Robert Louis Stevenson

Robert Louis Stevenson was one of the most gifted and most beloved writers of the Victorian age — an author whose adventure novels are still read by millions, whose horror novella invented the modern concept of the divided self, whose children’s poems are still recited, and whose prose style is among the finest in nineteenth-century English. He was also one of the most romantic figures in literary history: a frail, tubercular Scotsman who wandered the world in search of health, married an American divorcee, sailed the South Seas, and died at forty-four on a Samoan hilltop, where the islanders carried his body to the summit of Mount Vaea and buried him overlooking the Pacific.

Edinburgh and Bohemia

Robert Louis Balfour Stevenson was born in Edinburgh in 1850, the only child of Thomas Stevenson, a civil engineer who designed lighthouses. His childhood was marked by chronic illness — he suffered from a respiratory condition, probably tuberculosis, that would plague him throughout his life — and by the conflict between the strict Calvinist piety of his parents and his own increasingly bohemian temperament.

He studied engineering and then law at the University of Edinburgh, taking his degree in 1875 but never practising. His true ambition was literature, and he served a deliberate apprenticeship in the craft of prose, studying the styles of Hazlitt, Montaigne, and Defoe and producing the polished travel essays — An Inland Voyage (1878) and Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes (1879) — that first established his reputation.

In 1876, he met Fanny Van de Grift Osbourne, an American woman ten years his senior, separated from her husband, with two children. He followed her to California in 1879, making a harrowing journey across America by emigrant train and steamship that nearly killed him. They married in 1880 and returned to Europe.

The Great Novels

Treasure Island (1883), written partly to entertain his stepson Lloyd Osbourne, is the greatest adventure novel in the English language — a story of pirates, buried treasure, and a boy’s education in the ambiguities of courage and morality. Its real achievement is the character of Long John Silver, the one-legged sea cook who is simultaneously the most charming and the most dangerous character in the book — a villain who is also a friend, a murderer who is also irresistible.

Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) is a horror novella that became one of the most famous stories in Western culture. The tale of a respectable doctor who transforms himself into a creature of pure evil entered the language — “Jekyll and Hyde” became a common phrase for moral duality — and influenced the development of psychoanalysis. Stevenson wrote it in three days, destroyed the first draft on his wife’s advice, and rewrote it in three more.

Kidnapped (1886) and its sequel Catriona (1893) are historical novels set in Scotland after the Jacobite rising of 1745, combining a gripping adventure plot with a nuanced portrait of Highland culture and a memorable friendship between the cautious Lowlander David Balfour and the flamboyant Jacobite Alan Breck Stewart.

The Master of Ballantrae and Weir of Hermiston

The Master of Ballantrae (1889) is Stevenson’s darkest novel — the story of two brothers, one conventionally virtuous and one diabolically charming, whose conflict spans decades and continents. Weir of Hermiston, left unfinished at his death, is considered by many critics to be his finest work — a novel of fathers and sons, law and justice, set in early-nineteenth-century Scotland, whose prose has a density and authority that suggests Stevenson was still developing as a writer at the time of his death.

Samoa and Death

Stevenson settled in Samoa in 1890, drawn by the climate and captivated by Polynesian culture. He became deeply involved in Samoan politics, defending the islanders against colonial exploitation. He wrote prolifically — The Beach of Falesá (1892), his finest short fiction, is a clear-eyed study of colonial corruption in the South Seas. He died of a cerebral haemorrhage on 3 December 1894, at the age of forty-four.

Reputation and Reassessment

Stevenson’s literary reputation has undergone a dramatic arc. In his lifetime he was hugely popular and critically respected. After his death, the reaction set in: the modernists dismissed him as a lightweight — a writer of children’s books and adventure stories. His friend Henry James had always taken him seriously, but the critical establishment did not. For much of the twentieth century, Stevenson was studied in English departments only as a minor Victorian, if at all.

The reassessment began in the 1980s and has accelerated since. Critics like Jenni Calder, Barry Menikoff, and Robert Louis Stevenson scholars at Edinburgh have argued convincingly that Stevenson was a far more complex and original writer than the popular image suggests — that Jekyll and Hyde is a profound meditation on the Victorian unconscious, that The Beach of Falesá anticipates Conrad’s colonial critique, that Weir of Hermiston would have been a masterpiece, and that his prose style — lucid, rhythmic, perfectly controlled — is among the finest achievements of nineteenth-century English.

Collecting Stevenson

Treasure Island (Cassell, London, 1883) in first edition is one of the most important Victorian novels and a major collecting target. Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (Longmans, London, 1886) in the original wrappers is extremely scarce. A Child’s Garden of Verses (Longmans, 1885) is a key children’s book. Kidnapped (Cassell, 1886) and The Master of Ballantrae (Cassell, 1889) are also heavily collected.