Lanyon–Hyde encounter

The Lanyon–Hyde encounter is the story's central revelation, the moment when the supernatural truth of Henry Jekyll's double existence is forced upon an unwilling witness. Dr. Hastie Lanyon, a rationalist physician who had long dismissed Jekyll's scientific heresies, is compelled by an urgent, registered letter from his old colleague to perform a series of bizarre errands: force open Jekyll's cabinet, retrieve a specific drawer containing powders, a phial, and a notebook, and then, at midnight, admit a stranger who will present himself in Jekyll's name. The encounter that follows—in which that stranger, Edward Hyde, drinks a compound and transforms into Henry Jekyll—destroys Lanyon's grip on reality, leaves him psychologically shattered, and ultimately kills him within a fortnight. It is the only scene in the novel where a character other than Jekyll himself witnesses the transformation, and it provides the crucial narrative bridge between the external mystery and Jekyll's own confession.

Background and Preparation

The encounter is set in motion on the evening of January 9, when Lanyon receives a registered envelope addressed in Jekyll's hand. The letter, dated December 10, is a desperate appeal: Jekyll writes that his life, honour, and reason depend on Lanyon's compliance, and he instructs Lanyon to postpone all other engagements, take a cab to Jekyll's house, and, with the help of Poole and a locksmith, force open the cabinet door. Lanyon is to enter alone, open the glazed press marked "E," and remove the fourth drawer from the top, carrying it back to his own house in Cavendish Square exactly as it stands. At midnight, he is to admit a man who will come in Jekyll's name and hand over the drawer. The letter is so urgent and so strange that Lanyon, though he suspects his colleague is insane, feels bound to obey. He drives to Jekyll's house, where Poole has already summoned a locksmith and a carpenter; after two hours of work, the door is forced open, and Lanyon retrieves the drawer. Back at Cavendish Square, he examines its contents: neatly made-up powders of a white crystalline salt, a phial half-full of a blood-red, pungent liquor, and a notebook filled with dates and occasional remarks—"double" appearing six times, and once, early in the list, "total failure!!!" Lanyon, still convinced he is dealing with a case of cerebral disease, dismisses his servants but loads an old revolver for self-defence.

The Midnight Visitor

At twelve o'clock, the knocker sounds gently on the door. Lanyon answers himself and finds a small man crouching against the pillars of the portico. The visitor confirms he comes from Dr. Jekyll with a constrained gesture, and before entering, he casts a searching backward glance into the darkness of the square, where a policeman is approaching with his bull's eye lantern open—at the sight, the visitor starts and makes greater haste. In the bright light of the consulting room, Lanyon gets his first clear look at the man. He is small, with a shocking expression on his face, a remarkable combination of great muscular activity and great apparent debility of constitution, and—most disturbingly—he produces an odd, subjective disturbance in those near him, a sensation Lanyon compares to incipient rigour accompanied by a marked sinking of the pulse. The visitor is dressed in clothes enormously too large for him: trousers hanging on his legs and rolled up, the waist of the coat below his haunches, the collar sprawling wide on his shoulders. This ludicrous accoutrement, far from moving Lanyon to laughter, only reinforces the sense of something abnormal and misbegotten in the creature's very essence. The visitor is on fire with sombre excitement, crying out, "Have you got it?" and laying his hand on Lanyon's arm, a touch that sends an icy pang along Lanyon's blood.

The Transformation

Lanyon, maintaining a professional composure, points to the drawer where it lies on the floor behind a table, still covered with a sheet. The visitor springs toward it, then pauses, laying his hand on his heart; Lanyon can hear his teeth grate with the convulsive action of his jaws, and his face is so ghastly that Lanyon grows alarmed for both his life and reason. With the decision of despair, the visitor plucks away the sheet, utters one loud sob of immense relief, and then, in a voice already fairly well under control, asks for a graduated glass. Lanyon gives it to him. The visitor measures out a few minims of the red tincture and adds one of the powders. The mixture, initially reddish, brightens in colour as the crystals melt, effervesces audibly, and throws off small fumes of vapour. Suddenly the ebullition ceases, and the compound changes to a dark purple, which fades more slowly to a watery green. The visitor, having watched these metamorphoses with a keen eye, smiles, sets down the glass, and turns to Lanyon with an air of scrutiny. He offers Lanyon a choice: let him leave with the glass and remain as he was, or witness a prodigy that will stagger the unbelief of Satan. Lanyon, having already gone too far in inexplicable services, chooses to see the end. The visitor puts the glass to his lips and drinks at one gulp. A cry follows; he reels, staggers, clutches at the table, staring with injected eyes, gasping with open mouth. As Lanyon watches, a change comes: the man seems to swell, his face becomes suddenly black, the features melt and alter—and the next moment, Lanyon has sprung to his feet and leaped back against the wall, his arms raised to shield himself, his mind submerged in terror. For there before his eyes—pale and shaken, half fainting, groping before him with his hands like a man restored from death—stands Henry Jekyll.

Aftermath and Consequences

What Jekyll told Lanyon in the next hour, Lanyon cannot bring his mind to set on paper. He saw what he saw, heard what he heard, and his soul sickened at it; even after the sight has faded from his eyes, he asks himself if he believes it and cannot answer. His life is shaken to its roots; sleep leaves him; the deadliest terror sits by him at all hours of the day and night. He feels his days are numbered and that he must die, and yet he will die incredulous. As for the moral turpitude that Jekyll unveiled to him, even with tears of penitence, Lanyon cannot dwell on it in memory without a start of horror. He writes only one thing to Utterson: the creature who crept into his house that night was, on Jekyll's own confession, known by the name of Hyde and hunted for in every corner of the land as the murderer of Sir Danvers Carew. Lanyon's sealed narrative, addressed to Utterson and marked "not to be opened till the death or disappearance of Dr. Henry Jekyll," becomes the second of the two documents that finally explain the mystery. Within a week of the encounter, Lanyon takes to his bed, and in less than a fortnight he is dead. His physical decay—the rosy man grown pale, his flesh fallen away, visibly balder and older—is matched by a look in his eye that testifies to some deep-seated terror of the mind. He declares himself a doomed man, refuses to hear Jekyll's name, and dies with the secret locked in his sealed packet, leaving Utterson to wait for Jekyll's own confession to complete the story.