what kind of a person was dr. jekyll and what possessed him to try the experiment on himself?

Dr. Jekyll was a prominent middle-aged doctor described as both tall and handsome. He is also extremely wealthy with a fortune well over two million dollars. All that know him describe him as respected and proper. However, as the novel progresses, we subtly witness his hypocritical behavior, which Stevenson claimed was Jekyll's fatal flaw. The doctor's belief that within each human being there exist forces of good and evil leads to his experiments that try to separate the two. Although presented as a scientific experiment, Jekyll undertook this task to allow himself a release from the respectable guise of Dr. Jekyll. In the book, Jekyll's voice is only heard in the concluding chapter, only after being described through the lens of Utterson, Lanyon, Poole, and Enfield.