Robert Louis Stevenson

Robert Louis Stevenson: The Invalid Who Conquered the Pacific

On 3 December 1894, at his house on a Samoan hillside, a forty-four-year-old Scotsman was straining to open a bottle of wine when he stopped, turned to his wife and asked, "Does my face look strange?" He collapsed and was dead within hours, probably of a brain haemorrhage. He had spent his entire adult life bracing for death by suffocation; his lungs, in the end, had nothing to do with it. That night Samoans surrounded his body with a watch-guard, and in the morning they carried him on their shoulders to the top of Mount Vaea. They knew him as Tusitala — Teller of Tales.

The Lighthouse Family

Robert Lewis Balfour Stevenson was the only child of Thomas Stevenson, one of the great lighthouse engineers of the age, and Margaret Isabella Balfour, daughter of a Church of Scotland minister. Lighthouse-building was the family trade: his grandfather Robert was a celebrated civil engineer, and his uncles Alan and David carried on the work. The expectation that Louis would take his place in that line was total, and it collapsed almost immediately. He entered the University of Edinburgh in November 1867 to read engineering and showed no enthusiasm whatever for it. A compromise with his father produced a law degree instead; he qualified for the Scottish bar in July 1875 at twenty-four and never practised.

What he inherited from the engineers was not a profession but a sensibility — an eye for coastlines, storms and the machinery of construction that would later give his prose its startling physical exactness. He named his English house Skerryvore, after the lighthouse his uncle Alan built.

A Constitution Made of Coughs

Stevenson's health was the organising fact of his life. Serious bronchial trouble kept him out of school for long stretches — he passed through Mr Henderson's School, the Edinburgh Academy, a term at Spring Grove and a private school under Robert Thomson, none of them for long. Contemporaries assumed tuberculosis; modern analysis has suggested bronchiectasis or sarcoidosis, and research published in 2000 proposed hereditary haemorrhagic telangiectasia, which would explain the chronic respiratory complaints, the pulmonary haemorrhages and the early death together. He was, by every account, extraordinarily thin.

His nurse Alison Cunningham — "Cummy" — fed him a diet of intense Presbyterian religion mixed with folk terror that produced nightmares and, eventually, *A Child's Garden of Verses* (1885), which he dedicated to her. By twenty-two he had rejected Christianity outright and declared himself an atheist, devastating his devout parents. The rupture never fully healed, though in a conciliatory letter of 1878 he granted Christianity was "a very wise, noble and strange doctrine of life," and in Samoa he taught Sunday School and wrote prayers while keeping organised religion at arm's length.

Learning by Theft

Stevenson taught himself to write by systematic imitation. "Whenever I read a book or a passage that particularly pleased me," he explained, "I must sit down at once and set myself to ape that quality." The apprenticeship shows in the early travel books — *An Inland Voyage* (1878), from a canoe trip through Belgium and France, and *Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes* (1879), a two-week ramble with a donkey called Modestine that effectively invented recreational hiking and camping as literary subjects.

In 1876 at Grez-sur-Loing he met Fanny Van de Grift Osbourne, an American magazine writer ten years his senior, separated from her husband and the mother of three. When she returned to San Francisco he followed in 1879, travelling second-class to save money and to observe emigrant life, and arrived in Monterey near death. Ranchers and Fanny nursed him back. They married in May 1880 — he thirty, she forty — with the groom describing himself as "a mere complication of cough and bones, much fitter for an emblem of mortality than a bridegroom." They honeymooned in an abandoned mining camp, which became *The Silverado Squatters* (1883).

The Weevil in the Biscuit

The most productive three years of his life were spent largely in bed. From 1884 the Stevensons settled at Bournemouth for the sea air, and there, living by his own description "like a weevil in a biscuit," he wrote the books everyone knows. *Treasure Island* (1883) had already made him; Long John Silver may owe something to the one-legged poet W. E. Henley. Then came *A Child's Garden of Verses*, the *Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde* (1886), which permanently altered how the English-speaking world talks about the divided self, and *Kidnapped* (1886). Henry James came to dinner almost daily from April 1885.

