The 10 chapters of this novel aren’t in chronological order. You don’t find out the actual order of events until chapter 10.
That’s great if you are a reader in 1885, gripped with suspense, desperate to find out what happens next and why.
It’s a complete pain in the neck if you are in year 10 or 11, grappling with language and ideas which are 150 years old!
If you don’t mind the spoiler alert, it is much easier to know the whole plot before you read the book. I hope this helps!
1. On their weekly walk, a very sensible, trustworthy lawyer named Mr. Utterson listens as his friend Mr. Enfield tell a gruesome tale of assault. The tale describes a sinister figure named Mr. Hyde who tramples over young girl, disappears into a door on the street, and reemerges to pay off her relatives with a check signed by an un-named but respectable gentleman.
2. Since both Utterson and Enfield disapprove of gossip, they agree to speak no further of the matter. It happens, however, that one of Utterson’s clients and close friends, Dr. Jekyll, has written a will transferring all of his property to this same Mr. Hyde.
3. Soon, Utterson begins having dreams in which a faceless figure stalks through a nightmarish version of London.
4. Puzzled, the lawyer visits Dr. Jekyll and their mutual friend Dr. Lanyon to try to learn more. Lanyon reports that he no longer sees much of Jekyll, since they had a dispute over the course of Jekyll’s research, which Lanyon calls “unscientific balderdash.”
5. Curious, Utterson stakes out a building that Hyde visits—which, it turns out, is a laboratory attached to the back of Jekyll’s home. Encountering Hyde, Utterson is amazed by how indefinably ugly the man seems, as if deformed, though Utterson cannot say exactly how. Much to Utterson’s surprise, Hyde willingly offers Utterson his address.
6. Dr. Jekyll tells his friend and lawyer, Utterson, not to concern himself with the matter of Hyde, and not to worry about Hyde.
7. A year passes uneventfully.
8. Then, one night, a servant girl witnesses Hyde brutally beat to death an old man named Sir Danvers Carew, a member of Parliament and a client of Utterson. The murder weapon is a cane.
9. The police contact Utterson, and Utterson suspects Hyde as the murderer. He leads the officers to Hyde’s apartment in Soho, feeling a sense of foreboding amid the eerie weather—the morning is dark and wreathed in fog.
10. When they arrive at the apartment, the murderer has vanished, and police searches prove futile. They do find part of the cane, the murder weapon.
11. Shortly afterwards, Utterson again visits Dr. Jekyll, who now claims to have ended all relations with Hyde; he shows Utterson a note, allegedly written to Jekyll by Hyde, apologizing for the trouble he has caused him and saying goodbye.
12. That night, however, Utterson’s clerk points out that Hyde’s handwriting bears a remarkable similarity to Jekyll’s own. Utterson wonders if Dr. Jekyll has forged the note to protect Hyde. He wonders what hold Hyde might have over Dr. Jekyll.
13. For a few months, Jekyll acts especially friendly and sociable, as if a weight has been lifted from his shoulders.
14. But then Jekyll suddenly begins to refuse visitors.
15. Around the same time, Dr. Lanyon dies from some kind of shock he received in connection with Jekyll. Before dying, however, Lanyon gives Utterson a letter, with instructions that he not open it until after Jekyll’s death.
16. Meanwhile, Utterson goes out walking with Enfield, and they see Jekyll at a window of his laboratory; the three men begin to conversation, but a look of horror comes over Jekyll’s face, and he slams the window and disappears.
17. Soon afterward, Jekyll’s butler, Mr. Poole, visits Utterson in a state of desperation: Jekyll has secluded himself in his laboratory for several weeks, and now the voice that comes from the room sounds nothing like the doctor’s. He suspects that Dr. Jekyll has been killed, and that the killer is still in the room.
18. Utterson and Poole travel to Jekyll’s house through empty, windswept, sinister streets; once there, they find the servants huddled together in fear. After arguing for a time, the two of them decide to break into Jekyll’s laboratory.
19. Inside, they find the body of Hyde. He is strangely wearing Jekyll’s clothes which don’t fit him. Hyde has apparently committed suicide. Utterson and Poole find a letter from Jekyll to Utterson promising to explain everything.
20. Utterson takes the document home, where first he reads Lanyon’s letter, the one that was not supposed to be read until Dr. Jekyll’s death. It reveals that Lanyon’s deterioration and eventual death were caused by the shock of seeing Mr. Hyde take a potion and metamorphose into Dr. Jekyll.
21. The second letter is a testament by Jekyll. It explains how Jekyll, seeking to separate his good side from his darker impulses, discovered a way to transform himself periodically into a deformed monster free of conscience and guilt. When he transformed himself, he became Mr. Hyde.
22. At first, Jekyll reports, he delighted in becoming Hyde and rejoiced in the moral freedom that the creature possessed, because he could do anything without feeling guilty about it. Dr. Jekyll never tells us what the immoral things are that he tried as Mr. Hyde.
23. Eventually, however, he found that he was turning into Hyde involuntarily in his sleep, even without taking the potion. Hyde’s personality was taking over, and so was his physical change.
24. At this point, Jekyll decides to cease becoming Hyde. One night, however, the urge gripped him too strongly, and after the transformation he immediately rushed out and violently killed Sir Danvers Carew.
25. Horrified, Jekyll tried more adamantly to stop the transformations, and for a time he proved successful; one day, however, while sitting in a park, he suddenly turned into Hyde, the first time that an involuntary metamorphosis had happened while he was awake.
26. The letter continues describing Jekyll’s cry for help. Far from his laboratory and hunted by the police as a murderer, Hyde needed Lanyon’s help to get his potions and become Jekyll again—but when he undertook the transformation in Lanyon’s presence, the shock of the sight instigated Lanyon’s deterioration and death. He warns Dr. Lanyon that he will be shocked, but part of him wants revenge because Dr. Lanyon had criticised Dr. Jekyll’s science.
27. Meanwhile, Jekyll returned to his home, only to find himself ever more helpless and trapped as the transformations increased in frequency and necessitated even larger doses of potion in order to reverse themselves.
28. It was the onset of one of these spontaneous metamorphoses that caused Jekyll to slam his laboratory window shut in the middle of his conversation with Enfield and Utterson. Eventually, the potion began to run out, and Jekyll was unable to find a key ingredient to make more. The ingredient he had used was impure, and Dr. Jekyll doesn’t find out in time, so he can’t reproduce it. All he can do is get pure forms of the ingredient. For this reason, he can’t make any more of the potion.
29. His ability to change back from Hyde into Jekyll slowly vanished. Jekyll writes that even as he composes his letter he knows that he will soon become Hyde permanently, and he wonders if Hyde will face execution for his crimes or choose to kill himself.
30. Jekyll notes that, in any case, the end of his letter marks the end of the life of Dr. Jekyll. With these words, both the document and the novel come to a close.