Who wrote the famous book “The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde”?

Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is a gothic novella by Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson, first published in 1886. The work is also known as The Strange Case of Jekyll Hyde, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, or simply Jekyll & Hyde. It is about a London legal practitioner named Gabriel John Utterson who investigates strange occurrences between his old friend, Dr Henry Jekyll, and the evil Edward Hyde. The novella’s impact is such that it has become a part of the language, with the phrase “Jekyll and Hyde” entering the vernacular to refer to people with an unpredictably dual nature: outwardly good, but sometimes shockingly evil.

The central idea of the book, that one man may have a ‘Jekyll and Hyde’ personality, a separation of distinct social and moral traits, seemed to say something about the strain between private and public self, personal desire and social duty, that spoke not just to middle-class professional men of late Victorian English society, but to people around the world. The book is a rare instance of the invention of a modern myth – and the story is often known in outline even by those who have never read the book. Indeed ‘Jekyll and Hyde’ has entered the English language as an idiom, used to describe persons or things of a dual character, alternately good and evil. It has of course been staged and filmed many hundreds of times.

 

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