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The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde: Book Review

The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson

A forgotten classic that always finds itself being mentioned by the public is The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson. That is why we will be reviewing this gothic novella and see just how good it was and if you should get around to reading it!

The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde Summary

The story starts off with Gabriel John Utterson and his cousin Richard Enfield discussing a strange occurrence that took place three months ago. At 3 A.M. on that day, Enfield recalls a sinister man named Edward Hyde trample a young girl after accidentally bumping into her. Enfield forced Hyde to pay the family of the girl a £100 to quiet them. Hyde then leads Enfield to a door and gives Enfield a check signed by Doctor Henry Jekyll, a friend and client of Utterson.

That leads Enfield to believe that Hyde is blackmailing hide along with the fact that Jekyll changed his will and made Hyde the sole beneficiary in case anything happens to him. This leads to them talking to Jekyll about Hyde and Jekyll says he has everything under control. But Jekyll’s world starts to crumble around him when a murder takes place and Hyde is a suspect, threatening to make his secret public.

The novella was written in 1986 and even over a century later, it holds up well. When people think of gothic horror novels , this novel is one that comes to most people’s mind. Even the phrase “ Jekyll and Hyde ” has become ingrained in mainstream culture. This novella was one an instant success and one of Stevenson’s best selling works.

For its time, this was considered a horror novel unlike any other. And while I don’t think that is it that terrifying, there was nothing like it when it was published. What makes this novel fascinating is that it tackles a lot of things and there are a lot of interpretations that critics took away from the book. The obvious ones such as good versus evil and one that many gravitate towards to.

I enjoyed this short read and can see the appeal of this novel. You can buy it for cheap for under a $1 or read it for free at Project Gutenberg . Stevenson’s Treasure Island is the novel everything thinks of first and this is a great second book to read if you enjoyed Treasure Island . You won’t go wrong with this classic novel!

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‘The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll And Mr Hyde’ by Robert Louis Stevenson – Book Review

A spine-tingling psychological horror

Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic on the dichotomy of goodness and wickedness in human nature arose from the depths of his personal consciousness, as it is said that his partner woke him during one of his nightmares after hearing his screeches.

This masterpiece was written prior to Freud’s identification of the ego and id, which is groundbreaking in itself. Stevenson’s thrilling book exemplifies his clear understanding of the internal struggles of personality before they were even given a name.

The book opens with Dr. Henry Jekyll’s Will, in which we discover that if he goes missing or ends up dead, his wealth would be transferred to Mr. Edward Hyde. We learn about Jekyll and Hyde from the lawyer Mr. Utterson.

Gabriel Utterson, who looks into strange occurrences involving his friends, the decent Dr. Henry Jekyll, as well as the enigmatic and evil Edward Hyde, serve as the storyline’s point of view character. Mr. Enfield claims that Hyde is a despicable person who purposefully knocks a kid over and steps on her. However, this merely marks the commencement of his heinous behavior.

Strange events begin to occur over and over again, including the mysterious actions of Dr. Jekyll, as well as the bizarre and immediate repugnance that everyone feels towards Mr. Hyde. Utterson and many others, including their friend Dr. Lanyon, look into these events in order to comprehend Mr. Jekyll’s situation.

One can’t help but wonder how two people (Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde), so different in character and temperament are linked. Dr. Jekyll seems to be a decent person who is extremely worried. But then why is Dr. Jekyll safeguarding Mr. Hyde? Whilst we follow Mr. Utterson, readers explore the dark secret that links them through the crafty use of personal letters written by Jekyll and Hyde.

The plot examines the conflicted nature of people as well as the effects of trying to give in to urges by exploring your sinister side.

The central idea of the novel is that humans contain a dual disposition, though this idea doesn’t fully come to light until the final chapter, which tells the entire Jekyll-Hyde psychological tale. As a consequence, we don’t consciously discuss the idea of a two-dimensional personality until we’ve read the entire book and confirmed that happens, such as Hyde’s wrongdoings and his eventual eclipse of Jekyll.

The writing not only makes the dichotomy of human beings its centerpiece but also compels us to think about the characteristics of this and weigh different theories while analyzing each of the chapters.

Jekyll claims that “man is not truly one, but truly two”, and he sees the human spirit as a place where an “angel” as well as a “fiend”, each vying for supremacy, engage in combat. Hyde appears, yet he’s got no angelic match. His drug, which he wished would split and decontaminate each aspect, only brings about the evil side. Once freed, Hyde gradually seizes control until Jekyll vanishes. One begins to question the “angel” after the tale as if a person is half angel as well as half-fiend, where is the angel persona?

We can hypothesize that maybe the angel completely takes a back seat to Jekyll’s devil. Alternatively, it’s possible that Jekyll is wrong on that point and that man is not, in fact, “truly two”, but rather, first and above all else, the primitive creature encapsulated in Hyde, which is tentatively subdued by society, rules, and conscience. This argument holds that the drug simply removes the surface layer of civilization, revealing the true nature of man.

Hyde is portrayed as being particularly animalistic throughout the book. For instance, he is ugly as well as hairy and behaves instinctively instead of rationally. To support this argument, he is referred to by Utterson as nothing more than a “troglodyte”.

However, if Hyde were a simple animal, he wouldn’t enjoy crime so much. In fact, he appears to carry out violent acts against helpless victims for no other reason than pure enjoyment. Instead of being amoral, he comes across as purposefully and joyfully immoral. It appears as though he is aware of the ethical law and revels in breaking it. Hyde additionally seems strangely at home in the city for an animalistic being. These observations suggest that maybe human civilization has a shadowy side as well.

Stevenson clearly states that human beings have two facets, but he leaves it unclear as to what exactly these facets are. They might be made up of evil and morality; they might stand for one’s primal nature and the façade that human civilization has constructed. Stevenson makes the book more complex by asking us to think for ourselves.

Another interesting component in the book is that maintaining one’s good name becomes crucial throughout the tale. The fact that honorable men like Utterson as well as Enfield minimize gossip at any and all costs because they view it as a major reputation destroyer shows how prevalent this sense of morality is.

Comparable to this, once Utterson suspects Jekyll of being a victim of blackmail at first and then of protecting Hyde from the police later, he keeps his fears to himself because a crucial component of being a trustworthy companion to Jekyll is really being able to conceal his secrets and preserve his public image. The significance of a good name in the book is a reflection of the value placed on outward appearances, facades, and layers, which frequently conceal a hazy ugly side.

Utterson, in keeping with Victorian society, insists on sustaining Jekyll’s good name as well as the appearance of order as well as civility throughout much of the book, despite sensing a despicable truth hidden beneath.

The characters’ silence is yet another element of the book that’s fascinating. Characters frequently struggle or refuse to express themselves. Whether they intentionally end or avoid specific discussions, or they appear unable to explain a sickening perception, including the physical attributes of Hyde. Enfield and Utterson stop talking about Hyde during the first chapter because they dislike gossip, and Utterson keeps his doubts about Jekyll to himself as he looks into his client’s situation.

Additionally, neither Jekyll throughout his last revelation nor the third-person narrator throughout the remainder of the book, ever divulge any information about Hyde’s obscene actions and hidden vices. It’s vague whether these narrative pauses are the consequence of limited use of language or deliberate omissions.

Robert Louis Stevenson’s novel ranks among the most captivating and intriguing books he has written, and it’s considerably different compared to his other writings. Although it is rather unsettling, it is such a gripping tale that it is hard to put down.

The 1886 novel, which features an unsettling storyline and such in-depth character analysis, is presumably one of the earliest works of its kind, which is rather commendable. However, this novel is rather challenging to read (language wise) in today’s world where everyone seeks out straightforward reading material. Apart from that, this is a brilliant timeless classic of its genre.

Stevenson’s book skillfully mixes up facets of psychological horror, crime, and philosophical genres and utilizes letters to give Utterson a way to find the intimate link between Jekyll and Hyde. It is brilliantly structured, reflecting the essence of the tale and the catastrophic wrongs that have been committed throughout.

Readers of this fascinating, twisted, yet unquestionably thrilling book will be shocked and taken aback by the revelations that occur, and it is unquestionably a novel worth reading.

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Literary Theory and Criticism

Home › British Literature › Analysis of Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

Analysis of Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on October 7, 2022

Longman, Green, and Company published Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in 1886 as a “shilling shocker.” Stevenson reputedly developed the storyline from a dream he had about a man forced into a cabinet after ingesting a potion that would convert him into a brutal monster. The composition of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde began in September 1885, and the final draft was submitted for publication later that same year. Unlike most 19th century literary works, Stevenson’s manuscript was released in book form instead of being serialized in a popular magazine. The publishers withheld its release until January 1886 because booksellers had already placed their Christmas stock. Within six months, Stevenson’s novella sold more than 40,000 copies in England and America.

