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The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, with other fables. [With a note by S. C., i.e. Sidney Colvin.]
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, with other fables. [With a note by S. C., i.e. Sidney Colvin.]
British Library, Historical Print Editions
The British Library is the national library of the United Kingdom. It is one of the world's largest research libraries holding over 150 million items in all known languages and books, journals, newspapers, sound recordings, patents, maps, stamps, prints and much more. Its collections include around 14 million books, along with substantial additional collections of manuscripts and historical items dating back as far as 300 BC.
The FICTION & PROSE LITERATURE collection includes books from the British Library digitised by Microsoft. The collection provides readers with a perspective of the world from some of the 18th and 19th century's most talented writers. Written for a range of audiences, these works are a treasure for any curious reader looking to see the world through the eyes of ages past. Beyond the main body of works the collection also includes song-books, comedy, and works of satire.
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The below data was compiled from various identification fields in the bibliographic record of this title. This data is provided as an additional tool in helping to insure edition
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British Library
Stevenson, Robert Louis; Colvin, Sidney;
1896.
247 p.; 8.
012627.i.21.
British Library, Historical Print Editions
The British Library is the national library of the United Kingdom. It is one of the world's largest research libraries holding over 150 million items in all known languages and books, journals, newspapers, sound recordings, patents, maps, stamps, prints and much more. Its collections include around 14 million books, along with substantial additional collections of manuscripts and historical items dating back as far as 300 BC.
The FICTION & PROSE LITERATURE collection includes books from the British Library digitised by Microsoft. The collection provides readers with a perspective of the world from some of the 18th and 19th century's most talented writers. Written for a range of audiences, these works are a treasure for any curious reader looking to see the world through the eyes of ages past. Beyond the main body of works the collection also includes song-books, comedy, and works of satire.
++++
The below data was compiled from various identification fields in the bibliographic record of this title. This data is provided as an additional tool in helping to insure edition
++++
British Library
Stevenson, Robert Louis; Colvin, Sidney;
1896.
247 p.; 8.
012627.i.21.
- GenresClassics
268 pages, Paperback
Published March 16, 2011
About the author
Robert Louis Stevenson
7,720 books7,234 followersRobert Louis Balfour Stevenson was a Scottish novelist, poet, and travel writer, and a leading representative of English literature. He was greatly admired by many authors, including Jorge Luis Borges, Ernest Hemingway, Rudyard Kipling and Vladimir Nabokov.
Most modernist writers dismissed him, however, because he was popular and did not write within their narrow definition of literature. It is only recently that critics have begun to look beyond Stevenson's popularity and allow him a place in the Western canon.
Most modernist writers dismissed him, however, because he was popular and did not write within their narrow definition of literature. It is only recently that critics have begun to look beyond Stevenson's popularity and allow him a place in the Western canon.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
June 21, 2019
I was familiar with the story, but I've never known how the actual story goes. I loved the old English goth writting, it was refreshing after so much modern day fantasies. The fables were amazing, and all with excellent morals.
Recommendation to all.
Recommendation to all.
May 9, 2020
Loved the tale oft he doctor, found humor in most of the fables. Some just weren’t my cup of tea. All well written and told though.
January 21, 2026
The novella itself is a classic for a reason. Terrifying, sharp, and uncomfortably human.
I had the pleasure to read The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in an older edition (1906), and what shocked me most is how little it feels “dated.” Stevenson could drop this story into today’s world, change almost nothing, and it would still read as believable — not because of the potion, but because of the psychology.
I expected a familiar monster story. What I got was something colder and smarter—a slow, lawyerly unraveling that turns into a confession where the voice itself begins to fracture. As Jekyll tells his story, you can hear the shift in tone to the respectable justification, the embarrassed recoil, and then Hyde’s outright pride when cruelty becomes “freedom.” The murder passage is some of the most disturbing writing I’ve read in a long time, not just violence, but the way Stevenson captures the sick “glee” of losing restraint, followed by fear that feels less like remorse and more like consequences catching up. It felt almost like the scene in Crime and Punishment.
