The Wrong Hero
Here is the question I want to answer. Who is the main character of Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde? Not the doctor. I counted. The lawyer, Mister Utterson, is named one hundred and thirty-one times. Jekyll, ninety-six. And in the very last chapter, Utterson is named zero times. This is a full summary, so it spoils everything, the big secret included.
You get the plot chapter by chapter, all ten, with the lawyer as our guide. I will also show you where the book hides its secret in plain sight. Every count is mine.
Which Edition
I read the Project Gutenberg text, ebook number forty-three, released in June two thousand eight. Robert Louis Stevenson’s story first came out in January eighteen eighty-six, from Longmans, Green and Company in London, as reported by Wikipedia and the Oxford Text Archive, as of November two thousand twenty-six.
By my count the ten chapters run about twenty-five and a half thousand words. That is a short book. The last two chapters are the two long documents, and together they make up about thirty-eight percent of the text. Keep that in mind, because it is the whole trick of the book.
The Door
Chapter one, Story of the Door. Mister Utterson is a dry, austere London lawyer who is, somehow, lovable. On a Sunday walk, his distant cousin Mister Enfield points at a shabby door with no bell and no knocker, and tells a story.
Three o’clock on a winter morning, a small man tramples a little girl who ran into him at a corner, and walks on calmly. Enfield catches him. The girl’s family, and a doctor who goes white with the wish to kill him, demand money. The man agrees to pay a hundred pounds. He opens that door with a key, comes back with ten pounds in gold and a cheque, signed with a respectable, well known name.
The cheque is real. Enfield cannot describe the man, only that he gives a strong feeling of deformity. His name is Hyde. Utterson goes quiet. He says he knows the name already, and the two men agree never to speak of it again.
The Will
Chapter two, Search for Mister Hyde. That night, Utterson takes out the will he keeps for his friend Doctor Henry Jekyll. It leaves everything to Edward Hyde, and if Jekyll disappears for more than three months, Hyde takes his place at once.
He asks Doctor Lanyon, an old friend of both. Lanyon says he has seen little of Jekyll for more than ten years, since Jekyll’s science went wrong, and has never heard of Hyde. So Utterson begins to haunt that door, by day and by night. He says, if he be Hyde, I shall be Seek.
At last Hyde comes, key in hand. Utterson asks to see his face, and gets a pale, small man with a husky voice, who gives an address in Soho. Utterson cannot say why he loathes him, only that the man hardly seems human. At Jekyll’s house, the butler Poole says Hyde has a key, and the servants are told to obey him.
The Promise
Chapter three, Doctor Jekyll Was Quite at Ease. A fortnight later, after a dinner party, Utterson stays behind and raises the will. Jekyll, a big, smooth man of fifty, goes pale. He says he can be rid of Hyde the moment he chooses, and begs Utterson to drop it.
He also asks one thing. If I am taken away, he says, promise to get Hyde his rights. Utterson says he will never like him, but he promises.
The Murder
Chapter four, The Carew Murder Case. Nearly a year later, in October, a maid at her window sees an old white haired gentleman politely speak to a small man with a heavy cane. The small man flies into a rage and clubs him to death. She recognises him as Hyde.
The dead man carries a letter addressed to Utterson. He is Sir Danvers Carew, a member of parliament. The broken cane is one Utterson himself gave Jekyll years ago. Utterson leads a Scotland Yard inspector to Hyde’s rooms in Soho. They find them ransacked, papers burned, and half a cheque book. Hyde has vanished. No photograph of him exists, and everyone who describes him mentions the same thing, a feeling of deformity.
The Letter
Chapter five, Incident of the Letter. Utterson goes to Jekyll, who looks deathly sick, in the laboratory building behind his house. Jekyll swears he will never see Hyde again, and shows a note from Hyde saying he has a way of escape. Jekyll says it was handed in. Poole says nothing came but circulars.
Utterson shows the note to his head clerk, Mister Guest, who studies handwriting. Guest compares it to a dinner invitation from Jekyll and finds the two hands almost the same, only sloped differently. Utterson locks the note away. He thinks, Jekyll forged for a murderer.
Two Friends Fall
Chapter six, Incident of Doctor Lanyon. Hyde is never found. Jekyll comes back to life, gives to charity, and for more than two months is at peace. Then in January the door is shut to Utterson, again and again.
Lanyon looks like a dying man. He says he has had a shock, will never recover, and wants to hear nothing more of Jekyll. Jekyll writes that he must live in seclusion and asks Utterson to respect his silence. Within a few weeks Lanyon is dead. He leaves an envelope for Utterson, with a second sealed envelope inside, not to be opened until the death or disappearance of Jekyll. Utterson locks it away.
Chapter seven, Incident at the Window. On another Sunday walk, Utterson and Enfield stop in the court and see Jekyll at a window, sad as a prisoner. They talk. Then the smile is struck from his face, replaced by abject terror, and the window slams. The two men walk away pale.
The Last Night
Chapter eight, The Last Night. In March, Poole turns up at Utterson’s door, terrified. The master has shut himself in his cabinet for a week. Poole says the voice is not his master’s, and that someone has been begging the chemists for a drug, again and again, because the last sample was impure.
Poole once saw the figure in a mask, and says it was more of a dwarf. Utterson and Poole break the door down with an axe, on the fifth blow. Inside, a man lies dead, still twitching, in clothes far too big for him. It is Hyde, with a crushed phial in his hand and a smell of kernels in the air. Utterson reads it as suicide.
There is no sign of Jekyll anywhere. The key to the back door is broken and rusty. A new will on the desk names Utterson. A note tells him to read Lanyon’s narrative first, then Jekyll’s confession.
Lanyon’s Story
Chapter nine, Doctor Lanyon’s Narrative. Lanyon tells what broke him. In December he got an urgent letter from Jekyll. Go to my cabinet, take a drawer, and give it at midnight to a man I send. Lanyon did. Inside he found powders, a red liquid, and a notebook of dates, one marked total failure.
At midnight a small man in clothes far too big arrives, mixes the powder and the liquid, and gives Lanyon a choice, to watch or leave. Lanyon watches. The man drinks, changes, and stands there as Henry Jekyll. Lanyon will not write down the rest. He says only that Hyde and Jekyll are one.
The Confession
Chapter ten, Henry Jekyll’s Full Statement. Jekyll explains that he hid his pleasures all his life and came to believe that man is truly two. He made a drug to separate the two halves. He drank it, and became Hyde, smaller, younger and wholly evil, and he found it a joy. He made the house in Soho, the will, and the signature in a backward hand.
Then it went wrong. He woke one morning as Hyde without taking the drug. He gave Hyde up for two months, then drank again, and as Hyde he killed Carew. Afterwards he is horrified, locks the door and grinds the key under his heel.
But in January, sitting in Regent’s Park, he turned into Hyde without the drug. He sent Hyde’s letters to Lanyon and Poole. From then on he needed more and more of the drug, until the old salt ran out, and the new batches would not work. He believes the first supply had an impurity. He writes the last pages as himself, and ends by saying he is bringing the life of Henry Jekyll to an end.
Counting the Secret
Now the counts. The name Hyde appears ninety-eight times in the ten chapters. Forty-eight of them, nearly half, are in the final chapter. In chapter one it appears once.
The reader gets the secret late and in one dose. Utterson, the man we follow for eight chapters, never even learns it first hand. He reads it, in a study at night. Here is my reading, and it is an opinion. The book is a detective story told by a man who does not want to know the answer. That is why I think it still works when you already know the twist.
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