We’re such goths (apparently), we didn’t even realize we were doing a Halloween month when we recorded this episode on Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886). Stevenson’s novella is about an insufferable prick who invents a potion that turns him into a tiny psychopath -- and then he gets stuck like that. What did your (deranged, race-sciencey) grandmother tell you about the dangers of making a face of THE CRIMINAL TYPE? Lots of great discussion on Victorian anxieties about “the criminal” and the city, epistemology, and, once again, phrenology.

We read the Penguin Classics edition edited by Robert Mighall. Chris Baldick’s In Frankenstein’s Shadow: Myth, Monstrosity, and Nineteenth-Century Writing puts Stevenson in conversation with several C19th authors (including Shelley, Melville, and Conrad!) working through the political in horror/early science fiction.

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