Robert Louis Stevenson

• 1. Introduction

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  Robert Louis Stevenson was born at 8 Howard Place in Edinburgh on the 13th of November 1850, into a dynasty of lighthouse engineers, and died at the age of 44 on a tropical island at the far end of the Pacific. Between those two points lies one of the most restless lives in the history of British letters. He was a man whose lungs never fully cooperated with his ambitions, whose body was so frequently wrecked by illness that he once described himself as "a mere complication of cough and bones" -- yet who still managed to produce Treasure Island, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Kidnapped, and A Child's Garden of Verses, among dozens of other works. He crossed oceans, moved to Samoa, befriended a king, and turned his pen toward the politics of empire in his final years. By 2018, he had been ranked the 26th-most-translated author in the world, just behind Charles Dickens. How did a perpetually sick man from a family of engineers become one of literature's most enduring voices? And why did the literary establishment spend most of the 20th century trying to forget him?

• 2. The Engineer's Son

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  Thomas Stevenson, Robert's father, was a leading lighthouse engineer. His own father Robert Stevenson was a civil engineer, and his brothers Alan and David worked in the same profession. Thomas's maternal grandfather Thomas Smith had also been in the field. The family's identity was so bound up with this work that when Robert showed no interest in following them, the disappointment was predictable -- though his mother reported that Thomas was "wonderfully resigned" to his son's decision.

  The child's constitution was shaped by the same damp Edinburgh climate that defined his early years. His nurse, Alison Cunningham -- known as Cummy -- was a woman of intense Calvinist faith mixed with folk belief, and her stories became a source of nightmares for the young Robert. She also read to him from John Bunyan and the Bible when he was bedridden. He later dedicated A Child's Garden of Verses to her, recalling those sick-room hours in the poem "The Land of Counterpane".

  Stevenson was a late reader, not mastering the skill until he was seven or eight. But before that he dictated stories to his mother and nurse, and he wrote compulsively throughout childhood. His father recognised this early. He had once written stories himself in his spare time until his own father found them and told him to "give up such nonsense and mind your business." He did not repeat that response with his son. At 16, Robert published his first work -- The Pentland Rising: A Page of History, 1666 -- and his father paid for the printing. The publication date of 1866 was not accidental; it marked the 200th anniversary of the Covenanters' rebellion the essay described.

  In November 1867, Stevenson entered the University of Edinburgh to study engineering, and from the start he devoted his energies to avoiding lectures. The university proved far more useful as a social environment. He joined the Speculative Society, an exclusive debating club, where he formed a lasting friendship with Charles Baxter, who would later become his financial agent. He also grew close to the professor Fleeming Jenkin, whose biography he would eventually write. And he met his cousin Robert Alan Mowbray Stevenson -- known as Bob -- who had rejected the family profession to study art, a choice that encouraged Robert to trust his own instincts.

• 3. London Circles and Fanny Osbourne

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  In late 1873, aged 23, Stevenson met two people who would shape the next decade of his life: Fanny Sitwell and Sidney Colvin. Sitwell was 34 years old, separated from her husband, and drew the devotion of many who met her -- including Colvin, who eventually married her in 1901. Stevenson wrote to her over several years, wavering in his letters between the role of suitor and son, addressing her as "Madonna". Colvin, meanwhile, placed Stevenson's first paid contribution -- an essay titled "Roads" -- in The Portfolio.

  Stevenson's health failed and he was sent to Menton on the French Riviera in November 1873 to recover. He returned in better health the following April and began making long trips to the neighbourhood of the Forest of Fontainebleau, staying at Barbizon, Grez-sur-Loing and Nemours, becoming part of the artists' colonies there. He qualified for the Scottish bar in July 1875, aged 24, and his father affixed a brass plate reading "R.L. Stevenson, Advocate" to the Heriot Row house. He never practised law.

  It was a canoe voyage through Belgium and France with his friend Sir Walter Simpson that brought Stevenson to Grez-sur-Loing in September 1876, where he met Fanny Van de Grift Osbourne. She had been born in Indianapolis in 1840, had married at 17, and had taken her children to France to study art after separating from her husband. By the time Stevenson met her she was a published magazine short-story writer in her own right. He wrote the essay "On Falling in Love" for The Cornhill Magazine. They became lovers.

