dr jekyll and mr hyde

Presentation Dr Jekyll and Mr hyde   Biography Robert Louis Stevenson was born in Edinburgh in eighteen fifty, and died at 44 years old in Samoa. As a novelist he is often noted for the powers of invention and depth of psychological insight found in his work ; a skill admired by many writers including Jorge Luis borges, ernest hemingway and G.K Chesterton, who said of him that he « seemed to pick the right word up on the point of his pen”   His father, who was a prosperous civil engineer, had plans for stevensson to follow his profession, but his son’s ill-health and weak disposition meant that an alternative career had to be decided upon. He chose law as a compromise, but his growing disillusion with the high class led him to be more fascinated for city’s low life and the bizarre characters he came across proved rich material for his later stories. Because of his health problems he spent much of his time in warmer countries such the south of France, where he met his future wife, mrs fanny Osbourne. He followed her to California by emigrant ship in 1879, he published works as An Island voyage (1878) and Travels with a Donkey in the Cervennes (1879), based on his own adventures.   However, in 1883 his first full length work of fiction, Treasure island , appeared. The recognition Stevensson had received from treasure Island grew with the publication of The Strange Case of DR Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Kidnapped in 1886. Then, he settled in Samoa, where he gained a reputation as a story-teller, and finally died in 1894 from a brain haemorrhage.   Context of the book Stevenson wrote Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde at bornemouth, in England, in 1885, while convalescing from an illness. The original idea occured to him in a nightmare from which his wife awakened him. In fact, stevenson was disappointed that she had interrupted a « fine bogey-tale « he said. Originally, Stevenson’s idea was to compose a simple horror story, but after reading the original version to his wife, she suggested more could be made of the tale. Stevenson burned the original manuscript and rewrote the entire novel in only three days.   Stevenson lived and wrote during the Victorian era, when Queen Victoria ruled England. The Victorian era brought a great progression of technology and the advancement of European power throughout the world. However, during Stevenson’s writing at the end of the nineteenth century, artists, writers and intellectuals were beginning to m...