Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde - Robert Louis Stevenson

The well told tale of the scrupulous, if tragically ill-fated, Dr. Jekyll has become one of the world’s most famous parables. A true case of curiosity killing the cat if ever there was one, this novella hit the stands in the 19th century with a clatter. Before your screen adaptations, before the plays, the operas, before the television series…before we all knew exactly how the story would end, before we already knew Dr. Jekyll’s dark secret, before all this people merely had a short book chock-full of gothicism, intrigue and a rather shocking climax. It’s sad that, today, this story is such a culturally recognised one that you’d be hard tested to find someone who would ...

The Strange Case Of Dr Jekyll And Mr Hyde was first published in 1886, and is surprisingly short for such an acclaimed book - it has only 88 pages! I read it in school as part of my English Literature coursework and I was expecting it to be pretty good - after all, there have been so many TV programmes, spin offs and dramatisations of it! It came out in the 19th century, during which 'classic' novels such as Dracula by Bram Stoker and Frankenstein by Mary Shelley were published. Jekyll And Hyde did really well and has often been described as the best horror story of all time, which I think is pushing it a bit, but there you go! The storyline ...

The trouble with Jekyll and Hyde is that everyone knows about it - through endless repeats, revisions, parodies and the like it has become part of our consciousness and the book that started it all off has suffered greatly for this. When I first read "The strange case...." I could not help but wonder what it would have been like to encounter that book with no preconceived ideas, no notion of where it might be going. The plot is far too well known - Dr Jekyll is a good man dabbling in weird science. He invents a potion that turns him into Mr Hyde - a bestial, violent and unpleasant man. The book itself is nothing like as violent as later ...