Stevenson, Robert Louis Balfour

Stevenson, Robert Louis Balfour (originally Robert Lewis Balfour Stevenson) (1850–94), entered Edinburgh University to study engineering but soon abandoned this for the law. In 1875 L. Stephen introduced him to W. E. Henley, who became a close friend, and with whom he was to collaborate on four plays. From this time on much of his life was spent travelling in search of health; he suffered from a chronic bronchial condition (possibly tuberculosis). In France in 1876 he met Mrs Fanny Osbourne whom he married in 1880. He published An Inland Voyage (1878), describing a canoe tour in Belgium and France, and Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes (1879), relating a tour with his donkey Modestine. He travelled to California in 1879; published The Silverado Squatters (1883); then returned to Europe, settling at Bournemouth for three years in 1884, where he consolidated a friendship with H. James. By this time he had published widely in periodicals, and many of his short stories, essays, and travel pieces were collected in volume form. His first full-length work of fiction, Treasure Island (1883), brought him fame, which increased with the publication of The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886). This was followed by his popular Scottish romances, Kidnapped (1886), its sequel Catriona (1893), and The Master of Ballantrae (1889).

In 1888 Stevenson had set out with his family entourage for the South Seas. He visited the leper colony at Molokai, which inspired his celebrated defence of the Belgian priest Father Damien (1841–89), in Father Damien: An Open Letter to the Reverand Dr Hyde of Honolulu (1890). He finally settled in Samoa at Vailima, where he gained a reputation as ‘Tusitala’ or ‘The Story Teller’. He died there suddenly from a brain haemorrhage, while working on his unfinished masterpiece, Weir of Hermiston (1896).

Stevenson published many other volumes, including The Merry Men (1887, with ‘Markheim’ and his earliest Scottish story, ‘Thrawn Janet’); many travel books; Island Nights' Entertainments (1893), which includes ‘The Beach of Falesá’; and St Ives (1897, unfinished, completed by Quiller-Couch). With his stepson Lloyd Osbourne he wrote The Wrong Box (1889), The Wrecker (1892), and The Ebb-Tide (1894). He also published volumes of poetry, including A Child's Garden of Verses (1885) and Underwoods (1887): his Collected Poems, ed. Janet Adam Smith appeared in 1950. In them as in many of his prose works, critics have detected beneath the lightness of touch a sense of apprehension, sin, and suffering. The theme of dualism and the doppelgänger recurs in his work, as does an admiration for morally ambiguous heroes or anti-heroes. Although his more popular books have remained constantly in print, and have been frequently filmed, his critical reputation has been obscured by attention to his vivid personality and adventurous life.