STEVENSON, Robert Louis

Nationality: Scottish. Born: Robert Lewis Balfour Stevenson in Edinburgh, 13 November 1850. Education: Mr. Henderson's school, Edinburgh, 1855-61; Edinburgh Academy; a school in Isleworth; Mr. Thompson's school, Edinburgh; University of Edinburgh, 1867-72; studied law in the office of Skene Edwards and Gordon, Edinburgh: called to the Scottish bar, 1875. Family: Married Fanny Osbourne in 1880; two stepchildren, including the writer Lloyd Osbourne. Career: Lived in Europe, mainly in France, 1875-80; contributor, Cornhill Magazine, London, 1876-82; lived in the U.S., 1879-80 and 1887-88, Scotland, 1881-82, Hyères, France, 1882-84, and Bournemouth, 1884-87; made three cruises in the Pacific, 1888-89; settled at Vailima, Samoa, 1890. Died: 3 December 1894.

Publications

Collections

Works (Vailima Edition), edited by Lloyd Osbourne and FannyStevenson. 26 vols., 1922-23.

Selected Writings, edited by Saxe Commins. 1947.

Collected Poems, edited by Janet Adam Smith. 1950.

Essays, edited by Malcolm Elwin. 1950.

The Collected Shorter Fiction, edited by Peter Stoneley. 1991.

Short Stories

New Arabian Nights. 1882.

More New Arabian Nights: The Dynamiter, with Fanny Stevenson. 1885.

Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. 1886; edited by EmmaLetley, with Weir of Hermiston, 1987.

The Merry Men and Other Tales and Fables. 1887.

Island Nights' Entertainments, Consisting of The Beach of Falesá, The Bottle Imp, The Isle of Voices. 1893.

The Ebb-Tide: A Trio and Quartette, with Lloyd Osbourne. 1894.

The Body-Snatcher. 1895.

The Amateur Emigrant from the Clyde to Sandy Hook. 1895.

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, with Other Fables. 1896.

Fables. 1896.

The Waif Woman. 1916.

When the Devil Was Well, edited by William P. Trent. 1921.

The Suicide Club and Other Stories, edited by J. KennethWhite. 1970.

An Old Song: A Newly Discovered Long Story; and a Previously Unpublished Short Story, Edifying Letters of the Rutherford Family, edited by Roger G. Swearingen. 1982.

The Scottish Stories and Essays, edited by Kenneth Gelder. 1989.

Novels

Treasure Island. 1883; edited by Emma Letley, 1985.

Prince Otto: A Romance. 1885.

Kidnapped, Being Memoirs of the Adventures of David Balfour in the Year 1751. 1886; edited by Emma Letley, with Catriona, 1986.

The Misadventures of John Nicholson: A Christmas Story. 1887.

The Black Arrow: A Tale of the Two Roses. 1888.

The Master of Ballantrae: A Winter's Tale. 1889; edited by EmmaLetley, 1983.

The Wrong Box, with Lloyd Osbourne. 1889; edited by ErnestMehew, 1989.

The Bottle Imp, with American Notes, by Rudyard Kipling. 1891.

The Wrecker, with Lloyd Osbourne. 1892.

Catriona: A Sequel to Kidnapped. 1893; as David Balfour, 1893; edited by Emma Letley, with Kidnapped, 1986.

Weir of Hermiston: An Unfinished Romance. 1896; edited by Emma Letley, with Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, 1987.

St. Ives, Being the Adventures of a French Prisoner in England, completed by Arthur Quiller-Couch. 1897.

Plays

Deacon Brodie; or, The Double Life, with W.E. Henley (produced1882). 1880; revised edition, 1888.

Admiral Guinea, with W.E. Henley (produced 1897). 1884.

Beau Austin, with W.E. Henley (produced 1890). 1884.

Macaire, with W.E. Henley (produced 1900). 1885.

The Hanging Judge, with Fanny Stevenson. 1887.

Monmouth, edited by Charles Vale. 1928.

Poetry

Penny Whistles (for children). 1883.

A Child's Garden of Verses. 1885.

Underwoods. 1887.

