English Literature- Jekyll and Hyde Quotes

4 Jekyll and Hyde Quotes with Original Analysis, Context, and Effect.

“The fog rolled over the city.”

• Pathetic fallacy.

• Sinister tone- the fog suggests something is to come.

• Hyde’s arrival is always marked with negative weather. Force of nature.

• “Fog” hiding the sins of Hyde. Represents the gothic genre, nature shown as evil (duality).

CONTEXT:

• Gothic novels use of pathetic fallacy.

• Negative weather can be seen as God’s anger, wrath against Jekyll playing God- punishing his sins.

EFFECT:

• Unease within the reader, the pattern of bad weather and Hyde’s crimes suggests he will commit again. Frightens the reader, building tension for the next scene,

"These polar twins should be continuously struggling."

• Oxymoron.

• “Polar twins” foreshadows the reveal of Jekyll and Hyde being the same person.

• Good and evil are linked- one and the same.

• Jekyll believes he can control each side as 2 separate identities, displays the continuous struggle he faces until his death. Referencing his later admission “All men are commingled out of good and evil.”

CONTEXT:

• Victorian gentlemen repressed their dark desires; an outer persona and an inner. They would go to the slums, like Soho, to drink or visit brothels. They also split themselves like Jekyll, the scandals would kill them- socially.

• Superego, id, and ego- Freud. Hyde is the Id, Jekyll is the ego, and Mr Utterson is the superego perspective on Jekyll and Hyde, shows how we are not truly good or truly evil, the id and the ego are apart of us.

EFFECT:

• This criticises the reader, making them evaluate on their choices and ideals. It criticises the society that hides and represses their true emotions to fit in- even when we all experience them.

• We see Hyde as less of a beast, and more of a cautionary tale against repression, we all have a Hyde within ourselves, but it all depends on our Ego.

“The animal within me, licking the chops of memory.”

• Animalistic imagery. Uncomfortable, and unsettling. The story does not sweeten or repress the true feelings of Jekyll for the pleasure and comfort of the reader.

• The animal has won, and is now eating its kill. Jekyll is now powerless, his ego has weakened, and Hyde has taken over.

• Hyde plagues his thoughts, evolving past physical means.

CONTEXT:

• Id, Superego, and Ego.

• Theory of Evolution vs pleasant religious belief. Not evolving from fish or savage monkeys is idealistic, to be created in the image of a loving God is more comforting than being alone.

• Gentlemanly Repression.

EFFECT:

• Visceral and disturbing. Hyde is not a deformity of Jekyll, everyone has a Hyde- but he is repressed. Hyde being in the memory shows evolution/devolution is closer than you think.

“I incline to Cain's heresy.”

• Not taking responsibility- Mr Utterson.

• Despite his goodness, the evil of inaction has helped to the death of Dr Jekyll.

• “Incline” shows choice. Mr Utterson knows his lack of action was wrong, yet chose to do so. Evilness behind us all.

• Jesus says to “love thy neighbour” yet he chooses to follow a belief going against religious doctrine, “heresy”. Contradicts moral responsibility. We are “commingled” out of good and evil. Even though idleness is not a sin, we know it’s morally wrong.

CONTEXT:

• Victorian attitudes to mental health and addiction. They did not truly help those who suffered, but left them to die or threw them into insane asylums. Dr Jekyll’s deterioration shows the consequence of this- allowing Hyde to fester and conquer.

• The Bible story of Cain and Abel. Cain kills his brother and takes no responsibility, “Am I my brother’s keeper?”, highlights the obvious moral failure that is recognised and thrown away.

• Jekyll and Hyde reflect Cain and Abel- foreshadowing the link between the two. Sharing blood (the same person).

• Criminals were seen as ugly and poor. Society judges people for their appearance. So, for Hyde to be rich is a contrast that shocks the reader into evaluating, maybe everyone has the chance/desire to be evil.

EFFECT:

• Further criticises the audience, our inaction is an evil within us. It is an attempt to make us reflect on ourselves. The average person is Utterson (The Bystander Effect), none of us would go further into a situation to fix it, but rather watch it unfold and gossip about it later. Our inaction is one of the reasons Hyde festered, as none of the onlookers of the trampling stopped to think that perhaps Hyde was a deeply unwell man that needed help- judging him on his evil appearance.

"Such unscientific balderdash would have estranged Damon and Pythias."

• Irony. Lanyon disagrees with his science- he will eventually see it first hand.

• Despite his intelligence, Lanyon's arrogant refusal to engage with Jekyll's ideas contributes to Jekyll's isolation and eventual destruction.

• "Balderdash" shows contempt rather than curiosity. Lanyon mocks. This intellectual pride closes the door on any possibility of helping Jekyll, revealing how vanity masquerades as virtue.

