Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde - Characters

Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde - Characters

1. Dr Henry Jekyll

   • Doctor & Experienced Scientist
   • Wealthy & Respectable
   • During the course of the novel, his behaviour becomes increasingly erratic
   • His will states that if he disappears, everything goes to Hyde
   • In last chapter, we learn that Jekyll has been experimenting to separate his personality

2. Mr Edward Hyde

   • People react with horror and fear when they see him but there is no single thing which makes him extremly unpleasant
   • He is violent and has no sense of guilt about his crimes or neither motive for causing pain
     • Chapter 1 - Hyde assaults young girl
     • Chapter 4 - Beats an elderly gentleman to death
   • His appearances in the novel are always brief - people only catch impressions of him before he vanishes into the dark or behind a door
   • Extremely Secretive

3. Gabriel Utterson

   • An old friend of Jekyll and his lawyer
   • Calm & rational - His approach to life is to weigh up the evidence
   • He is a lover of the same and customary sides of life
     • Stevenson utilises him to represent attitudes of the average reader at the time
   • His sense of shock and horror when he first meets Hyde is irrational by contrast to his normal reaction to things
   • He spends much of the novel trying to advise and help Jekyll, who recognises that he is a good friend but rejects all his efforts to help
   • At no stage does he suspect that Jekyll and Hyde are the same person but he does make key observations which keep the reader in tune

4. Dr Hastie Lanyon

   • He was once close friends with Jekyll and attended Medical School together
   • Respectable & Conventional - he follows the rules and obeys the laws of science
   • He believes in science and the world of real, material things
   • Contrasts to Jekyll, who likes to live dangerously and experiment with the paranormal
   • He disagrees with Jekyll's ideas and calls them 'scientific balderdash' - Chapter 2 hadn't seen him since he became 'too fanciful' and 'wrong in mind'
     • Jekyll refers to him as 'hidebound' - narrow-minded and unadventurous in his attitude to medical science
   • The only person to see Hyde transforming into Jekyll
     • He cannot cope with the fight between his common sense view of the world and what Jekyll's experiments reveal - not long after he becomes mentally and physically ill, he dies

5. Minor Characters

   • Richard Enfield - distant relative of Utterson and well known man about town
   • Poole - Jekyll's man-servant who appears briefly in novel, notably when Utterson goes to see Jekyll
     • In Chapter 11, he goes to Utterson's house to report the strange goings on - helps break down door
   • Sir Danvers Crew - distinguished elderly gentleman beat to death by Hyde - turning point in novel
   • Mr Guest - Utterson's secretary and handwriting expert - In Chapter 5, he comments on similarity in Jekyll and Hyde's handwriting