From Longman's Cultural Editions series, come three tales of transformation: Mary Shelley's Transformation, Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Joseph Conrad's The Secret Sharer. In these three nightmarish tales, an uncanny other turns out to be a second self, a sharer of intimate anxieties, repressed energies, dark impulses.

This book examines the attempts of four great Victorians to write what amounted to latter-day 'Pilgrim's Progresses'. Writing in and for an age whose spiritual needs and assumptions differed utterly from those of Bunyan, they produced very different kinds of books from his - but books which still owed as much to the puritan tradition of Pilgrim's Progress and Quarles Emblems, of spiritual biography and the typological reading of scripture, as to the secular redefinition of that tradition in the early nineteenth century. Carlyle's Sartor Resartus represents the closest convergence-point of...