A respectable London doctor. A creature he cannot control. A secret that will destroy them both.

Robert Louis Stevenson's 1886 gothic classic follows the lawyer Gabriel Utterson as he investigates the sinister connection between his old friend Dr Henry Jekyll and the brutal, unaccountable Edward Hyde—a man capable of violence with no apparent limit, and no apparent past. As the trail of blackmail, murder, and vanished evidence closes in, Utterson uncovers a truth stranger and darker than he ever suspected: that Jekyll and Hyde are, and have always been, the same man.

This edition goes further than the story itself. A new foreword places the novella in its 1880s context—a London obsessed with respectability and secrecy, written the same year Britain criminalised love between men—and a new afterword explores one of the more compelling readings to emerge from decades of scholarship on the book: that Jekyll and Hyde can be listened to as a coded portrait of hidden Victorian identity, a man living two lives because one could never hold the whole of him. It's not the only way to read the novella, and Stevenson never said as much himself, but once you notice it in the text, it's hard to unsee.

Whether you're returning to a classic you read at school or discovering it for the first time, this edition gives you the full, unabridged 1886 text alongside a reading of its central metaphor that adds a new layer to a story you may think you already know.