Reading Order
Jekyll and HydeThe Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde Reading Order
Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) is a standalone novella — there is no series and no sequel. Dr Henry Jekyll, a respected London doctor, experiments on himself and discovers that a chemical compound separates the moral and immoral aspects of his personality into two distinct bodies — himself and the murderous Edward Hyde. Under 100 pages, it is one of the most widely adapted and allusive works in English literature.
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The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
Complete Jekyll and Hyde Book List
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The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
Robert Louis Stevenson·1886·Standalone novella — Jekyll's experiments and Hyde's crimes in Victorian London; under 100 pages; in the public domain and available in numerous editions; the Oxford World's Classics edition has the most useful scholarly notes; can be read in under two hours - Buy
The Master of Ballantrae
OptionalRobert Louis Stevenson·1889·Stevenson's most ambitious novel — two brothers (one virtuous, one villainous) whose fates are locked together; the Gothic successor to Jekyll and Hyde in Stevenson's own work; more complex and less well-known, but by many accounts his finest longer fiction
Jekyll and Hyde — Frequently Asked Questions
What does Jekyll and Hyde mean?
The phrase 'Jekyll and Hyde' has become shorthand in English for any person with two opposing natures — typically one respectable and one criminal or violent. Stevenson's novella dramatizes a fantasy that was already present in Victorian culture: that the civilized self is constructed over a primitive self, and that the primitive self can be released. The philosophical and scientific context includes Darwin's evolution, the idea of atavism (the reversion to a more primitive type), and the nascent theory of the unconscious. Stevenson was writing before Freud articulated the id/ego distinction, but the novella is a popular-culture anticipation of exactly that structure.
Is The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde a detective story?
The novella is structured partly like a detective story — Mr Utterson, Jekyll's lawyer and the protagonist of the frame narrative, investigates the mysterious connection between the respectable Jekyll and the sinister Hyde. But it differs from conventional detective fiction in that the reader understands the solution before the detective does: the twist of Jekyll's full statement at the end is less a mystery resolution than a psychological confession. Stevenson was influenced by the sensation novels of Wilkie Collins and is an ancestor of the genre, but Jekyll and Hyde is more interested in the horror of its revelation than the puzzle of how it was done.
Is The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde a horror story?
Yes — Jekyll and Hyde is one of the foundational horror texts in English and the origin of the 'doppelgänger' or 'double' motif in horror fiction. Stevenson was writing in the Gothic tradition that includes Horace Walpole, Ann Radcliffe, Matthew Lewis, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, and Edgar Allan Poe — a tradition he was explicitly engaging with. The horror is not supernatural in origin (Jekyll's transformation is chemical rather than magical) but psychological and moral: the horror of discovering that the self contains a monster that is capable of murder and enjoys it.
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