Dr. Jekyll (right) and Mr. Hyde, both as portrayed by Fredric March in Rouben Mamoulian’s film Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931).

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde debates the conflict between good and evil and the correlation among bourgeois values, urban violence, and class structure. Dr. Jekyll is a seemingly placid character whose often-debated scientific research has nonetheless gained him respect amid his peers. The potion that Jekyll develops causes an unexplainable transformation into the violent Mr. Hyde. The Mr. Hyde alter-ego may represent an uncontrollable subconscious desire driven by anger and frustration toward an oppressive English class structure. Hyde’s numerous rampages include trampling a young girl and murdering the prominent English politician Sir Danvers. Although Jekyll prefers living the life of “the elderly and discontent doctor” (84), he cannot control his urge for “the liberty, the comparative youth, the light steps, leaping impulses, and secret pleasures” that the Hyde persona offers him. Dr. Jekyll’s desired liberty is perhaps caused by the restricted lifestyle that bourgeois cultural codes imposed on English society. Several Victorian social critics maintained that inner-city London dwellers were a debased life form living in junglelike conditions analogous to those in Africa. In 1890, William Booth, the founder of the Salvation Army, claimed that England needed rescuing from its continually degenerating condition since its citizens were gradually turning into “[a] population trodden with drink, steeped in vice, [and] eaten up by every social and physical malady” (quoted in Stevenson, 183). Stevenson’s text describes how hidden desires have always existed in a seemingly perverted civilization.

Literary critics have stressed that Stevenson’s success in the “shilling shocker” market both helped and hindered his career. The rapid success of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde led Henry James to remark that Stevenson’s novella was at first too popular a work to be comfortably called a masterpiece. Henry James was not questioning Stevenson’s talent as a writer but rather was noting that the book’s quick popularity defined it as a story that was easily accessible to the mass public.

Playwright Richard Mansfield produced a stage version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in 1888. Shortly after Mansfield’s play opened, several East End London prostitutes were murdered by a serial killer nicknamed Jack the Ripper. English newspapers initially termed the slayer the “Whitechapel murderer” and “Leather Apron” before settling on “Jack the Ripper.” Reporters based their stories on the possible correlation between the killings and Mansfield’s theatrical representation of violence. Mansfield’s play was eventually closed because such parallels made it seem as though Jack the Ripper was mimicking the violence depicted in Mansfield’s play, marking the first time that the concept of Mr. Hyde was used in reference to sequential crime sprees. Reports from the Daily Telegraph further damaged the profits for Mansfield’s play by stating that “there is no taste for horror” (17) on the London stage. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde remains a significant canonical text that uses its patchwork narrative to explore the conflation of reality and fictional representation that most postmodern writers still examine.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Caler, Jenni. The Robert Louis Stevenson Companion. Edinburgh: P. Harris, 1980. James, Henry. “Robert Louis Stevenson.” Reprinted in The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, edited by Martin A. Danahay, 140–141. Orchard Park, N.Y.: Broadview Literary Texts, 1999. Rose, Brian A. Jekyll and Hyde Adapted: Dramatizations of Cultural Anxiety. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1996. Saposnik, Irving S. “The Anatomy of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.” In The Definitive Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde Companion, edited by Harry M. Geduld, 108–117. New York: Garland Publishing, 1983. Stevenson, Robert Louis. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Edited by Martin A. Danahay, 29–91. Orchard Park, N.Y.: Broadview Literary Texts, 1999.

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Review: Strange Case Of Dr. Jekyll And Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson

“The most racking pangs succeeded: a grinding in the bones, deadly nausea, and a horror of the spirit that cannot be exceeded at the hour of birth or death. Then these agonies began swiftly to subside, and I came to myself as if out of a great sickness. There was something strange in my sensations, something indescribably sweet. I felt younger, lighter, happier in body; within I was conscious of a heady recklessness, a current of disordered sensual images running like a millrace in my fancy, a solution of the bonds of obligation, an unknown but innocent freedom of the soul. I knew myself, at the first breath of this new life, to be more wicked, tenfold more wicked, sold a slave to my original evil and the thought, in that moment, braced and delighted me like wine.”

When one thinks of Halloween-appropriate reads, Robert Louis Stevenson’s  Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde  exists alongside the likes of Bram Stoker’s  Dracula   and Mary Shelley’s  Frankenstein  as a favourite read of this morbidly celebratory season. Aside from a willingness to deal in creepy supernaturalism, these three literary masterpieces are connected by an intrinsic understanding of the problems most fundamental to the human experience. Leslie Fielder wrote that  “the Gothic mode is essentially a form of parody, a way of assailing clichés by exaggerating them to the limit of grotesqueness.”  In this knowledge that the gothic genre provides an almost unlimited capacity for the exploration of those debates and clichés that we find most intriguing – the battle between good and evil, notions of gender, the connection between identity and belonging – Stoker, Shelley, and Stevenson all work to unpick their respective themes through a fearless fascination with the grotesque. The timelessness of their novels – otherwise surprising, giving our ever-increasing tolerance for graphic violence and horror in the media that we consume – owes so much to the authors’ understanding of the possibilities inherent in gothicism and engagement with the supernatural. Rather than attending simply to a very human desire for fear-inspired adrenaline, these authors all use their capacity for creepiness to examine a set of human concerns so fundamental to our condition that the novels have outlasted countless political, social, and cultural shifts across centuries.

Of these three novels, Robert Louis Stevenson’s  Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde  is certainly the most unexpected. Known globally for his wholesomely adventurous children’s fiction, Stevenson’s ability to engage in the most ferocious and appalling limits of human desire are a testament to his literary skills beyond the thrilling piracy of  Treasure Island .  Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde  is a short read dealing with remarkably deep themes. Through the experiences of the lawyer, Mr. Utterson, the reader is introduced to a supernatural conundrum in which one man’s body is seemingly occupied by two disparate personalities. The kind and intelligent Henry Jekyll believed to be in the thrall of the murderous and physically grotesque Edward Hyde, later revealed to be quite the same man. The novel follows Mr. Utterson as he attempts to unravel the mystery of Jekyll and Hyde and Jekyll’s own actions in bringing Hyde’s existence to fruition.

“I have been doomed to such a dreadful shipwreck: that man is not truly one, but truly two. I say two, because the state of my own knowledge does not pass beyond that point.

Others will follow, others will outstrip me on the same lines; and I hazard the guess that man will be ultimately known for a mere polity of multifarious, incongruous and independent denizens. I, for my part, from the nature of my life, advanced infallibly in one direction and in one direction only. It was on the moral side, and in my own person, that I learned to recognise the thorough and primitive duality of man; I saw that, of the two natures that contended in the field of my consciousness, even if I could rightly be said to be either, it was only because I was radically both…”

That the notion of a ‘Jekyll and Hyde’ personality has entered our vernacular does, in many respects, a great disservice to the depth of Stevenson’s gothic novella. In this, as in most of the popular notions regarding the themes of  Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde , the assumption that we already understand everything that this work has to say ensures that most of us miss out on an opportunity to engage fruitfully with the novel in all of its visceral intensity. Where popular depictions of Stevenson’s work typically focus on the poles of Jekyll and Hyde – usually rendered visual in the grotesque disruption of Jekyll’s features as he ‘becomes’ Hyde – there is little appreciation for the subtlety in the questions that Stevenson poses about identity and desire. Jekyll and Hyde are not two different men – they are one man who, in the guise of Hyde, permits himself free expression of his most base and socially prohibited wants.

The werewolf-esque transformations of John Barrymore, Frederic March, and Spencer Tracy as they bubble and lurch their way into the slack-jawed, hunch-backed, and chip-nailed depictions of Edward Hyde capture only a small part of what Stevenson’s novella aimed to project. Although a dramatic physical alteration is certainly present in Stevenson’s fictionalisation of Jekyll’s transformation, it is on the doctor’s duality and the coexistence of these two opposing natures – something to which Jekyll himself attests – that the novel truly focuses. Where Frederic March’s Academy Award-winning interpretation of Hyde depicts the man as ape-like in appearance – thus seemingly suggesting that his desire for violence references something far back on the evolutionary ladder – Jekyll and Hyde actually represent a sophisticated, science-driven recognition of the way that cultural norms shutter us from the full expression of ourselves. Although the novel certainly does not argue that we should be able to murder at want, Stevenson himself pointed to Jekyll’s hypocrisy as the novel’s central tension.

“Under the strain of this continually impending doom and by the sleeplessness to which I now condemned myself, ay, even beyond what I had thought possible to man, I became, in my own person, a creature eaten up and emptied by fever, languidly weak both in body and mind, and solely occupied by one thought: the horror of my other self.”

