Works · Novella · 1886

Jekyll and Hyde

First appeared 5 Jan 1886

Nocturne plate · illustration (AI-generated, 2026)

Full title: Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde

The lawyer Gabriel Utterson is troubled by the will of his friend Dr Henry Jekyll, which leaves everything to a stranger named Edward Hyde. Hyde is small, pale and repellent, and the first thing Utterson hears of him is that he trampled a child in the street and bought the family off with a cheque in Jekyll’s name. When Hyde is later wanted for murder, Utterson goes looking for the hold he has over a respectable man. Two written documents, one from a dead colleague and one from Jekyll himself, close the book. They describe an experiment in a London laboratory and what it costs a man to divide himself.

that man is not truly one, but truly two. I say two, because the state of my own knowledge does not pass beyond that point.

Henry Jekyll's Full Statement of the Case. Checked against Project Gutenberg ebook #43 (Gutenberg file does not name its source edition; the text is divided into ten titled sections, not numbered chapters)

The publication record

Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde

Robert Louis Stevenson

Novella

Volume 5 Jan 1886 Charles Scribner's Sons, New York Authorized American edition, issued in wrappers and in cloth. Booksellers’ bibliographies citing McKay date it 5 January 1886, four days before the London edition. [1]
Volume 9 Jan 1886 Longmans, Green & Co., London Priced at one shilling. Planned for Christmas 1885 and held back because, in Charles Longman’s words as quoted by Prideaux, the bookstalls were full of Christmas numbers; some wrappers printed 1885 were corrected by hand to 1886. [1][2][3][4]

Longmans 1886 shilling paper cover/title Longmans, Green & Co, 1886-06. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Robert Louis Stevenson, 1850–1894. Jekyll and Hyde first appeared when Robert Louis Stevenson was 35.

Facts

Stevenson said the tale began in a dream: after two days of racking his brains for a plot he dreamed the window scene and a scene in which Hyde, pursued, takes the powder and changes before his pursuers. In ‘A Chapter on Dreams’ he wrote that what the dream gave him was ‘the matter of three scenes, and the central idea of a voluntary change becoming involuntary’, and that the rest was made awake.[6]
The American publisher came first. Scribner’s issued its authorized New York edition on 5 January 1886, about four days before Longmans in London, whose edition had been meant for Christmas 1885 and was held back until the new year.[1][2][3]
At one shilling the book belonged to the ‘shilling shocker’ trade. A bookseller’s catalogue note records that it sold slowly until a favourable review in The Times, then about 40,000 copies in its first six months.[4][2]

Setting

Contemporary London; the year is masked in the text as 18—[5]

London
Soho
Cavendish Square

Themes

Notes on dates 2 notes on disputed dates and attribution

Publication dates: The First Edition (a dealer) cites McKay 346 and Prideaux 17 for Scribner’s, New York, on 5 January 1886 and Longmans, London, on 9 January 1886; Bonhams and Bauman (citing Beinecke and Prideaux) say only that Longmans’ publication was held to January 1886. No publisher’s ledger or Publishers’ Circular notice was seen.
The Times review (25 January 1886 per Wikipedia) and ‘close to 40,000’ copies in six months are repeated by Bonhams but no sales ledger or the notice itself was seen; the sales figure is given as a catalogue note.

Threads

Threads in

No sourced relation to an earlier work is recorded.

Threads out

No sourced relation from a later work on this timeline is recorded.

Contemporaries

Works on the timeline that first appeared within three years of 1886, and the other writers alive when Jekyll and Hyde appeared (ages computed from sourced dates).