Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
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First editionFirst publication
1886
Literature form
Novella
Genres
Literary, science fiction, horror
Writing language
English
Author's country
Scotland
Length
Approx. 24,500 words
Notable lines
Mr Utterson the lawyer was a man of rugged countenance, that was never lighted by a smile; cold, scanty and embarrassed in discourse; backward in sentiment; lean, long, dusty dreary, and yet somehow lovable.
— First line
"I incline to Cain's heresy," he used to say quaintly: "I let my brother go to the devil in his own way.''
"Oh, God!" I screamed, and "Oh, God!" again and again; for there before my eyes—pale and shaken, and half fainting, and groping before him with his hands, like a man restored from death—there stood Henry Jekyll!
I sat in the sun on a bench; the animal within me licking the chops of memory; the spiritual side a little drowsed, promising subsequent penitence, but not yet moved to begin.
With every day, and from both sides of my intelligence, the moral and the intellectual, I thus drew steadily nearer to the truth, by whose partial discovery I have been doomed to such a dreadful shipwreck: that man is not truly one, but truly two.
The doom and burthen of our life is bound forever on man's shoulders, and when the attempt is made to cast it off, it but returns upon us with more unfamiliar and more awful pressure.
All human beings, as we meet them, are commingled out of good and evil.
Here then, as I lay down the pen and proceed to seal up my confidence, I bring the life of that unhappy Henry Jekyll to an end.
— Last line
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