• "Unscientific" functions almost as a moral judgement, to Lanyon, bad science is bad character. Yet his certainty is its own kind of blindness. He claims reason, but reacts with emotion. The irony is that the man most committed to truth refuses to investigate it.

• CONTEXT:

• Victorian scientific culture was fiercely territorial. The Royal Society and medical establishment policed the boundaries of "legitimate" science aggressively. Anything veering toward the metaphysical- mesmerism, early psychology, vitalism- was socially and professionally dangerous to endorse. Lanyon's contempt isn't just personal; it reflects institutional pressure to conform.

• The allusion to Damon and Pythias- the classical Greek ideal of unbreakable friendship- reveals the depth of what has been lost. Lanyon reaches for the greatest symbol of loyalty to describe a rupture, which ironically confirms how profound the friendship once was. He condemns Jekyll using the very language of devotion.

• EFFECT:

• Stevenson uses Lanyon to critique the Victorian intellectual class specifically. His pomposity feels recognisable- we all know people who weaponise intelligence to avoid being proven wrong. The reader is invited to see that Lanyon's "rationalism" is partly ego, and that ego has consequences. His refusal to take Jekyll seriously accelerates Jekyll's loneliness and his dependency on Hyde.

• Like Utterson and the Bystander Effect, Lanyon represents a different but equally damaging form of inaction- intellectual inaction. He sees the warning signs, labels them "unscientific," and walks away. Stevenson implicates the educated reader directly: our confidence in our own reason can be just as dangerous as ignorance. The man who knows best is often the least likely to help.

"I wish to see or hear no more of Dr. Jekyll. I am quite done with that person; and I beg that you will spare me any allusion to one whom I regard as dead."

• Despite witnessing the truth of Jekyll's condition, Lanyon's total rejection rather than compassion makes him complicit in Jekyll's final isolation and destruction.

• "Quite done" shows finality. "Quite" is a composed, gentlemanly word- Lanyon has tidied Jekyll away like an inconvenient letter. No warmth, no mourning. Just erasure. The evilness of indifference behind a respectable façade.

• "Regard as dead" is Lanyon's act of psychological self-preservation. He cannot cope, so he decides Jekyll no longer exists. Repression in its purest form- not of desire, as with Jekyll, but of guilt. We are all capable of this. Declaring someone dead is easier than carrying responsibility for them.

CONTEXT:

• Victorian attitudes to mental illness meant that a gentleman who had "gone wrong in mind" was socially excommunicated rather than helped. Lanyon's behaviour is not unusual- it is expected. This is what respectable Victorian society does to those who break down. It closes the door and walks away.

• The Victorian gentleman's composure is critical here. Men of Lanyon's class were conditioned to suppress emotional distress. His declaration that Jekyll is "dead" is his attempt to re-seal the lid on what he has witnessed. Repression is not just Jekyll's flaw- it is the entire culture's flaw. Stevenson implicates the whole of Victorian society, not just one man.

• Biblically, this echoes Pontius Pilate washing his hands of Christ- condemned by the very society he belonged to. Lanyon publicly withdraws his association to protect himself, mirroring Pilate's moral abdication dressed as a formal declaration. Like Cain's "Am I my brother's keeper?", Lanyon recognises the moral failure and throws it away regardless.

• The Gothic tradition of the "living dead" is invoked with dark irony. Lanyon calls Jekyll dead, yet Hyde- Jekyll's shadow self- remains very much alive. In Gothic literature, the undead represent the return of what is repressed. By declaring Jekyll dead, Lanyon unwittingly proves the novel's central argument: you cannot bury what lives inside you.

EFFECT:

• The reader feels the cruelty of this moment because we know what Lanyon does not- that Jekyll is desperately alone and losing control, and that one friend's intervention might have changed everything. Stevenson engineers this dramatic irony to indict Lanyon, and through him, the audience. How often do we declare someone "done" when their behaviour becomes difficult, rather than asking why?

• Lanyon mirrors Utterson's bystander passivity but in a more visceral, damning way. Utterson avoids from ignorance. Lanyon avoids from knowledge. He has seen the truth and chosen silence- making him arguably the more culpable of the two. The most dangerous people are not the ignorant, but the informed who look away. The average person is Lanyon- we have all ended a friendship because someone became "too much."

• "Spare me any allusion" reveals Lanyon cannot hold his composure if Jekyll is mentioned again. His demand is not indifference- it is barely contained terror. This exposes the fragility beneath Victorian respectability. The composed gentleman is only composed because he has not yet been truly tested. The moment reality intrudes, the mask slips. Stevenson's warning is clear- repression is not strength. It is a structure. And structures collapse.