I was a little disappointed when I first read this novel, in 1995, to find that there was no romance in it (hey, I'm a romantic at heart! :-), nor was it told from the point of view of Jekyll/Hyde which I had expected. Instead, what Robert Louis Stevenson offers is a hard look at the battle between good and evil, the immorality that plagues our world, and the uses and abuses of science.

It has been a while since I read the book, so I can't really comment much on it, but I read these comments about the novel, in reference to a play that was done, and I thought it could be applied to the changes that were made in the musical as well:
Stevenson, like Mary Shelley before him, stressed the hubris of scientism and the immoral use of discovery to make humanity more powerful than his morality could handle. The immorality in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde involves the desire to separate the good and bad within a human thus allowing them to go their separate ways. The result is a split and a loss of soul. The introduction of the sexuality in the play is problematic because in the orginal there is a decided lack of femininity and relationship on the part of Dr. Jekyll which lead to his isolation and greed. He wanted to remain an upstanding philanthropic and at the same time indulge his lower nature to its full extent, a thing his conscience couldn't allow him to do unless he found a way to split off his evil nature and disavow responsibility for it.

Also, Leanne Shawler contrasted the novel and musical on her website. Read about it here!

If you'd like to add any comments, or just talk about the book in general, please feel free to email me!