Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894) was a Scottish novelist, poet and travel writer, the author of Treasure Island, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Kidnapped. Frail from childhood, he spent his life travelling in search of a healthier climate, from the Cévennes to California and the South Pacific, and died in Samoa at forty-four.
Genres
novels and stories, poetry
Works
Treasure Island, A Child's Garden of Verses, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Kidnapped, Underwoods
Edinburgh
Robert Lewis Balfour Stevenson was born in Edinburgh on 13 November 1850, the only child of Thomas Stevenson, a member of a famous family of lighthouse engineers. A sickly boy, often confined to bed with lung trouble, he was looked after by his devoted nurse Alison Cunningham, whose stories of Scottish history and religious terror fired his imagination.
He entered Edinburgh University to study engineering, as his family expected, but switched to law and was admitted to the bar in 1875 without ever practising. He changed the spelling of his middle name to Louis, and led a bohemian life that worried his parents.
Travels with a donkey
Stevenson began by writing essays and travel books. An Inland Voyage tells of a canoe trip through Belgium and France, and Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes (1879) of a twelve-day walk across southern France in 1878 with an obstinate donkey called Modestine.
In France, at the artists' colony of Grez-sur-Loing, he met Fanny Van de Grift Osbourne, an American married woman ten years older than he was. In 1879 he crossed the Atlantic and America in poor health to join her in California; they married in San Francisco in 1880 after her divorce.
Treasure Island and Jekyll and Hyde
During a rainy holiday in Braemar in 1881, Stevenson drew a map of an imaginary island with his twelve-year-old stepson Lloyd, and began to tell a story about it. Treasure Island, serialised in a boys' magazine and published as a book in 1883, with its pirate Long John Silver, made his name.
Living in Bournemouth, often bedridden, he wrote Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), a short novel about a respectable doctor who transforms himself into a violent double, and Kidnapped, a historical adventure set in the Scottish Highlands after the Jacobite rising. Both were immediate successes.
Tusitala
After his father's death in 1887 Stevenson left Britain for good. He spent a winter at Saranac Lake in New York State, then chartered a yacht and sailed with his family among the islands of the Pacific. In 1890 he bought land at Vailima, on the island of Upolu in Samoa, and built a house there.
The Samoans called him Tusitala, the teller of tales. He took their side in disputes with the colonial powers and wrote about Pacific life. On 3 December 1894 he collapsed, probably from a cerebral haemorrhage, and died within hours. He was buried on top of Mount Vaea, overlooking the sea.
Anecdotes
A draft in the fire
According to his wife and stepson, Stevenson wrote the first draft of Jekyll and Hyde in about three days after a nightmare. Fanny criticised it, saying that he had missed the allegory; he threw the manuscript into the fire and rewrote the story from scratch in a few more days.
A birthday given away
In 1891 Stevenson learned that Annie Ide, the daughter of an American official in Samoa, was unhappy because her birthday fell on Christmas Day. He drew up a formal deed giving her his own birthday, 13 November, on condition that she use it properly. The document was later published.
Frequently asked questions
What are Robert Louis Stevenson's most famous books?
Treasure Island (1883), Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), Kidnapped (1886), The Master of Ballantrae and the poems for children A Child's Garden of Verses.
Where did Stevenson die?
At his house at Vailima, in Samoa, on 3 December 1894. He is buried on Mount Vaea.
Where does the map of Treasure Island come from?
Stevenson drew it in 1881 with his stepson Lloyd Osbourne, during a rainy holiday in Scotland, and invented the story to go with it.