Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde

About the book

Mr. Utterson is a dry, careful London lawyer who would rather help a friend than judge him. On a Sunday walk his distant kinsman Enfield points to a shabby door on a back street and tells a story: in the small hours he saw a man trample a little girl and walk on, and when cornered, the man paid the family a hundred pounds, most of it in a check signed with one of the most respected names in London.

The man is Edward Hyde, and Utterson already knows the name. It is in the will of his old friend Dr. Henry Jekyll, which leaves everything to Hyde should Jekyll die or simply disappear. Utterson suspects blackmail and begins to watch the door. Then a member of Parliament is beaten to death in a moonlit street, and the stick is half of one Utterson gave Jekyll years ago. Jekyll swears he has done with Hyde forever. Two months later he has shut his door against his oldest friends.

Stevenson wrote the book in a few weeks in the autumn of 1885. It is short enough to read in an evening and unfolds like a detective story, until two documents at the end, one by Dr. Lanyon and one by Jekyll himself, tell what really happened behind that door.

This is the complete text of the first edition, published by Longmans, Green, and Co. in January 1886. Stevenson’s spelling and punctuation are kept, and two small errors of the transcription are corrected against the 1886 text. Our complete Korean translation was made from the same text, chapter for chapter.