"Dear Silksoundbooks - I just wanted to tell you how much I am enjoying Alan Howard reading Jekyll and Hyde. He really is superb!"

MP - by e-mail

It was a nightmare from which he was furious to have been woken which triggered Robert Louis Stevenson’s most successful and famous work. Having been stirred from what he termed “a fine bogey tale” Stevenson set about putting his nightmare onto paper. It reputedly took him only three days to write but the story of a split personality, warring with itself between righteousness and immorality is as much a part of modern thought as it became in 1885.

The story of the upright and moral Dr Jekyll and his horrific and uncontrollable other within has been seen as an allegory for the chronic duality of the Victorian Era with its insistence on outward respectability and its underbelly of vice and exploitation. History has it that the first draft of the novella was burnt by Stevenson in response to his wife’s criticisms, possibly about the explicitly sexual nature of the wild Mr Hyde’s nocturnal exploits, and the chilling vagueness of the final version’s descriptions of his pursuits adds to the Victorian nature of the story as much as to the horror of the man.

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