'The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, The Companion Edition' Presents Stevenson's Novella in Its 1886 First-Edition Text, With the Nightmare, the Legend, and the Fog Explained

Collated against a scan of the 1886 Longmans edition

With an introduction that flags documented fact against legend, a Who's Who, four explainers, and twenty-four discussion questions fenced chapter by chapter

NEW YORK, Oct. 30, 2026, In October 1885, at a villa in Bournemouth, Robert Louis Stevenson woke from a nightmare with the first scenes of a story already playing in his head. He wrote the tale in the autumn of that year, and in January 1886 Longmans, Green & Co. published it in London as a slim volume priced at one shilling, a "shilling shocker", in the trade's slang for railway-stall sensation fiction. It was a classic within the year. A new Companion Classics edition, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, The Companion Edition, presents the complete novella, 25,531 words, all ten chapters, unabridged, in the text of that first edition, taken from Project Gutenberg eBook #43 and collated by probe against a scan of the 1886 Longmans printing. It is a novella, and the edition says so plainly: the shortest book in the series, and one of the most perfectly engineered.

The case is assembled the way its hero, the lawyer Mr. Utterson, must assemble it: a story told of a door in a by-street; a will that names a beneficiary no one can account for, and that operates not only on its maker's death but on his unexplained disappearance; a cheque honoured on a famous signature; a murder in the moonlight, witnessed from a window; a letter whose provenance must be tested; and two sealed narratives that may not be opened until the end. Around that machinery, Stevenson's London does the rest, a respectable square with a laboratory door on the lane behind it, Soho a cab-ride and a moral world away, and the brown fog of the 1880s closing over all of it.

Companion Material

The companion material, all of it original to this edition, includes an introduction that tells the book's own story with its evidence graded, the nightmare origin Stevenson himself confirmed in "A Chapter on Dreams" (1888), the "shilling shocker" publication and instant success, his stepson Lloyd Osbourne's later recollection of the three-day first draft, and the famous story of the draft thrown into the fire, flagged plainly as legend that scholars doubt; a Who's Who of eleven entries, two of them marked to be read only after finishing the book; four explainers, covering Victorian London and Soho, the law and the will that powers the plot, the science and degeneration theory of the 1880s, Darwin, Maudsley, Lombroso, that Stevenson's first readers brought to it, and period money and customs; a short life of Stevenson; a reading schedule built for a short book, a one-week, two-meeting plan, or a single long evening; and twenty-four discussion questions, spoiler-fenced by meeting, so that the book's central secret, the most famous in literature, is never stated in this edition's companion until the novella's own final documents state it.

Book Club Kit

Alongside the book, the Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Book Club Kit offers the edition's discussion material as a printable PDF (12 pages, US Letter) for reading groups: the two-meeting plan, the Who's Who and explainers in full, all twenty-four questions arranged by meeting, and the kit's signature activity, "The Sealed Envelope", at the first meeting, every reader writes their complete theory of the case, seals it, and opens it only after the final chapter, when the group scores the theories and hunts the clues Stevenson planted in plain sight. The kit is available for $7 through the editor's Payhip store: https://payhip.com/horaceharriottjr

The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, The Companion Edition is available now as an eBook ($9.99) through Payhip: https://payhip.com/horaceharriottjr, and in The Classics and Companions Shop on the editor's Linktree. Print editions follow on Amazon (paperback, $14.99; hardcover, $24.99). The text is public domain worldwide (Robert Louis Stevenson died in 1894); all companion material is original to this edition. This is an independent publication, not affiliated with or endorsed by any Stevenson estate, museum, or stage or screen adaptation.

About the Editor

Horace Harriott Jr. is a New York-based author and editor of more than two dozen books, including The Side Hustle Handbook, Master Playbook and The Ultimate Commissary Cookbook. This edition is part of his Companion Classics series of reading-together editions of public-domain classics.

About the Book

The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, The Companion Edition, Robert Louis Stevenson (author), Horace Harriott Jr. (editor). Companion Classics, independently published, October 2026. Text: the first edition (Longmans, Green & Co., London, January 1886), via Project Gutenberg eBook #43, collated by probe against a scan of the 1886 edition; ten chapters; 25,531 words (a novella); interior proof 97 pages, 6 x 9 in.