“I realized I was leading a double life...”
Robert Louis Stevenson liked to tell the story of how The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) came to him one night in a dream, while staying, for the sake of his health, in the provincial English seaside town of Bournemouth. He wrote the first draft in three days‹then burned it when his wife suggested some changes. The second version was finished by the end of the week, and has scarcely been out of print since. The “double life” that the book’s hero (the respectable doctor Henry Jekyll) finds himself leading was something that Stevenson himself knew all about: the confined invalid who pioneered the art of travel-writing; the clergyman’s grandson who decadently slummed it in Edinburgh’s fleshpots; the Scottish writer spuriously known by a French middle-name...Well, we all have something to hide—though few of our secrets are as dreadful as Dr. Jekyll’s. This dynamic graphic novel adaptation by Andrzej Klimowski and Danusia Schejbal stays eerily faithful to the creeping chill of the London streets where Stevenson’s story was originally set.
Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894) won his first literary prize at the age of six; the edition of his collected works he was preparing at the time of his death eventually stretched to 28 volumes. Few writers before or since have matched the range of his restless expertise‹in adventure stories, ballads, plays, essays, folktales, historical romances, light verse, short stories, and travel journalism. Still fewer have managed to invent a complete genre (his Long John Silver is the Pirate of the Caribbean), let alone two: the moral thriller of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde remains a monument to mankind’s understanding of itself. What might Stevenson have dreamed if he had lived into his seventies?