  In August 1878 Fanny returned to San Francisco. In August 1879, aged 28, Stevenson set off after her without telling his parents and against the advice of his friends. He took second-class passage on the steamship Devonia, partly to save money and partly to learn how others travelled. He crossed the United States overland by train from New York City to California. He was near death when he reached Monterey, where local ranchers nursed him back to health. He stayed at the French Hotel at 530 Houston Street -- now a museum called the Stevenson House -- and often dined on credit at a nearby restaurant run by a Frenchman named Jules Simoneau. Years later he sent Simoneau an inscribed copy of Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, writing that it would be a stranger case still if Robert Louis Stevenson ever forgot Jules Simoneau.

  By December 1879, now 29, Stevenson had recovered enough to continue to San Francisco, where he struggled on forty-five cents a day. By winter his health was broken again. Fanny, newly divorced, came to his bedside and nursed him to recovery. Fanny and Robert married in May 1880 -- she was 40, he was 29. They spent their honeymoon at an abandoned mining camp on Mount Saint Helena, an experience he wrote about in The Silverado Squatters.

• 4. Westbourne and the Major Works

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  By 1884 the Stevensons had settled in Westbourne in the south-coast town of Bournemouth. Stevenson named the house Skerryvore, after a Scottish lighthouse built by his uncle Alan. He had moved there for the sea air, and despite being largely bedridden -- he described himself as living "like a weevil in a biscuit" -- his three years in Westbourne produced the bulk of his most celebrated writing.

  From April 1885, Henry James became a daily presence at Skerryvore. The two had already exchanged views in print on the "art of fiction", and James had moved to Bournemouth to support his invalid sister Alice. He took up Stevenson's invitation to come for conversation at the dinner table. Their friendship eventually found its way into a formal exchange of ideas: in "A Humble Remonstrance", Stevenson answered James's claim that the novel competes with life. Stevenson protested that no novel could hope to match life's complexity, writing that "Life is monstrous, infinite, illogical, abrupt and poignant; a work of art, in comparison, is neat, finite, self-contained, rational, flowing, and emasculate." He insisted the novel's power lay not in its resemblance to life but in its "immeasurable difference" from it. James preferred Treasure Island to Kidnapped. Stevenson had written Treasure Island as a story for boys, thinking it "in no need of psychology or fine writing", but its success has been credited with freeing children's writing from the "chains of Victorian didacticism".

  Thomas Stevenson died in 1887, leaving his 36-year-old son free to follow his physician's advice to try a completely different climate. Stevenson headed for Colorado but after landing in New York, the family changed course and spent the winter in the Adirondacks at a cure cottage in Saranac Lake. During the intensely cold winter he wrote some of his best-known essays, including "Pulvis et Umbra", and began The Master of Ballantrae. He began lightly planning a cruise to the southern Pacific for the following summer.

• 5. The Pacific Years

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  In June 1888 Stevenson chartered the yacht Casco from Samuel Merritt and set sail from San Francisco with his family. The sea air restored him, and for nearly three years he wandered the eastern and central Pacific. He spent extended time in the Hawaiian Islands, where he became a close friend of King Kalakaua. He befriended the king's niece Princess Victoria Kaiulani, who also had Scottish heritage. He visited the Gilbert Islands, Tahiti, New Zealand and the Samoan Islands, completing The Master of Ballantrae and composing two ballads based on island legends.

  In 1889 he visited the leper colony on Molokai in Hawaii, where girls were cared for by Sisters of Saint Francis led by Mother Marianne Cope. He brought a croquet set and taught the girls to play. After leaving, he arranged for a piano to be shipped to them from Honolulu.

  In December 1889, aged 39, Stevenson and his extended family arrived at the port of Apia in Samoa. He and Fanny bought land at Vailima, some miles inland from Apia, and 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". Stevenson took the Samoan name Tusitala, meaning "Teller of Tales", and began collecting local stories. The first work of literature in Samoan was his translation of The Bottle Imp in 1891, which presents a Pacific-wide community as the setting for a moral fable.

