Extract

I learned to recognise the thorough and primitive duality of man.

A door in a London side street, blistered and scarred, leads to the laboratory of a respectable physician: Robert Louis Stevenson built his most enduring story around that threshold between the public and the hidden self. Written in a white heat over three days in 1886, the novella came in a fever dream, and its structure mirrors the act of uncovering a secret, told not from Jekyll's perspective but through the baffled investigations of his lawyer Utterson. Victorian London becomes a geography of repression, fog and gaslight concealing the violence that respectability demands be kept invisible. So absorbed into culture that its revelation feels inevitable, it retains the power of a confession that cannot be taken back.