autumn

Autumn in The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is the season of the Carew murder case, a time of violent crime and moral decay that marks the beginning of the end for Henry Jekyll. The narrative's most brutal and consequential event, the murder of Sir Danvers Carew, occurs in October, and the season's imagery of fog, decay, and twilight pervades the aftermath, creating an atmosphere of moral and physical dissolution.

The Season of the Crime

The Carew murder case takes place in October, a month of autumn. The night of the murder is described as cloudless in its early part, with a full moon brilliantly lighting the lane where the crime occurs. This autumnal clarity gives way to the first fog of the season the following morning, a "great chocolate-coloured pall" that lowers over heaven. The fog, a recurring autumnal motif, is described as being "continually charging and routing" by the wind, creating a "marvelous number of degrees and hues of twilight" as Mr. Utterson's cab crawls through the streets. The dismal quarter of Soho, seen under these changing glimpses, appears to the lawyer "like a district of some city in a nightmare." The season's characteristic decay and obscurity thus mirror the moral horror of the crime and the concealment of its perpetrator.

Autumn's Atmosphere of Decay and Foreboding

The autumnal setting extends beyond the murder itself. The fog that "slept on the wing above the drowned city" on the evening Utterson consults his clerk Mr. Guest about Hyde's letter creates a sense of suffocation and moral murk. The lawyer's own chambers, however, are "gay with firelight," and a bottle of old wine, whose "imperial dye had softened with time, as the colour grows richer in stained windows," offers a brief, artificial warmth against the season's encroaching gloom. This contrast between the cozy interior and the autumnal fog outside underscores the tension between civilized order and the savage forces that have been unleashed. The season's association with decay and the approach of winter foreshadows the irreversible decline of Dr. Jekyll, who, after the murder, becomes a recluse, his life and health wasting away like the leaves of autumn.

Narrative Significance

Autumn functions as a temporal marker of crisis and irreversible change. The murder of Sir Danvers Carew, a crime of "singular ferocity" that startles all of London, is the pivotal event that transforms the mystery of Jekyll and Hyde from a private scandal into a public horror. The season's imagery of fog, twilight, and decay is not merely atmospheric but thematic, embodying the moral obscurity and the disintegration of Jekyll's carefully constructed dual life. The autumnal setting thus reinforces the novel's central themes of duality, concealment, and the inevitable collapse of a divided self, as the season of harvest and decline gives way to the winter of Jekyll's final, fatal transformation.