Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
Robert Louis Stevenson (1886)
“A Victorian lawyer investigates his friend's disturbing new associate — and unravels the most famous split personality in literature.”
At a Glance
London lawyer Gabriel Utterson investigates the sinister Mr Hyde, who has a strange hold over his respectable friend Dr Henry Jekyll. After Hyde murders a Member of Parliament and then disappears, Jekyll seals himself in his laboratory and refuses all visitors. The mystery resolves in the last two chapters through a pair of posthumous letters: Jekyll has been using a chemical compound to transform himself into Hyde — his repressed, evil alter-ego — and has lost control of the transformation. Unable to stop becoming Hyde, Jekyll takes poison. Hyde dies with him.
Read full summary →Why This Book Matters
Published January 1886, it sold 40,000 copies in six months in Britain and 250,000 in the United States within the first year. It was immediately adapted for the stage and became one of the defining cultural texts of late Victorian anxieties about human nature. It gave English the phrase 'Jekyll and Hyde' — now used universally to describe any person with a dramatically split public and private self. The novella is the origin point of the split-personality figure in popular culture.
Diction Profile
High formality throughout — legal and medical registers dominate, with Gothic intrusions of fear-vocabulary when characters encounter Hyde
Moderate but precise