Textual revision



A young lady consults a lexicographer

Commenting on Stevenson's softening of his original ideas, Jamie Andrews said that sometimes individual words, lines or paragraphs were deleted. "There's a sense of bits being too sensitive to be published." For example, Stevenson deleted the following line: "From an early age, however, I became in secret the slave of certain appetites." He replaced it with: "And indeed the worst of my faults was a certain impatient gaiety of disposition… hard to reconcile with my imperious desire to carry my head high, and wear a more than commonly grave countenance before the public."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/apr/15/jekyll-hyde-stevenson-explicit-manuscript