This edition of "The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde / Weir of Hermiston" includes Stevenson's essay "The Importance of Dreams". Both these stories deal in different ways with a topic which fascinated Stevenson: the duality of human nature.

The book which put Stevenson's name in the mouth of the ' man in the street,' lifted him at a single bound to a place among men of the time and, by the still greater sensation which it created in America, led to the large income which soon afterwards he drew from the United States. The ear of a great public to whom his earlier writings were unknown was captured by this intense picture of the elements of good and evil in man's nature. It was hailed from pulpits and in the religious press as a great moral parable; though its moral quality, on close analysis, is seen to be more an illusion, due to the art of its writing, than the essence of the fable. Reduced to its simplest formula Jekyll and Hyde is a cry of terror at the potency for evil latent in the human soul. Such moral force as it has depends upon its assault on the nerves, not on its appeal to the heart. If not thus interpreted by the preachers of the time, it yet served the purpose of moving their hearers by the spectacle of the evil partner in the human ego, indulged in a moment ' when virtue slumbered,' coming in the end to destroy the good.

In 1890, the year after first reaching Samoa but before he had properly settled there, Stevenson and his stepson planned and began what they intended to be a huge novel, a black, ugly, trampling, violent story, full of strange scenes and striking characters. It took them until 1893 to finish the story. It seems to be that Stevenson realized he had taken his spade too deep in the black depths of human nature. His metier had mostly been the dark primitive passions of the race, but not even the conception of pure evil in Mr. Hyde is more repulsive than the trio of villainy in The Ebb Tide, where it is heightened against the dazzling beauty of the Pacific seas and beaches.

This edition contains the most important and best known short stories, that were not included in other prominent collections. Included are: The Body-Snatcher Thrawn Janet Will O' the Mill The Treasure of Franchard Markheim The Misadventures of John Nicholson The Story Of A Lie Heathercat The Great North Road The Young Chevalier Fables

Mr. Henry James, speaking of the quarrel between Alan Breck and David Balfour in Kidnapped, declares that he knows of " few better examples of the way genius has ever a surprise in its pocket — keeps an ace, as it were, up its sleeve." And in Weir of Hermiston we have a surprise of an even higher order from Stevenson's pocket; that pocket which during his lifetime seemed like the proverbial small boy's—almost inexhaustible, stuffed full of a delightfully heterogeneous mass, sometimes of jingling trinkets, and sometimes of the oddest and rarest treasures. It may seem rash to declare a half-finished and half-revised book the greatest achievement of an author who had so high a passion for finality as Stevenson, but many will unhesitatingly declare Weir of Hermiston Stevenson's best book.

In the South Seas, as here available to the reader, is the result of a journey on the 'Casco' together with Stevenson's mother, wife and stepson. The earlier parts, those on the Marquesas and Paumotos, or low or atoll islands, most definitely mark Stevenson's original intention ; those on the Gilberts, with their picture of the king Tembinok, are more in the personal strain of R. L. S., and are thus accepted as the most successful part of these writings. But the things most to be regretted about them is their omissions ; nothing of Stevenson's long stay at Tautira as the guest of the chief Ori a Ori, nor of his visit to the leper settlement of Molokai. His letters to friends in England, and the extracts from his journal in the ' Life ' do something to fill in these gaps, but not in proportion to the interest of the subjects.

The book which made Stevenson famous, and has since become a classic among tales of adventure, to be ranked with "Robinson Crusoe". Its appearance did much more than establish him as a writer for boy readers. In fact, the book was not instantaneously a success among readers of that day, pledged to Captain Marry at and his imitators. But it brought Stevenson prominently to the notice of an elder public, able to perceive the uncommon power of romantic description which marked Treasure Island from previous tales of adventure. A couple of years passed before this yarn of buccaneers and mutiny on the high seas became one of the most popular of boys' books. Meanwhile its author, who had never been a campaigner like Mayne Reid in Mexico, or Ballantyne with the Hudson Bay Company, but had lived in a bedroom world of romance of his own making, first found himself recognized as a writer of note outside the small literary circle in which his work was esteemed.