What we have in  Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde  is, therefore, a novella that is wholly unexpected in many ways. Beyond its gripping premise and Stevenson’s seamless narrative execution, this is a story that crossed boundaries in terms of what literature permitted itself to explore about the nature of the human character. Stevenson gives no easy answers – Jekyll is not possessed by the devil, nor has he relinquished his soul to some other supernatural power. He is a man who has utilised his scientific knowledge to effectively remove the barriers that prohibited him from giving voice to those desires by which he had been both consciously and subconsciously plagued. Interestingly, the final draft of the novella submitted for publication was a significant toning-down of the author’s previous attempts to explore the limits of Jekyll’s unconscious avarice. He almost entirely eliminated the theme of sexual tension that had previously been one of Hyde’s – and Jekyll’s – principal motivating factors. The admission by Jekyll that had been  “in secret the slave of certain appetites,”  was wholly eliminated and replaced with lines far softer in their connotations. Yet what we are left with is a novel that remains willing to discomfort its readers in a willingness to challenge traditional notions of good and evil.

Although written over 130 years ago,  Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde  is a surprisingly easy and relevant read. The fact that the novella has received over 120 adaptations is testament to the continued interest in its themes. Unlike  Dracula  and  Frankenstein , Stevenson’s gothic experiment is limited in reach to its humanistic foundations – it has less space to inspire the breadth of world-building content that has followed both Stoker and Shelley’s creations. Yet,  Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde  has survived on its own merits. Where it lacks the sexy intrigue of a neck-biting supernatural philanderer or the pity inspired by a non-human being in search of belonging, Stevenson’s masterpiece retains all the fullness of its questions on good, evil, and self-acceptance. Where Jekyll’s transformation and the surpassing evil of Hyde’s murders give the novel an appropriate degree of creepiness for the darkening days of late October,  Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde  is a novella that reaches into the very limits of desire to examine the tensions that exist between resistance and recognition.

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Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde: Full Analysis and Themes

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

The story for Jekyll and Hyde famously came to Robert Louis Stevenson in a dream, and according to Stevenson’s stepson, Lloyd Osbourne, Stevenson wrote the first draft of the novella in just three days, before promptly throwing it onto the fire when his wife criticised it. Stevenson then rewrote it from scratch, taking ten days this time, and the novella was promptly published in January 1886.

The story is part detective-story or mystery, part Gothic horror, and part science fiction, so it’s worth analysing how Stevenson fuses these different elements.

Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde: analysis

Now it’s time for some words of analysis about Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic 1886 novella. However, perhaps ‘analyses’ (plural) would be more accurate, since there never could be one monolithic meaning of a story so ripe with allegory and suggestive symbolism.

Like another novella that was near-contemporary with Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde , and possibly influenced by it ( H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine ), the symbols often point in several different directions at once.

Any attempt to reduce Stevenson’s story of doubling to a moral fable about drugs or drink, or a tale about homosexuality, is destined to lose sight of the very thing which makes the novella so relevant to so many people: its multifaceted quality. So here are some (and they are only some) of the many interpretations of Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde which have been put forward in the last 120 years or so.

A psychoanalytic or proto-psychoanalytic analysis

In this interpretation, Jekyll is the ego and Hyde the id (in Freud’s later terminology). The ego is the self in Freud’s psychoanalytic theory, while the id is the set of primal drives found in our unconscious: the urge to kill, or do inappropriate sexual things, for instance.

Several of Robert Louis Stevenson’s essays, such as ‘A Chapter on Dreams’ (1888), prefigure some of Freud’s later ideas; and there was increasing interest in the workings of the human mind towards the end of the nineteenth century (two leading journals in the field, Brain and Mind , had both been founded in the 1870s).

The psychoanalytic interpretation is a popular one with many readers of Jekyll and Hyde , and since the novella is clearly about repression of some sort, one can make a psychoanalytic interpretation – an analysis grounded in psychoanalysis, if you like – quite convincingly.

It might be significant, reading the story from a post-Freudian perspective, that Hyde is described as childlike at several points: does he embody Jekyll’s – and, indeed, man’s – deep desire to return to a time before responsibility and full maturity, when one was freer to act on impulse? Early infancy is the formative period for much Freudian psychoanalysis.

Recall the empty middle-class scenes at the beginning of the book: Utterson and Enfield on their joyless Sunday walks, for instance. Hyde attacks father-figures (Sir Danvers Carew, the MP whom he murders, is a white-haired old gentleman), which would fall in line with Freud’s concept of the Oedipus complex and Jekyll’s desire to return to a time before adult life with its responsibilities and disappointments.

However, one fly in the Oedipal ointment is that Hyde also attacks a young girl – almost the complete opposite of the ‘old man’ or father figure embodied by Danvers Carew.

Nevertheless, psychoanalytic readings of the novella have been popular for some time, and it’s worth remembering that the idea for the book came to Stevenson in a dream. Observe, also, the presence of dreams and dreamlike scenes in the novel itself, such as when Jekyll remarks that he ‘received Lanyon’s condemnation partly in a dream; it was partly in a dream that I came home to my own house and got into bed’.

An anti-alcohol morality tale?

Alternatively, a different interpretation: we might analyse these dreamlike aspects of the novel in another way and see the novel as being about alcoholism and temperance , subjects which were being fiercely debated at the time Stevenson was writing.

Here, then, the ‘transforming draught’ which Jekyll concocts represents alcohol, and Jekyll, upon imbibing the draught, becomes a violent, unpredictable person unknown even to himself. (This reading has been most thoroughly explored in Thomas L. Reed’s 2006 study The Transforming Draught .)

Note how often wine crops up in this short book: it turns up first of all in the second sentence of the novella, when Utterson is found sipping it, and Hyde, we learn, has a closet ‘filled with wine’. Might the continual presence of wine be a clue that we are all Hydes waiting to happen? Note how the opening paragraph informs us that Utterson drinks gin when he is alone.

This thesis – that the novella is about alcohol and temperance – is intriguing, but has been contested by critics such as Julia Reid for being too speculative and reductionist: see her review of The Transforming Draught in The Review of English Studies , 2007.

The ‘drugs’ interpretation

Similarly, the idea that the ‘draught’ is a metaphor for some other drug, whether opium or cocaine . Scholars are unsure as to whether Stevenson was on drugs when he wrote the book: some accounts say Stevenson used cocaine to finish the manuscript; others say he took ergot, which is the substance from which LSD was later synthesised. Some say he was too sick to be taking anything.

You could purchase cocaine and opium from your local chemist in 1880s London (indeed, another invention of 1886, Coca-Cola, originally contained cocaine, as the drink’s name still testifies: don’t worry, it doesn’t any more).

This is essentially a development of the previous interpretation concerning alcohol, and arguably has similar limitations in being too restrictive an interpretation. However, note the way that Jekyll, in his ‘full statement’ becomes reliant on the ‘draught’ or ‘salt’ towards the end.

A religious analysis

As such, the story has immediate links with the story Stevenson would write sixty years later. Stevenson was an atheist who managed to escape the constrictive religion of his parents, but he remained haunted by Calvinistic doctrines for the rest of his life, and much of his work can be seen as an attempt to grapple with these issues which had affected and afflicted him so much as a child.

The sexuality interpretation

Some critics have interpreted Jekyll and Hyde in light of late nineteenth-century attitudes to sexuality : note the almost total absence of women from the story, barring the odd maid and ‘old hag’, and that hapless girl trampled underfoot by Hyde.

Some critics have suggested that the idea of blackmail for homosexual acts lurks behind the story, and the novella itself mentions this when Enfield tells Utterson that he refers to the house of Mr Hyde as ‘Black Mail House’ as a consequence of the girl-trampling scene in the street.

As such, the novella becomes an allegory for the double life lived by many homosexual Victorian men, who had to hide (or Hyde ) their illicit liaisons from their friends and families. The poet Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote to his friend Robert Bridges that the girl-trampling incident early on in the narrative was ‘perhaps a convention: he was thinking of something unsuitable for fiction’.

Some have interpreted this statement – by Hopkins, himself a repressed homosexual – as a reference to homosexual activity in late Victorian London.

Consider in this connection the fact that Hyde enters Jekyll’s house through the ‘back way’ – even, at one point ‘the back passage’. 1885, the year Stevenson wrote the book, was the year of the Criminal Law Amendment Act (commonly known as the Labouchere Amendment ), which criminalised acts of ‘gross indecency’ between men (this was the act which, ten years later, would put Oscar Wilde in gaol).

However, we should be wary of reading the text as about ‘homosexual panic’, since, as Harry Cocks points out, homosexuality was frequently ‘named openly, publicly and repeatedly’ in nineteenth-century criminal courts. But then could fiction for a mass audience as readily name such things?

