The strange case of dr jekyll and mr hyde summery, Sintesi del corso di Inglese

Scarica The strange case of dr jekyll and mr hyde summery e più Sintesi del corso in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! THE STRANGE CASE OF DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE SUMMARY The novel begins with the physical description of Mr. Utterson, with even some mention of his personality, his lifestyle and his attitude towards the others. Every week the lawyer used to meet his distant kinsman, Mr. Richard Enfield, in their Sunday walks and it chanced on one of this rambles that their way led them in a busy quarter of London, where, all of a sudden, Mr. Enfield lifted up his cane pointing a door and asked his friend “Did you remark that door?”. At this point, he began to recount an episode he had experienced time before: a brute of a man dropped a little girl who was running, he trampled calmly over her and left her screaming on the ground; Mr. Enfield instinctively ran, he grabbed the rude man and forced him to provide money for a compensation, so the man entered the door and came back with ten pounds in gold and a cheque drawn from Dr. Jekyll, which Enfield had expected to be a forgery, but found it genuine. An honest man paying for the misdeeds of a damnable man? There had to be something underneath... When Mr. Utterson came home, curious and suspicious at the same time, went into his business room and opened his safe, where he found Dr. Jekyll's will. It provided that, in the event of Dr. Jekyll's death or disappearance, his entire estate would be turned over to Mr. Hyde, who was the man who had walked over the child, a man of whom the lawyer could learn no more. It was then that Mr. Utterson, extremely suspicious of this whole arrangement, hoping to receive answers, visited Dr. Lanyon, who admitted he was no longer in contact with Dr. JekyII. Trying to get to the bottom of this kind of strange mystery, from that time forward, Mr. Utterson began to haunt the door in the street, until Mr. Hyde appeared with this sort of Satan's signature upon his face. At this point, impressed with the cruelty that came out of that man, the lawyer decided to turn directly to Dr. Jekyll; unfortunately, the doctor was not at home and the only information that the lawyer managed to carry back with him from the butler was that Dr. Jekyll reposed a great deal of trust in that ugly man called Hyde. And just coincidence, two weeks later, Dr. Jekyll invited Utterson to dinner and, when the lawyer led up to that subject that so disagreeably preoccupied his mind, the doctor said it was a private matter and he begged the other not to be interested in it anymore; at last, he also asked his friend to help Hyde when he would no longer be there. Nearly a year later, Sir Danvers Carew, one of Utterson's clients, was brutally beaten to death and Mr. Hyde was recognised as his murderer: he killed the man with the stick Mr. Utterson had presented many years before to Henry Jekyll. Jekyll gives Utterson a letter signed by Hyde which stated that Mr. Hyde had run away and in which he apologised for taking advantage of Jekyll's generosity; as he was too disappointed and had lost confidence in himself, Dr. Jekyll asked Utterson to judge this letter he said someone had delivered by hand. On his way out, the lawyer stopped to talk to Jekyll's butler and asked him to describe the messenger who delivered the letter but Poole answered him that nothing had come except by post, renewing Utterson's fears that the letter came from Jekyll. That night, Utterson compared the handwriting of Hyde's letter to an invitation signed by Jekyll and, with the help of his head clerk Guest, determined that Jekyll had forged the letter to protect Hyde. With the disappearance of Hyde and his evil influence, a new life began for Dr. Jekyll, who seemed to return to his happy and social life for a few months. On the 8° of January both Utterson and Lanyon dined at the doctor’'s home, but on the 12!" and the 14" the lawyer found the door shut against him; Poole said the doctor was confined to the house and saw no one. Worried, a few days later, Mr. Utterson visited their mutual acquaintance Lanyon to discuss Jekyll's return to solitude and he was shocked at the change which had taken place in the doctor's appearance: Lanyon confessed he had suffered a great shock in relation to Jekyll and warned Utterson against interfering anymore in Jekyll's affairs. As soon as he got home, Utterson wrote to Jekyll, asking the cause of this unhappy break with Lanyon. The answer from the doctor came the following day and it was clear that he intended to lead a life of extreme seclusion; he defined himself “the THE STRANGE CASE OF DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE chief of sinners” and “the chief of sufferers”, and begged Utterson to respect his silence. Lanyon died soon after and, the night after the funeral, Utterson found an envelope written by the hand of Lanyon with the instructions to not open it until after Jekyll's death or disappearance; struck by another mention of a “disappearance” in relation to Jekyll, Utterson managed to resist the temptation to read the letter and stored it away. On his usual walk with Mr. Enfield, Utterson and Enfield came once again in front of Hyde's door and, after sharing with each other the feeling of repulsion they both had towards him, they realised that the door was a back way entrance to Jekyll's laboratory. They entered the court and took a look at the windows: sitting beside one of them, Utterson saw Jekyll, looking disconsolate; the lawyer and his cousin attempted to speak with him, and, if Jekyll answered at first, then his smile was suddenly struck out of his face and succeeded by an expression of terror and despair. One evening after dinner, Mr. Utterson received a visit from Poole, who told him that Jekyll had barricaded himself in his laboratory for more than a week, always ordering Poole to visit various wholesale chemists in search of a mysterious drug; The alteration of the doctor's voice, the mask he wore on his face and the avoidance of his friends, led the butler to believe that foul play was committed, and he couldn't bear that situation more. That's why Mr. Utterson decided to go with Poole and see for himself: they took an axe and a kitchen poker and broke into the laboratory where, right in the middle, laid the body of a man: he was Edward Hyde dressed in Jekyll's clothes, and he had apparently committed suicide by drinking a vial of poison. They found several enclosures fell to the floor: the first was Jekyll's revised will, which names Utterson as the new benefactor in place of Hyde, the second a brief note from Jekyll addressed to the lawyer, explaining that he had disappeared and suggesting Utterson to read Lanyon's letter first of all, the third one contains Jekyll's own confession. Mr. Utterson returned to his office and read Lanyon's letter, in which he wrote that, after Jekyll's last dinner party, he had received a strange letter from Jekyll. The letter asked Lanyon to go to Jekyll's home and break into the cabinet of the laboratory, then to carry back to his own home a specific drawer and all its contents, and wait for a man who would come to claim it at midnight; that man was Mr. Hyde, who, before Lanyon's eyes, took a potion that transformed him into Dr. JekyIl. Lanyon here ended his letter, stating that the horror of the event was so shocking to cause his deterioration and eventually death (“my life is shaken to its roots”). Then was up to Jekyll's confession. By the time he was fully grown, Dr. Jekyll dreamt of separating the good and the evil natures as he insisted that “man is not truly one, but truly two”. He reported that, after much research, he had eventually found a chemical solution that might serve his purposes: he had taken the potion and, after experiencing pain and nausea, he had become the deformed Mr. Hyde, the personification of his evil side. He managed to control his transformation until one night, when he involuntarily transformed into Hyde; this incident convinced him that he must cease with his transformations, but only after two months as Jekyll, he took the potion again. Hyde, so long repressed, emerged wilder and stronger, and it was in this mood that he killed Carew. The horrifying nature of the murder convinced Jekyll never to transform himself again, and it was during these months that he tried to occupy himself with friends and social activities. Another spontaneous transformation into Hyde took place when Jekyll was sitting in a park, far from home, and that's why he wrote to Lanyon in Jekyll's handwriting asking him to get his potion for him. Over the time, Hyde grew stronger as Jekyll grew weaker, and the original salt, which must have contained an impurity that made the potion work, ran out. Resigned he would forever remain Hyde, Jekyll killed himself.