Robert Louis Stevenson wrote The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in a fever of creative urgency - reportedly in just six days, while ill and bedridden at his home in Bournemouth, England. Published in 1886, what began as a shilling paperback went on to sell nearly 40,000 copies in its first six months across Britain and the United States, and never stopped. More than 135 years later, its central question - how much of the darkness in a person can be separated from the light? - remains as unsettling as ever.
The Edition
Part of the Masterpiece Library series, this is a hardcover keepsake built to last. The cover is embossed with iridescent highlighting; the spine is gold foil-stamped; the page edges are gilded. The binding uses a reinforced cloth quarter-binding construction, which gives the book its backbone - literally. This is not a book that will crack and splay after a handful of reads.
Inside, the paper is premium acid-free archival stock, chosen specifically to resist yellowing over time. The cream-coloured pages are printed with careful attention to font selection, type size, and line spacing - all calibrated to reduce eye strain and keep the reading experience comfortable even in low light. A matching satin ribbon bookmark is bound into the volume.
The text is the complete, unabridged novella, accompanied by classic illustrations by Charles Raymond Macauley, whose original drawings have long been considered the definitive visual companion to Stevenson's prose.
The Story
Dr. Henry Jekyll is a respected London physician, outwardly composed, morally upright. But Jekyll has long suspected that human nature is not singular - that good and evil exist not in tension but in parallel within the same person. His experiments eventually allow him to give his hidden self a body of its own: the wiry, violent, unknowable Edward Hyde. What begins as liberation becomes, by degrees, something Jekyll can no longer control.
Stevenson wrote the novella as a Gothic thriller, and it works brilliantly on that level — there is genuine dread in it, and the pacing is almost cinematic. But it also carries serious weight as a moral and psychological study. The phrase "Jekyll and Hyde" has entered the language for a reason. Few novels from that era have aged as well, or as honestly.
Who This Is For
This edition is well suited to collectors of finely made books, readers who appreciate a considered approach to book design, and anyone who wants a reliable, beautiful hardcover to give or to keep. It works as an introduction to Stevenson for younger readers who are ready for the text in full, and it holds its own alongside more expensive collector's editions that offer far less for the price. The Masterpiece Library series was conceived in the tradition of the press's founders, Peter and Edna Beilenson, who believed that beautiful books should not be the exclusive province of the wealthy — a philosophy this edition continues to honour.
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