What makes the book endure is the central terror of the fantasy that you can separate the “bad” from the “good” and become purified. Though it is the nightmare of what you’re really doing is giving the worst impulses a body and a name. It isn’t subtle about the moral cost, but it’s brutally honest about how self-deception works. Of how we rationalize, how we compartmentalize, and how quickly a hidden self can become the one steering.
The added fables at the end of the book were entertaining, and a few felt surprisingly relatable (especially the way they expose denial and risk as “normal”), though some of the folklore and references went over my head and didn’t land with the same force.
I would recommend this copy to anyone who enjoys classic stories that transcend time and space.
I had the pleasure to read The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in an older edition (1906), and what shocked me most is how little it feels “dated.” Stevenson could drop this story into today’s world, change almost nothing, and it would still read as believable — not because of the potion, but because of the psychology.
I expected a familiar monster story. What I got was something colder and smarter—a slow, lawyerly unraveling that turns into a confession where the voice itself begins to fracture. As Jekyll tells his story, you can hear the shift in tone to the respectable justification, the embarrassed recoil, and then Hyde’s outright pride when cruelty becomes “freedom.” The murder passage is some of the most disturbing writing I’ve read in a long time, not just violence, but the way Stevenson captures the sick “glee” of losing restraint, followed by fear that feels less like remorse and more like consequences catching up. It felt almost like the scene in Crime and Punishment.
What makes the book endure is the central terror of the fantasy that you can separate the “bad” from the “good” and become purified. Though it is the nightmare of what you’re really doing is giving the worst impulses a body and a name. It isn’t subtle about the moral cost, but it’s brutally honest about how self-deception works. Of how we rationalize, how we compartmentalize, and how quickly a hidden self can become the one steering.
The added fables at the end of the book were entertaining, and a few felt surprisingly relatable (especially the way they expose denial and risk as “normal”), though some of the folklore and references went over my head and didn’t land with the same force.
I would recommend this copy to anyone who enjoys classic stories that transcend time and space.
April 25, 2018
My memory of reading this as a teenager focuses almost entirely on the one shockingly violent scene in this novella, the one where Edward Hyde viciously attacks a prominent Parliamentarian in a London street. In my immature haste to get to the action I had clearly bypassed all the diversions -- the discussions, the dialogues and the descriptions -- as irrelevant waffle. For years I laboured under the impression that Hyde continued to roam the back alleys of the capital after story's end, causing mayhem and fear. I long wondered if I'd confused elements of this tale with Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (which was in fact published five years after this, in 1890) or a title by Arthur Machen concerning flâneurs in London (such as The Hill of Dreams, 1907).
In truth, Jekyll and Hyde plays on the meme of a dismal, foggy London in which dark deeds occur in side streets, a meme which every fin de siècle and early 20th-century novel exhibits, from the Sherlock Holmes stories to Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent and beyond. It is the epitome of Ruskin's 'pathetic fallacy', the notion that nature echoes the human spirit when it is actually the reverse: London's habitual murky darkness is merely a metaphor for human depravity, if anything the cause not the effect.
My younger self then was not in sympathy with how atmosphere was created and developed in a novel; but I hoped the passage of years would allow me now to enjoy the slow build-up to a dénouement that only a reader reared in complete isolation could be in ignorance of.
That dénouement we all know now, is that Jekyll and Hyde are one and the same. Or rather, they are one but not entirely the same: Jekyll has, by dint of allowing free rein to his baser desires, has unwittingly allowed them to not only rise to the surface but to effectively take over, save for one small chink that will finally bring him release. Hyde is the skin that Jekyll uses to, as it were, hide in plain sight; Hyde is Jekyll without a shred of remorse for his behaviour which, though it is only hinted at, seems to encompass sex and violence as well as, ultimately, murder.
