Publisher's Synopsis
Good and evil, right and wrong. Both are seen through the eyes of John Utterson, a lawyer and friend of the scientist Dr. Jekyll. After hearing the alarming account of the horrendous trampling of a small girl "like some damned juggernaut" by a violent man named Mr. Hyde, who also holds a connection to the lawyer's dear friend, Utterson's curiosity gets the better of him and he begins to investigate. As he probes further into the events and the hidden life of Mr. Hyde, Utterson slowly uncovers a terrifying and ghastly story. 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.Robert Louis Stevenson was a Scottish novelist, poet, and travel writer, and a leading representative of Neo-romanticism in English literature. Stevenson was a celebrity in his own time, but with the rise of modern literature after World War I, he was seen for much of the 20th century as a writer of the second class, relegated to children's literature and horror genres. Condemned by authors such as Virginia and Leonard Woolf, he was gradually excluded from the canon of literature taught in schools. His exclusion reached a height when in the 1973 2,000-page Oxford Anthology of English Literature Stevenson was entirely unmentioned.
