Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde was published by Longmans, Green in January 1886. The novella was famously written in a creative fever — Stevenson produced the first draft in three days, burned it at his wife Fanny’s suggestion, and rewrote it in another three days. The story is told through the perspective of Gabriel John Utterson, a London lawyer, who gradually pieces together the connection between his friend Dr. Henry Jekyll, a respected physician, and the violent, physically repulsive Edward Hyde, who commits acts of increasing savagery on the streets of London.
The revelation — that Jekyll and Hyde are the same man, that Jekyll has developed a chemical compound that separates his personality into its virtuous and vicious components — is one of the most famous plot twists in literature, so universally known that it has become impossible to experience the story as Stevenson’s original readers did, in ignorance of the secret.
The novella’s deeper horror is not the transformation itself but its asymmetry: Hyde grows stronger with each use of the compound while Jekyll grows weaker, until Hyde no longer needs the drug to appear. The story is about the impossibility of containing the destructive impulses within oneself — the discovery that the “lower” nature, once given expression, will devour the “higher.”
The book was an immediate bestseller, selling 40,000 copies in Britain in six months. In America, it was pirated and sold in enormous quantities. It became a stage play, then a film, then a permanent metaphor in the English language. “Jekyll and Hyde” now means any person or thing with contradictory dual natures.
Collecting Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
First edition (Longmans, Green, London, 1886): Paper wrappers, priced one shilling. The first edition was issued as a “shilling shocker” — a cheap paperback format.
Market values:
- First edition in wrappers, fine: $30,000–$80,000
- First edition in wrappers, good: $10,000–$30,000
- First US edition (Scribner’s, 1886, cloth): $2,000–$8,000
- Later Longmans printings: $200–$1,000
The paper wrapper first edition is extremely rare in good condition because the format was not designed for preservation. Most surviving copies show significant wear.
People Also Ask
Is Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde a true story? No, but Stevenson may have been influenced by the case of Deacon Brodie, an eighteenth-century Edinburgh cabinet-maker who was a respectable citizen by day and a burglar by night. Stevenson had a cabinet made by Brodie in his childhood bedroom.
What is the moral of Jekyll and Hyde? The story warns against the belief that human nature can be neatly divided into good and evil, and that the evil half can be indulged without consequence. Jekyll’s experiment fails because Hyde, once released, cannot be controlled or contained.