Jekyll & Hyde was classed as a 'fable' by Stevenson himself. In the 1896 posthumous edition the publishers included not only his shorter literary fables but a preface which described this novella as one of his "semi-supernatural stories ... in the composition of which there was combined with the dream element ... the element of moral allegory or apologue." In other words, Jekyll & Hyde was a fable without an explicit moral; readers are expected to draw the moral out for themselves. This lesson seems to be that we all have the propensity to do evil things though most of us resist the temptation; but those who, like Jekyll, attempt to absolve themselves of responsibility for ignoble and wicked actions must of necessity face the consequences of those actions.
Stevenson reportedly -- as with Mary Shelley and Frankenstein -- was inspired by a vivid waking dream to develop his story. The tale is presented as a series of narratives, first by an omniscient storyteller who introduces Mr Gabriel Utterson the lawyer and his cousin Mr Richard Enfield, who muse on a curious incident involving Mr Edward Hyde, a child and a door. Hyde has "something wrong with his appearance; something displeasing, something downright detestable." Utterson then discusses with Dr Lanyon his concerns about their mutual friend Dr Henry Jekyll and the latter's relationship to Mr Edward Hyde.
Those concerns are not allayed by Hyde's reported frenzied attack on Sir Davers Carew. After the murder everything seems to go quiet, Hyde disappears from public view and Dr Jekyll appears to regain a composure he had lost. But Utterson has not lost sight of his suspicions regarding Hyde's mysterious hold on Jekyll, especially after Dr Lanyon's unexpected decline and demise. When Jekyll becomes reclusive, Utterson gains the support of Jekyll's butler and breaks into the rooms where Jekyll has locked himself up; here they find the body of Hyde and a final note in the hand of Jekyll, explaining everything.
The mystery of Jekyll and Hyde is no mystery to us now, but the first readers of Stevenson's fable must have been very shocked as they grew to realise the truth of the matter, as confirmed in the final revelation. The story must have appealed to respectable Victorian society's worst fears: the threat from the worst the lower classes (as Hyde appears to be part of) could inflict on them; the dark, almost magical, arts that the renegade scientist might be attracted to; and the latent evil, perhaps a trace of original sin, that might lurk within any or all of them, ready to emerge unless severely repressed.
Nowadays we might not so readily conflate evil with a conventionally unattractive appearance as exhibited by Jekyll's altered state -- even traditional tales likes Cupid and Psyche and other tales of the Beauty and the Beast type warn us against such leaps to judgement -- but authors then felt no such constraints. Classic fiction has often favoured simplistic correlations for the sake of narrative.
In psychological terms Jekyll's alter ego could also be the shadow, an aspect of the personality that writers have explored before and since the publication of Stevenson's fable. It becomes evident that The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (the novella was first published in 1885 without the definite article) is not about a split personality but about Jekyll's deliberate liberation of his baser instincts, a liberation that leads to degradation, deaths and Jekyll's own suicide when he realises he has become the shadow he sought to split off from himself.
In one sense Jekyll's story is the precursor of J M Barrie's Peter Pan, "the boy who wouldn't grow up", and who had a shadow that could be separated, even if only temporarily, from Pan. Jekyll, for all his learned sophistication, childishly wants to indulge his primitive instincts by letting his shadow self take over; by consuming the concoctions he has himself prepared he hopes to release his shadow self, and even gives it a new name. Unlike Peter Pan, though, here things don't end so well.
https://wp.me/s2oNj1-jekyll
In truth, Jekyll and Hyde plays on the meme of a dismal, foggy London in which dark deeds occur in side streets, a meme which every fin de siècle and early 20th-century novel exhibits, from the Sherlock Holmes stories to Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent and beyond. It is the epitome of Ruskin's 'pathetic fallacy', the notion that nature echoes the human spirit when it is actually the reverse: London's habitual murky darkness is merely a metaphor for human depravity, if anything the cause not the effect.
My younger self then was not in sympathy with how atmosphere was created and developed in a novel; but I hoped the passage of years would allow me now to enjoy the slow build-up to a dénouement that only a reader reared in complete isolation could be in ignorance of.
