Robert Louis Stevenson

Robert Louis Stevenson was born on 13 November 1850 at 8 Howard Place in Edinburgh, the only child of Thomas Stevenson and Margaret Isabella Balfour ^[1]. The family occupied an unusual place in Scottish life. His grandfather Robert Stevenson had built the Bell Rock Lighthouse, one of the great engineering feats of the age, and his father and uncles designed and maintained lights around the Scottish coast. The boy was expected to continue the dynasty ^[2].

His childhood was dominated by illness. Recurrent fevers and a weak chest, probably inherited from his mother, kept him in bed for long stretches, and his nurse Alison Cunningham, whom he called Cummy, filled those hours with Bible stories, Covenanter history, and tales of ghosts and graveyards ^[1]. The mixture of piety and terror left a permanent mark on his imagination, and he later dedicated A Child's Garden of Verses to her. Formal schooling was patchy because of his health, but he read voraciously and began composing stories before he could reliably write them down, dictating his first narrative, a history of Moses, to his mother at the age of six ^[3].

In 1867 he entered the University of Edinburgh to study engineering, dutifully accompanying his father on inspection tours of harbours and lighthouses. He had no intention of building anything. In 1871 he told Thomas Stevenson that he wanted to write, and a compromise was struck: he would read for the law instead. He passed advocate in 1875 but never seriously practised, having already decided that the essays he was placing in magazines mattered more than any brief ^[2].

Anyone asking who was Robert Louis Stevenson in the mid 1870s would have found a thin, velvet-jacketed bohemian haunting the artists' colonies of Fontainebleau and the debating societies of Edinburgh. He served his apprenticeship in the periodical press, publishing essays and short fiction in the Cornhill Magazine under the editorship of Leslie Stephen, who introduced him to the poet W. E. Henley, later a close collaborator and the physical model for Long John Silver ^[3].

Travel gave him his first books. A canoe journey through Belgium and France produced An Inland Voyage in 1878, and a twelve-day hike through the Cévennes with a stubborn pack animal became Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes in 1879 ^[1]. Both were slim, witty, and admired by critics, though neither sold widely. They established the voice that would carry his whole career: precise, conversational, and alert to landscape and character in equal measure.

At Grez-sur-Loing in 1876 he met Fanny Van de Grift Osbourne, an American ten years his senior, separated from her husband and travelling with her children. When she returned to California in 1878, Stevenson followed a year later against his family's wishes, crossing the Atlantic in steerage conditions and the continent by emigrant train. The journey nearly killed him, and he arrived in Monterey destitute and gravely ill ^[2]. The ordeal supplied the material for The Amateur Emigrant, one of the most unsparing accounts of nineteenth-century migration written by a literary figure ^[4].

The decade after his marriage contained nearly all the work for which he is remembered, and any honest account of Robert Louis Stevenson achievements begins with a map. In the summer of 1881, rain-bound in Braemar, he drew an imaginary island to amuse his stepson Lloyd Osbourne and began spinning a story around it. Serialised in the boys' paper Young Folks and published in book form in 1883, Treasure Island transformed the pirate yarn into literature, giving the world Long John Silver, the black spot, and the enduring template of the treasure map ^[1].

The astonishing year was 1886. Kidnapped, a historical novel set in the aftermath of the Jacobite rising of 1745, followed David Balfour and Alan Breck Stewart across the Highlands and confirmed Stevenson as a master of Scottish historical fiction ^[3]. A few months earlier he had published Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, a short novel written at speed in Bournemouth after a nightmare. The tale of a respectable doctor and his monstrous second self sold roughly 40,000 copies in Britain within six months, was quoted from pulpits, and gave the English language a permanent shorthand for the divided personality ^[2].

He was equally accomplished in other forms. A Child's Garden of Verses (1885) remains among the most read poetry collections ever written for children, and essays such as An Apology for Idlers kept him in the front rank of Victorian prose stylists ^[4]. The Master of Ballantrae (1889), a dark study of fraternal hatred spanning Scotland, America, and India, and the unfinished Weir of Hermiston show the direction his mature work was taking: away from pure adventure and toward moral tragedy. Henry James, a close friend and correspondent, regarded him as one of the finest craftsmen writing in English ^[5].

