The Scottish writer Robert Louis Stevenson's short novel, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) is a classic of Victorian gothic fiction. The story of an upstanding, educated gentleman who seeks to access his own dark sides and gets caught in a maelstrom of evil captivated late nineteenth-century London readers and then the world. Today Jekyll and Hyde has become the universal reference for "man's double being," but the story's revelatory ending shows that Stevenson did far more than create an archetype in this compelling eerie tale. Frequently adapted for stage and screen, the story continues to mesmerize readers and belongs among the great works of world literature, alongside Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, and Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness.