Amazon.com Review: 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
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3.5 Stars . . . Doesn't Hold Up ^ "The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" has been called a Victorian parable, and it must have been groundbreaking in its time, but Robert Louis Stevenson seems to draw heavily on this passage from the Apostle Paul: "I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do...it is no longer I myself who do it, but it is sin living in me." (Romans 7:15&17) He explores this spiritual struggle with unabashed fervor in a tale still talked about over a hundred years later.
The story, no longer than a novella, reads quickly. Told through second-hand accounts and letters (similar to Stoker's "Dracula"), the tale's violence and mayhem are never directly experienced through the eyes of a victim or the perpetrator, which made it more palatable for its original audience, but makes it somewhat distant for those bred on "Silence of the Lambs." We have no clear protagonist, no clear definition of the next victim of Mr. Hyde's brutality; we have only snippets of letters and glimpses of a broken body. Stevenson manages to create a sense of foreboding, and the good doctor's final confessions are chilling, in that they describe the common struggle that all humans encounter within, fighting for the moral and ethical high ground.
Sadly, the story doesn't hold up as well as hoped to the test of time. It lacks true suspense, and there's little mystery to be found. In an era of Victorian virtue, though, it was surely shocking to have a writer admit to that struggle within and portray it in vivid terms.
I'm glad to have read the book for myself, and I believe it was foundational in the evolution of psychological suspense.
Not Really About a Split-Personality ^ Jekyll and Hyde is commonly evoked to describe someone with a split personality. Stevenson's novel is not really about a split personality, but rather a dual physical and spiritual nature struggling for control of one person. In this struggle, Dr. Jekyll doesn't just assume a different personality, he actually becomes Mr. Hyde.
Presbyterian Pastor Tim Keller has a good, brief analysis of parts of the Jekyll and Hyde story in his book The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism (Hardcover). Keller pinpoints a key point in the story, noting that it's in a moment of vainglory that Dr. Jekyll involuntary transforms into Mr. Hyde. This transformation occurs as Dr. Jekyll sits "on a bench in Regents Park, thinking about all the good he has been doing, and how much better man he was, despite Edward Hyde, than the great majority of people."
All this to say that Stevenson's novel goes far deeper than a psychoanalytic study of a split personality; it's about a profound spiritual struggle of the evil and good nature within a person.
Timeless ^ This is a great classic. This story brings to life the battle each one of us has within ourselves. Dr. Jekyll calls it his "dualtiy of purpose". The struggle of good versus evil; told in that colorful language of classics.
You Think You Know ^ Most readers may be surprised at just how coy and evasive this short novel is. We get only fleeting images of the villain and his transgressions. For a work that has become so well knit into our cultural standards and mores, it's perhaps remarkable how little actually goes on.
You think you know the story. But what most people actually know is the 1936 movie starring Frederic March. Who Hyde is, his relationship to Jekyll, even how one becomes the other: all of these have been changed in every movie, TV, stage, and comic book adaptation ever made.
For what's reputedly a horror novel, this book is remarkably unscary. Maybe in 1886, when its ideas were new, it was terrifying. But now, when its core idea has become part of our culture, it's more thought-provoking than frightening. As Stevenson hints at dribs and drabs of Freudian, Darwinian, post-colonial, and other ideas that have become common coin, remember that he wrote before any of these were popular notions.
Start right in on the novel. Vladimir Nabokov's introductory essay states a lot that is obvious, and should be read only after the novel itself. On balance, Dan Chaon's afterword, about the novel's cultural impact, is probably more revelatory, and more accessible to general audiences.
Remember, this book is probably not what you think you know. It's at once more ambitious, yet far harder to pin down, than the cheapened versions in the mass media. It's smart yet understandable, familiar yet strange. It's the kind of book too few writers create these days.
Need Tea Reviews ^ Alright, so I've never read this book before (terrible I know). My Secret Santa bought me this book, along with a bunch of others, as my present and I finally had time to read it.
The plot is straightforward, starting off with a problem before gradually growing into heightened suspense that pulls and leaves hints all over the place towards the climax. Of course since this is a classic, much of the plot twists are already known to the well read, so it wasn't much of a shock, but it was interesting nonetheless. The metaphor/symbolism doesn't really show itself until the very end where it blazes loud and clear with the writer's subtle metaphors, or maybe not so subtle. It's written in 3rd omniescent, before the end where it switches over to 1st.
I actually like how the story revolved around two people investigating the actual main character of the book (or rather the person the story is about) versus it just being about the person and his descent into the clutches of evil. It was refreshing and gave every character their equal time in the spotlight. The themes of this book are very skillfully played through succinct prose. It wasn't overstated, nor written in a dense, complex way that makes the reader pause and think a bit more harder than needed. The writing was simple, direct, and to the point without being bogged down by excess descriptions or philosophical/political musings.
Another plus was that the chapters were very short, so this book is a super fast read, not to mention that it's only 54 pages long. I mean, if you can't sit down and read that, I don't know what else to say. Okay, sure perhaps the font is a wee bit too small, and there is a lot more semicolons in his sentences than any other story I've seen, but that shouldn't detract you. The only real section that tends to drag was the final chapter, which was from the perspective of Henry Jekyll. My mind started to wander a lot and I found myself skimming a lot of the passages. (Okay, so maybe I was tired and reading this around 1:30 in the morning) It's probably because there was such a great buildup to the climax and when we get to his chapter we're stuck reading about how he grew up and blah blah blah that wasn't directly attached with the ending. I mean, we want to know what happens, not how he was raised! By the middle of the chapter is when the real meat of the story comes to its conclusion and I had my eyes glued to every word, even though I had contemplated sleeping a few minutes earlier.
I thoroughly enjoyed this book and recommend it to anyone who likes to read, and if you wanted to try some classics out, this would probably be the easiest of them to do.
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