were the servants' area, usually located in the basement of a London home). Therefore, the laboratory is apart from the central living area and not easily accessible.

This building is described in terms that make it seem prisonlike and unpleasant. We learn it is sometimes called the "dissecting rooms," as a surgeon once owned the house and used the space to study anatomy. Now the main source of inquiry is chemistry, but the association with death and cadavers has been established. 

Mr. Utterson goes through this dingy, unkept place, past equipment strewn around. He climbs up a staircase and through a red, baize-covered door into Dr. Jekyll's inner sanctum. The isolation of the laboratory, and especially of the final room with its barred windows, suggests that what goes on here is far removed from Jekyll's ordinary, public life. The description is both unpleasant and mysterious. Stepping through the red baize door especially seems to imply crossing a threshold into a different realm. Readers might have been reminded of the green baize door that typically separated servant quarters of a home from the family's living space, emphasizing what a different world Utterson has now entered.  

Our introduction to Dr. Jekyll's laboratory seems somewhat off-handed, and only concerns a description of its exterior.  However, it reveals quite a bit and begins to set the mood for the entire story.

In chapter one, Mr. Enfield, a lawyer, tells his client, Mr. Utterson, a story, one that Mr. Enfield was reminded of by the sight of the laboratory's door.  As the story goes, he once observed a small, ugly man who seemed somewhat deformed, exit that door.  This man bumped into a little girl and trampled her without any regard for her whatsoever.  When passers-by stopped him and demanded that he compensate the child's family with a sum of 100 pounds, he disappeared back into the house and returned shortly with a check made out by one Dr. Jekyll.  Thus, Mr. Enfield reached the conclusion that this man must be blackmailing Dr. Jekyll (who is known to live elsewhere) and now refers to the house as the "Black Mail House."  He assumes that this ugly, evil-looking man must have information about some indiscretion in Dr. Jekyll's youth that he is holding over him in exchange for money.

Further, he says that he asked no questions of Dr. Jekyll in the wake of this scene because "the more it looks like Queer Street, the less [he] ask[s]."  Queer Street, as the footnote tells us, is an "Imaginary street where people in difficulties are supposed to reside."  Therefore, the building which houses the laboratory has, to respectable folk, become synonymous with a place where unrespectable or disreputable people live.  It is associated with criminal and malicious activity.

The reader gets his first glimpse of the laboratory in the fifth chapter, "The Incident of the Letter." Mr. Utterson describes it as a "dingy, windowless structure" and the theatre "gaunt and silent" (Stevenson 23). There are tables with chemical equipment, crates and straw on the floor and the place is dimly lit. At the further end of the theatre is the door to the doctor's office, covered in a red, woolen-like material. Through this is his office which contains a full-length mirror, a desk, and "fitted round with glass presses" (Stevenson 23). There are three dusty windows in the office fitted with iron bars and a fireplace on one side 

The description is found in "The Last Night" (Ch 8). Poole has successfully swung his axe and broken into the lab. The sight is hardly one of horror, save the body lying in the middle of the floor "sorely contorted and still twitching." Otherwise, it is nothing out of the ordinary:

"The besiegers, appalled by their own riot and the stillness that had succeeded, stood back a little and peered in. There lay the cabinet before their eyes in the quiet lamplight, a good fire glowing and chattering on the hearth, the kettle singing its thin strain, a drawer or two open, papers neatly set forth on the business table, and nearer the fire, the things laid out for tea; the quietest room, you would have said, and for the glazed presses full of chemicals, the most commonplace that night in London."