Themes

Duality, being two things at once, is everywhere.

• Jekyll and Hyde: one man with two sides, because ‘man is not truly one, but truly two’ (Chapter 10).
• Jekyll's house: a handsome front, and a shabby back door into the laboratory.
• London: grand squares, and the dark, foggy streets of Soho where Hyde lives.

Stevenson suggests that everyone has a hidden side, and that respectable Victorian society had one too.

For Victorian gentlemen, reputation was everything.

• Enfield assumes the cheque means blackmail, and calls the building ‘Black Mail House’ (Chapter 1).
• Jekyll creates Hyde so that he can sin without risking his good name.
• Utterson protects Jekyll's reputation rather than going to the police.
• Lanyon would rather die than tell what he saw.

Stevenson shows that the obsession with respectability makes people hide their sins, not give them up.

Lanyon's science is cautious and rational. Jekyll's goes further, towards ‘the mystic and the transcendental’ (Chapter 10): he tries to change human nature itself, as if playing God.

Religious language follows Hyde: Utterson sees ‘Satan’s signature upon a face’ (Chapter 2). After the murder, Jekyll turns to religion and good works, but it doesn't last.

Stevenson raises a Victorian fear: that science, without morality, might unleash something it can't control.

Hyde's violence is shocking because it is so calm and so sudden. He tramples a child like ‘some damned Juggernaut’ (Chapter 1), and kills Carew ‘with ape-like fury’ (Chapter 4).

The animal imagery suggests violence is a primitive instinct, hidden under the surface of civilised life. Jekyll admits that when Hyde was set free, ‘My devil had been long caged, he came out roaring’ (Chapter 10).

Violence in the novel comes from inside a respectable man, not from a stranger.

Almost everything important is hidden or left unsaid.

• Enfield and Utterson agree never to talk about the door again.
• Lanyon refuses to speak of Jekyll, and seals his letter until Jekyll's death or disappearance.
• Jekyll locks himself in his laboratory.
• Even Hyde can't be described: people fail to find words for him.

The silence protects reputations, but it also lets evil grow.