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Robert Louis Stevenson

1850–1894

Stevenson writes short books that move fast and leave a chill behind. Both «Treasure Island» and «The strange case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde» are lean, quick reads with a taste for the dark side of ordinary people, and neither wastes a page. Start with «Treasure Island» if you want adventure and a narrator worth trusting; start with «The strange case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde» if you want a tight Victorian mystery about respectability and what it hides.

Feels like curiosity, dread and morality.

Start with The strange case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

Stevenson said the central scene came to him in a dream, and he wrote the first draft in only a few days, while ill and confined to bed in Bournemouth.

The suspicion that a single self is a convenient fiction.

And it chanced that the direction of my scientific studies, which led wholly towards the mystic and the transcendental, reacted and shed a strong light on this consciousness of the perennial war among my members. With every day, and from both sides of my intelligence, the moral and the intellectual, I thus drew steadily nearer to that truth, by whose partial discovery I have been doomed to such a dreadful shipwreck: that man is not truly one, but truly two. I say two, because the state of my own knowledge does not pass beyond that point. Others will follow, others will outstrip me on the same lines; and I hazard the guess that man will be ultimately known for a mere polity of multifarious, incongruous and independent denizens. I, for my part, from the nature of my life, advanced infallibly in one direction and in one direction only.
— The strange case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Robert Louis Stevenson (1886)

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