Robert Louis Stevenson, born 1850, was a Scottish novelist, essayist, poet and travel writer. He was born into a family of lighthouse designers. His Bohemian interests and lack of religion caused him to be seen as a “failure” in the family. He suffered from respiratory illnesses for much of life. He was a popular writer in his time. In his relatively short life, he produced books the diversity of whose subject matter can be gauged from their titles: Treasure Island (1883), Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), Kidnapped (1886), The Wrong Box (1889), New Arabian Nights (1882), Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes (1879), A Child’s Garden of Verses (1885) to name a few. He travelled through America and Hawaii to ultimately settle in an estate he purchased in Samoa, where he died of a stroke at the age of 44.

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde are well known names in the popular culture. We are all familiar with the trope of the solemn Dr. Jekyll who, after drinking a concoction in his laboratory, turns into the brutish Mr. Hyde. The characters recur in films and cartoons. But reading this book for the second time after several years was quite refreshing. The original characters of this book, much like many other characters who have gone on to become popular tropes—Frankenstein, Dracula, etc.—are very different from what they are popularly imagined to be.

The story opens in London where Mr. Utterson, a lawyer, becomes the eyes of the reader. His old friend Dr. Jekyll has turned reclusive after naming a Mr. Hyde the sole heir in his will. Mr. Utterson learns from a kinsman about how terrible a man this heir is and he sets himself to find out more about him. Despite his best efforts to gain knowledge, he doesn’t prove to be a good enough detective except for one brief encounter he manages with Hyde. Instead, facts are simply accumulated towards his direction as the months pass.

The story is already well known. Dr. Jekyll maintains the image of a noble gentleman in society. He develops a potion that transforms not just his mental state, but also his physical appearance to an extent that he is no longer recognisable as Jekyll. Given such transformative power, what man wouldn’t want to indulge in things that are held to be taboo? For a while, the noble doctor marvels at the things he does as Hyde, for they both share a common memory. But soon comes the day when Hyde begins to struggle to change back into the doctor’s body, which he sees as his “composite” self.

Most of the text of the story is about the mental states of its characters, not just Jekyll and Hyde, but also these two other characters in the story, Mr. Utterson and Dr. Lanyon. For example, after struggling with his thoughts all night, we see the mists dissolve in the mind of Mr. Utterson who then resolves to find out more about Hyde:

The figure in these two phases haunted the lawyer all night; and if at any time he dozed over, it was but to see it glide more stealthily through sleeping houses, or move the more swiftly and still the more swiftly, even to dizziness, through wider labyrinths of lamplighted city, and at every street-corner crush a child and leave her screaming. And still the figure had no face by which he might know it; even in his dreams, it had no face, or one that baffled him and melted before his eyes; and thus it was that there sprang up and grew apace in the lawyer’s mind a singularly strong, almost an inordinate, curiosity to behold the features of the real Mr. Hyde. If he could but once set eyes on him, he thought the mystery would lighten and perhaps roll altogether away, as was the habit of mysterious things when well examined. …

From that time forward, Mr. Utterson began to haunt the door in the by-street of shops. In the morning before office hours, at noon when business was plenty, and time scarce, at night under the face of the fogged city moon, by all lights and at all hours of solitude or concourse, the lawyer was to be found on his chosen post.

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

The narrative proceeds in the minds of the characters. Scenes involving the characters actually acting on the ground is perhaps only twenty-five percent of the book.

We never learn what goes on inside the mind of Mr. Hyde, except through the words of Dr. Jekyll. Hyde is said to be pure evil, except not in the fashion that the popular culture has come to depict him. While he is seen indulging in at least two horrible acts in the book, he has a reasoning of his own, talks like any other gentleman of his time and at one point is even shown to hold a conversation like a normal human being. He is simply a version of man who cannot help but indulge in every animal desire that springs up inside him. Hyde has no history, no status to maintain in society, no responsibilities towards anyone, has Jekyll’s wealth at his disposal and can simply dissolve back into Jekyll, making him untraceable. Hyde is what he is not because of some innate evil nature, but because any one who finds himself in such circumstances would have no incentive to be good. The price you pay for being good is too high when you have no long-term. Hyde has fears of his own, such as the fear of being caught by the police and the fear that Jekyll will commit suicide. Hyde is also shorter in stature, deformed and younger than Jekyll in appearance, which the latter theorises is because he is the less-developed self as he has never cultivated that part of him.

Although the text is rather short, Stevenson doesn’t skimp on fleshing out the minor characters of the book. For instance, two sentences are enough to reveal the nature of Mr. Hyde’s landlady:

An ivory-faced and silvery-haired old woman opened the door. She had an evil face, smothered by hypocrisy; but her manners were excellent.

The book is highly readable and short. The overall effect of the book is blunted because you go into reading it already knowing the story. Still, the book is enjoyable unless you are put off by dense prose and archaic language that is used every now and then.