A Darwinian analysis

Charles Darwin’s book On the Origin of Species , which laid out the theory of evolution by natural selection, had been published in 1859, when Stevenson was still a child. In this reading, Hyde represents the primal, animal origin of modern, civilised man.

Consider here the repeated uses of the word ‘apelike’ in relation to Hyde, suggesting he is an atavistic throwback to an earlier, more primitive species of man than Homo sapiens . This reading incorporates theories of something called ‘devolution’, an idea (now discredited) which suggested that life forms could actually evolve backwards into more primitive forms.

This is also linked with late Victorian fears concerning degeneration and decadence among the human race. Is Jekyll’s statement that he ‘bore the stamp, of lower elements in my soul’ an allusion to Charles Darwin’s famous phrase from the end of The Descent of Man (1871), ‘man […] bears […] the indelible stamp of his lowly origin’?

In his story ‘Olalla’, another tale of the double which Stevenson published in 1885, he writes: ‘Man has risen; if he has sprung from the brutes he can descend to the same level again’.

This Darwinian analysis of Jekyll and Hyde could incorporate elements of the sexual which the previous interpretation also touches upon, but would view the novel as a portrayal of man’s – and we mean specifically man ’s here – repression of the darker, violent, primitive side of his nature associated with rape, pillage, conquest, and murder.

This looks back to a psychoanalytic reading, with the ‘id’ being the home of primal sexual desire and lust. The girl-tramping scene may take on another significance here: it’s a ‘girl’ rather than a boy because it symbolises Hyde’s animalistic desire to conquer and brutalise someone of the opposite, not the same, sex.

There have been many critical readings of the novella in relation to sex and sexuality, but it’s important to point out that Stevenson denied that the novella was about sexuality (see below).

A study in hypocrisy?

Or perhaps not: perhaps there is something in the idea that hypocrisy is the novella’s theme , as Stevenson himself suggested in a letter of November 1887 to John Paul Bocock, editor of the New York Sun : ‘The harm was in Jekyll,’ Stevenson wrote, ‘because he was a hypocrite – not because he was fond of women; he says so himself; but people are so filled full of folly and inverted lust, that they can think of nothing but sexuality. The Hypocrite let out the beast’.

This analysis of Jekyll and Hyde sees the two sides to Jekyll’s personality as a portrayal of the dualistic nature of Victorian society, where you must be respectable and civilised on the outside, while all the time harbouring an inward lust, violence, and desire which you have to bring under control.

This was a popular theme for many late nineteenth-century writers – witness not only Oscar Wilde’s 1891 novel The Picture of Dorian Gray but also the double lives of Jack and Algernon in Wilde’s comedy of manners, The Importance of Being Earnest (1895). This is a more open-ended interpretation, and the novella does appear to be about repression of some sort.

In this respect, this interpretation is similar to the psychoanalytic reading proposed above, but it also tallies with Stevenson’s own assertion that the story is about hypocrisy. Everyone in this book is masking their private thoughts or desires from others.

Note how even the police officer, Inspector Newcomen, when he learns of the murder of the MP, goes from being horrified one moment to excited the next, as ‘the next moment his eye lighted up with professional ambition’. He can barely contain his glee. The maid who answers the door at Hyde’s rooms has ‘an evil face, smoothed by hypocrisy; but her manners were excellent’.

From these clues, we can also posit a reading of the novel which sees it as about the class structure of late nineteenth-century Britain, where Jekyll represents the comfortable middle class and Hyde is the repressed – or, indeed, oppressed – working-class figure.

Note here, however, how Hyde is repeatedly described as a ‘gentleman’ by those who see him, and that he attacks Danvers Carew with a ‘cane’, rather than, say, a club (though it is reported, tellingly, that he ‘clubbed’ Carew to death with it).

A scientific interpretation

The reference to the evil maid with excellent manners places Jekyll’s own duality at the extreme end of a continuum, where everyone is putting on a respectable and acceptable mask which hides or conceals the evil truth lurking behind it. So we might see Jekyll’s scientific experiment as merely a physical embodiment of what everyone does.

This leads some critics to ask, then, whether the novella about the misuse of science . Or is the ‘tincture’ merely a scientific, chemical composition because a magical draught or elixir would be unbelievable to an 1880s reader? Arthur Machen, an author who was much influenced by Stevenson and especially by Jekyll and Hyde , made this point in a letter of 1894, when he grumbled:

In these days the supernatural per se is entirely incredible; to believe, we must link our wonders to some scientific or pseudo-scientific fact, or basis, or method. Thus we do not believe in ‘ghosts’ but in telepathy, not in ‘witch-craft’ but in hypnotism. If Mr Stevenson had written his great masterpiece about 1590-1650, Dr Jekyll would have made a compact with the devil. In 1886 Dr Jekyll sends to the Bond Street chemists for some rare drugs.

This is worth pondering: the use of the ‘draught’ lends the story an air of scientific authenticity, which makes the story a form of science fiction rather than fantasy: the tincture which Jekyll drinks is not magical, merely a chemical potion of some vaguely defined sort. But to say that the story is actually about the dangers of misusing science could be a leap too far.

We run the risk of confusing the numerous film adaptations of the book with the book itself: we immediately picture wild-haired soot-faced scientists causing explosions and mixing up potions in a dark laboratory, but in fact this is not really what the story is about , merely the means through which the real meat of the story – the transformation of Jekyll into Hyde – is effected.

It’s only once this split has been achieved that the real story, about the dark side of man’s nature which he represses, comes to light. (Compare Frankenstein here .)

All of these interpretations of Jekyll and Hyde can be – and have been – proposed, but it’s worth bearing in mind that the popularity of Stevenson’s tale may lie in the very polyvalent and ambiguous nature of the text, the fact that it exists as a symbol without a key, a riddle without a definitive answer.

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MILLER’S BOOK REVIEW 📚

The Strange(r) Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

Robert louis stevenson’s gothic horror story and the possible source of his remarkable powers.

My first exposure to Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde wasn’t reading the gothic horror story for myself. I imbibed it indirectly, watching Looney Tunes as a kid. Those of a certain age will already have scenes flashing through their minds.

The creators put the novella’s idea of a potion that transforms a mild-mannered person into a monster to comedic effect in 1955 with “ Hyde and Hare ,” a short in which Bugs Bunny meets Dr. Jekyll in a park and returns home to his laboratory, whereupon the sheepish doctor turns into the knuckle-dragging brute, Mr. Hyde. Bugs eventually drinks the potion himself and suffers his own transformation.

Looney Tunes returned to this particular poisoned well several times . In one version Tweety becomes a monster ; in another Sylvester goes feral . The Looney Tunes adaptations were just a few among countless others. By then, Stevenson’s story had long since burrowed itself into the public imagination, spawning endless variations and versions.

Written in October 1885 and published in January 1886, the novella was an instant sensation. In England it sold forty thousand copies by summer and God knows how many pirated copies in America. It still sells today. But the real strange case might have been the book’s initial composition.

Written in a Flurry

The story came to Stevenson in a dream. “I dreamed about Dr. Jekyll,” he told an interviewer. “One man . . . swallowed a drug and changed into another being.” His wife, Fanny, apparently woke him when she heard him screaming in his sleep. “Why did you wake me?” he complained . “I was dreaming a fine bogey tale.”

No matter. The rest of the story soon fell into place. “As I again went to sleep almost every detail of the story, as it stands, was clear to me,” he said.

He began writing feverishly, working day and night for three straight days without sleep. When he was finished, Stevenson presented the manuscript to Fanny. She dutifully read through it and rendered her verdict: No good. She thought it should be more allegorical and later reported she “wrote several pages of criticism pointing out that he had here a great moral allegory that the dream was obscuring.”

Stevenson retreated upstairs to ponder his options. Half an hour later Fanny found her husband staring at a pile of ashes in the fireplace. He’d burnt the entire thing, all thirty thousand words of it. Maybe. It’s also possible Fanny torched it. In a letter to one of the couple’s friends, she said Stevenson had written “a quire full of utter nonsense” and added, “I shall burn it after I show it to you.”

Regardless, Stevenson began rewriting the book from scratch, somehow managing the same brutal schedule as before—ten thousand words a day for three straight days with no sleep, after having just run the same punishing marathon.

What’s more, he performed this feat in diminished physical condition. Stevenson suffered from tuberculosis, was often bedridden, and lived on morphine. Recalled Fanny,

The amount of work this involved was appalling; that an invalid in my husband’s condition of health should have been able to perform the manual labour alone of putting 60,000 words to paper in six days seems incredible.

