Sybil's got nothin' on this one...
When you think of the the most famous pirate tale of all time, you probably don't realize that the same author penned perhaps one of the most horrid novels of psychological and murderous horror ever published. Robert Lewis Stevenson wrote Treasure Island and the Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The beloved Long John Silver came first in 1883, Dr. Henry Jekyll came second in 1886, but bith of these books display a deeply flawed and psychopathic main character. Silver would kill for greed, and Jekyll kills just because he can. Both men are fundamentally evil. Nevertheless, you like Silver on some level, you can't help it...perhaps that is the brilliance of Stevenson's creation...you know he's bad, but he still has some sort of redeeming value. Jekyll/Hyde is simply a murderous monster...vile...the mirror reflection of Victorian social and societal ills, a creature of the real horror's taking place on the streets of London and New York in the late 19th-century. Unemployment, child exploitation, good women turning to selling their bodies to survive, hunger, despair...ignorance and want....
Is it any wonder that a few years later the ugliness was manifested on the streets of Whitechapel...a real life Mr. Hyde...calling himself Jack...Jack the Ripper.
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is a gothic novella, sharing the the 19th-century literary stage with other masterpieces of the genre, like Frankenstein and Dracula.
Originally, the first edition of Stevenson's book was a paperback sold on the streets for a shilling in Britain and a penny in the U.S. Known as "shilling shockers" or "penny dreadfuls", these "nasty little ditties" are the precursors to the cheap and canned horror flicks that would appear later in the 20th-century...
Here's the 1886 first edition:
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