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
This small novella tells the tale of two impossibly intertwined gentlemen living in Victorian London---the friendly and sociable Dr Jekyll, and the monstrously deformed, obviously dangerous Mr Hyde. As Mr Hyde's crimes gain the attention of the police, the manhunt is on; but every lead on Hyde consistently leads back to Jekyll instead. When the darker truth of Hyde's identity becomes clear to all, that the monstrous predator of London's industrial-fog enshrouded streets is none other than Jekyll himself, transformed by a tincture of his own making, he sets forth to destroy himself and bring down Hyde with him. Allegedly written within a single week under the influence of cocaine, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is one of Scottish prose-poet Robert Louis Stevenson's most famous and influential works. It has been remade and adapted into numerous other mediums, including film, television, stage performance, and graphic novel; endlessly quoted in a host of derivative works, speeches, and religious sermons; it even served as the foundation of Freudian psychology and the inspiration for Freud's allegorical tale, The Beast Within. It is widely considered to be the quintessential tale on the duality of the individual, and the danger of suppressing humanity's baser instincts for the outward appearance of morality.
'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).
