Robert Louis Stevenson

William Frost

Originally planned for serialization in Longman's Magazine, and written in less than ten weeks from first conception, this story was instead published separately and earned Stevenson a substantial royalty of one-sixth of the retail price on all copies sold, with an immediate advance for the first 10,000, and half of all proceeds from foreign sales; it won a rave review in The Times ("every connoisseur...must certainly read it twice...he works out the essential power of Evil") and sold 40,000 copies in the first six months. It touched a raw nerve in the late-Victorian imagination. As Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote to a friend, "You are certainly wrong about Hyde being overdrawn; my Hyde is worse." Vladimir Nabokov asserted in his Cornell lecture "that it was a fable belonging to the same order of art as...Madame Bovary."

Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde

clara

If I am the chief of sinners, I am the  chief of sufferers also.

jana 

Jessie!

God bless me, the man seems hardly human! Something troglodytic, shall we say? Or can it be the old story of Dr. Fell? Or is it the mere radiance of a foul soul that thus transpires through, and transfigures, its clay continent? The last, I think; for, O, my poor old Harry Jekyll, if ever I read Satan's signature upon a face, it is on that of your new friend.

I learned to recognise the thorough and primitive duality of man: I saw that, of the two natures that contended in the field of my consciousness, even if I could rightly be said to be either, it was only because I was radically both.

Good and evil are so close as to be chained together in the soul.

Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde quotes

Join the club