Jekyll and Hyde
Extract-based essay on Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (Paper 1, Section B).
Learn
Jekyll and Hyde, explained point by point
Everything the GCSE specification expects you to be able to do, and how to actually do it - the same lesson a signed-in student studies from.
Build a clear, thesis-driven argument in response to the question (AO1)
Open with an idea the whole essay will prove - "Stevenson uses the doubling of Jekyll and Hyde to argue that respectability and savagery live inside the same man". Then argue it paragraph by paragraph. The novella's own thesis - "man is not truly one, but truly two" - invites an argument about duality rather than a plot retelling.
Analyse Stevenson's methods - language, form and structure - using precise terminology (AO2)
Name the choices and their effects: the mystery structure that withholds the truth until Jekyll's final confession, the gothic setting of fog-choked Soho "like a district of some city in a nightmare", the semantic field of the animalistic that clings to Hyde. Label the method, quote it, then explain what it does to the reader.
Move from the extract to the whole novella, tracking how a theme develops (AO1/AO2)
The task is extract AND elsewhere, so trace the arc: Hyde first "trampled calmly over the child's body", then murders Carew "with ape-like fury", until Jekyll loses control of the change entirely. Showing how Stevenson escalates a theme across the chapters proves whole-text knowledge, not one page of it.
Weave in context meaningfully, linked to the question (AO3)
Context earns marks only when it deepens your point. Victorian ideas of respectability and the pressure to hide private vice explain why Jekyll builds Hyde; anxieties stirred by Darwin about a savage self beneath the civilised one explain Hyde's "ape-like" descriptions. Link context to the question, never bolt it on.
Embed short, well-chosen quotations smoothly into your sentences (AO1)
A few woven words beat a copied paragraph: Hyde gives "an impression of deformity without any nameable malformation", the vagueness itself making him disturbing. Short quotations give you single words to analyse and are far easier to carry into a closed-book exam.
Write with accurate spelling, punctuation and grammar under time pressure (AO4)
This 19th-century-novel question is marked alongside dedicated technical-accuracy credit on the paper. Keep sentences controlled, spell names and terms correctly (Jekyll, Utterson, gothic, duality), and save two minutes to reread. Clear, accurate writing makes your argument easier to reward everywhere else.
Practice
Try a Jekyll and Hyde question
A GCSE-style original task from this topic. Sketch a quick plan of your own before you open what a strong answer covers.
Read the following extract from Chapter 10 ('Henry Jekyll's Full Statement of the Case') of The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and then answer the question that follows. At this point in the novel, Jekyll explains the discovery that led to his experiments. With every day, and from both sides of my intelligence, the moral and the intellectual, I thus drew steadily nearer to that truth, by whose partial discovery I have been doomed to such a dreadful shipwreck: that man is not truly one, but truly two. Starting with this extract, explore how Stevenson presents the duality of human nature. Write about: - how Stevenson presents duality in this extract - how Stevenson presents duality in the novel as a whole. [30 marks]
Show what a strong answer covers
The marking points an examiner looks for. Not a model answer - a checklist to plan against.
- AO1: presents a clear, thesis-driven argument that duality is the novel's central claim about all people, not a private oddity of Jekyll's, supported by well-chosen references from the extract and the wider novel
- AO1: selects precise, embedded references tracking duality beyond the extract, e.g. Jekyll's 'profound duplicity of life', Utterson's respectable restraint, and the contrast of the bright street with the blistered door
- AO2: analyses the balanced syntax of the central declaration - 'not truly one, but truly two' - the antithesis enacting in grammar the very split it describes
- AO2: analyses the metaphor of 'dreadful shipwreck' and the framing of discovery as doom - scientific 'truth' presented in the language of catastrophe, foreshadowing where the experiment leads
- AO2: analyses how the novel's structure embodies duality - the truth withheld behind Utterson's investigation until two confessional documents split the ending, and one body housing two names throughout
- AO3: relates duality to Victorian respectability - a culture demanding public virtue while driving private appetite underground, so every gentleman in the novel polices a divided self
- AO3: relates the novel to post-Darwinian anxieties about a primitive self beneath the civilised one, and to contemporary interest in the divided mind, which gave Stevenson's fable scientific resonance