I think most people have an unofficial list of books that “everyone is supposed to read” that they somehow missed in school. For me, the top three that come to mind that I unintentionally dodged are Romeo & Juliet, The Odyssey, and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
In resolving to close these gaps, I plunged into Jekyll and Hyde and was not disappointed. The story is a well-known one, read or not, with “Jekyll and Hyde” as a common catchphrase we slap on unpredictable people. Narrated from the third person perspective of Dr. Jekyll’s friend and lawyer, Mr. Utterson, Jekyll and Hyde is a concise but powerful presentation of the sum of all fears regarding human nature, posing an interesting study of character. If given the chance to live with impunity, will the selfish, hedonistic nature lurking at the bottom of a person rise up and consume the better part of him?
The dual nature of virtue and depravity that we each see within ourselves Dr. Jekyll makes incarnate, and like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the story highlights the hubris of man in overestimating his powers to control the monster. Another literary reference that well illustrates Stevenson’s point is the infamous Scarlett O’Hara. She confides to Rhett that she could not afford to keep her principles while struggling to survive but will reinstate them once life is stabilized, and he responds with the warning that discarded morals are not always easily recovered: “I fear that when you can afford to fish up the honor and virtue and kindness you’ve thrown overboard, you’ll find they have suffered a sea change.” Sure enough, there is no easy return to Dr. Jekyll once Mr. Hyde has been given free license to walk abroad unchecked, and like a ravenous beast, the more he is permitted, the more he craves.
Robert Louis Stevenson was inspired to write the piece from an extraordinarily vivid dream and worked at it feverishly for several days without cessation, publishing the novella in 1886. Stevenson’s stepson, Lloyd Osbourne, wrote: “I don’t believe that there was ever such a literary feat before as the writing of Dr. Jekyll … Louis came downstairs in a fever; read nearly half the book aloud; and then, while we were still gasping, he was away again, and busy writing. I doubt if the first draft took so long as three days.”
It was an instant success and became one of Stevenson’s bestselling works, becoming commonly found in sermons and religious papers as well as in the hands of the ordinary reader. In the introduction to the Folio Society edition, John Hampden writes, “If this ‘strange case’ were no more than the ‘shocker’ which Stevenson first planned, it would still be a remarkable novel, for the originality of the idea is matched by the skill with which tension is added to mystery almost to the end. But it is far more than that. Its title has become proverbial; it has been reprinted, translated, filmed and dramatized again and again, because it touches some of the most primitive chords of feeling; there is no more forceful presentation of that duality in man’s nature of which every human being is painfully aware.”