Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde

The respectable Dr Jekyll brews a potion that frees his hidden appetites as the monstrous Mr Hyde, and the lawyer Utterson traces the growing horror through a fog-bound London toward a locked cabinet and a confession. Stevenson's city is a real, gaslit London of double lives: the fine house with its sinister back door, the squalid Soho lodgings of Hyde, and the lanes where his violence erupts, all mapping the divided self onto the divided town.

Dr Jekyll

Jekyll's house

The respectable front

Dr Jekyll's handsome house presents a face of perfect respectability to the square, while behind it, through the old anatomy theatre, lies the laboratory where he works his transformations. Stevenson builds the whole story on this architecture of the double life, the fine front and the sinister back that are, like the man, two aspects of one dwelling.

The opening chapters

inspired by Dr Jekyll's fine house, with its laboratory in the old dissecting-rooms behind, is drawn from the respectable squares of the West End; sited there.

Google Maps ↗ Street View ↗