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Robert Louis Stevenson | HearLore
Robert Louis Stevenson
Robert Louis Stevenson was born with a chest that seemed determined to betray him, a physical frailty that would define his entire existence yet fail to silence his imagination. Born on the 13th of November 1850 at 8 Howard Place in Edinburgh, he entered a world of lighthouse engineers and Presbyterian ministers, inheriting a genetic predisposition to respiratory failure that would plague him from infancy. His early years were spent moving between damp, chilly houses and sunnier spa towns like Bridge of Allan, where a child's cave became the setting for Ben Gunn's hideout in his future masterpiece. While other children played outside, Stevenson spent his time dictating stories to his mother and nurse, Alison Cunningham, known affectionately as Cummy. Her mix of Calvinist terror and folk tales provided the nightmares that fueled his early writing, creating a precocious concern for religion and the supernatural that would never leave him. He was an only child, strange-looking and eccentric, often too ill to attend school regularly, yet he managed to publish his first work, The Pentland Rising, at the age of 16, a historical account of the Covenanters' rebellion that his father proudly paid to print. This early defiance of his physical limitations set the stage for a life where the body was a constant enemy, but the mind was an unstoppable force.
The Law That Led To Letters
At the University of Edinburgh, Stevenson enrolled to study engineering, a family tradition, but he quickly found himself avoiding lectures and devoting his energy to the Speculative Society, an exclusive debating club where he forged friendships that would shape his future. It was here that he met Charles Baxter, who would become his financial agent, and Professor Fleeming Jenkin, whose home hosted amateur dramas in which Stevenson participated. Yet the true pivot of his life came when he decided to pursue a life of letters, a choice that horrified his father, a leading lighthouse engineer who had expected his son to follow in the footsteps of his grandfather and uncles. Stevenson qualified for the Scottish bar in July 1875, aged 24, and his father even added a brass plate to their Heriot Row house reading R.L. Stevenson, Advocate, but he never practiced law. Instead, he spent his days traveling and writing, eventually rejecting the family profession in a famous essay called An Apology for Idlers, arguing that a happy person was a better thing to find than a five-pound note. His rejection of Christianity, which he declared at age 22, caused a rift with his parents that he later tried to mend, but the spiritual turmoil remained a constant undercurrent in his work, driving him to explore the darker corners of the human soul.
Robert Louis Stevenson was born on the 13th of November 1850 at 8 Howard Place in Edinburgh. He entered a world of lighthouse engineers and Presbyterian ministers with a genetic predisposition to respiratory failure that plagued him from infancy.
Who did Robert Louis Stevenson marry and when did they get married?
Robert Louis Stevenson married Fanny Van de Grift Osbourne in May 1880. She was 40 and he was 29 when they wed after he traveled to San Francisco to join her following a period of illness in Monterey.
Where did Robert Louis Stevenson live during the last years of his life?
Robert Louis Stevenson settled in the Samoan islands in December 1889 and purchased land at Vailima in January 1890. He built the islands' first two-storey house there and took the native name Tusitala, meaning Teller of Tales.
How did Robert Louis Stevenson die and what is the cause of his death?
Robert Louis Stevenson died on the 3rd of December 1894 at the age of 44 after collapsing while talking to his wife. He likely died from a brain haemorrhage, though research published in 2000 suggests he might have suffered from hereditary haemorrhagic telangiectasia.
Where is Robert Louis Stevenson buried and what is on his tomb?
Robert Louis Stevenson is buried on Mount Vaea in Samoa on land donated by British Acting Vice Consul Thomas Trood. His tomb features an epitaph from his poem Requiem on the eastern side and the biblical passage of Ruth 1:16, 17 on the western side.
Why was Robert Louis Stevenson excluded from literary anthologies in the 20th century?
Robert Louis Stevenson was excluded from literary anthologies in the 20th century because he was relegated to children's literature and horror genres by figures such as Virginia Woolf. His exclusion reached its nadir in the 1973 Oxford Anthology of English Literature where he was entirely unmentioned and he was excluded from The Norton Anthology of English Literature from 1968 to 2000.
