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 ...  Read the complete review

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 ...  Read the complete review

Dr Jekyl and Mr Hyde is one of the books that I have to read for my University course and so wanting to get a little bit ahead and not be swamped by reading when I return next month I decided to read it over the summer holiday. I thought before I read the book that I already knew the story of Dr Jekyl and Mr Hyde but when I began reading it I realised that I only really knew the outline and that the actual story was a little bit different to what I expected. I must also say though that what I did end up reading actually disappointed me a little bit because I expected the tale to be much more dramatic than it actually was. I also was under the impression, ...  Read the complete review

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 ...  Read the complete review

Stevenson tells us a lot about Victorian society in this book. The upper and middle classes were often superficial and hypocritical with regard to their morality. They thought it was acceptable behaviour to appear respectable on the surface, while at the same time dabbling in various forms of immoral behaviour. In the book, much of the clandestine behaviour occurs when it is foggy or dark, which helps to imply the hidden nature of their immoral behaviour. Poverty and squalor were part of everyday life for the lower classes in the cities of Victorian England. The poor were often desperate so turned to criminal activities. The upper classes thought of criminals as ...  Read the complete review