He was motivated. Stevenson was trying to get the book into print for the Christmas buying season. As mentioned above, he just missed it—but not for lack of trying. Working under a rushed publishing schedule, he was still making edits on the printer’s page proofs.

Confined to bed after the feat, he told his doctor, “I’ve got my shilling shocker.” He certainly did, and it’s that product of inhuman endurance that went on to become a category-defining, bestselling classic.

Split Personality

Stevenson had wanted to write on the duality of people’s nature and character. He just needed a device to pull it off. The dream provided it. But the teasing art of his unfolding narrative ensured the book’s success.

The primary character is neither Jekyll nor Hyde, but Jekyll’s attorney, Gabriel John Utterson. Out walking with his cousin, Utterson hears the story of how a man named Edward Hyde had, while running down the street, trampled a little girl. Passing the same house into which Hyde retreated prompts the memory.

But the key detail? Utterson’s cousin had pressed Hyde to pay damages, which he did, forking over a check signed by none other than Dr. Jekyll. Most troubling of all, Jekyll has recently named Hyde as the beneficiary of his will. What could be the relationship between his client and this brute?

Utterson attempts to find Hyde and speak to him for himself. After staking out the house, he finally encounters Hyde and confronts him. Little comes from the exchange except heightening Utterson’s suspicions that something is amiss. For starters, Hyde’s very appearance is offputting. “The man seems hardly human! Something trogladytic. . . . If I ever read Satan’s signature upon a face, it is on that face of your new friend,” says Utterson, speaking as if Jekyll were there with him.

When Utterson finally gets a chance to talk with Jekyll about Hyde, his client tells him not to worry. Everything is fine. What’s more, if Hyde is ever in need of help, Jekyll asks Utterson to see to it. Utterson reluctantly agrees and the mystery recedes—until Hyde is spied one night on an empty street clubbing an elderly pedestrian to death.

Sought by authorities, Hyde goes missing, and Utterson visits Jekyll to confront him about his rogue beneficiary. At this meeting Jekyll’s opinion of Hyde has changed. “I’m quite done with him,” he says. But a curious clue emerges: samples of Hyde’s handwriting which ominously matches Jekyll’s.

The curiosities mount from there. While Jekyll temporarily returns to his jovial, sociable self for a while, he eventually retreats to his laboratory and refuses to see a soul. Meanwhile, he sends his servant on futile errands to chemists for compounds to make drugs, none of which meet his standards.

Afraid for his master, the servant finally contacts Utterson for help. Returning to the laboratory, the pair break through the door and find Hyde, dead on the floor. And here at last the story finally falls out, thanks to a document trail left by both Jekyll and his estranged friend Dr. Lanyon.

We all know the gist, thanks to the story’s ubuiquity: Jekyll, an upstanding member of the community, concocts a potion that allows him to give liberal rein to his baser nature. When he consumes the draught, he transforms into Hyde and is free to act on any impulse he desires—but soon finds he has lost control.

Having loosed Hyde, Jekyll can’t manage him. Or if he could, those days quickly pass. Soon the transformations happen unbidden. Increasingly desperate and unable to find a remedy, Hyde suicides, letting the terrible truth finally emerge.

Stevenson leaves much unsaid in the story, permitting readers wide interpretive berth. And the tale invites many angles of analysis and appreciation: psychological, theological, spiritual, social, literary, and more. It’s no mystery why it became a bestseller and adapted into every sort of production, including kid’s cartoons. What is mysterious? That Stevenson managed to write the novel at all.

Fueling the Flurry

As mentioned, the writer suffered from tuberculosis. Beset and bedridden, he hadn’t produced anything of merit in a while. He lived in a house paid for by his father with Fanny and his stepson and couldn’t otherwise afford to live. He wrote a friend,

I have been nearly six months (more than six) in a strange condition of collapse when it was impossible to do any work and difficult (more difficult than you would suppose) to write the merest note. I am now better, but not yet my own man in the way of brains and in health only so-so.

He mentioned his “substantial capital of debts” and his work “still moving with a desperate slowness.” That was October 22. Some weeks before—though the letter is undated—he’d written another friend, “I am pouring forth a penny (12 penny) dreadful; it is dam dreadful. . . .” Pouring forth is an interesting expression for a writing spree.

By the end of the month, he’d finished not just one draft of Jekyll and Hyde , but, owing to his or his wife’s immolatory rashness, two. How did he do it? Financial straits can certainly motivate a man. But it hardly explains his frantic, energetic pace of composition. One suspicion? Cocaine.

Stevenson suffered from a hemorrhage, and cocaine—then touted as a wonder drug—was known to constrict blood vessels. Fanny regularly scoured the British medical journal, the Lancet , looking for any treatments that would help her husband, and cocaine was touted in the Lancet and elsewhere a miracle cure for all manner of illnesses. As Dominic Streatfeild recounts in his history, Cocaine: The Unauthorized Biograpy , that winter the Lancet ran more than twenty articles on cocaine, and Stevenson’s stepson reported that his mother was “glued . . . to it.” We also know from a later letter Stevenson used cocaine to ward off colds.

It goes a long way to explain how an “invalid” who could barely “write the merest note” could manage to stay awake and write 10,000 words a day for six straight days. Its powerful effect, as Streatfeild wonders, might have even influenced Stevenson’s conception of Jekyll’s life-altering potion.

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Book Review: The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Lewis Stevenson is a novel about a scientist in London, Dr. Jekyll, that has the misfortune of having to control and mask his alter identity, Mr. Hyde. After some unfortunate events partake, others begin to realize that the wise Dr. Jekyll has an alter identity. This novel has an unpredictable ending that left me stunned. I thought that the book was really good due to the continuously moving plot and the amazing characters that create a wonderous mystery throughout the book. I was required to read this book for school and I would definitely recommend it for readers that are in middle school and beyond that enjoy a great science fiction or mystery novel. Reviewer Grade: 9

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DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE

The graphic novel.

by Robert Louis Stevenson & adapted by Alan Grant & illustrated by Cam Kennedy ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 14, 2008

Two comic-book veterans condense Stevenson’s well-known psychological thriller into 40 pages in this slim graphic-novel adaptation. Following closely to the original, Grant’s adaptation portrays the enigmatic Dr. Jekyll, as pursued by the lawyer Mr. Utterson. When Utterson hears rumors of a ruthless maniac named Mr. Hyde, he begins an investigation into Hyde’s background. As he deepens his search, he makes the startling discovery that Jekyll and Hyde are actually the same person. Grant’s reworking should serve as an adequate introduction for younger readers interested in Stevenson’s work. Kennedy’s illustrations, while brightly colored, are somewhat flat, with a consistently straight-on point-of-view; the overuse of this angle becomes tiring. As far as graphic-novel adaptations go, this one is rather pedestrian: There are no real standout features, though no glaring detractions. And not much popular appeal, either, unless classics adapted in this form are actively being sought. (Graphic fiction. 10 & up)

Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2008

ISBN: 978-0-88776-882-8

Page Count: 48

Publisher: Tundra Books

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2008

GENERAL GRAPHIC NOVELS & COMICS

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BOOK REVIEW

by Robert Louis Stevenson ; illustrated by Chris Sheban

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by Raina Telgemeier & illustrated by Raina Telgemeier ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 1, 2012

From award winner Telgemeier ( Smile , 2010), a pitch-perfect graphic novel portrayal of a middle school musical, adroitly capturing the drama both on and offstage.

Seventh-grader Callie Marin is over-the-moon to be on stage crew again this year for Eucalyptus Middle School’s production of Moon over Mississippi . Callie's just getting over popular baseball jock and eighth-grader Greg, who crushed her when he left Callie to return to his girlfriend, Bonnie, the stuck-up star of the play. Callie's healing heart is quickly captured by Justin and Jesse Mendocino, the two very cute twins who are working on the play with her. Equally determined to make the best sets possible with a shoestring budget and to get one of the Mendocino boys to notice her, the immensely likable Callie will find this to be an extremely drama-filled experience indeed. The palpably engaging and whip-smart characterization ensures that the charisma and camaraderie run high among those working on the production. When Greg snubs Callie in the halls and misses her reference to Guys and Dolls , one of her friends assuredly tells her, "Don't worry, Cal. We’re the cool kids…. He's the dork." With the clear, stylish art, the strongly appealing characters and just the right pinch of drama, this book will undoubtedly make readers stand up and cheer.

Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2012

ISBN: 978-0-545-32698-8

Page Count: 240

Publisher: Graphix/Scholastic

Review Posted Online: July 21, 2012

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2012

GENERAL GRAPHIC NOVELS & COMICS | CHILDREN'S SOCIAL THEMES | CHILDREN'S ENTERTAINMENT & SPORTS

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SEEN & HEARD

ALL SUMMER LONG

From the eagle rock series , vol. 1.

by Hope Larson ; illustrated by Hope Larson ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 1, 2018

A coming-of-age story as tender and sweet as a summer evening breeze

Summer adventures begin when Bina accidentally locks herself out of her house in Larson’s newest middle-grade graphic novel.

