Robert Louis Stevenson's writing process for The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is legendary: it is said that at the age of thirty-five, Stevenson drafted the tale as a "shilling shocker" for Christmas (a time when ghost stories were often published in Victorian England) in six weeks of 1885, burned the draft after critique from his wife, and rewrote it in three days. The piece turned out to be Stevenson's first true literary success, a bestseller in the late Victorian era, and would go on to be reflected in culture for the centuries to follow.
The novella tells the story of an attorney, Utterson, who learns that the suspicious behavior of a disturbing man called Hyde is...