Robert Louis Stevenson (1850 - 1894) was a Scottish novelist, essayist, poet and travel writer whose books include Treasure Island, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Kidnapped and the verse collection A Child's Garden of Verses. [1] Persistently ill from childhood, he travelled in search of a climate that suited him and settled in Samoa, where he died at the age of forty-four. [2]
Early life and education
Robert Lewis Balfour Stevenson was born in Edinburgh on 13 November 1850 into a family of distinguished lighthouse engineers. Chronic respiratory illness made his childhood a sequence of sickrooms, and he was cared for largely by his nurse Alison Cunningham, to whom he later dedicated A Child's Garden of Verses. [1]
He entered the University of Edinburgh to study engineering, intending to follow his father into the family firm, but abandoned it for law. He qualified as an advocate in 1875 yet never practised, having already resolved to make his living by writing. [2]
Travel writing and early work
His first books were travel narratives: An Inland Voyage (1878), describing a canoe journey through Belgium and France, and Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes (1879). He also established himself as an essayist, contributing to magazines and publishing the collection Virginibus Puerisque. [3]
In France he met Fanny Van de Grift Osbourne, an American ten years his senior and separated from her husband. He followed her to California in 1879, a journey that nearly killed him and that he recorded in The Amateur Emigrant, and they married in 1880. [1]
Major fiction
Treasure Island, begun as a map drawn to entertain his stepson Lloyd Osbourne, was serialised from 1881 and published as a book in 1883. Its pirates, its buried treasure and the figure of Long John Silver fixed the popular image of piracy for generations of readers. [2]
Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde appeared in 1886 and was an immediate sensation, its account of a respectable doctor who chemically separates his darker self becoming a permanent metaphor in English. The same year brought Kidnapped, a historical adventure set in the aftermath of the Jacobite rising, followed by The Master of Ballantrae in 1889. [1]
The Pacific and Samoa
Seeking a climate that would ease his lungs, Stevenson chartered a yacht in 1888 and cruised the Pacific with his family, visiting the Marquesas, Tahiti, Hawaii and the Gilbert Islands. In 1890 he bought an estate at Vailima on Upolu in Samoa and settled there, becoming known to Samoans as Tusitala, the teller of tales. [3]
He took a close interest in Samoan affairs, writing letters to The Times and the book A Footnote to History criticising the colonial powers' conduct in the islands. He died suddenly at Vailima on 3 December 1894, probably of a cerebral haemorrhage, leaving the novel Weir of Hermiston unfinished, and was buried on Mount Vaea. [1]
Legacy
Long treated in Britain as a writer chiefly for children, Stevenson has been reassessed as a serious stylist and innovator, admired by writers from Henry James and Jorge Luis Borges to Vladimir Nabokov. His major works have been adapted for film and stage more often than those of almost any other novelist of his period. [2]
