Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
1886 novella by Robert Louis Stevenson
Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is an 1886 Gothic horror novella by Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson. It follows Gabriel John Utterson, a London-based legal practitioner who investigates a series of strange occurrences between his old friend, Dr Henry Jekyll, and a murderous criminal named Edward Hyde.
Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is one of the most famous pieces of English literature, and is considered to be a defining book of the gothic horror genre. The novella has also had a sizeable impact on popular culture, with the phrase "Jekyll and Hyde" being used in vernacular to refer to people with an outwardly good but sometimes shockingly evil nature.
Inspiration and writing
Stevenson had long been intrigued by the idea of how human personalities can reflect the interplay of good and evil. While still a teenager, he developed a script for a play about William Brodie, a Scottish cabinet-maker, deacon of a trades guild, and Edinburgh city councillor, who maintained a secret life as a burglar in order to fund his mistresses and gambling addiction, which Stevenson later reworked with the help of W. E. Henley and which was produced for the first time in 1882.
Inspiration may also have come from the writer's friendship with an Edinburgh-based French teacher, Eugène Chantrelle, who was convicted and executed for the murder of his wife in May 1878. Chantrelle, who had appeared to lead a normal life in the city, poisoned his wife with opium. According to author Jeremy Hodges, Stevenson was present throughout the trial and as "the evidence unfolded he found himself, like Dr Jekyll, 'aghast before the acts of Edward Hyde'." Moreover, it was believed that the teacher had committed other murders both in France and Britain by poisoning his victims at supper parties with a "favourite dish of toasted cheese and opium".
Stevenson was friends with homosexual men, including Horatio Brown, Edmund Gosse, and John Addington Symonds, and the duality of their socially suppressed selves may have shaped his book.
The public source identifies “Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde” as 1886 novella by Robert Louis Stevenson. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Strange, Case and Jekyll.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 21, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q217352. VIAF identifies the subject as 307173707. The Library of Congress control number is n90662176. 4 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1886, 1882 and 1878.
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