The Strange Case of Self-loathing and self-abasement, wrapped in a cult of Self, in which the central Ego controls....

 And the lawyer set out homeward with a very heavy heart. “Poor Harry Jekyll,” he thought, “my mind misgives me he is in deep waters! He was wild when he was young; a long while ago to be sure; but in the law of God, there is no statute of limitations. Ay, it must be that; the ghost of some old sin, the cancer of some concealed disgrace: punishment coming, pede claudo, years after memory has forgotten and self-love condoned the fault.” And the lawyer, scared by the thought, brooded awhile on his own past, groping in all the corners of memory, least by chance some Jack-in-the-Box of an old iniquity should leap to light there. His past was fairly blameless; few men could read the rolls of their life with less apprehension; yet he was humbled to the dust by the many ill things he had done, and raised up again into a sober and fearful gratitude by the many he had come so near to doing yet avoided. And then by a return on his former subject, he conceived a spark of hope.

-Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.

The cult of self, Jekyll was at times, up to being half a man, even that much, and other times, not equal to the task, barely putting in the niceties to keep up appearances.

As a half of person, he was out of his depth, but he kept to the line and gave no sign of the truth, that he imbibed himself into someone else.  This is like Stephen King and Peter Straub's other world behind the fog of drink, where good and evil fought tete-a-tete, where the real world reeked more of poverty and dissipation on its own terms.

Here I was thinking Jekyll should have had a third alter ego, something more of a happy medium, but decidedly different than the other too.  But I note Jekyll behaved secretively, and then openly and grand, as if he too were experimenting with making another personality, living his "best life" writ large in the society pages.  And that without a tonic, but his own life energy being used, that wick burning brighter and brighter still, folding down and down, until at last, he would disappear as Hyde for two mighty months.

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