This small novella tells the tale of two impossibly intertwined gentlemen living in Victorian London---the friendly and sociable Dr Jekyll, and the monstrously deformed, obviously dangerous Mr Hyde. As Mr Hyde's crimes gain the attention of the police, the manhunt is on; but every lead on Hyde consistently leads back to Jekyll instead. When the darker truth of Hyde's identity becomes clear to all, that the monstrous predator of London's industrial-fog enshrouded streets is none other than Jekyll himself, transformed by a tincture of his own making, he sets forth to destroy himself and bring down Hyde with him. Allegedly written within a single week under the influence of cocaine, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is one of Scottish prose-poet Robert Louis Stevenson's most famous and influential works. It has been remade and adapted into numerous other mediums, including film, television, stage performance, and graphic novel; endlessly quoted in a host of derivative works, speeches, and religious sermons; it even served as the foundation of Freudian psychology and the inspiration for Freud's allegorical tale, The Beast Within. It is widely considered to be the quintessential tale on the duality of the individual, and the danger of suppressing humanity's baser instincts for the outward appearance of morality.
The young Robert Louis Stevenson suffered from repeated nightmares of living a double life, in which by day he worked as a respectable doctor and by night he roamed the back alleys of old-town Edinburgh. In three days of furious writing, he produced a story about his dream existence. His wife found it too gruesome, so he promptly burned the manuscript. In another three days, he wrote it again.
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was published as a "shilling shocker" in 1886, and became an instant classic. In the first six months, 40,000 copies were sold. Queen Victoria read it. Sermons and editorials were written about it. When Stevenson and his family visited America a year later, they were mobbed by reporters at the dock in New York City. Compulsively readable from its opening pages,
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is still one of the best tales ever written about the divided self.
This University of Nebraska Press edition is a small, exquisitely produced paperback. The book design, based on the original first edition of 1886, includes wide margins, decorative capitals on the title page and first page of each chapter, and a clean, readable font that is 19th-century in style. Joyce Carol Oates contributes a foreword in which she calls Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde a "mythopoetic figure" like Frankenstein, Dracula, and Alice in Wonderland, and compares Stevenson's creation to doubled selves in the works of Plato, Poe, Wilde, and Dickens.
This edition also features 12 full-page wood engravings by renowned illustrator Barry Moser. Moser is a skillful reader and interpreter as well as artist, and his afterword to the book, in which he explains the process by which he chose a self-portrait motif for the suite of engravings, is fascinating. For the image of Edward Hyde, he writes, "I went so far as to have my dentist fit me out with a carefully sculpted prosthetic of evil-looking teeth. But in the final moments I had to abandon the idea as being inappropriate. It was more important to stay in keeping with the text and, like Stevenson, not show Hyde's face." (Also recommended: the edition of Frankenstein illustrated by Barry Moser) --Fiona Webster
