The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
1886
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
1886
Few novels have seared themselves into the collective consciousness the way this one has. Robert Louis Stevenson wrote it in a fever dream, pulled from his wife's arms after screaming through a night terror, and the raw, urgent quality of that creation still reverberates. In fog-shrouded Victorian London, the respectable Dr. Henry Jekyll seems the very model of Victorian virtue: generous, cultured, trusted. His friend Utterson, a lawyer, grows troubled by Jekyll's peculiar will, which bequeaths everything to a mysterious man named Edward Hyde, a figure so loathsome that a servant faints at the sight of him. When Hyde tramples a child in the street and signs Jekyll's name to the compensation cheque, the web of mystery tightens. What follows is a descent into the dark architecture of the soul itself, a terrifying proposition: that beneath every civilized exterior lurks something feral, something hungry, something utterly without remorse. More than a horror story, it is an exposé of the hypocrisy at the heart of respectable society, and a question that still haunts us: what exactly are we capable of, if no one is watching?