Tusitala

In June 1888 Stevenson chartered the yacht *Casco* and sailed from San Francisco with his family, wandering the Pacific for nearly three years — Hawaii, where he befriended King Kalākaua and shipped a piano to the leper girls of Molokaʻi; the Gilberts, where he spent months with the tyrant-chief Tem Binoka; Tahiti; New Zealand. In December 1889 the family settled at Apia in Samoa, buying 314 acres at Vailima and building the islands' first two-storey house. Fanny's sister observed that "it was in Samoa that the word 'home' first began to have a real meaning for these gypsy wanderers."

Samoa also produced what Stevenson's biographers call his political awakening. Watching British, German and American warships manipulate clan rivalries in the harbour, he recognised the Scottish Highlands. He stopped being a romancer and became a reporter and agitator, firing letters at *The Times*, publishing *A Footnote to History: Eight Years of Trouble in Samoa* (1892), allying himself openly with the chief Mataafa against the German-backed Malietoa, and helping force the recall of two European officials at real risk of deportation. "I used to think meanly of the plumber," he wrote, "but how he shines beside the politician!" His fiction changed with him: *The Beach of Falesá* (1891) and *The Ebb-Tide* (1894) abandoned the sugar-candy South Seas. "It is the first realistic South Seas story," he told Sidney Colvin of *Falesá*. "Everybody else that has tried... got carried away by the romance." At his death he left *Weir of Hermiston* unfinished; many consider it his best. "It's so good," he reportedly said, "that it frightens me."

Why Robert Is Called a Genius

The quality at issue is verbal precision under the pressure of pure narrative momentum. G. K. Chesterton put it exactly: Stevenson "seemed to pick the right word up on the point of his pen, like a man playing spillikins." He could make an adventure story move at speed while every sentence held. *Jekyll and Hyde* did something rarer still — it supplied a permanent metaphor for the subconscious to a culture that did not yet have the vocabulary, and it did so in under a hundred pages.

The counter-case is substantial and was, for decades, the majority verdict. Britannica records that "the reaction against him set in soon after his death: he was considered a mannered and imitative essayist or 'only' a writer of children's books." Virginia Woolf — daughter of his early mentor Leslie Stephen — and Leonard Woolf condemned him. He was dropped from school curricula, omitted entirely from the 1973 *Oxford Anthology of English Literature*, and excluded from the *Norton Anthology* from 1968 until the eighth edition of 2006. Half his manuscripts, including *Treasure Island*'s, were sold off by his heirs and lost. The charge of mannerism is not baseless: the self-taught aping of masters sometimes shows.

The recovery is equally real. Britannica notes that "by the 1950s his reputation was established as a writer of originality and power," praising essays that render "aspects of the human condition," and stories that "combine horror and suspense with moral diagnosis" — while conceding his poetry lacks "the highest poetic genius." Roger Ebert's blunter version in 1996: Stevenson "should be put on the same shelf with Joseph Conrad and Jack London instead of in between Winnie the Pooh and Peter Pan."

Legacy

He is now read as a peer of Conrad and Henry James rather than a writer for boys — an essayist, literary theorist, social critic and witness to Pacific colonial history. By the Index Translationum he is the twenty-sixth most translated author in the world, just behind Dickens and ahead of Wilde and Poe. His translation of *The Bottle Imp* was the first work of literature in the Samoan language. On Mount Vaea his tombstone carries his own "Requiem": *Under the wide and starry sky / Dig the grave and let me lie.* The Samoans set it to a song of grief.

Achievements

• Notable work: Treasure Island
• Notable work: Kidnapped
• Notable work: Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
• Notable work: Prince Otto
• Educated at University of Edinburgh
• Worked as poet, essayist and novelist