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'All human beings, as we meet them, are commingled out of good and evil.'

After taking an elixir created in his laboratory, mild mannered Dr Jekyll is transformed into the cruel and despicable Mr Hyde. Although seemingly harmless at first, things soon descend into chaos and Jekyll quickly realises there is only one way to stop Hyde. Stevenson's quintessential novella of the Victorian era epitomizes the conflict between psychology, science and religious morality, but is fundamentally a triumphant study of the duality of human nature.

Robert Lewis Balfour Stevenson was born on 13 November 1850, changing his second name to ‘Louis’ at the age of eighteen. During his youth, Stevenson read many ‘penny dreadfuls’ and other accounts of crime and murder (fact and fiction), and always held a keen interest in the supernatural and the uncanny ways in which the human brain can distort reality. His own short stories are often distinguished by psychological insight together with a deft handling of horror. Stevenson’s first ‘crawler’ (his own pet name for horror stories) was The Body Snatcher, written in 1881 and inspired by the notorious exploits of Burke and Hare. Robert Louis Stevenson has always been loved and admired by countless readers and critics for ‘the excitement, the fierce joy, the delight in strangeness, the pleasure in deep and dark adventures’ found in his classic stories and, without doubt, he created some of the most horribly unforgettable characters in literature: Long John Silver, Ebenezer Balfour, James Durie of Ballantrae and, above all, Mr. Edward Hyde.