The summer before eighth grade is a season of self-discovery for many 13-year-olds, including Bina, when her best friend heads off to soccer camp and leaves her alone to navigate a SoCal summer. Without athletic Austin around to steer the ship, Bina must pursue her own passions, such as discovering new bands and rocking out on her electric guitar. Unexpected friendships bloom, and new members are welcomed into her family. Though her sphere grows over the summer, friendship with Austin is strained when he returns, and Bina must learn to embrace the proverb to make new friends but keep the old. As her mother wisely observes, “you’re more you every day,” and by the end of summer Bina is more comfortable in her own skin and ready to rock eighth grade. Larson’s panels are superb at revealing emotional conflict, subtext, and humor within the deceptively simple third-person limited plot, allowing characters to grow and develop emotionally over only a few spreads. She also does a laudable job of depicting a diverse community for Bina to call home. Though Bina’s ethnicity is never overtly identified, her racial ambiguity lends greater universality to her story. (In the two-toned apricot, black, and white panels, Bina and her mother have the same black hair and gold skin, while her dad is white, as is Austin.)

Pub Date: May 1, 2018

ISBN: 978-0-374-30485-0

Page Count: 176

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Review Posted Online: March 3, 2018

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2018

GENERAL GRAPHIC NOVELS & COMICS | CHILDREN'S SOCIAL THEMES

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The New Annotated Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde Hardcover – October 18, 2022

 The definitive edition of Robert Louis Stevenson’s immortal tale of depraved murder and unrelenting horror, introduced by Joe Hill, annotated by Edgar-winner Leslie S. Klinger, & illustrated with over 100 color images

There’s no question that The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is one of the most influential texts of all time. The now-iconic tale, which has confounded and thrilled readers for more than a century, was described by one scholar as the only detective-crime story in which the solution is more terrifying than the problem. And even as its plot gets continually reinterpreted and reimagined in literature, film, and theater, the main themes persist, as do the titular characters, now so familiar as to have become a part of the English language.

This new edition gives the classic tale of depraved murder and unrelenting horror its most complete and illuminating presentation yet. Heavily illustrated with over a hundred and fifty full color images from the history of this cultural touchstone―including reproductions of rare books, film stills, theatrical posters, and the true-life people associated with the adventure―and extensively annotated by Edgar Award winning editor and noted Victorian literature expert Leslie S. Klinger, this thorough and authoritative approach is both an invaluable resource for scholars and a sumptuous treat for fans of the text.

Introduced by a compelling and erudite essay from bestselling novelist and short story writer Joe Hill, this complete illustrated and annotated edition of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is the ultimate tribute to an enduring classic, combining revelatory and surprising information and in-depth historical context with beautiful illustrations and photographs. It is sure to please anyone interested in the Victorian era, mystery fiction, and horror tales.

• Print length 224 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Mysterious Press
• Publication date October 18, 2022
• Dimensions 8.5 x 0.8 x 10.3 inches
• ISBN-10 1613163215
• ISBN-13 978-1613163214
• See all details

From the Publisher

Editorial Reviews

About the author.

Robert Louis Stevenson was a Victorian author born in Scotland in 1850. He is best known for his novels  Treasure Island and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde . He died in Samoa in 1894.

Product details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Mysterious Press; Annotated - New edition (October 18, 2022)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 224 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1613163215
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1613163214
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.57 pounds
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 8.5 x 0.8 x 10.3 inches
• #3,938 in Occult Fiction
• #4,949 in Traditional Detective Mysteries (Books)
• #6,874 in Historical Mystery

About the authors

Robert louis stevenson.

Discover more of the author’s books, see similar authors, read author blogs and more

Leslie S. Klinger

Leslie S. Klinger is considered to be one of the world's foremost authorities on those icons of the Victorian era, Sherlock Holmes, Dracula, and Frankenstein. He is the editor of the three-volume collection of the short stories and novels, THE NEW ANNOTATED SHERLOCK HOLMES, published by W. W. Norton in 2004 and 2005, winner of the Edgar Award for Best Critical/Biographical Work and nominated for every other major award in the mystery genre. THE NEW ANNOTATED DRACULA, published by W. W. Norton in 2008, offers a similar in-depth examination of Bram Stoker's haunting classic and its historical context. It received a starred review in Publishers' Weekly.

Since the 1960s, the study of the rich fantastic literature of the Victorian writers has been Klinger's consuming passion. He has written dozens of articles on Sherlockiana, published 20 books on Sherlock Holmes in addition to the Norton work, and regularly teaches UCLA Extension courses on "Sherlock Holmes and His World" and "Dracula and His World." Klinger's Sherlock Holmes Reference Library has been called by the Baker Street Journal "the standard text of reference for all serious Sherlockians." He contributed essays to Playboy Magazine and the Times of London on vampires and served as the technical adviser for Warner Bros. on the "Sherlock Holmes" films starring Robert Downey, Jr. and Jude Law.

Klinger has edited several anthologies of stories relating to Holmes, vampires, horror, and Victorian fiction, including "In the Shadow of Dracula" and "In the Shadow of Sherlock Holmes" for IDW Books and "In the Shadow of Edgar Allen Poe" for Pegasus Books. He has also co-edited with Laurie R. King four anthologies of new stories about Sherlock Holmes, "A Study in Sherlock," the Anthony-winning "In the Company of Sherlock Holmes," "Echoes of Sherlock Holmes," and "For the Sake of the Game." The four-volume "The Annotated Sandman" in collaboration with Neil Gaiman for DC Entertainment appeared in 2012-14, and his "Watchmen: Annotated Edition" was published by DC Entertainment in 2017. Also in 2017, his "New Annotated Frankenstein," published by W. W. Norton, was nominated for a World Fantasy Award. Klinger's "The New Annotated H. P. Lovecraft," shortlisted for the Bram Stoker Award, appeared in 2014, and a second volume, "New Annotated H. P. Lovecraft: Beyond the Mythos" will be published by Norton in 2019.

Klinger and co-editor Laura Caldwell just completed "ANATOMY OF INNOCENCE: TESTIMONIES OF THE WRONGFULLY CONVICTED," published by Liveright Publishing/W. W. Norton in 2017. This harrowing anthology pairs exonerees with major mystery/thriller writers to tell their tales of despair, hope, and courage. A nonprofit project, proceeds from the book benefit innocence projects.

In 2018, Klinger published "Classic American Crime Fiction of the 1920s," a massive annotated collection of five novels, including the first Charlie Chan mystery, the first Ellery Queen mystery, the first Philo Vance mystery, Dashiell Hammett's first novel, and "Little Caesar," the first gangster novel. The book was awarded the Edgar for Best Critical/Biographical and is nominated for several other awards.

Later in 2019, Neil Gaiman's "Annotated American Gods," edited with notes by Klinger, will appear from William Morrow.

Born in Chicago, Illinois, Klinger received an AB in English from the University of California, Berkeley, followed by a JD from Boalt Hall (School of Law, U.C. Berkeley). Since then, he has lived in Los Angeles, pursuing a legal career in tax, estate, and business planning. Klinger is a member of the Baker Street Irregulars, the Horror Writers Association, and the Mystery Writers of America. He served for three years as the chapter president of the SoCal Chapter of MWA and on its National Board of Directors, and he is the Treasurer of the Horror Writers Association.

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Book review: “Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde”

Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson Recommended Ages: 12+

The title of this book varies from one edition to another. Sometimes it is published with a “The” at the beginning. Sometimes “Strange Case of” is omitted. Sometimes it is even given simply as Jekyll & Hyde . It’s not as though the printer needs to save ink; it’s a very short book, a novella really. There are even more versions of Stevenson’s story than variants of its title. Next to A Christmas Carol , it has probably seen more adaptations for stage and film than any other work of English literature, including parodies and re-imaginings that (ha, ha) transform the original story almost out of recognition. I have seen and read several of these re-tellings, which share little in common except the essential concept of a man who, by taking a potion, transforms himself into another person—in most versions, an identity compounded of all the dark, evil parts of himself. And of course, the trouble that bad Mr. (or Ms.) Hyde gets into, always complicates things for Dr. Jekyll as well.

