The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
Mr. Gabriel Utterson is a serious, austere lawyer living a humdrum life in Victorian London. Yet there is a strange clause in his friend, Dr. Henry Jekyll's will: should he disappear for more than 3 months, everything will be inherited by Hyde. But after Edward Hyde's darker nature is revealed one dark winters night, Mr. Utterson begins to investigate the connection between the two men, and finds the dark secret binding them closer then he could have ever thought imaginable. Adapted countless times in film, some times in video game form, and referenced countless times in popular culture, here is the story that started it all: The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde!
Stats for nerds
3recommend
6mentions
6people
2018–2025years
50% recommend50% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- You should read the Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde as a follow up.
The original inspiration for it was Stevenson hearing about respectable pillar of Edinburgh society, William Brodie, being caught as a burglar, stealing to repay his gambling debts. Your social capital in Victorian Britain was based around your outward appearance of respectability and had to be defended to the utmost. If you were outed as a criminal, or as a homosexual, you'd lose every shred of privilege and position.
With that in mind, you can imagine the duality of Dr Jekyll trying to maintain his good standing while licentious Mr Hyde wants to engage in hijinks?
One such reading of the novella: https://sci-hub.st/10.1525/lal.2012.24.1.21
- Have Space Suit Will Travel (Heinlein)
Stranger in a Strange Land (Heinlein)
Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption (one story in the book "Different Seasons" by Stephen King)
Of Mice and Men (Steinbeck)
The Martian Chronicles (Bradbury)
Roadside Picnic (Strugatsky)
Frankenstein (Shelley)
Brave New World (Huxley)
Farenheit 451 (Heinlein)
Never Cry Wolf (Mowatt)
A Whale for the Killing (Mowatt)
The Machine Stops (Forster)
Heart of Darkness (Conrad)
Starship Troopers (Heinlein)
The Jungle Book (Kipling)
Lost in the Barrens (Mowatt)
The Republic (Plato)
Rendezvous with Rama (Clarke)
Ringworld (Niven)
The Stainless Steel Rat (Harrison)
The Hobbit (Tolkien)
Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (Stevenson)
The Odyssey (Homer)
The Man who Would be King (Kipling)
The Pearl (Steinbeck)
Thus Spake Zarathustra (Nietzsche)
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (Dick)
A Scanner Darkly (Dick)
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (Adams)
Dracula (Stoker)
To Kill a Mockingbird (Lee)
The Count of Monte Cristo (Dumas)
Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare)
The Wind in the Willows (Grahame)
A Christmas Carol (Dickens)
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass (Carroll)
Watership Down (Adams)
Gulliver's Travels (Swift)
Animal Farm (Orwell)
- A peculiar presentiment—the feeling that LSD-25 could possess properties other than those established in my first investigations—induced me, five years after the first synthesis, to produce it once again so that a sample could be given to the pharmacological department for further tests.
This was quite unusual; experimental substances as a rule were definitely stricken from the research program if once found to be lacking in pharmacological interest. Nevertheless, in the spring of 1943, I repeated the synthesis of LSD-25. As in the first synthesis, this involved the production of only a few centigrams of the compound.
I absolutely love this writing. Reminds me of the great "scientific gothic" novels like Frankenstein and Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.
- Each year, I put together lists of the books and articles that I found most interesting. This started out as a way to motivate myself to take better notes when I read. Now, I occasionally also get a nice message from someone who stumbled onto something new. Enjoy!
Here's the list:
* Fading Foundations by David Atkinson and Jeanne Peijnenburg
* 1177 B.C. by Eric Cline
* The Isles: A History by Norman Davies
* How Carrots Won the Trojan War by Rebecca Rupp
* The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
* Pythagoras and the Pythagoreans by Charles Kahn
- > "What if F Scott Fitzgerald came up to earth, said "It's pronounced Jatsby", then left?"
Oh what you don't know!
Robert Louis Stevensons 'Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde', the pronunciation of Jekyll should be "Jyeec-ill" (rhymes with 'treacle') and not "Jek-ill".
Stevenson was of course Scottish, and this is how the Scots name is pronounced. However, the latter pronunciation for the books title has come into more common use for some reason.
- Yes. I recently read “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” and I’m sure that my enjoyment of it was significantly reduced by the central mystery’s resolution having inundated popular culture my entire life.
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