The Strange Case of Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde
- Written By Robert Louis Stevenson
The Strange Case of Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde
- Robert Louis Stevenson
$19.99
One man. Two natures. No escape.
In the fog-bound streets of Victorian London, a lawyer named Utterson begins to notice something amiss. His old friend Dr. Henry Jekyll โ brilliant, respected, a pillar of the professional classes โ has recently acquired a troubling new associate: a small, pale man named Hyde who inspires revulsion in everyone he meets, and who seems to hold inexplicable sway over Jekyll’s affairs.
What Utterson uncovers, piece by piece, is a story that strains the limits of rational thought. Hyde is violent, reckless, and utterly without conscience โ and his connection to the impeccable Dr. Jekyll grows darker and more dangerous with every new revelation.
Robert Louis Stevenson wrote the novella in a fever of creative urgency, and it shows: Jekyll and Hyde moves like a nightmare, tightly wound and impossible to put down. Published in 1886, it gave literature one of its most enduring archetypes โ the civilized man and the darkness he cannot contain โ and has never stopped asking what we owe to the parts of ourselves we refuse to name.
โAll human beings are commingled out of good and evil.โ
About the Author
- Robert Louis Stevenson
Robert Louis Stevenson (1850โ1894) was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, into a family of lighthouse engineers, a profession he was expected to follow. Instead, after a turbulent youth marked by chronic illness, religious conflict with his father, and restless wandering across Europe, he turned to writing.
Stevenson wrote with uncommon range: adventure novels, travel essays, poetry, and the Gothic fiction that would cement his reputation. Treasure Island appeared in 1883; Kidnapped followed in 1886, the same year that, in a fever of inspiration, he wrote The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde in a matter of days. Under pressure from his wife, Fanny, he more fully developed the novelโs enduring allegory, creating one of the most influential works of the Victorian era.
In his final years, Stevenson left Europe, chartering a yacht and sailing across the Pacific in search of a climate his lungs could bear. In 1894, he died in Samoa at age forty-four, his travels at rest and his legacy only beginning.