That dénouement we all know now, is that Jekyll and Hyde are one and the same. Or rather, they are one but not entirely the same: Jekyll has, by dint of allowing free rein to his baser desires, has unwittingly allowed them to not only rise to the surface but to effectively take over, save for one small chink that will finally bring him release. Hyde is the skin that Jekyll uses to, as it were, hide in plain sight; Hyde is Jekyll without a shred of remorse for his behaviour which, though it is only hinted at, seems to encompass sex and violence as well as, ultimately, murder.
Jekyll & Hyde was classed as a 'fable' by Stevenson himself. In the 1896 posthumous edition the publishers included not only his shorter literary fables but a preface which described this novella as one of his "semi-supernatural stories ... in the composition of which there was combined with the dream element ... the element of moral allegory or apologue." In other words, Jekyll & Hyde was a fable without an explicit moral; readers are expected to draw the moral out for themselves. This lesson seems to be that we all have the propensity to do evil things though most of us resist the temptation; but those who, like Jekyll, attempt to absolve themselves of responsibility for ignoble and wicked actions must of necessity face the consequences of those actions.
Stevenson reportedly -- as with Mary Shelley and Frankenstein -- was inspired by a vivid waking dream to develop his story. The tale is presented as a series of narratives, first by an omniscient storyteller who introduces Mr Gabriel Utterson the lawyer and his cousin Mr Richard Enfield, who muse on a curious incident involving Mr Edward Hyde, a child and a door. Hyde has "something wrong with his appearance; something displeasing, something downright detestable." Utterson then discusses with Dr Lanyon his concerns about their mutual friend Dr Henry Jekyll and the latter's relationship to Mr Edward Hyde.
Those concerns are not allayed by Hyde's reported frenzied attack on Sir Davers Carew. After the murder everything seems to go quiet, Hyde disappears from public view and Dr Jekyll appears to regain a composure he had lost. But Utterson has not lost sight of his suspicions regarding Hyde's mysterious hold on Jekyll, especially after Dr Lanyon's unexpected decline and demise. When Jekyll becomes reclusive, Utterson gains the support of Jekyll's butler and breaks into the rooms where Jekyll has locked himself up; here they find the body of Hyde and a final note in the hand of Jekyll, explaining everything.
The mystery of Jekyll and Hyde is no mystery to us now, but the first readers of Stevenson's fable must have been very shocked as they grew to realise the truth of the matter, as confirmed in the final revelation. The story must have appealed to respectable Victorian society's worst fears: the threat from the worst the lower classes (as Hyde appears to be part of) could inflict on them; the dark, almost magical, arts that the renegade scientist might be attracted to; and the latent evil, perhaps a trace of original sin, that might lurk within any or all of them, ready to emerge unless severely repressed.
Nowadays we might not so readily conflate evil with a conventionally unattractive appearance as exhibited by Jekyll's altered state -- even traditional tales likes Cupid and Psyche and other tales of the Beauty and the Beast type warn us against such leaps to judgement -- but authors then felt no such constraints. Classic fiction has often favoured simplistic correlations for the sake of narrative.
In psychological terms Jekyll's alter ego could also be the shadow, an aspect of the personality that writers have explored before and since the publication of Stevenson's fable. It becomes evident that The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (the novella was first published in 1885 without the definite article) is not about a split personality but about Jekyll's deliberate liberation of his baser instincts, a liberation that leads to degradation, deaths and Jekyll's own suicide when he realises he has become the shadow he sought to split off from himself.
In one sense Jekyll's story is the precursor of J M Barrie's Peter Pan, "the boy who wouldn't grow up", and who had a shadow that could be separated, even if only temporarily, from Pan. Jekyll, for all his learned sophistication, childishly wants to indulge his primitive instincts by letting his shadow self take over; by consuming the concoctions he has himself prepared he hopes to release his shadow self, and even gives it a new name. Unlike Peter Pan, though, here things don't end so well.
https://wp.me/s2oNj1-jekyll
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews