"[Brantlinger's] writing is admirably lucid, his knowledge impressive and his thesis a welcome reminder of the class bias that so often accompanies denunciations of popular fiction." —Publishers Weekly "Brantlinger is adept at discussing both the fiction itself and the social environment in which that fiction was produced and disseminated. He brings to his study a thorough knowledge of traditional and contemporary scholarship, which results in an important scholarly book on Victorian fiction and its production." —Choice "Timely, scrupulously researched, thoroughly enlightening, and steadily readable. . . . A work of agenda-setting historical scholarship." —Garrett Stewart Fear of mass literacy stalks the pages of Patrick Brantlinger's latest book. Its central plot involves the many ways in which novels and novel reading were viewed—especially by novelists themselves—as both causes and symptoms of rotting minds and moral decay among nineteenth-century readers.

This Top Five Classics edition of Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde includes: • More than 20 illustrations by Charles Raymond Macauley • Introduction • Author bio and bibliography Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, first published in 1886, has been and remains one of the most well-known works of popular fiction in the English language, having spawned hundreds of dramatic adaptations and inspired countless other works—beginning with the first stage production less than a year after the original book was published. It is also one of the most widely translated works in English literature. But if you’ve never read Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, you might be surprised at just how riveting the tale remains—as well as how different it is from what you’ve come to expect.

First published in 1886 as a “shilling shocker,” Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde takes the basic struggle between good and evil and adds to the mix bourgeois respectability, urban violence, and class conflict. The result is a tale that has taken on the force of myth in the popular imagination. This Broadview edition provides a fascinating selection of contextual material, including contemporary reviews of the novel, Stevenson’s essay “A Chapter on Dreams,” and excerpts from the 1887 stage version of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Also included are historical documents on criminality and degeneracy, the “Jack the Ripper” murders, the “double brain,” and London in the 1880s. New to this third edition are an appendix on the figure of the Victorian gentleman and an expanded selection of letters related to the novel; the introduction and bibliography have also been updated to reflect recent criticism.

In Robert Louis Stevenson's influential novel of mad science and criminal inquiry, attorney Gabriel John Utterson comes to the aid of Dr. Henry Jekyll, an old friend, only to find himself dragged from a world of genial hospitality into London's foreboding night, which is shrouded in shadows and fog—and stalked by the deranged Edward Hyde. Utterson's quest for truth is not only a detective story laden with twists, but an intense meditation on man's inherently dualistic nature, written in a style that often combines disturbing violence with restrained language typical of the Victorian era.