Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Other Tales [Oxford World's Classics]

"I who sicken and freeze at the mere thought of him...when I know how he fears my power to cut him off by suicide, I find it in my heart to pity him." This quote comes at the end of the novella, when the crux of Stevenson's point comes to a head. It is at this point when madness and reason - the forms of Hyde and Jekyll, respectively - are completely separated, and Hyde threatens to completely overtake Jekyll. It is in this last chapter that the core philosophy is revealed in all of its stunning originality. Leading up to this moment however, is an almost unremarkable detective story with stock characterizations. Albeit the imagery gives a foreboding tone ("The fog still slept on the wing above the drowned city, where the lamps show more glittered like carbuncles") and the narrative moves by briskly, the text as a whole isn't particularly remarkable. Truly, it is the last chapter that stands out the most, and the reader is finally able to get a glimpse of the pure evil that the story has been leading up to. Vague on details yet astute on human psychology, Stevenson has created a tale that resonates in its concept, not in its literary abilities. show less

Having never read any Robert Louis Stevenson, I decided to remedy this by reading Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, together with two of his other short stories contained within the same volume. They are all well-written, with likeable and realistically flawed characters. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is perhaps the best of the three, which all have something of the moral tale about them, but the other two are also worth reading, particularly The Treasure of Franchard.

It's a bit hard to comment on a classic that has resulted in numerous adaptations. I found the stories in this book to be creepy and the essays interesting.

Jekyll is a well written tale with a spooky sense running throughout it. One you can get through in a day but I just did not feel inclined to read all the other short tales. Maybe I will dip back into this one. Just not that much of a fan of short stories I guess.

Not sure what to say about this book.
I saw the movie and must say, that that made a bigger impression on me than this book. Maybe because the actually telling of the story was quite factual, of cold, or distant I didn't get as involved in the book in the strange case as I might have otherwise. Maybe I had set my expectations too high, I don't know.
If I'm totally honest, while writing this review nearly a week after finishing the book, I have a hard time to recall exactly the how, who and when. And that about sums it up for me, unfortunately.

From the Introduction, by Roger Luckhurst:
"Stevenson veered constantly between high literary ambition and writing in commercial forms for market rates, and many of his critics were confused about where to place each work. Stevenson was himself unsure at times, and frequently misjudged things. PRINCE OTTO, a novel on which he spent five years to secure his reputation as a 'serious' novelist, was not well received; JEKYLL AND HYDE, dreamt up, written, rewritten, and published all in under ten weeks, became his masterpiece. It was also a commercial success, selling 40,000 copies in England in six months, and innumerable tens of thousands of pirated copies in America, where the book was a popular sensation. This confusion over incompatible show more forms of high and low literary value was not unusual in the late Victorian era, as authors as diverse as Oscar Wilde, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Joseph Conrad sought to negotiate the new commercial forms and the increasing professionalization of literature (including newfangled things like literary agents and limited international copyright). The distinction of high and low literature, as we understand them in the modern sense, was still emergent, so that this was a moment when a lowly Gothic romance might conjoin unexpectedly with a species of psychological realism to produce a JEKYLL AND HYDE." (Kindle location 96-108) show less