In September 1876, Stevenson met Fanny Van de Grift Osbourne in Grez-sur-Loing, a woman who was already divorced and raising three children, including a son named Lloyd. She was 34, he was 26, and their connection was immediate and intense, though it began with a correspondence that wavered between suitor and son. Fanny had been married at 17 and moved to Nevada to rejoin her husband after the Civil War, but anger over his infidelities led to a series of separations. When Stevenson returned to Britain, he wrote the essay On falling in love for The Cornhill Magazine, but he could not stay away. They met again in early 1877 and became lovers, spending the following year together in France before Fanny returned to San Francisco. Stevenson followed her in August 1879, aged 28, against the advice of his friends and without notifying his parents, taking a second-class passage on the steamship Devonia to save money and increase the adventure. He traveled overland by train from New York City to California, a journey that broke his health and left him near death in Monterey, where local ranchers nursed him back to life. Fanny, now divorced and recovered from her own illness, came to his bedside and nursed him to recovery, and in May 1880, they were married. She was 40, he was 29, and he described himself as a mere complication of cough and bones, much fitter for an emblem of mortality than a bridegroom, yet their marriage would become the anchor that allowed him to write his greatest works.
The Pacific That Changed Him
In June 1888, Stevenson chartered the yacht Casco from Samuel Merritt and set sail with his family from San Francisco, leaving behind the European literary circles that had once embraced him. The sea air and thrill of adventure restored his health for a time, and for nearly three years he wandered the eastern and central Pacific, stopping for extended stays at the Hawaiian Islands, where he became a good friend of King Kalākaua and befriended the king's niece Princess Victoria Kaiulani. He spent time at the Gilbert Islands, Tahiti, New Zealand, and the Samoan Islands, completing The Master of Ballantrae and composing two ballads based on the legends of the islanders. During this period, he also wrote The Bottle Imp, a moral fable set in a Pacific-wide community, and preserved the experience of these years in his letters and in In the South Seas, which was published posthumously. He made a voyage in 1889 with Lloyd on the trading schooner Equator, visiting Butaritari, Mariki, Apaiang, and Abemama in the Gilbert Islands, where they spent several months with tyrant-chief Tem Binoka. In 1889, he visited the leper colony on Moloka'i, Hawaii, where leper girls were cared for by Sisters of Saint Francis, led by Mother Marianne Cope, and he brought a croquet set and taught the girls to play croquet, even shipping a piano to them after his departure. These experiences transformed him from a romantic adventurer into a political observer, as he became increasingly alarmed by the growing European and American influence in the South Sea islands.
The Teller Of Tales In Samoa
In December 1889, 39-year-old Stevenson and his extended family arrived at the port of Apia in the Samoan islands, and there he and Fanny decided to settle. In January 1890, they purchased at Vailima, some miles inland from Apia, the capital, on which they built the islands' first two-storey house. Fanny's sister, Nellie Van de Grift Sanchez, wrote that it was in Samoa that the word home first began to have a real meaning for these gypsy wanderers. In May 1891, they were joined by Stevenson's mother, Margaret, and while his wife set about managing and working the estate, 40-year-old Stevenson took the native name Tusitala, meaning Teller of Tales, and began collecting local stories. Often he would exchange these for his own tales, and the first work of literature in Samoan was his translation of The Bottle Imp in 1891. Immersing himself in the islands' culture occasioned a political awakening, placing him at an angle to the rival great powers, Britain, Germany, and the United States, whose warships were common sights in Samoan harbours. He understood that, as in the Scottish Highlands, an indigenous clan society was unprepared for the arrival of foreigners who played upon its existing rivalries and divisions. As the external pressures upon Samoan society grew, tensions soon descended into several inter-clan wars, and Stevenson became a reporter and an agitator, firing off letters to The Times which rehearsed with an ironic twist that surely owed something to his Edinburgh legal training, a tale of European and American misconduct. He openly allied himself with chief Mataafa, whose rival Malietoa was backed by the Germans whose firms were beginning to monopolise copra and cocoa bean processing, and in 1894, just months before his death, he addressed the island chiefs, warning them that if they did not occupy and use their country, others would.
