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

Stevenson wrote this novella in six days in 1885. It gave the English language a phrase for what it could not otherwise name: the respectable man and what he does in the dark.

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is not a story about a scientist who goes wrong. It is a story about Victorian respectability — the particular violence of a society that demands one face in public and buries everything else — and what happens when the buried thing refuses to stay buried. Hyde is not Jekyll's evil twin. He is Jekyll's authentic self, made possible by a drug that removes the social pressure to perform decency. What disturbs the novella's first readers, and what has never stopped disturbing readers since, is that Hyde is described as repellent by everyone who sees him — and no one can say exactly why. He has no specific deformity. Only the impression of evil, worn on the surface of a face that has never had to conceal itself.

The critical apparatus in this edition reads the novella with full attention to what Stevenson was doing and what the Victorian text could not quite say directly: the door that leads to Hyde's quarters and what it represents; the conspicuous absence of women from a story about masculinity in crisis; the sexuality that the novella encodes without naming; the final confession as the most unreliable document in the text.

Henry Jekyll — a man of good reputation who discovers that reputation is a cage, and that what lives inside the cage has been growing stronger in the dark.

Edward Hyde — who moves through Victorian London with the freedom that respectability costs; who is evil the way a released pressure is evil: not in intent, but in consequence.

Mr. Utterson — the lawyer who investigates without wanting to know the answer; who represents the Victorian reader's own investment in not understanding what the story is actually about.

Dr. Lanyon — who sees the transformation and dies of it; for whom knowledge is itself fatal.

✦ The complete, unabridged text of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde — together with a full critical apparatus by Henry Bugalho.

This edition also includes:

✦ The Unmasterable Double: A Literary Analysis — twelve chapters reading the novella with full critical attention: the architecture of the narrative, the door as threshold, Hyde's indescribable face, respectability as disease, the sexuality the text encodes but cannot name, and the impossibility of Jekyll's final confession

✦ The World That Dreamed Jekyll and Hyde: A Historical Context — the Victorian gentleman, the cult of respectability, the specific social pressures that made the novella's central fantasy both necessary and terrifying

✦ The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson — from Edinburgh to Samoa, through the tuberculosis, the wandering years, and the extraordinary productivity that produced this novella in six days

For readers who enjoy:

✦ Gothic fiction and the Victorian dark imagination — at its most psychologically precise

✦ Classic English literature read with full critical attention to what it could not say directly

✦ Dark fiction about the divided self — and the text that gave psychology one of its central metaphors

✦ The complete story behind one of the most recognizable titles in English literature

"I learned to recognise the thorough and primitive duality of man."