January 5, 1886: "Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" is Published

January 5, 1886: Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde -- there is no "The" in the title -- by Robert Louis Stevenson is published. It becomes one of the most-copied stories in popular culture.

What people tend to remember is this: Dr. Henry Jekyll, a London physician, feeling constrained by the conventions of Victorian society, concocts a potion, drinks it, and turns into Edward Hyde, the embodiment of his repressed selfish desires. He ends up committing a murder as Hyde, and eventually finds himself transforming into Hyde even without the potion, and finally commits suicide.

What people tend to forget is this: There is a hero to the novel, and it's not Jekyll in his natural form. It's Jekyll's friend, a lawyer named Gabriel Utterson, who investigates Hyde, and discovers that Hyde was actually Jekyll. The 1st half of the book is Utterson's investigation, and the 2nd half is Jekyll's confession.

Ever since, "Jekyll and Hyde" has referred to a person who appears to be mild-mannered, but has a dark side. The story inspired the Marvel Comics character of the Hulk.

The original story has been filmed many times, with the Spencer Tracy version of 1941 being the best-known. That version is also the one that changed the pronunciation. Up until 1931, with Frederic March in the dual role, the doctor's name was pronounced "JEE-kill." From 1941 onward, it's been "JEHK-ill."

The story has been, sort-of, reversed. In 1963, Jerry Lewis starred in The Nutty Professor, playing Dr. Julius Kelp, a goofy-looking nerd whose formula turns him into the handsome, suave Buddy Love, whose conduct becomes worse as the film goes along. It has long been believed to be a swipe by Lewis at his former comedy partner, singer-actor Dean Martin. Lewis always wanted to do a sequel, but never got around to it. When Eddie Murphy made his remake in 1996, he credited Lewis as a producer, and did produce a sequel.

There's also been gender bends. In 1971, Ralph Bates and Martine Beswick starred in Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde, one of several stories that makes the Hyde character Jack the Ripper, even though the Ripper murders happened in 1888, 2 years after the book's publication. In 1995, Tim Daly played the doctor's great-grandson, and Sean Young the result of his experiments, in Dr. Jekyll and Ms. Hyde.

In the years following the death of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in 1930, some authors have put his creation, Sherlock Holmes, on the trail of Hyde, and on that of the Ripper. Michael Dibdin's 1978 novel The Last Sherlock Holmes Story combines all three: Holmes tries to find a cure for his cocaine addiction, which leads him to become a Hyde-like character, and to commit the Ripper murders.

And of the man who created Jekyll and Hyde? Robert Louis Balfour Stevenson was born on November 13, 1850 in Edinburgh, Scotland -- the same city where Conan Doyle would be born, 9 years later. Always interested in the sea and in stories of the South Pacific, he published Treasure Island in 1883, creating the character of Long John Silver and forming the common view of pirates ever since.

Like Conan Doyle with Holmes, he based Jekyll and Hyde on a well-known figure in Edinburgh. Unlike Conan Doyle, it was a man he could never have met: William Brodie was a cabinetmaker, respected enough to be elected to the city council, but who fell into deep debt due to gambling, and secretly turned to burglary, and was hanged for it in 1788.

But for all his fame and fortune for writing Treasure Island and Jekyll & Hyde, 2 of the most popular and most-adapted stories in English-language literature, he was in ill health for much of his life. Bronchial trouble led him to seek a warmer climate, and he went to the South Pacific, dying in Samoa of a cerebral hemorrhage on December 3, 1894, only 44 years old. He had been trying to open a bottle of wine, and stopped, and said, "What's that?" He turned to his wife, Fanny, an American born Frances Matilda Van de Grift, herself a writer, and asked her, "Does my face look strange?" Perhaps it was appropriate that the last word he spoke was "strange."

Robert and Fanny had no children together, but Fanny had 3 children, 2 surviving, from her 1st marriage. Those 2 surviving children have living descendants today.

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January 5, 1886 was a Tuesday. Baseball and football were in their off-seasons. Hockey was not yet organized. And basketball had not yet been invented. So there were no scores on this historic day.