The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Other Tales of Terror

This Penguin collection brings together three of Stevenson’s major Gothic tales. The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde follows the lawyer Gabriel Utterson through Victorian London as he investigates the connection between the respected physician Henry Jekyll and the violent Edward Hyde. Jekyll’s chemical experiment separates his public identity from his appetite for cruelty, but the transformation becomes increasingly involuntary and destructive.

The Body Snatcher moves back to the era of Edinburgh’s anatomy schools, where medical students discover that scientific ambition depends on bodies obtained through grave robbing and murder. Olalla follows a wounded British officer recuperating with a decayed aristocratic family in the Spanish mountains during the Peninsular War. Together the stories connect urban respectability, medical progress, hereditary degeneration and concealed violence, showing how apparently civilised households and professions sustain their own forms of terror.