The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde Synopsis
Exam board: AQA, Edexcel, OCR, Eduqas; SQA
Level & Subject: GCSE English Literature; Nationals and Highers
First teaching: September 2015
Next exam: June 2025
This edition of The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is perfect for GCSE-level students: it comes complete with the novel, plus an introduction providing context, and a glossary explaining key terms.
'He put the glass to his lips, and drank at one gulp. A cry followed; he reeled, staggered, clutched at the table and held on, staring with injected eyes, gasping with open mouth; and as I looked there came, I thought, a change…'
A series of brutal incidents - a murder, the trampling of a child - leads lawyer Mr Utterson to try to find out more about the repulsive perpetrator Mr Hyde. More importantly, he begins to question how Hyde is connected to Utterson's old friend, the respectable Dr Jekyll.
Robert Louis Stevenson's 1886 novel, with its concern with doubles and the 'dual nature of man', takes the reader into the darker regions of late Victorian London, as Utterson begins to unravel the mystery and confront the horror of Hyde's true identity.
About This Edition
ISBN: |
9780008325930 |
Publication date: |
14th January 2019 |
Author: |
Robert Louis Stevenson |
Publisher: |
Collins an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers |
Format: |
Paperback |
Pagination: |
112 pages |
Series: |
Collins Classroom Classics |
Suitable For: |
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Recommendations: |
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About Robert Louis Stevenson
Robert Louis Stevenson was born to Thomas and Margaret Isabella Balfour Stevenson in Edinburgh on 13 November 1850. From the beginning he was sickly. Through much of his childhood he was attended by his faithful nurse, Alison Cunningham, known as Cummy in the family circle. She told him morbid stories about the Covenanters (the Scots Presbyterian martyrs), read aloud to him Victorian penny-serial novels, Bible stories, and the Psalms, and drilled the catechism into him, all with his parents' approval. Thomas Stevenson was quite a storyteller himself, and his wife doted on their only child, sitting in admiration while her precocious son expounded on religious dogma. Stevenson inevitably reacted to the morbidity of his religious education and to the stiffness of his family's middle-class values, but that rebellion would come only after he entered Edinburgh University.
The juvenilia that survives from his childhood shows an observer who was already sensitive to religious issues and Scottish history. Not surprisingly, the boy who listened to Cummy's religious tales first tried his hand at retelling Bible stories: "A History of Moses" was followed by "The Book of Joseph." When Stevenson was sixteen his family published a pamphlet he had written entitled The Pentland Rising, a recounting of the murder of Nonconformist Scots Presbyterians who rebelled against their royalist persecutors.
More About Robert Louis Stevenson