
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