This handsome gift edition presents Robert Louis Stevenson's classic work Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, featuring a luxurious, silver-embossed cover design, gilded page edges and patterned endpapers.
Gabriel Utterson is disturbed by the behaviour Edward Hyde. When he discovers Hyde is acquainted with one of his clients, the respectable Dr Henry Jekyll, he worries about the power that Hyde seems to exert over Jekyll. But after an MP is murdered, events take a turn for the worse and Utterson begins to piece together the terrible truth.
This beautiful pocket gift edition also contains the short stories 'The Body Snatcher', 'Markheim', 'The Bottle Imp' and 'The Weir of Hermiston'. Part of the ArcturusOrnate Classics series, this book makes wonderful gift for any lover of classic fiction.
ABOUT THE SERIES:Arcturus Ornate Classics are beautifully bound editions of iconic literary works across history. These compact, foil-embossed hardbacks are printed using deluxe ivory paper and make the perfect gift.
Robert Louis Stevenson was born in Edinburgh in 1850. The son of a prosperous civil engineer, he was expected to follow the family profession, but was allowed to study law at Edinburgh University. Stevenson reacted strongly against the Presbyterian respectability of the city’s professional classes and this led to painful clashes with his parents. In his early twenties he became afflicted with a severe respiratory illness from which he was to suffer for the rest of his life; it was at this time that he determined to become a professional writer. The effects of the often harsh Scottish climate on his poor health forced him to spend long periods abroad. After a great deal of travelling he eventually settled in Samoa, where he died on 3 December 1894.
Stevenson’s Calvinistic upbringing gave him a preoccupation with pre-destination and a fascination with the presence of evil. In Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde he explores the darker side of the human psyche, and the character of the Master in The Master of Ballantrae (1889) was intended to be ‘all I know of the Devil’. Stevenson is well known for his novels of historical adventure, including Treasure Island (1883), Kidnapped (1886) and Catriona (1893). As Walter Allen comments in The English Novel, ‘His rediscovery of the art of narrative, of conscious and cunning calculation in telling a story so that the maximum effect of clarity and suspense is achieved, meant the birth of the novel of action as we know it.’ But these works also reveal his knowledge and feeling for the Scottish cultural past. During the last years of his life Stevenson’s creative range developed considerably, and The Beach of Falesá brought to fiction the kind of scene now associated with Conrad and Maugham. At the time of his death Robert Louis Stevenson was working on his unfinished masterpiece, Weir of Hermiston. He also wrote works of non-fiction, notably his descriptive and historical books on the South Seas area, A Footnote to History (1892) and In the South Seas (1896), as well as his celebrated defence of Father Damien, the Belgian priest who devoted his life to caring for lepers, in Father Damien; an open letter to the Reverend Hyde of Honolulu (1890).
