How To Write The PERFECT Jekyll & Hyde Essay On.. Dr Jekyll! 🧪

I want to go over one of my favourite Victorian novels.. Jekyll and Hyde! Specifically – I want to show you how to write the perfect essay if you get a character question on Dr Jekyll.

Remember – he isn’t just a scientist — he’s the symbol of Victorian duality and repression. If you’re writing about him, this is what you should always include in your essay:

1. Jekyll is respectable but repressed

Firstly, let me get the meaning of “repressed” out of the way. It means a feeling or thought that’s avoided, pushed down or restrained.

Remember, Jekyll avoids and “represses” his darker desires, creates a whole other person (Hyde) to indulge in them. Why? Victorian society won’t let him accept this dark, hidden side – otherwise his reputation would be ruined. Stevenson is critical of this as it just led him to have a double life.

Quotes:

“I concealed my pleasures.”

“man is not truly one, but truly two.”

2. He shows the tension between science and religion

He’s obsessed with science – which leads him to create Hyde. He experiments how he can separate good and evil and this backfires!

Quotes:

“the temptation of a discovery so singular and profound”

“horror of the spirit”

3) He represents our civilised and animalistic side

Jekyll is the same person as Hyde and this revelation is horrific and unsettling to us. Why? It shows that we all have within us a civilised side (which is Jekyll the gentleman) and an animalistic side (Hyde). Stevenson’s message was we must accept this!

Quotes:

“a large, well-made, smooth-faced man”

“ape-like”

✨PS: I am running Jekyll & Hyde HALF TERM class on 1 November going over a GCSE model answer plus you’ll get a 3-page cheat sheet for your mocks: https://www.firstratetutors.com/october-literature