Robert Louis Stevenson

Robert Louis Stevenson was born in Edinburgh in 1850 into a family of lighthouse engineers — his grandfather Robert Stevenson built the Bell Rock Lighthouse, one of the engineering marvels of the 19th century. He was a sickly child, and chronic respiratory illness (almost certainly tuberculosis) would shadow his entire life, driving him across Europe, to California, and eventually to Samoa in search of climates that did not threaten to kill him. His father wanted him to follow into lighthouse engineering; he studied law instead, was called to the Scottish bar, and practiced never. He had decided to be a writer.

His early career was as an essayist and travel writer. An Inland Voyage (1878) and Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes (1879) established him as a prose stylist — lucid, self-deprecating, observant. He met Fanny Osbourne, an American ten years his senior, in France; she was married. He followed her to California, crossing the Atlantic and then the United States by emigrant train (the experience became The Amateur Emigrant), courted her, married her after her divorce, and brought her back to Scotland. His father disapproved; the couple eventually reconciled.

Treasure Island began as a story invented for Fanny's twelve-year-old son Lloyd during a rainy Scottish summer in 1881. It was serialized in the children's magazine Young Folks beginning in 1881 and published in book form in 1883. It is the foundational text of the pirate adventure novel, and Long John Silver remains the most fully realized morally ambiguous villain-hero in adventure fiction. Kidnapped (1886) followed, also serialized, set in Scotland after the 1745 Jacobite uprising — David Balfour is a more interesting protagonist than Jim Hawkins, and Alan Breck Stewart is one of Stevenson's finest creations.

Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde appeared the same year as Kidnapped. Stevenson claimed the central idea came to him in a dream; the novella was written in approximately six days. The speed of composition has been used to diminish it, which is wrong — the work is allegorically precise and psychologically serious in ways that repay slow reading. Hyde is not simply evil; the horror is that Jekyll finds liberation in him. The text has generated more psychological and literary interpretation than almost any other short Victorian fiction. It was immediately successful, selling 40,000 copies in six months in England alone.

The Stevensons eventually settled in Samoa in 1889, where he was known to the Samoans as Tusitala — "teller of tales." He became involved in Samoan politics, wrote in defense of the Samoan people against German colonial administration, and was beloved in a way that is almost without parallel for a European writer in the Pacific. He died in December 1894, at 44, of a cerebral hemorrhage while opening a bottle of wine. The Samoan chiefs carried his body to the top of Mount Vaea for burial, cutting a path through the jungle to do so.

The long critical condescension toward Stevenson — classified as an adventure writer for boys, not a serious literary figure — has been substantially revised. His essays are read seriously now. His late unfinished novel Weir of Hermiston, set aside the day he died, is considered by some critics his greatest work. The rehabilitation is deserved.