The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde was an immediate success and is one of Stevenson's best-selling works. Within a year of its publication, stage adaptations began in Boston and London, and soon moved all across England and then towards his home in Scotland. The novella has gone on to inspire scores of major film and stage performances.

The work is commonly associated with the rare mental condition often spuriously called "split personality", where within the same body there exists more than one distinct personality. In this case, there are two personalities within Dr. Jekyll, one apparently good and the other evil, with completely opposite levels of morality.

The novella's impact is such that it has become a part of the language, with the very phrase "Jekyll and Hyde" coming to mean a person who is vastly different in moral character from one situation to the next.