What I never realized until now, on finally reading the story as Stevenson wrote it, is how different his novella is from any and all of the dramatizations, abridgements, contextualizations, and “for dummies” versions on the market. The popular idea of what this story is about is also quite out of order. It isn’t about split personalities or “dissociative identity disorder.” It is about a man’s struggle with the conflicting powers of good and evil within his one personality, and the tragedy that takes place when he experiments with a drug to separate the two. It is a story about the course of a life-destroying addiction, together with a man’s losing struggle against moral corruption, guilt, and the terror of justice. It is a true tale of horror. It resembles nightmares I have had and—assuming that I’m not alone in this—explores something that troubles many people with a well-developed moral conscience and an understanding of the evil nature within each of us. And it does this in a story that combines shock, suspense, mystery, and a really chilling final confession, as only a master writer can. Here is a sample of the story you thought you knew, in case you’ve never read it:

This was the shocking thing; that the slime of the pit seemed to utter cries and voices; that the amorphous dust gesticulated and sinned; that what was dead, and had no shape, should usurp the offices of life.

When I started reading this story, I thought the quote I was going to drop into my review was going to be, “ ‘If he be Mr Hyde,’ he had thought, ‘I shall be Mr Seek. ‘” At first it doesn’t seem to take the Jekyll/Hyde mythology as seriously as it ought to, judging from more recent redactions. Pretending that we don’t know what the story hasn’t openly revealed to us (though we do know, we do), we don’t find out what’s up with Jekyll and Hyde until almost the end of the story. We come at the truth slowly, through the investigations of a lawyer friend of Henry Jekyll’s, named Gabriel Utterson.

Lawyer Utterson knows something fishy is going on between the good doctor and his bad protege. He worries that, by making his will in favor of the violent and amoral Edward Hyde, Jekyll puts himself in harm’s way. But Jekyll tells him not to worry. Then Hyde is seen committing a notorious murder, and worrying is back on the menu. But the mystery only grows more perplexing as Hyde disappears and as Jekyll, after a season of unusually sociable behavior, suddenly goes into strict seclusion. A mutual friend of Jekyll and Utterson’s, a physician named Lanyon, suddenly suffers a physical and mental breakdown and dies within weeks, leaving Utterson a sealed letter to be read only on the death or disappearance of Jekyll. The crisis finally comes when Jekyll’s servants appeal to the lawyer for help, suspecting that Hyde has done away with Jekyll. They break down the door of the chemist’s laboratory and make the kind of ghastly discovery that can only be understood after reading the last testament of both Lanyon and Jekyll. And the chill deepens the farther you read, all the way down to the bone.

This isn’t about a man innocently, accidentally, and (at first) uncontrollably being split into two persons, one good and the other evil, and then having trouble keeping his double life from being detected. It is, rather, about a man who struggles with the spiritual duality within himself. He thinks he can create two persons out of one, and separate the bad from the good; but when he tries it, he discovers that he was wrong. The Jekyll part of him remains as he was before, with both the good and bad held in constant tension; the Hyde side, however, is deformed, stunted, and purely evil. Because of this imbalance in favor of evil, and the weakness of Jekyll’s human nature, and the wicked abandon of Hyde, and the decreasing effectiveness of the drug, all working together, what starts as a weird experiment quickly becomes an addiction. And while Jekyll increasingly loses control, Hyde has become a hunted man, doomed to the gallows if captured.

Any civilized and decent person must be able to imagine and sympathize with the horror a man feels as he sees himself becoming a monster, and knows that his identity will soon be lost. The top horror fetishes of the moment—zombies, vampires, and werewolves—can also be understood in the light of losing yourself and becoming something monstrous. But Dr. Jekyll’s situation is, if anything, even more cruel: he has, at least to start with, the ability to come back to himself at will. But through his own weakness, errors, and the biochemistry of addiction, he lives through the agony of losing that saving grace, bit by tiny bit. And all the while, he knows that he brought it on himself by choice; nothing bit him or scratched him to make him this way. This is what he chose, rather than having to struggle between his high aspirations and his low appetites. It’s an instructive horror, then, for the rest of us who sometimes feel discouraged as we fight our own inner demons. But it’s also a horrible horror, and no mistake. I, for one, will have something new to pray about tonight, after finishing this book. I might as well pray anyway, since I’ll be lying awake!

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By Walter Kirn

• May 30, 2014

Robert Louis Stevenson’s “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” is an oblique and artful Gothic tale framed as a detective story. The truth seeker is Jekyll’s lawyer, Utterson, the book’s most prominent character. Jekyll — the ­gentleman who dabbles in chemical self-­transformation — appears only ­intermittently, never fully speaking for himself until the end, when he discloses the details of the disastrous experiments that unleashed his primitive alter ego. The novel isn’t a conventional horror story, lingering on the macabre for its own sake, but an allegory of the divided self, perhaps also a meditation on addiction. Stevenson dramatizes human duality but doesn’t analyze its causes, treating it as pervasive and fundamental. For him, the Jekyll-Hyde split is the split in all of us, between the animals we evolved from and the angels we aspire to be.

“Hyde” is the first-time novelist Daniel Levine’s ingenious revision of this canonical work, an elevated exercise in fan fiction that complicates and reorients the story by telling it from the perspective of the monster, exposing the tender heart inside the brute and emphasizing the pathos of his predicament. Hyde is an outlet for Jekyll’s buried lusts, a manifestation of his banished id, but he is also a person in his own right who longs for acknowledgment and recognition. Far from being the accidental product of Jekyll’s experimental potion, he’s an integral, abiding second self who first emerged during Jekyll’s painful childhood as a defense against severe abuse and then went dormant inside him for decades, until the medicine reawakened him. While Stevenson casts Hyde as purely evil, a creature without a conscience, Levine — by placing him center stage and awarding him a full measure of humanity — portrays him as a wounded innocent, scorned, bewildered and oppressed. He dwells like a squatter in the body that he and Jekyll share, an illegal lodger, without rights.

Levine’s book is appreciably longer than Stevenson’s, chiefly because it’s vastly more subjective, describing the tortured Hyde’s interior life as he waits, locked in Jekyll’s house, for the authorities to catch up with him after his murder of a member of Parliament who discovered his and Jekyll’s secret. The mood is one of frustration and claustrophobia. For as long as he can remember, Hyde has lived as the captive of his master, able to observe the doctor’s deeds and draw inferences from his behavior but lacking access to his thoughts. Levine exploits this unusual arrangement to invent a hybrid point of view that fuses the first person and the third. Hyde, the “I,” refers to Jekyll as “he” and to their composite being as “we.” This fractured perspective takes some getting used to, but eventually it feels logical and apt, elegantly ­expressing the mind’s ­plurality and its propensity for self-estrangement. We are many, ­every one of us, peering inward and outward simultaneously and beholding our lives from conflicting, varied angles that we perpetually strive to reconcile. For Hyde, this task is singularly difficult; his ­peculiar existence denies him wholeness, condemning him to confusion and anxiety.

In “Hyde,” the outside world — Victorian London — is as byzantine as its ­narrator’s inner world. It’s a murky metropolis of vice and cruelty, especially at night, which is when Hyde can most freely range about, his fearsome visage obscured by shadows. The gaslit, mazelike, foggy city that Stevenson only lightly sketched engrosses and excites Levine, particularly its seamy side of swarming, roaring pubs and vile back-alley brothels. Hyde is drawn to these dubious establishments by impulses he only half understands but is powerless to check because they emanate from Jekyll, the upright scientist and man of means for whom reason and civilized comforts have fallen short. The brothels where he seeks companionship specialize, some of them, in supplying little girls for callous, predatory gentlemen. The girls are slaves, held hostage in much the same way that Hyde is chained to Jekyll, suggesting a moral cleavage within society that mirrors the divided makeup of the main character. This backdrop creates sympathy for Hyde, a being capable of many sins but immune to the one that defines his age, hypocrisy, because he wears no public mask of virtue. He does have a gallant side, however. His affinity for the helpless and exploited impels him to rescue a child prostitute and violently confront a prowling john.

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Words And Peace

Book reviews and good books for you to read.

Book review: Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

In Un été avec Rimbaud [a summer with Rimbaud], Sylvain Tesson focuses on the poet’s ambivalent personality. Rimbaud even wrote “Je est un autre”. (I is another)

So for my BookBound project , I decided to choose then another book about ambivalence of personality. Obviously a classic on my TBR right away jumped to mind, plus it is even mentioned by Tesson in his book on Rimbaud : Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde .

The last time I read something by Stevenson was Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes , so this is VERY different!! I’m actually quite impressed by the variety of genres this author has.

I’m sure you all have seen the movie or movies. I haven’t, and I only vaguely knew what this was about. So this was a wonderful surprise. Some consider it in the horror genre. But seeing the content of contemporary horror novels, I would actually consider it rather as gothic . And it seems to me a great example of gothic mystery, as it is only slowly that the noir and creepy ambiance leads the reader to the full revelation of what happened. The pace was fabulous in that respect.

