Nineteenth-century novel, Year 10: duality, science and reputation (The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde option)

That each person has two natures, one good and one bad, sharing one body

HintHe thinks everyone is divided inside.

The whyHe then says he suspects there are even more than two. The idea is meant to apply to everyone, so Hyde is not a freak but a picture of what is in all people.

Younger, lighter and happier, with a sense of reckless freedom

HintThe first change is pleasant in some ways.

The whyHe writes “I felt younger, lighter, happier in body”. That feeling is why he repeats the experiment. Stevenson shows that evil is attractive to Jekyll, which is what makes the story a warning.

That Hyde is part of him and not a separate person

HintHe feels welcome rather than horror.

The whyHe describes the sight as natural and human. The line shows that Jekyll cannot truly escape responsibility for what Hyde does.

Jekyll is a mixture of good and evil, as all other people are

HintThink of how he describes everyone else.

The whyJekyll says all human beings are commingled out of good and evil. Hyde has had the good taken out of him, which is why he is so extreme.

Hyde grows stronger and Jekyll weaker, until Hyde takes over

HintThe one who is allowed out more often gains power.

The whyJekyll writes “The powers of Hyde seemed to have grown with the sickliness of Jekyll”. In the end Hyde takes over and Jekyll cannot come back.

On himself, knowing he might die

HintHe asks nobody else to take the risk, for good or bad.

The whyHe says he knew he risked death. The secret, selfish experiment sets him apart from the cautious Lanyon, and nobody else knows what he is doing.

In a laboratory in the old dissecting-room block at the back of his house

HintThe building was once used for surgery.

The whyIn Chapter 5 we learn that Jekyll bought the house from a surgeon's heirs and turned the block into a chemical laboratory. In Chapter 2 Hyde is seen using a key to its old dissecting-room door, and in Chapter 7 Enfield sees that the door of his story is a back way to Jekyll's. So his secret science and Hyde's door are one place.

That he has always rejected Jekyll's mystical, boundary-breaking science

HintHe is the sceptic who is about to be proved wrong.

The whyHyde says it just before he drinks the potion and transforms before Lanyon's eyes. Lanyon, the man of ordinary science, is destroyed by seeing what the other kind can do.

That some knowledge is so terrible that it can destroy the person who learns it

HintHe is a healthy man before and a dying man after.

The whyThis is one reading: Lanyon does not die from a weapon but from a fact. Stevenson hints that science has uncovered something humans were not meant to see.

Never to refer to the story of the door again

HintA handshake closes the subject.

The whyBoth men are ashamed of having talked. The bargain is a small example of the silence of the novel's gentlemen, who protect each other's reputations by not asking.

He suspects someone is paying Hyde to keep quiet about an old scandal

HintThe cheque suggests an honest man buying silence over his youth.

The whyHe guesses at blackmail because a respectable name was on the cheque. The word shows how easily these gentlemen assume that a good name hides a secret.

A profound duplicity of life

HintA word meaning pretending to be two things at once.

The whyHe wanted to hold his head high and wear a more than commonly grave countenance before the public. The pressure to look respectable is what makes him need a second self.

Jekyll

HintThe man whose cane was the weapon.

The whyUtterson is afraid that the scandal might sweep up Jekyll. He keeps what he knows from the police for a time, which shows how loyalty can become a kind of concealment.

He takes the letter to his clerk, privately, to compare handwriting

HintHe prefers a quiet inquiry to a public one.

The whyA lawyer's habit of discretion leads him to keep things in his own office. It is part of why the secret stays hidden for so long.