Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
Mr Utterson, a lawyer, hears a story about a man who tramples a child and pays the family off with a cheque signed by someone else. He begins to investigate, and the novella withholds its central fact so carefully that the first readers had no idea they were reading a horror story.
Stevenson wrote it in a few days after a dream, and the result is less about divided personalities than about reputation: a respectable man who wants to do what he likes without being seen. The final chapters change narrators twice, and each change makes the earlier account look more naive.
Public-domain status
First published in 1886. In the United States, works published before 1930 are in the public domain. In the European Union the general term is the life of the author plus 70 years; Robert Louis Stevenson died in 1894, so this work has been free to republish there since 1965.
Read the text free
- Project Gutenberg, ebook no. 43 — plain text, EPUB and Kindle, checked by us
- Internet Archive — scanned editions and free audiobooks
- Open Library — edition history and borrowable copies
Keep reading
- Pride and Prejudice — Jane Austen, 1813
- Frankenstein — Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, 1818
- The Picture of Dorian Gray — Oscar Wilde, 1890
- Great Expectations — Charles Dickens, 1861
- London — the city behind the books
- Reading lists — 19 ways through the collection
Find a print edition on Amazon · As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases. Disclosure