The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

The normally stoic Poole shows up at Utterson’s house in great fear and distress, indicating from the start of the chapter that something is amiss. The chapter’s title also reveals that a final reckoning is approaching for Jekyll. Stevenson creates suspense by keeping us guessing at who is occupying Jekyll’s room. Poole’s words are chilling, especially his use of the word “it”: “…and who’s in there instead of him, and why it stays there, is a thing that cries to Heaven, Mr. Utterson!” (90); “All this last week…him, or it, or whatever it is that lives in that cabinet, has been crying night and day for some sort of medicine and cannot get it to his mind” (91).

When Utterson and Poole finally break down Jekyll’s door, they find Hyde on the floor, dying from an apparent suicide. We will eventually connect this up with Jekyll’s account in the final chapter of his final moments. However, at the time, Utterson and Poole still do not understand that Jekyll and Hyde are one and the same person. They surmise that Jekyll may have escaped. Stevenson saves the final revelation until the last two chapters, where we learn along with Utterson the truth of Jekyll’s double persona.

Jekyll was a religious man. Religion and science had a closer connection in the nineteenth century than today, and many famous scientists were persons of faith (Charles Darwin, for example, once contemplated becoming a minister). One clear sign of Jekyll’s degradation is the fact that Utterson and Poole find in his room a “pious work, for which Jekyll had several times expressed a great esteem, annotated, in his own hand, with startling blasphemies” (98). Jekyll’s alter ego forced him to deface a religious book; it has worked a moral and religious apostasy in him, like a sort of demonic possession. This would have been a particularly shocking and telling detail for Stevenson’s predominantly Christian audience.