Robert Louis Stevenson

Life

Robert Louis Stevenson was born in Edinburgh in 1850, the only child of a family of lighthouse engineers. He was sickly from childhood, with lung trouble that would follow him all his life, and he spent much of his early years in bed being read to. He studied engineering and then law at Edinburgh University to satisfy his father, and qualified as an advocate, but never practiced; by his early twenties he had decided to write.

His first books were travel narratives, including An Inland Voyage (1878) and Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes (1879). In France he met Fanny Van de Grift Osbourne, an American married woman ten years older than him, and in 1879 he followed her to California, where they married after her divorce. The 1880s were his most productive decade despite constant illness: Treasure Island (1883), A Child’s Garden of Verses (1885), Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), and Kidnapped (1886) all appeared within a few years and made him famous.

In 1888 he sailed with his family to the Pacific in search of a climate that would let him breathe, and in 1890 he settled on the island of Upolu in Samoa, where he built a house, took an active part in local politics, and was known as Tusitala, the teller of tales. He died there suddenly in December 1894, at forty-four, and was buried on a hill above his home.

Literary significance

Stevenson was one of the most popular writers of his time, and his reputation among critics has risen and fallen more than once since. He wrote in many forms: adventure stories, horror, poems for children, essays, and travel books. His adventure fiction set a standard of economy and pace that later writers in the genre worked from, and his interest in moral doubleness, most famously in Jekyll and Hyde, connects him to the darker Scottish literary tradition of Hogg and to the modernist writers who admired him. He was a conscious stylist who revised heavily and wrote about the craft of fiction with unusual clarity.

Where to start

Treasure Island is the book to begin with for readers of any age. Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, which can be read in an evening, shows a different and darker side of his work.