The Annotated Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde/Introduction

by Robert Louis Stevenson

The Annotated 'Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde' is a Wikisource community annotation project. Please help to make the world's best, and free, annotated version of the classic Stevenson "bogey tale".^[1]

Goals

1. Commentaries of passages (footnotes). This is the primary goal of the project, and focus of further expansion.
2. Wikilink (to Wiktionary or Wikipedia) all words and phrases that are relevant and/or possibly need further explanation. Per conventions below. This is mostly complete.

Conventions

Conventions used in this project.

• Footnotes/Commentaries

Commentaries are at the heart of the annotations and offer unlimited expansion. Please dive in and contribute.

• Wikilinks

It is the philosophy of this project that a few wikilinks links are good, too many are bad. Wiktionary links should be for words that are archaic 19th century and which are rarely used or recognized today; or for proper nouns and names that have Wikipedia articles which are of contextual relevance to the text. In essence, the links should guide and focus the reader to the main themes of the story, not irrelevant tangents that may distract the reader. It is the assumption that the reader has an advanced vocabulary and does not need to know the definitions of commonly used and known words.

If Wiktionary does not have an entry for the word in question, please consider adding one (with the text from this story as the example!), it just takes a minute to lookup a definition elsewhere on the web and help Wiktionary grow. If the definition is on Wiktionary, but there are multiple definitions and it is not clear which is the right one, add a footnote to clarify.

• Inter-wikilinks are created as follows:

• Wikipedia: [[w:Robert Louis Stevenson]] — will link to the Encyclopedia article on Robert Louis Stevenson.
• Wiktionary: [[wiktionary:bonnie]] — will link to the Dictionary article on "Bonnie".

• Footnotes follow the MediaWiki footnote feature as detailed at w:Wikipedia:Footnotes

• Example: This is text.<ref>This is a footnote.</ref>

• Spelling

Spelling in the source text should not be changed. 19th c English prose has lots of spelling "mistakes" for the modern reader (and computer spell checker); however they should not be "fixed", we want to preserve the originality of the work, spelling and all.

Participants

If you wish to list yourself as a participant please feel free, but anyone may contribute to the project at any time without being listed here.

• Stbalbach Feb 28, 2006. Stevenson is one of my favorite authors and this is my first annotation project, probably his most famous story.
• 68.39.174.238 17:46, 22 August 2007 (UTC). Made some annotations, best thing I think was the comparison of the 100 pounds.

Notes

1. Stevenson called it his "fine bogey tale" after awakening from a nightmare, in which he dreamed some of the first scenes in the book.