Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde

Robert Louis Stevenson, a Scottish author, published the Gothic horror novella Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde in 1886. It was written as a mystery for its first readers, who were not told in advance how the respectable doctor and the violent man of the title are connected.

Most of the story reaches the reader through Gabriel John Utterson, a London lawyer. On one of his walks with a distant relative, Mr Enfield, he hears about a small and deformed man who trampled a child in the street and then paid the family off, and about the door the man used, which belongs to a building everyone assumes is empty.

Utterson learns that his friend Dr Henry Jekyll has drawn up a will leaving everything to this stranger, Edward Hyde, and that Jekyll has begun shutting himself away. The lawyer keeps picking at the arrangement, and the novella unfolds through a handful of episodes and written statements, including accounts left by the men closest to the case.

Stevenson wrote the book quickly, and it was published in the period when short sensation fiction was cheap to print and read by a wide audience. It has since been staged and filmed many times, and it is usually counted as a defining work of Gothic horror.