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Everything on the GCSE English Literature Jekyll and Hyde: Plot Summary poster is written out below, section by section. Use it to search the sheet, copy parts into your own notes, or check a fact quickly.
1. The trampling and the door
- Walking the city, Mr Utterson hears how a cold little man, Edward Hyde, calmly trampled a young girl at a street corner, then paid her family £100 to hush it up.
- The money came partly by a cheque signed by Utterson's respectable friend Dr Jekyll, whose will, alarmingly, leaves his whole fortune to Hyde.
- Suspecting blackmail, Utterson seeks Hyde out at the shabby door he uses: the back way into Jekyll's lab.
- Hyde proves small, pale and deformed, filling everyone who meets him with instinctive loathing.
2. The Carew murder
- At a dinner, Utterson presses Jekyll on the will but he makes light of it, insisting he can be rid of Hyde at will.
- Nearly a year later, a maid watching from a window sees Hyde club an elderly gentleman to death in the street with a heavy cane.
- The victim is Sir Danvers Carew, a Member of Parliament.
- The cane snaps in two, and a letter found on his body is addressed to Utterson.
- The police hunt Hyde, but he has vanished from his Soho lodgings without a trace.
3. The letter and Lanyon
- In his lab, Jekyll shows Utterson a letter, supposedly from Hyde, promising he has fled for good.
- Utterson's clerk notices the writing resembles Jekyll's, hinting he may have forged it to shield the murderer.
- Jekyll seems himself again for a time, then abruptly shuts himself away and refuses all visitors.
- Their friend Dr Lanyon, shaken by some unspoken horror, sickens and dies, leaving Utterson a letter to be opened only on Jekyll's death or disappearance.
4. The last night
- Passing the window, Utterson and Enfield glimpse Jekyll freeze in terror and slam it shut, leaving them chilled.
- Soon after, Jekyll's terrified butler Poole begs Utterson's help, certain a stranger has shut himself inside the lab.
- They break the door with an axe and find not Jekyll but Hyde, in Jekyll's oversized clothes, dead but still twitching, having poisoned himself.
- Jekyll has vanished. Beside the body lie a new will leaving everything to Utterson, and a sealed confession.
5. Confessions
- Lanyon's letter reveals his deadly secret: he watched Hyde drink a potion and transform into Jekyll.
- Jekyll's own statement completes the truth: believing every man is two, he brewed a drug to become the younger, purely evil Hyde and change back at will.
- Hyde let him sin without shame, but grew stronger, until Jekyll began turning into him unbidden and, as Hyde, committed the Carew murder.
- Unable to brew more potion and lost to Hyde, Jekyll writes his confession before the monster consumes him.