Before You Begin

Before you begin.

It begins, as the worst things often do, with a quiet Sunday walk and an ordinary door. Two London gentlemen pause before a “sinister block of building” in a busy by-street — blistered, windowless, distained — and one of them tells the other a story so ugly it has clung to him ever since: a small, deformed man who trampled a child underfoot “like some damned Juggernaut,” then vanished behind that very door. From this single chilling image, Robert Louis Stevenson builds one of the most enduring mysteries in the English language.

Stevenson wrote the tale in 1886, and it made him famous almost overnight. Working in the fog-bound, gas-lit London of the late Victorian age, he found a way to dramatize a question every reader recognizes in private: what lives inside a respectable person, beneath the smooth face and the good name? The respectable Dr. Henry Jekyll, the loyal lawyer Mr. Utterson, the skeptical Dr. Lanyon — all of them circle a secret that grows more terrible the closer they come. More than a horror story, it is a meditation on the divided self, and the names Jekyll and Hyde have entered the language as shorthand for the two natures at war in us all.

What keeps the book alive is its craftsmanship: the slow, lawyerly tightening of suspense, the fog and lamplight, the dread that something monstrous is hiding in plain sight. It is short, swift, and unforgettable — a perfect storm of atmosphere and ideas.

This illustrated edition opens with a gallery of the cast, the map of their London, and the shadowed world of the mystery; and as you read, each chapter unlocks its own illustrated plate — a painted recap of the scene you have just lived through, and never a glimpse of what lies ahead. Before you follow Mr. Utterson down that by-street, step into the gallery that follows.