The Features Of The Real Mr. Hyde

Illustration by Mervyn Peake for The Folio Society, 1948. Click for a better jpeg.

A few comments on "Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde," revisited for the first time in decades.

-- The disclosure that Hyde and Jekyll are one man comes without warning, without preparation, in the final pages of the story: a narrative trick that I would call insanely bold.

-- Adapters from Rouben Mamoulian to Mervyn Peake have shown Hyde as monstrous, but Stevenson makes clear that Hyde gives "an impression of deformity without any nameable malformation." Hyde is "dwarfish" yet otherwise normal, but people respond to his face with "a spirit of enduring hatred."

“He is not easy to describe. There is something wrong with his appearance; something displeasing, something downright detestable. I never saw a man I so disliked, and yet I scarce know why. He must be deformed somewhere; he gives a strong feeling of deformity, although I couldn’t specify the point. He’s an extraordinary looking man, and yet I really can name nothing out of the way. No, sir; I can make no hand of it; I can’t describe him. And it’s not want of memory; for I declare I can see him this moment.”

-- My only criticism of the story is that I wanted to return, at the end, to Utterson. The story begins with Utterson, follows him throughout the mystery, but leaves him to brood offstage at the death of his two closest friends. I would have been happy with one final paragraph about his thoughts on the "strange case."

-- The one path into a story is the prose.

"Six o’clock struck on the bells of the church that was so conveniently near to Mr. Utterson’s dwelling, and still he was digging at the problem. Hitherto it had touched him on the intellectual side alone; but now his imagination also was engaged or rather enslaved; and as he lay and tossed in the gross darkness of the night and the curtained room, Mr. Enfield’s tale went by before his mind in a scroll of lighted pictures. He would be aware of the great field of lamps of a nocturnal city; then of the figure of a man walking swiftly; then of a child running from the doctor’s; and then these met, and that human Juggernaut trod the child down and passed on regardless of her screams. Or else he would see a room in a rich house, where his friend lay asleep, dreaming and smiling at his dreams; and then the door of that room would be opened, the curtains of the bed plucked apart, the sleeper recalled, and lo! there would stand by his side a figure to whom power was given, and even at that dead hour, he must rise and do its bidding. 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."