Stevenson married Fanny Osbourne in San Francisco on 19 May 1880, shortly after her divorce was finalised. He was twenty-nine, penniless, and so weakened by illness that the couple spent their honeymoon squatting in a derelict bunkhouse at an abandoned silver mine on Mount Saint Helena, an episode he turned into The Silverado Squatters ^[2]. Fanny proved a fierce guardian of his health and a blunt critic of his drafts. Her son Lloyd Osbourne later co-wrote three novels with his stepfather, including The Wrong Box and The Ebb-Tide ^[1].

The great private conflict of his life was with his father. Thomas Stevenson, a devout engineer, was wounded first by his son's rejection of the family profession and then, far more deeply, by Louis declaring himself an agnostic in 1873. The quarrel caused real anguish on both sides, yet father and son were reconciled, and Thomas quietly subsidised the writer for years, even buying the Bournemouth house, named Skerryvore after a family lighthouse, as a gift to Fanny ^[3].

Friendship mattered to him as much as family. His circle included Henry James, the critic Edmund Gosse, and Sidney Colvin, who edited his letters after his death. The long, affectionate, quarrel-scarred relationship with W. E. Henley ended badly in 1888 over an accusation Henley levelled at Fanny, a breach that grieved Stevenson for the rest of his life ^[5].

His lungs made Britain impossible. After his father's death in 1887, Stevenson took his mother, wife, and stepson to America, wintering at Saranac Lake in the Adirondacks under the care of the tuberculosis specialist Edward Livingston Trudeau ^[4]. There he began The Master of Ballantrae and wrote some of his best essays. In June 1888 the family chartered the schooner yacht Casco out of San Francisco and sailed into the Pacific, beginning nearly three years of island voyaging through the Marquesas, the Tuamotus, Tahiti, Hawaii, the Gilbert Islands, and Samoa ^[1].

The sea suited him. His health, wretched everywhere else, held steady in the tropics, and in 1890 he bought around 314 acres of rainforest above Apia on the Samoan island of Upolu, building an estate he called Vailima, meaning five waters ^[2]. Samoans knew him as Tusitala, the teller of tales. He learned the language, entertained chiefs, and threw himself into local politics, publishing A Footnote to History in 1892, an angry account of the mismanagement of Samoa by German, British, and American officials, and writing letters of protest to The Times ^[3].

He kept writing at a ferocious pace: Catriona, the sequel to Kidnapped, appeared in 1893, and The Ebb-Tide in 1894. On the evening of 3 December 1894 he was helping Fanny prepare dinner when he suddenly collapsed, asking whether his face looked strange. He died within hours of a cerebral haemorrhage, aged forty-four ^[1]. Samoan chiefs cut a path up Mount Vaea overnight and carried his coffin to the summit, where he was buried beneath a tomb inscribed with his own Requiem: Home is the sailor, home from sea, and the hunter home from the hill ^[4].

Few writers have been read so continuously. Treasure Island and Jekyll and Hyde have never gone out of print, and both have been adapted for stage and screen hundreds of times, making Stevenson one of the most translated authors in the world according to the UNESCO Index Translationum ^[6]. Every pirate with a parrot, every respectable character hiding a monster, descends in some measure from his invention. Basic Robert Louis Stevenson facts, his birth in Edinburgh in 1850 and his death in Samoa in 1894, frame one of the strangest trajectories in Victorian letters, from the New Town drawing rooms of Scotland to a mountaintop grave in Polynesia.

His critical reputation travelled a rougher road. Modernist critics dismissed him as a boys' entertainer, and for much of the twentieth century he was excluded from the serious canon. Reassessment began in earnest late in the century, led by scholars who read Jekyll and Hyde as a founding text of psychological fiction and his Pacific writing as an early, clear-eyed critique of colonialism ^[5]. Writers as different as Jorge Luis Borges, Graham Greene, and Vladimir Nabokov named him an essential influence ^[3].

The memorials are scattered like his life. The Writers' Museum in Edinburgh holds his childhood relics, the National Library of Scotland preserves manuscripts and letters, and Vailima now houses the Robert Louis Stevenson Museum, maintained in Samoa since 1994 ^[7]. Any Robert Louis Stevenson biography ultimately returns to the quality his friends kept remarking on: a sick man who refused to write like one, and who treated storytelling, in his own phrase, as the great creative and generative act available to ordinary life ^[4].