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.”
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.
Firsts & Innovations
First major literary work to use a chemical compound as the mechanism of psychological transformation — anticipating 20th-century psychopharmacology
Established the 'double' (Doppelgänger) theme as a central preoccupation of English-language Gothic literature
One of the first works of literary mystery structured around the disclosure of information through posthumous documents rather than direct investigation
Pioneered the multiple-narrator structure that Stoker would develop in Dracula (1897)
Cultural Impact
'Jekyll and Hyde' entered common English as a synonym for radical personality split — the novella's title became a diagnostic phrase used in psychiatry, journalism, and ordinary conversation
Freud's concept of the id, ego, and superego (developed 1900s-1920s) is widely seen as the scientific formalization of what Stevenson dramatized
Over 100 film and stage adaptations — the 1931 film with Fredric March and the 1941 version with Spencer Tracy were major Hollywood productions
The Jack the Ripper murders (1888) were immediately and persistently associated with Hyde in the press — the fictional monster made real
The novella was directly invoked during the Oscar Wilde trials (1895): newspapers called Wilde 'a real Jekyll and Hyde'
Continues to be cited in contemporary discussions of duality, repression, and the relationship between respectability and violence
Banned & Challenged
Not formally banned, but subject to significant moral panic on publication — some clergymen preached sermons against it as a corrupting influence. American piracy of the text was so extensive that Stevenson received almost no American royalties despite its enormous US sales.