Dr. Henry Jekyll, fascinated by the dichotomy of good and evil, no longer wants to inhibit his dark side. He concocts a potion to create the alter ego of Mr. Edward Hyde. With the burden of evil placed on Hyde, Jekyll can now take pleasure in his immoral, nefarious fantasies - free of conscience and guilt. It's when Hyde turns to murder that Jekyll realizes how monstrous his impulses are and how hard they are to suppress.
Exploring the nature of shame, repression, desire, and control, Stevenson's story has so endured that "a Jekyll and Hyde personality" has become part of our lexicon in understanding our own - sometimes involuntary - duality.
Revised Previously published as The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, this edition of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (AmazonClassics Edition) includes editorial revisions.
Robert 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.