Portland Street

Portland Street appears only once in the narrative, but at a moment of supreme crisis. After the murder of Sir Danvers Carew, Edward Hyde—fugitive, hunted, and still wearing the ill-fitting clothes of Henry Jekyll—hails a passing hansom cab and directs the driver to a hotel on Portland Street whose name he happens to remember. The choice is not casual: it is the first deliberate step in a desperate plan to reach Dr. Hastie Lanyon and secure the transformative drug that alone can restore Jekyll's identity.

The Hotel and the Letters

At the Portland Street hotel, Hyde's appearance is so grotesque—his borrowed garments hanging formlessly on his shrunken frame—that the cab driver cannot conceal his mirth. Hyde responds with a gust of devilish fury, gnashing his teeth, and the smile withers from the driver's face; the narrator reflects that had the man laughed a moment longer, Hyde would have dragged him from his perch. Inside the hotel, Hyde's black countenance makes the attendants tremble; they obey his orders without exchanging a look, lead him to a private room, and bring him writing materials. There, mastering his rage with a great effort of will, Hyde composes two crucial letters: one to Lanyon and one to Poole, his own butler. To ensure they are actually posted, he sends them out with instructions that they be registered. He then spends the rest of the day sitting alone over the fire in the private room, gnawing his nails, dining in solitude while the waiter visibly quails before his eye.

The Night Journey

When night fully comes, Hyde leaves the Portland Street hotel in the corner of a closed cab and is driven to and fro about the streets of the city. The narrator—now speaking of Hyde in the third person, as a creature apart—describes him as a child of Hell with nothing human in him but fear and hatred. Thinking the driver has begun to grow suspicious, Hyde discharges the cab and ventures on foot, attired in his misfitting clothes, an object marked out for observation, into the midst of the nocturnal passengers. He walks fast, hunted by his fears, chattering to himself, skulking through less frequented thoroughfares, counting the minutes until midnight. When a woman speaks to him, offering a box of lights, he smites her in the face and she flees. Portland Street thus serves as the staging ground for Hyde's last independent actions before the transformation that will bring him, at Lanyon's house, face to face with the horror of his own nature.