  Stevenson wrote an estimated 700,000 words during his years in Samoa. He completed The Beach of Falesa, which he described as "the first realistic South Seas story", telling his friend Sidney Colvin: "Everybody else that has tried, that I have seen, got carried away by the romance, and ended in a kind of sugar candy sham epic." The Ebb-Tide, completed in 1894 and co-written with Lloyd Osbourne, opens with the line: "Throughout the island world of the Pacific, scattered men of many European races and from almost every grade of society carry activity and disseminate disease." Reviewers noted parallels with several of Conrad's works, including Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim. By the end of 1893, Stevenson feared he had overworked and exhausted his creative vein. Then he began Weir of Hermiston. "It's so good that it frightens me," he reportedly exclaimed. The manuscript was unfinished when he died.

• 6. Political Awakening in Samoa

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  Immersing himself in Samoan culture produced what biographer Julia Reid calls a "political awakening". Stevenson came to see that, as in the Scottish Highlands, an indigenous clan society was unprepared for foreign powers who played upon its existing rivalries. Britain, Germany and the United States all had warships in Samoan harbours. Rival clan wars followed.

  Stevenson began firing off letters to The Times, chronicling European and American misconduct. His A Footnote to History: Eight Years of Trouble in Samoa, published in 1892, was a detailed account of the intersection of great-power rivalries and the first Samoan Civil War. He helped secure the recall of two European officials, fearing his efforts might result in his own deportation. He allied himself openly with chief Mataafa, whose rival Malietoa was backed by German firms that were beginning to monopolise copra and cocoa bean processing.

  What alarmed Stevenson most was what he called the Samoans' "economic innocence" -- their failure to establish legal claim to their land through its active use and management. In 1894, just months before his death, he addressed the island chiefs directly: "There is but one way to defend Samoa. Hear it before it is too late. It is to make roads, and gardens, and care for your trees, and sell their produce wisely, and, in one word, to occupy and use your country." He told them of the Scots: "These were a fine people in the past brave, gay, faithful, and very much like Samoans, except in one particular, that they were much wiser and better at that business of fighting of which you think so much. But the time came to them as it now comes to you, and it did not find them ready."

  Five years after Stevenson's death, the Samoan Islands were partitioned between Germany and the United States.

• 7. Death and Afterlife

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  On the 3rd of December 1894, while at his home in Vailima, Stevenson was talking to his wife when he suddenly exclaimed, "What's that?", then asked her, "Does my face look strange?" He collapsed and died within a few hours at the age of 44, possibly as the result of a brain haemorrhage. Research published in 2000 proposed that he may have suffered from hereditary haemorrhagic telangiectasia -- also known as Osler-Rendu-Weber Syndrome -- which could explain his chronic respiratory complaints and early death.

  The Samoans surrounded his body with a watch-guard through the night and carried him on their shoulders to Mount Vaea, where they buried him on a spot overlooking the sea. His tombstone epitaph, drawn from his poem "Requiem", was translated into a Samoan song of grief. The ensign flag that was draped over his coffin was returned to Edinburgh and now rests in a glass case over the fireplace of rooms in Edinburgh University's Old College belonging to the Speculative Society -- the debating club where Stevenson had made some of his most important friendships as a student.

  For much of the 20th century the literary establishment consigned Stevenson to the children's shelf. Virginia Woolf -- daughter of his early mentor Leslie Stephen -- condemned him, and he was gradually excluded from the teaching canon. His exclusion reached a low point in 1973, when a 2,000-page Oxford Anthology of English Literature left him out entirely. The Norton Anthology excluded him from 1968 to 2000, from its first through seventh editions, including him only in the eighth edition of 2006.

  The late 20th century brought a reversal. Scholars began reading him as a literary theorist, an essayist and social critic, a witness to Pacific colonial history, and a humanist. In 1996 the film critic Roger Ebert wrote that Stevenson "is a splendid writer of stories for adults, and he should be put on the same shelf with Joseph Conrad and Jack London instead of in between Winnie the Pooh and Peter Pan." By 2018, he was ranked the 26th-most-translated author in the world, ahead of Oscar Wilde and Edgar Allan Poe. Half of his original manuscripts are lost, including those of Treasure Island, The Black Arrow and The Master of Ballantrae -- many auctioned off in 1918 after his heirs sold his papers during the First World War. What survives is more than enough to keep the argument about his place in literature very much alive.