Dr. Henry Jekyll, also known as Edward Hyde, is the eponymous main antagonist of the 1886 gothic novella Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by the late Robert Louis Stevenson. Hyde is the dark side of Henry Jekyll, unleashed by use of a potion. Over the course of the novel, Jekyll transforms into Hyde in order to keep his good and evil personalities separate, only to find himself addicted to the potion as Hyde slowly overtakes him.
He has since been the subject of many films and was prominently featured in the first two volumes of The League of Extraordinary Gentleman, a graphic novel by Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill.
In the original novella, Hyde is described as "pale and dwarfish", and has rough, corded hands. Everyone who sees him describes him as giving an impression of ugliness, although he is not physically deformed. Hyde was created out of an experiment by Dr. Henry Jekyll, who wanted to live a wild and carefree existence without losing his respectability, so he decided to unleash his darker side. He created a potion, which allowed this to happen, and he named his new face Edward Hyde. Hyde was shorter than Jekyll because he had yet to exercise the evil in his soul.
For a time after this, Jekyll is the respectable doctor by day, then uses the potion to become Hyde and live a life of debauchery and excess by night. However, the more Jekyll used the formula, the more difficult it was to control his impulsive actions. One night, he trampled a small child who had bumped into him in the street. About a year after that, something worse occurred: As Hyde, without provocation, savagely beat an old Member of Parliament named Sir Danvers Carew to death with his cane and feet. After this incident, Jekyll determined never to use the potion again. However, Jekyll began to transform without even taking the potion, and he had to brew more antidotes to change back into himself.
When Jekyll ran out of his first batch of ingredients, he tried procured more to brew the antidote again, but he couldn't reproduce it exactly. For several weeks, Jekyll had to live in seclusion in his laboratory, since he was stuck as Edward Hyde, a wanted criminal. Unable to go on, he wrote a letter confessing his double life as Hyde and the murder of Danvers Carew. Afterward, he brewed a bottle of poison and died on consumption to avoid punishment.
To see the trope of Dr, Jekyll/Mr. Hyde, see here.
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