Robert Louis Stevenson

Robert Louis Stevenson was born in Edinburgh on 13th November 1850, the son of lighthouse engineer, Thomas Stevenson. His mother, Margaret Isabella Balfour, came from a family of lawyers and ministers. Robert was frequently ill as a child and spent long periods alone with  only his Scots nurse, Alison (whom he called ‘Cummy’), for company. She would pass the time by telling him tales and singing him songs. It was she who instilled in him a love of Scottish history and language. In the summers his family moved out to Swanston on the northern slopes of the Pentland hills. Stevenson initially studied engineering at the University of Edinburgh but soon changed to the law. However, he had no intention of actively practising this profession – he was determined to become a writer.

His first book, An Inland Voyage (1878) was written following a canoe trip on the Continent, from Antwerp to Northern France. Another journey, this time in the Cevennes, provided the inspiration for another travel book, Travels with a Donkey (1879).

In August of 1879 he travelled to America – to California – where he met up with a woman he had first met in Grez, France, a divorcee called Fanny Osbourne. He wrote an account of his experience in travelling to California which was published as The Amateur Emigrant (written 1880, published 1894). Stevenson and Fanny married in 1880 and returned to Scotland. California provided the setting for another work, The Silverado Squatters, (1883) based on their honeymoon experience at an abandoned silver mine. In 1881 Stevenson began writing Treasure Island which was published in 1883; this book established his reputation but he and Fanny were looking for a place to settle with a kinder, warmer climate than Scotland for Stevenson’s bronchial problems. They moved to Bournemouth, on the south coast of England in 1885, the year that A Child’s Garden of Verses was published. Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde was published a year later along with Kidnapped.

In 1887 the couple emigrated to America where Stevenson wrote The Master of Ballantrae (1889). In 1889 they finally settled in Samoa where Stevenson became a popular local figure. He died suddenly at his home there from a cerebral haemorrhage in 1894. His final novel, Weir of Hermiston was published posthumously in an unfinished state in 1896.

In the years following his death Stevenson was regarded primarily as a children’s writer, however, the latter half of the twentieth century has seen a critical re-evaluation of his work.

Stevenson was a prolific writer encompassing many forms and styles, below is a select list of his works:

An Inland Voyage (1878)

Picturesque Notes on Edinburgh (1879)

Travels with a Donkey (1879)

Deacon Brodie (1880)

Not I and Other Poems (1881)

New Arabian Nights (1882)

Treasure Island (1883)

The Silverado Squatters (1883)

A Child’s Garden of Verses (1885)

The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886)

Kidnapped (1886)

Thomas Stevenson, Civil Engineer (1887)

Ticonderoga: a Poem ( 1887)

Master of Ballantrae (1888)

The Wrong Box (1889)

Ballads (1890)

The South Seas (1890)

Across the Plains with other Memories and Essays (1892)

Catriona (1893)

The Ebb Tide (1894)

Weir of Hermiston (posthumously 1896)