The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

1. Is there a meaningful difference between who you are in public and who you are in private, or is that gap just part of being a person?
2. Victorian London judged people harshly for scandal. What are the reputations people in your world are most afraid of losing, and what do they do to protect them?
3. If you could put the parts of yourself you dislike into a completely separate body — one that nobody could trace back to you — would that be freedom, or a trap?
4. Think about the phrase "he was a completely different person." When people say that about someone, what do they actually mean, and how literally should we take it?
5. Who has more power in a story: the person who knows the secret, or the person trying to work it out? Why might a writer choose to tell a mystery from the outside?
6. What responsibility does a scientist have for what happens after a discovery is made? Can knowledge itself be dangerous, or only the use people make of it?

• Duality — track every place where something in this book comes in a matched pair: two names, two handwritings, two doors into one building, two friends who no longer speak.
• Reputation as a currency — notice how often characters make decisions to protect a good name rather than to find the truth.
• Silence and the refusal to ask — watch how many of these gentlemen actively choose not to investigate, and what that costs.
• Doors, windows, and locks — pay attention to how Stevenson uses thresholds and barriers to show who is shut in, shut out, or shutting themselves away.
• The limits of science — follow the disagreement about what research should be allowed to do, and who turns out to be right about it.
• Loss of control — notice the language the book borrows from addiction: appetite, relapse, dosage, and the moment a choice stops being a choice.

Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894) was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, into a family of celebrated lighthouse engineers. He trained first as an engineer and then as a lawyer to satisfy his father, and abandoned both to write. Chronic lung illness kept him traveling in search of climates he could survive, and he wrote much of his best-known work — Treasure Island, Kidnapped, and this novella — while frequently bedridden. He wrote the first draft of this story in a matter of days after a vivid nightmare, reportedly burned it after his wife Fanny criticized it, and rewrote the whole thing immediately. He died at forty-four in Samoa, where he had settled with his family and where he is buried.

The book appeared in 1886, deep in Britain's Victorian era, when middle-class respectability was close to a religion and a ruined reputation could destroy a professional man permanently. It was also a moment of enormous scientific confidence and anxiety: Darwin's work had recently forced people to think of humans as animals with an evolutionary past, early psychology was beginning to describe a mind divided against itself, and the newspapers were full of sensational crime reporting. Stevenson's London, with its fog, gaslight, and streets where wealth and poverty sit two doors apart, drew on the real geography of both London and his native Edinburgh, a city he knew as a place of elegant squares built directly above old slums. Two years after publication, the Whitechapel murders would make the novella's image of a monstrous figure moving unseen through a great city feel uncomfortably prophetic.