It is said that “ Robert Louis Stevenson’s masterpiece of the duality of good and evil in man’s nature sprang from the darkest recesses of his own unconscious—during a nightmare from which his wife awakened him, alerted by his screams.” I have read other authors mentioning that a dream or nightmare was the source of their inspiration, but wow, I wouldn’t have liked to be in Stevenson’s mind!

I liked the structure of the book with a f raming narrative , t he story starting with Utterson and Enfield having a conversation while passing in front of a sinister door.

The slow transformation of the doctor is a wonderful allegory of how some of our inner dark desires can take over, if we allow them. Until a certain point, Jekyll had the power to say no and close his door to his inner monster. But he didn’t, and then there was nothing he could do against it.

The Fathers of the Church have written about this since at least the 4th century. One major advice is not to allow the bad seeds to grow, but to uproot these thoughts as soon as we identify them, and for sure never to play with them in our minds. If we let them grow, they are going to become big trees that we will never be able to cut down.

They often describe the process in this way:

• First we have a thought ( logismoi). It is the initial stage where a thought or suggestion enters our mind. It can be good, bad, or neutral in origin. It is not sinful in itself, but a starting point for potential further engagement.
• Then in the second stage ( Attention ), we can ch oose to focus on and entertain a particular thought. This engagement is not yet sinful, but it can activate emotions and desires related to the thought.
• After that ( Agreement ), we mentally consent to the thought and the desires it stirs.
• When we choose not to resist the agreed-upon thought or its desires, we are preparing the way for the final stage ( Action ), where the thought translates into actual sin.

This has been beautifully explained first by Evagrius Ponticus (c.345-399). No, human psychology is not something we have discovered in the 20th century!

One wonderful book that focuses on the struggle against the thoughts is Our Thoughts Determine our Lives .

We can read Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and identify there the four stages of the struggle against the thoughts. The result is sin impersonated in the figure of Mr. Hyde, as the new identity completely takes over the originally rather good identity of the person, enslaves it, and eventually kills it.

I actually listened to this novel, and I found the narrator Alexander Spencer very good at conveying the constant underlying tension and looming terrible truth.

VERDICT:  Chilling gothic mystery exploring good vs evil, and showcasing Stevenson’s masterful storytelling.

BOOKBOUND INFO :

I highlighted how gothic this book is. I often associate gothic with the author Daphne du Maurier. I have read and loved several books by her, but have not read yet The Scapegoat. When I looked more closely at the synopsis, I was shocked how perfect it will be to read it after reading Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde : ” By chance, John and Jean–one English, the other French–meet in a provincial railway station. Their resemblance to each other is uncanny, and they spend the next few hours talking and drinking – until at last John falls into a drunken stupor. It’s to be his last carefree moment, for when he wakes, Jean has stolen his identity and disappeared. So the Englishman steps into the Frenchman’s shoes, and faces a variety of perplexing roles – as owner of a chateau, director of a failing business, head of a fractious family, and master of nothing. Gripping and complex, The Scapegoat is a masterful exploration of doubling and identity, and of the dark side of the self.”

WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE GOTHIC NOVEL ? SHARE YOUR THOUGHTS IN A COMMENT PLEASE

Share this:, 26 thoughts on “ book review: dr. jekyll and mr. hyde ”.

I love Daphne DuMaurier and have read about a dozen of her books. Also this one by RLS too, but many, many years ago.

She is so good indeed!

Like Liked by 1 person

Your synopsis of the DdM story sounded familiar, probably from other bloggers’ reviews, but I’ve yet to come across The Scapegoat . I reread and reviewed the RLS ‘fable’ (that’s how he described it) early on in blogging, but I think I might give it another go soon!

By the way, the advice from the Early Church Fathers about yielding (or rather, not yielding!) to temptation was not familiar to me, but the stages they list seem entirely logical to me.

Yes, these early Christian fathers knew human psychology really well!

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I’m not much into the gothic genre, but when I was in school we read some pretty dark stuff… mostly short stories like “The Pit and the Pendulum” by Poe, and “The Monkey’s Paw” by WW Jacobs, and “The African Veldt” by Ray Bradbury (although that’s also Sci-Fi).

Thanks, I’m not familiar with these. Though I’ll be reading this year a whole collection of stories Poe. Also, I read a fascinating collection of crime fiction by Bradbury, before he went into scifi

I read this story back in middle school. Never seen any movies base off this book. Have you read anything by E.T.A. Hoffmann? Know as the grandfather of weird fiction he inspire the likes of Poe and Stevenson. The short story The Sandman has a psychological twist of the mind.

The Sandman by E.T.A. Hoffmann | Short Story Analyzes |

Thanks so much. Just left a comment on your post. So cool to discover he is actually the guy from Jacques Offenbach’s famous opera The Tales of Hoffmann!!

I did read this one, and fell in love with Hoffmann. I did like, but I have a feeling I have to re-read it to really get the hang of the story. I am currently reading his The Devil’s Elixir which is another strange, sort of magic realism story.

The Devil’s Elixir: sounds quite a story!

I read this years ago, I remember enjoying it and the outline of the plot. I think authors in the 19th century were more flexible in what they wrote, as I don’t think genres had become so fixed or defined by that point.

Good point, making works so fascinating

I haven’t read Dr. Jekyll or The Scapegoat and it sounds a good idea to read them side by side, thanks!

Yes, I think it will be a fascinating experience

I really enjoyed reading this one again a few years ago! It held up to my memory of it really well.

Hard to forget indeed

Great review Emma. I did like the story, but am thinking that it would have been nice to read it, not knowing the story at all. It would probably give you another kind of experience. I have to get on to Scapegoat, sounds fabulous, like most of her books.

Yes, it’s always better when you know nothing, for some authors, I don’t read the synopsis. Plus these days, publishers tend to reveal always too much!

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I’ve read Jekyll & Hyde but not The Scapegoat but I intend to. I’ve had the book for a while. I’ve been listening to some Practicing the Way Podcasts (John Mark Comer) & he’s been quoting quite a few of the Church Fathers. He uses the word ‘shadow side’ to describe the damaged but mostly hidden version of who we are.

Hmm, more interesting connections between Patristics and gothic novels, who knew? Thanks!

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Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

The premise of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is fairly well known, although the telling isn’t quite as expected. Revealed as a dark mystery seen and unraveled by a friend, Jekyll remains aloof, speaking to readers finally through his confession letter. As such, we see the horror of Hyde from the outside and the secret addiction of Jekyll to this uncontrollable self. Tired of doing the right thing and living the right way, especially within a society where he, as a doctor, is expected to be highly esteemed, Jekyll is less of a mad scientist and more of an amoral escapist. The experiment is deliberate, the causation initially sought and longing for until, of course, Hyde’s actions become too egregious to ignore. Now, locked within his laboratory, Jekyll’s servants and friends are convinced that something has happened to the good doctor – and here lies the mystery and the slow putting together of puzzle pieces to form an intricate mosaic of how good and evil combined defines humanity.

Gabriel John Utterson is our stoic narrator, and through his eyes we view a non-linear story, starting with the horrors of a man trampling a child and leading to the initiation and final ending of this man, Mr. Hyde’s, story. In such a way the mystery is born and although most readers already know the basics of the tale, this presentation still keeps it fresh and dynamic, especially since many renditions have missed the finer details and the gothic overtones. Examining what a man is truly made of, Dr. Jekyll is not ever represented as having a purely “good” side. He merely has his evil side and then his normal combination side, a theory that he himself explains. As such, he isn’t the character you decide to weep for, even in normal state, but a weak and aberrant monster flaunting his selfishness and in that way, making a decision that ultimately dooms him.

In just two discs, the novella is well and completely told. The tension and suspense are contemporary and while the violence isn’t as horrific as some later renditions have depicted, the items that are hinted at and the “debauchery” of Mr. Hyde’s desires are more than enough for readers to intuit and imagine what they consider a personal worst.

Short, but immersive, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hide combines the atmosphere of a thriller with a subtle horror novel while also supplying an introspection on humanity. With a little bit of everything, the story is surprisingly poignant, the language layered in an atmospheric and fitting manner. Highly recommended!

A Note on Edition* I listened to an audio book edition read by Ralph Cosham. Cosham’s deep voice and ability to immerse readers thoroughly into the story is amazing. However (and you knew this was coming) it seems that my library had an old edition, no longer available.

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Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde & Other Stories: And Other Stories (classic Reprint) (Monstrous Classics Collection)

By: robert louis stevenson.

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Book Details

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• by Robert Louis Stevenson
• in Children's Books
• in Literature and Fiction
• in Mystery and Thrillers
• in Science Fiction and Fantasy

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