Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde: Henry Jekyll's Full Statement

In a long letter left for his friend Mr. Utterson, Dr. Jekyll at last explained how Mr. Hyde had come into the world, and he began with his own youth.He had been born rich and talented and eager for the respect of good people, but he had a cheerful, pleasure-loving side that he was ashamed of, so he hid it and lived a double life.The more he studied, the more he became convinced that every person is truly two, and he dreamed of separating the good self from the bad, so that each could live freely, without shame or guilt.

In his laboratory he discovered that certain chemicals could shake the human body, as a wind shakes a curtain, and he prepared a drug that could replace his form with another.He knew that he might die, but the temptation was too great, and one night he mixed the drug, watched it boil and smoke, and drank it.First he felt terrible pain and sickness, and then a strange sweet feeling of youth, lightness and reckless freedom, and he knew that he had become a much more wicked man than before.

He also noticed that he was smaller, and creeping through his sleeping house to his bedroom mirror, he saw for the first time the face of Edward Hyde.Hyde was smaller, younger and uglier than Jekyll, because Jekyll’s evil side had been used far less than his good side, yet Jekyll felt no disgust, only a welcome, for he told himself that this too was himself.He noticed that people felt uneasy when they first came near Hyde, and he explained that this was because everyone else is a mixture of good and evil, but Hyde alone was pure evil.

He hurried back to the laboratory, drank the drug again and became Dr. Jekyll once more, and he later understood that if he had tried the experiment with a noble heart, the result might have been an angel instead of a monster.Soon he rented a house in Soho for Hyde, hired a silent housekeeper, told his servants that Mr. Hyde was to be welcome at his own house, and wrote the will that had so troubled Mr. Utterson.In this way Jekyll believed that he was completely safe, for whatever Hyde did, he had only to drink the drug in his laboratory, and Hyde would vanish like breath on a mirror while respectable Dr. Jekyll sat quietly at home.

At first his pleasures were merely undignified, but in Hyde’s hands they soon became cruel, and Jekyll would return home amazed and horrified at what he had done, though he told himself that only Hyde was guilty.Then, one morning about two months before the murder of Sir Danvers, he woke in his own bed and, looking at his hand, saw that it was lean, dark and hairy: he had gone to sleep as Henry Jekyll and woken as Edward Hyde.Terrified, he had to slip across the house in Hyde’s body to reach his drugs while the servant Bradshaw stared in surprise, and only ten minutes later was Dr. Jekyll again, sitting down to breakfast with a darkened brow.

He now saw that he was slowly losing hold of his better self, for it had become harder to turn back into Jekyll than into Hyde, and he knew that he had to choose between them.He chose to remain Dr. Jekyll and said farewell to Hyde’s freedom, but he did not destroy Hyde’s clothes or give up the house in Soho, and for two months he lived very strictly, until time began to wear away the freshness of his alarm.