Messrs. Maw

Messrs. Maw is a wholesale chemical firm in London that plays a small but decisive role in the final catastrophe of Dr. Henry Jekyll's double existence. The firm's inability to supply the original, impure salt that gave Jekyll's transformative drug its efficacy—despite frantic orders and pleas—directly precipitates the irreversible collapse of Jekyll's control over his transformations and leads to his death.

Role in Jekyll's Final Crisis

In the last week of his life, Jekyll, confined to his cabinet and rapidly losing the ability to maintain his own form, sent a series of desperate orders to Messrs. Maw. The butler Poole was dispatched to the firm multiple times a day, each time returning with a sample that Jekyll immediately rejected as impure and useless. A crumpled note from Jekyll to the firm, preserved by Poole, reveals the doctor's mounting desperation: after a composed request for any remaining stock of the same quality he had purchased in the year 18—, the writing suddenly breaks into a spluttered plea: "For God's sake, find me some of the old." The man at Maw's, angered by the repeated rejections, threw the note back at Poole "like so much dirt."

Significance and Consequence

Messrs. Maw's inability to supply the original salt—which Jekyll later realized had been impure and that unknown impurity was what lent efficacy to the draught—meant that every subsequent batch was chemically correct but functionally inert. Jekyll's first supply had never been renewed since the date of his first experiment, and once it ran low, no amount of ransacking London's chemists could reproduce the transformative effect. The firm thus unwittingly became the agent of Jekyll's final, irreversible entrapment in the identity of Edward Hyde, leading directly to Hyde's suicide and the end of both men.