What does Edward Hyde look like?

Abstract Say ‘Jekyll and Hyde’, and the person you are speaking to will see in the mind’s eye Spencer Tracy’s amiably pudgy features dissolving into the monstrous physiognomy of Edward Hyde. The transformation is one of the high-points of early Hollywood special effects and close-up camera artistry. The World’s Classics volume pays tribute to the 1941 film by carrying on its cover a still photograph of Tracy in his Hyde make-up. Thanks to the film, when they think of Jekyll and Hyde modern readers see a face very vividly and in great detail. One of the puzzles in Stevenson’s source text, however, is that where Hyde’s face ought to be in the narrative there is a blank –– rather like the facial features technologically fuzzed out in television documentaries and newscasts ‘to protect the innocent’. What precisely was Stevenson’s motive for doing this? The numerous descriptions of Edward Hyde in the narrative agree on a number of points: (1) he is physically small; (2) he is a ‘gentleman’; (3) he is young; (4) he is, in some unspecified way, ‘deformed’.