5 Surprising Truths Hidden in Jekyll and Hyde (That You Probably Missed in School)
Introduction: More Than Just a Monster Story
For many, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is a straightforward horror story. A brilliant scientist drinks a potion, transforms into a monstrous alter ego, and unleashes mayhem on the foggy streets of Victorian London. It’s a classic tale of good versus evil, often reduced to a simple monster-of-the-week plot.
But beneath this familiar surface, Stevenson embedded a profound critique of society, psychology, and the very act of storytelling. The novella’s true power lies not in its overt horror but in its subtle techniques - literary devices that turn a simple tale into a timeless exploration of the human condition. This article uncovers five of the most impactful ideas hidden in the text, revealing why Jekyll and Hyde remains a chilling masterpiece.
1. The Real Horror Isn't Violence - It's Calm Violence
When we first witness Hyde’s cruelty, Stevenson uses an oxymoron - a figure of speech pairing two contradictory terms - to create a uniquely unsettling effect. Describing Hyde’s first on-page atrocity, a character recalls how he "Trampled calmly over the child’s body."
The horror of this phrase stems from the unnatural fusion of brutality and serenity. By pairing the violent verb "trampled" with the peaceful adverb "calmly," Stevenson creates an evil devoid of human passion. Hyde’s violence is not the product of rage, chaos, or a heated temper; it is a detached, remorseless act performed with the emotional investment one might have while stepping over a puddle.
This cold indifference is far more terrifying than a simple fit of rage because it feels fundamentally inhuman. Hyde’s evil isn’t just a loss of control; it’s the absence of a soul. This chilling detachment makes his evil feel disturbingly modern, echoing the dispassionate cruelty of systemic injustice or bureaucratic violence.
2. The Fog Isn't Just Weather - It's a Main Character
The London fog in Jekyll and Hyde is more than just atmospheric window dressing. Through the technique of personification, Stevenson elevates the setting from a passive backdrop to an active participant in the story - a character with its own sinister motives.
The fog doesn't just drift; it acts. It "slept above the drowned city" and, in one memorable passage, forms "a foggy cupola" that wraps London in a "sinister embrace." The choice of the word "cupola" - an architectural dome - is key. As the source material notes, this makes the fog feel "architectural, almost sentient." It is no longer just weather; it is a conscious entity, enclosing the city in a suffocating dome of secrecy and moral blindness. The "drowned city" is a society suffocating under this watching, knowing presence.
By treating the setting as an accomplice, Stevenson turns the entire city into a mirror for Jekyll’s internal decay. The fog is the physical manifestation of the moral blindness and suffocating repression that plague the characters, reminding us how our environments can actively enable our worst secrets.
3. The Story Is Told Through What Isn't Said
Despite its dramatic plot, the novella’s dialogue is often sparse, formal, and strikingly restrained. This is a deliberate choice reflecting one of the story’s central themes: Victorian repression. The characters are governed by a strict social code that values appearances and propriety above all else, and their speech reflects this culture of concealment.
Mr Enfield perfectly embodies this code of silence. After witnessing Hyde’s casual brutality, he enforces a rule upon himself to avoid prying into matters that seem strange or scandalous. His motto is a powerful summary of the Victorian gentleman’s creed: wilful ignorance is preferable to social discomfort.
“The more it looks like Queer Street, the less I ask.”
But this silence runs deeper than avoiding awkwardness. As Enfield later explains, "I feel very strongly about putting questions; it partakes too much of the style of the day of judgment." For the Victorian gentleman, prying into another’s affairs was akin to a moral or spiritual reckoning. This culture of concealment is precisely what allows Hyde to operate in the shadows, a monster thriving in a society that refuses to speak his name. It’s a chilling parallel to our modern world of curated social media personas, where we often prefer a pleasant façade to an uncomfortable truth.
4. The Book's Structure Is a Detective Story in Itself
Stevenson could have told Jekyll’s story in a linear, chronological fashion, starting with the experiment and ending with its tragic fallout. Instead, he intentionally fragments the narrative, dropping the reader in medias res ("in the middle of things") and forcing us to solve the mystery alongside the narrator, Mr Utterson.
The truth is revealed slowly, pieced together from second-hand accounts and a series of crucial embedded documents. We are not simply told the story; we must reconstruct it from key pieces of evidence like Jekyll's will, which first alerts Utterson to Hyde's existence; the posthumous narrative of Dr Lanyon, which details the horrifying transformation; and finally, Jekyll's own full confession, which provides the final, devastating explanation.
This structural choice is a work of genius because it mirrors the novella’s central theme: the slow, painful uncovering of a hidden, fractured identity. The reader’s experience of confusion and gradual revelation is designed to reflect the psychological and moral mystery of the book, forcing us to become detectives tasked with reassembling a shattered self - much like we piece together narratives from the fragmented feeds of our digital lives.
5. Hyde's Deformity Is Vague for a Terrifying Reason
Every character who encounters Hyde is overcome with an immediate, instinctual revulsion. They sense a profound wrongness about him, a palpable aura of deformity. Yet, crucially, not a single person can specify what, exactly, is physically wrong with him. He shrinks back "with a hissing intake of breath" like a serpent and is described as "troglodytic," yet his physical form remains frustratingly ambiguous.
“He is not easy to describe… something displeasing, something downright detestable.”
This ambiguity is Stevenson’s most terrifying technique. It creates a feeling literary critics call "the uncanny" - the horror that arises from something being both familiar (he is a man) and strangely alien at the same time. By refusing to give Hyde a concrete monstrous form - gothic, like a vampire’s fangs or a werewolf’s claws - Stevenson ensures that his evil is not physical, but psychological and moral. Hyde’s "deformity" is not in his body but in his soul, an inner corruption that onlookers sense instinctively.
Because Hyde’s evil has no specific shape, the reader is compelled to imagine it, creating a monster far more frightening than any single description could provide. He becomes a symbol of formless, nameless evil, akin to the vague but potent anxieties that haunt our modern consciousness.
Conclusion: The Door to Our Own Duality
Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde endures not because it’s a simple monster story, but because it is a masterclass in subtle technique. Stevenson uses narrative structure, symbolic setting, and the power of silence to create a story that is as much a psychological puzzle as it is a Gothic thriller. The novella is a carefully constructed machine for exploring the dark corners of the human soul.
Ultimately, the story’s central symbol - the hidden door to Jekyll’s laboratory - becomes a metaphor for the self. The story forces us to ask: What parts of ourselves do we keep hidden behind our own "blistered and distained" door?