Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
by Robert Louis Stevenson
Summary
London lawyer Gabriel Utterson grows troubled by the hold that a small, violent man named Edward Hyde seems to have over his old friend Dr. Henry Jekyll, a hold that begins with a will leaving Hyde everything Jekyll owns and worsens with a murder Hyde commits in the street. Utterson's investigation runs into dead ends at every turn, since Jekyll insists there is nothing wrong and Hyde is rarely seen at all, until a final confession left behind for Utterson explains what neither man could have guessed. Jekyll, convinced that every person carries a wholly good and a wholly evil self, had mixed a chemical draught that let him step bodily into the evil half alone, and found the freedom of it, and the diminished stature and violence of Hyde's body, addictive from the first change. The transformations begin happening without the draught at all, seizing Jekyll in his sleep and in the middle of ordinary afternoons, and when the original chemical salt that made the draught work turns out to be impure and irreplaceable, Jekyll is trapped as Hyde with no way back. The confession closes with Jekyll, feeling the final change coming on, sealing up the account of a life he knows is over, and Utterson and the butler find Hyde dead by his own hand in Jekyll's laboratory, wearing clothes many sizes too large for him.
Stevenson tells almost the whole story from Utterson's baffled outside view, so a reader working out what Hyde actually is keeps pace with the lawyer rather than being told upfront, and the device makes the eventual confession land as a real revelation rather than a twist the book had been coyly withholding. It is short enough to read in an evening and reads like a mystery for most of its length before it turns into something closer to horror, and the prose stays plain and controlled even as the material gets stranger, which if anything sharpens the unease rather than softening it.
Stevenson later said the idea came to him whole in a nightmare, and by his family's account he wrote the first draft in a matter of days before burning it and starting over at his wife's urging, though scholars doubt the burning ever happened.
Historical Context & Significance
Longmans, Green and Co. published the novella in London in January 1886, with Scribner's issuing it in New York the same month, priced as a cheap paperback shilling shocker rather than a prestige edition. It caught on slowly and then completely: The Times gave it a favorable notice that January, and within six months it had sold roughly forty thousand copies, helped along, according to Stevenson's biographer Graham Balfour, less by any conscious appreciation of its craft than by the public's own moral instincts responding to the story. Sermons quoted it and readers who otherwise never touched fiction picked it up anyway.
The phrase Jekyll and Hyde entered everyday English almost immediately as shorthand for a person whose respectable surface hides something monstrous, and it has stayed there. More than a hundred stage and film versions have followed since the 1880s, and by the turn of the twentieth century American sales alone were estimated past a quarter million copies, a reach few shilling shockers of its era came close to matching.