This classic horror story comes packaged with abridged and unabridged texts as well as teacher’s notes on CD-ROM. Read by the fantastic John Sessions, this atmospheric and thrilling story is brilliantly played out for the listener.
The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde Synopsis
"If I am the chief of sinners, I am the chief of sufferers also."
Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is a novella written by Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson and published in 1886.
London lawyer John Gabriel Utterson decides to investigate the appearance of the brutish and evil Edward Hyde, which leads him back to his old friend, Dr Henry Jekyll.
The Legend Classics series: Around the World in Eighty Days The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn The Importance of Being Earnest Alice's Adventures in Wonderland The Metamorphosis The Railway Children The Hound of the Baskervilles Frankenstein Wuthering Heights Three Men in a Boat The Time Machine Little Women Anne of Green Gables The Jungle Book The Yellow Wallpaper and Other Stories Dracula A Study in Scarlet Leaves of Grass The Secret Garden The War of the Worlds A Christmas Carol Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde Heart of Darkness The Scarlet Letter This Side of Paradise Oliver Twist The Picture of Dorian Gray Treasure Island The Turn of the Screw The Adventures of Tom Sawyer Emma The Trial A Selection of Short Stories by Edgar Allan Poe Grimm Fairy Tales The Awakening Mrs Dalloway Gulliver's Travels The Castle of Otranto Silas Marner Hard Times
'This new unabridged edition of Stevenson's spooky tale blows off the cobwebs of previous editions of the book ... a must-read'
South China Morning Post
Author
About Robert Louis Stevenson
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).
