The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde Chapter 10 - Henry Jekyll's Full Statement of the Case

**Kristin Hughes** (0:01)
Chapter 10 of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
Reading by Kristin Hughes.
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. By Robert Louis Stevenson. CHAPTER 10 HENRY JECKELL'S FULL STATEMENT OF THE CASE.
I was born in the year eighteen blank to a large fortune, endowed besides with excellent parts, inclined by nature to industry, fond of the respect of the wise and good among my fellow men, and thus, as might have been supposed, with every guarantee of an honorable and distinguished future. And indeed, the worst of my faults was a certain impatient gaiety of disposition, such as has made the happiness of many, but such as I found it hard to reconcile with my imperious desire to carry my head high and wear a more than commonly grave countenance before the public. Hence it came about that I concealed my pleasures, and that when I reached years of reflection and began to look around me and take stock of my progress and position in the world, I stood already committed to a profound duplicity of me. Many a man would have even blazoned such irregularities as I was guilty of, but from the high views that I had set before me, I regarded and hid them with an almost morbid sense of shame. It was thus rather the exacting nature of my aspirations than any part of degradation in my faults that made me what I was, and, with even a deeper trench than in the majority of men, severed in me those provinces of good and ill which divide and compound a man's dual nature. In this case I was driven to reflect deeply and inveterately on that hard law of life which lies at the root of religion and is one of the most plentiful springs of distress.
Though so profound a double-dealer, I was in no sense a hypocrite. Both sides of me were in dead earnest. I was no more myself when I laid aside restraint and plunged in shame than when I laboured, in the eye of day, at the furtherance of knowledge or the relief of sorrow and suffering. And it chanced that the direction of my scientific studies, which led wholly towards the mystic and the transcendental, retracted and shed a strong light on this consciousness of the perennial war among my members. 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 had been doomed to such a dreadful shipwreck, that a man is not truly one, but truly two. I say two because the state of my own knowledge does not pass beyond that point. Others will follow. Others will outstrip me on the same lines, and I hazard the guess that man will be ultimately known for a mere polity of multifarious, incongruous, and independent denizens. I, for my part, from the nature of my life, advanced infallibly in one direction, and in one direction only. It was on the moral side and in my own person that I learned to recognize the thorough and primitive duality of man. I saw that, of the two natures that contended in the field of my consciousness, even if I could rightly be said to be either, it was only because I was radically both. And from an early date, even before the course of my scientific discoveries had begun to suggest the most naked possibility of such a miracle, I had learned to dwell with pleasure, as a beloved daydream, on the thought of the separation of these elements. If each, I told myself, could be housed in separate identities, life would be relieved of all that was unbearable, the unjust might go his way, delivered from the aspirations and remorse of his more upright twin, and the just could walk steadfastly and securely on his upward path, doing the good things in which he found his pleasure, and no longer exposed to disgrace and penitence by the hands of this extraneous evil. It was the curse of mankind that these incongruous faggots were thus bound together, that in the agonized womb of consciousness these polar twins should be continuously struggling. How then were they disassociated?
I was so far in my reflections, when as I have said, a side-light began to shine upon the subject from the laboratory table. I began to perceive more deeply than it has ever yet been stated, the trembling immateriality, the mist-like transience of this seemingly so solid body in which we walk attired. Certain agents I found to have the power to shake and pluck back that fleshy vestment, even as a wind might toss the curtains of a pavilion. For two good reasons I will not enter deeply into this scientific branch of my confession. First, because I have been made to learn that the doom and burden of our life is bound forever on man's shoulders, and when the attempt is made to cast it off, it but returns upon us with more unfamiliar and more awful pressure. Second, because as my narrative will make, alas, too evident, my discoveries were incomplete. Enough then that I will not only recognize my natural body from the mere aura and effulgence of certain of the powers that make up my spirit, but manage to compound a drug by which these powers should be dethroned from their supremacy and a second form and countenance substituted. None the less natural to me, because they were the expression and bore the stamp of lower elements in my soul.