Book Club Guide

Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde

by Robert Louis Stevenson · 1886 · Classics

Key themes

The double self — and the suppressed nature that emerges
Victorian respectability and the violence it conceals
Scientific ambition and the ethics of self-experimentation

About this book

The respectable Dr Henry Jekyll creates a potion that releases his darker nature as the violent Mr Hyde — smaller, freed from conscience, and capable of acts Jekyll himself cannot commit. As Hyde's crimes grow worse, Jekyll loses control of the transformation. Stevenson's Gothic novella is a founding text of the double-identity story and a study of Victorian repression and the darkness it conceals beneath respectability.

Published in 1886, the novella was reportedly written in three to six days in a burst of fever-dream creativity. Stevenson's wife urged him to rewrite it as allegory rather than horror story. It is one of the most adapted texts in literary history.

Discussion questions

Hyde is described as physically deformed, though Stevenson never specifies how. Why does he refuse to describe Hyde's appearance precisely — and what does this vagueness achieve?
Jekyll creates Hyde to enjoy pleasures he cannot pursue as himself. What does the novel say about the relationship between repression and violence — and is Hyde a product of suppression or of liberation?
The novella is narrated almost entirely through documents — lawyers' narratives, letters, Jekyll's own confession. What does this fragmentary, secondhand quality add to the story?
Jekyll loses control of the transformation progressively — Hyde starts appearing without the drug. What is Stevenson saying through this progression about the relationship between the conscious self and its shadow?
The story has been read as a meditation on addiction, on homosexuality in Victorian society, on class. Which reading do you find most productive — and does it have to choose?