The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde

"Yes, I think that of all the great horror texts – Dracula , Frankenstein , Dorian Gray , Jekyll and Hyde – this is the best written. Stevenson is one of the most natural writers who ever lived. All his stories have this great ancient-mariner-grab-you-by-the-lapels thing. You think about the three beggars coming to the inn at the start of Treasure Island . Jekyll and Hyde has a good start as well. There is this guy who is out for a walk late at night and he sees this strange man trampling a child, which is still taboo and horrible all these years on. It’s amazingly intricate and perfectly structured and even though now we know the twist – we know that Doctor Jekyll is Mr Hyde – it still works. I assume that when it was first published it must have been like Fight Club or The Sixth Sense where people who had read it would tell their friends, you won’t believe the ending of this. You will never see it coming because it is completely out of left field."

"For exactly the reason that you just gave. Lots and lots of people know the phrase, that ‘Jekyll and Hyde’ means a split personality: good on one side, evil on the other. They might even have seen one or two film adaptations of the book. But I think one of the things that would surprise folk who haven’t read the original book, first of all, is that it’s very short. It’s a novella, only about 150 pages long, yet it’s dealing with such amazingly deep themes. It’s a real turn-the-page thriller , but it’s also a psychological and moral exploration. Stevenson asks: What’s the nature of good? What’s the nature of evil? Can they exist in one person? Another reason why I chose this book is that Stevenson is, to me, the bridge between the world of Walter Scott and the modern world. He died at a young age, at 44, but if he’d lived another decade or two he would have been writing into the 20th century. And I think he was already moving to write some very modern work. There are elements of that in Jekyll and Hyde , and in some of his later books as well, particularly what he wrote in the South Seas . Jekyll and Hyde is almost a template for what’s going to happen in the 20th century, when there is a shift from the panoramic novels about social life of Scott, Dickens and other great 19th-century writers, towards fiction that is more about the internal life of individuals. That’s what I think is going on in Stevenson’s little book. Also, today we all know what happens, in a sense: Jekyll concocts and drinks a potion that makes him turn into Hyde, who goes out into the London streets and does terrible things. When he comes back to being Dr Jekyll, he’s back to being the good doctor. That’s the heart of the novel. But when it was first published in 1886, people didn’t know that. They didn’t know about the transformation until they read to the end of the novel. It must have been quite shocking. Reading Jekyll and Hyde in 1886 must have been like going to the pictures in 1960 to see Psycho for the first time. The shock of that transformation, of not knowing about it until it happened, was what made it an immediate huge bestseller. I think he got the idea for the character from Deacon Brodie, who was a very upright citizen of 18th-century Edinburgh by day, but a housebreaker at night. I think that kickstarted the book. But although it’s very Edinburgh-based in terms of ideas, the setting is fog-bound, Victorian London. Yes. It was brilliant to set it where he did, because it’s full of mystery. You can’t see what’s happening. There are lots of secret stories going on in the book too—other male characters who may be having not entirely innocent night-time adventures. I’ve read this book ten or twelve times, and every time I read it I find something new."