The Final Burst Of Genius
Stevenson wrote an estimated 700,000 words during his years on Samoa, completing The Beach of Falesá, the first-person tale of a Scottish copra trader on a South Sea island, a man unheroic in his actions or his own soul. The villains were white, their behaviour towards the islanders ruthlessly duplicitous, and Stevenson saw The Beach of Falesá as the ground-breaking work in his turn away from romance to realism. He wrote to his friend Sidney Colvin that The Ebb-Tide, the misadventures of three deadbeats marooned in the Tahitian port of Papeete, confirmed the new Realistic turn in his writing, presenting a microcosm of imperialist society directed by greedy but incompetent whites. No longer was Stevenson writing about human nature in terms of a contest between Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, as the edges of moral responsibility and the margins of moral judgement were too blurred. With his imagination still residing in Scotland and returning to earlier form, Stevenson also wrote Catriona, a sequel to his earlier novel Kidnapped, and in a last burst of energy he began work on Weir of Hermiston, which he felt was the best work he had done. He wrote to H. B. Baildon that it was so good that it frightened him, and although he felt he had overworked and exhausted his creative vein, he continued to write until the very end. His writing was partly driven by the need to meet the expenses of Vailima, but in his final months, he produced a body of work that would redefine his legacy, moving from the adventure stories of his youth to a darker, more complex realism that anticipated the works of Joseph Conrad and Henry James.
The Death That Became A Legend
On the 3rd of December 1894, Stevenson was talking to his wife and straining to open a bottle of wine when he suddenly exclaimed, What's that?, then asked his wife, Does my face look strange?, and collapsed. He died within a few hours, at the age of 44, possibly as the result of a brain haemorrhage, though research published in 2000 suggests he might have suffered from hereditary haemorrhagic telangiectasia, a condition that would explain his chronic respiratory complaints, recurrent episodes of pulmonary haemorrhage, and his early death. After his death, the Samoans insisted on surrounding his body with a watch-guard during the night and on bearing him on their shoulders to nearby Mount Vaea, where they buried him on a spot overlooking the sea on land donated by British Acting Vice Consul Thomas Trood. Based on Stevenson's poem Requiem, the following epitaph is inscribed on his tomb: Under the wide and starry sky, Dig the grave and let me lie. Glad did I live and gladly die, And I laid me down with a will. The requiem appears on the eastern side of the grave, while on the western side the biblical passage of Ruth 1:16, 17 is inscribed. Stevenson was loved by the Samoans, and his tombstone epitaph was translated to a Samoan song of grief, ensuring that his final resting place would be a place of pilgrimage for generations to come. The ensign flag draped over his coffin in Samoa was returned to Edinburgh and now resides in a glass case over the fireplace of rooms in Edinburgh University's Old College, a testament to the enduring bond between the writer and the people who had embraced him in his final years.
The Ghost In The Machine
Half of Stevenson's original manuscripts are lost, including those of Treasure Island, The Black Arrow, and The Master of Ballantrae, and his heirs sold his papers during the First World War, with many of his documents auctioned off in 1918. Stevenson was a celebrity in his own time, being admired by many other writers, including Marcel Proust, Arthur Conan Doyle, Henry James, J. M. Barrie, Rudyard Kipling, and Emilio Salgari, and later Cesare Pavese, Bertolt Brecht, Ernest Hemingway, Jack London, Vladimir Nabokov, and G. K. Chesterton, who said that Stevenson seemed to pick the right word up on the point of his pen, like a man playing spillikins. He was seen for much of the 20th century as a second-class writer, relegated to children's literature and horror genres, condemned by literary figures such as Virginia Woolf and her husband Leonard Woolf, and gradually excluded from the canon of literature taught in schools. His exclusion reached its nadir in the 1973 2,000-page Oxford Anthology of English Literature where he was entirely unmentioned, and The Norton Anthology of English Literature excluded him from 1968 to 2000, including him only in the eighth edition in 2006. The late 20th century brought a re-evaluation of Stevenson as an artist of great range and insight, a literary theorist, an essayist and social critic, a witness to the colonial history of the Pacific Islands, and a humanist. He is now evaluated as a peer of authors such as Joseph Conrad, whom he influenced with his South Seas fiction, and Henry James, with new scholarly studies and organisations devoted to him. Throughout the vicissitudes of his scholarly reception, Stevenson has remained popular worldwide, ranked the 26th-most-translated author in the world, ahead of Oscar Wilde and Edgar Allan Poe, ensuring that his voice continues to resonate across cultures and generations.