Jekyll and Hyde

Also called Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde

Stevenson's 1886 novella about a respectable doctor and the man he becomes. Duality, repression and Victorian hypocrisy.

What it is

A Gothic novella in which a London lawyer investigates his friend's connection to a violent stranger, and discovers they are the same man.

Commonly set as the nineteenth-century text.

Where it applies

English Literature, extract plus whole text.

How it works

The structure is the point and students routinely miss it. The story is told mostly from the outside — through Utterson, through documents, through hearsay — and Jekyll's own account arrives last, when it can no longer change anything. The reader is kept at the distance the characters keep from each other.

Its subject is duality: not good and evil so much as respectability and what respectability requires you to hide. Victorian London is described as literally two-faced, streets with a bright shopfront and a black doorway.

Written the year after the Labouchere Amendment and two years before the Whitechapel murders, in a city obsessed with what gentlemen did after dark.

How to use it in your work

Write about narrative voice and the withheld structure. It is the strongest available point and the least used.

Avoid "Hyde is the evil side". The text is more interesting than that: Jekyll enjoys being Hyde, and chooses him repeatedly before he cannot.

Setting is doing thematic work throughout — doors, fog, back entrances. Treat it as symbolism, not scenery.

Where to get help

Your teacher, first — set texts vary by board and by school, and yours is the one that counts. Your board's past papers and examiners' reports are free online and say plainly what separates the bands.