He put the glass to his lips and drank at one gulp. A cry followed; he reeled, staggered, clutched at the table, and held on, staring with injected eyes, gasping with open mouth; and as I looked there came, I thought, a change—he seemed to swell—his face became suddenly black and the features seemed to melt and alter—and next moment I had sprung to my feet and leaped back against the wall, my arm raised to shield me from that prodigy, my mind submerged in terror.
    “Oh God!” I screamed, and “Oh God!” again and again; for there before my eyes—pale and shaken, and half-fainting, and groping before him with his hands, like a man restored from death—there stood Henry Jekyll.
    All is in the eye of the beholder—this is the account from the witness Hastie Lanyon. And now, for comparison, the reverse transformation from the viewpoint of the man himself.
    The most racking pains succeeded a grinding in the bones, deadly nausea, and a horror of the spirit that cannot be exceeded at the hour of birth or death. Then these agonies began swiftly to subside, and I came to myself as of out of a great sickness. There was something strange in my sensations, something indescribably new and, from its very novelty, incredibly sweet. I felt younger, lighter, happier in body; within I was conscious of a heady recklessness, a current of disordered sensual images running like a millrace in my fancy, a solution of bonds of obligation, an unknown but not an innocent freedom of the soul. I knew myself, at the first breath of this new life, to be more wicked, tenfold more wicked, sold a slave to my original evil; and the thought, in that moment, braced and delighted me like wine. I stretched out my hands, exulting in the freshness of these sensations; and in the act I was suddenly aware that I had lost stature…
    … I stole through the corridors, a stranger in my own house; and coming to my room, I saw for the first time the appearance of Edward Hyde.
    Robert Louis Stevenson, like Jules Verne, also struggled to make money after publishing his most famous books—Treasure Island and Kidnapped—how?!!?? When he wrote The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, it was a flop. The story goes that he was saved by Jack the Ripper—no one is completely useless—because someone had turned J&H into a play at the time Red Jack was loose in London and the actor who played Hyde so frightened audiences that people flocked to suffer the shock. The actor was so convincing many were persuaded that he had to be the Ripper and he was even regarded by the police as a prime suspect. This made Stevenson rich. Like Jules Verne, his greatest books have never been out of print for over a century except for that brief period which should have been the peak of his fame.