THE MONSTER DOES NOT COME FROM OUTSIDE. IT WAS HERE ALL ALONG.
In 1886, Robert Louis Stevenson published The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and gave the world a metaphor it would never forget. Within months, “Jekyll and Hyde” had entered the language, describing anyone with a dual nature, any contradiction between respectable surface and shameful reality.
But Stevenson’s exploration of the divided self did not end with Jekyll. In “Markheim,” a Christmas Day murderer confronts a mysterious visitor who forces him to see himself clearly for the first time. In “The Body Snatcher,” Edinburgh medical students discover that complicity in evil cannot be compartmentalized, that the bodies always resurface, that some guilt poisons everything it touches.
These three tales form a trilogy examining the impossible strategies humans use to manage their contradictions. Jekyll tries chemical division. Markheim tries self-deception. Fettes tries compartmentalization. None succeed. Division, Stevenson shows, is psychologically necessary but ultimately unsustainable. The mask always cracks.
The Pete Sumner Edition
This definitive annotated edition provides over 28,000 words of original scholarly apparatus:
• Biographical essay tracing Stevenson’s evolution from Edinburgh childhood to Pacific exile • Edinburgh context: the divided city, the Burke and Hare murders, medical school scandal • Victorian psychology: how Stevenson anticipated Freud and Jung • Story-by-story analysis with intelligent footnotes • Synthesizing essays examining duality, legacy, and the horror of the respectable • Comprehensive further reading
For serious readers who want to understand not just what these stories say but why they continue to disturb us nearly 140 years later.
“We are all Jekyll, all Markheim, all Fettes.”