Tom Holland

And it told the story of a London doctor, Dr. Henry Jekyll, who is outwardly a model of respectability.

But we are told he has a yearning for unnamed pleasures that fill him, and I quote, with an almost morbid sense of shame.

And so he creates a potion.

that transforms him into the embodiment of everything within his character that is evil and hidden away, repressed.

And this character takes the name of Mr. Edward Hyde,

And as Mr. Hyde, Jekyll is free to roam London as he pleases, indulging all his basest, cruelest instincts.

And ultimately, he commits murder.

And Jekyll finds that Mr. Hyde is starting to take him over, that he is involuntarily turning into Hyde.

So to quote the novella,

The powers of Hyde seem to have grown with the sickliness of Jekyll, and ultimately Jekyll is so appalled by what he's become that he kills himself.

And when his friends burst into his laboratory, they find in the clothes of Jekyll the shrunken, deformed, hideous form.

of Hyde.

It's a massive bestseller and it's so successful that they decide to make a stage version of it.

And this appears on the West End stage in the summer of 1888.

So exactly around the time that Jack the Ripper is starting his reign of terror.

The actor playing Mr. Hyde is the kind of the theatre manager, a very famous actor called Richard Mansfield.

And he's so convincing in the part of Mr. Hyde that numerous people who attend the play accuse him

in letters to the police, of actually being the ripper.

And ultimately, the staging of the play comes to seem so offensive to the victims and to the terror that is sweeping the capital that it gets closed down.

And the last performance is held to raise money for night refuges for homeless women.