Ticonderoga. 1887.

Ballads. 1890.

Songs of Travel and Other Verses. 1896.

Poems Hitherto Unpublished, edited by George S. Hellman. 2 vols., 1916; as New Poems and Variant Readings, 1918; additional volume, edited by Hellman and William P. Trent, 1921.

Other

The Pentland Rising: A Page of History, 1666. 1866.

The Charity Bazaar: An Allegorical Dialogue. n.d.

An Appeal to the Clergy. 1875.

An Inland Voyage. 1878.

Edinburgh: Picturesque Notes. 1879.

Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes. 1879.

Virginibus Puerisque and Other Papers. 1881.

Familiar Studies of Men and Books. 1882.

The Silverado Squatters: Sketches from a Californian Mountain. 1883.

Memoirs and Portraits. 1887.

Thomas Stevenson, Civil Engineer. 1887.

Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin. 1887.

Father Damien: An Open Letter to the Reverend Dr. Hyde of Honolulu. 1890.

The South Seas: A Record of Three Cruises. 1890.

Across the Plains, with Other Memories and Essays, edited by Sidney Colvin. 1892.

A Footnote to History: Eight Years of Trouble in Samoa. 1892.

The Works (Edinburgh Edition), edited by Sidney Colvin. 28 vols., 1894-98.

In the South Seas. 1896.

A Mountain Town in France: A Fragment. 1896.

The Morality of the Profession of Letters. 1899.

Letters to His Family and Friends, edited by Sidney Colvin. 2 vols., 1899; revised edition, 4 vols., 1911.

Essays and Criticisms. 1903.

Prayers Written at Vailima. 1905.

Essays of Travel. 1905.

Essays in the Art of Writing. 1905.

Lay Morals and Other Papers. 1911.

Records of a Family of Engineers. 1912; unfinished chapters edited by J. Christian Bat, 1930.

Memoirs of Himself. 1912.

Some Letters, edited by Lloyd Osbourne. 1914.

On the Choice of a Profession. 1916.

Diogenes in London. 1920.

Hitherto Unpublished Prose Writings, edited by Henry H. Harper. 1921.

Stevenson's Workshop, with Twenty-Nine MS. Facsimiles, edited by William P. Trent. 1921.

Confessions of a Unionist: An Unpublished Talk on Things Current, Written in 1888, edited by F.V. Livingston. 1921.

The Best Thing in Edinburgh, edited by Katharine D. Osbourne. 1923.

The Castaways of Soledad, edited by George S. Hellman. 1928.

Henry James and Stevenson: A Record of Friendship and Criticism, edited by Janet Adam Smith. 1948.

Silverado Journal, edited by J.E. Jordan. 1954.

RLS: Stevenson's Letters to Charles Baxter, edited by De LanceyFerguson and Marshall Waingrow. 1956.

From Scotland to Silverado, edited by J.D. Hart. 1966.

Travels in Hawaii, edited by A. Grove Day. 1973.

The Amateur Emigrant, with Some First Impressions of America, edited by Roger G. Swearingen. 2 vols., 1976-77.

The Cévennes Journal: Notes on a Journey Through the French Highlands, edited by Gordon Golding. 1978.

From the Clyde to California: Stevenson's Emigrant Journey, edited by Andrew Noble. 1985.

The Lantern Bearers and Other Essays, edited by JeremyTreglown. 1988.

Selected Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson, edited by ErnestMehew . 1997.

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Bibliography:

The Stevenson Library of E. J. Beinecke by G. L. McKay, 6 vols., 1951-64; Three Victorian Travel Writers: An Annotated Bibliography of Criticism on Mrs. Frances Milton Trollope, Samuel Butler, and Stevenson by F. J. Bethke, 1977.

Critical Studies:

Stevenson the Dramatist by Arthur Wing Pinero, 1903, edited by C. Hamilton, 1914; Stevenson by G. K. Chesterton, 1927; Stevenson by Janet Adam Smith, 1937; Stevenson, 1947, and Stevenson and His World, 1973, both by David Daiches; Voyage to Windward: The Life of Stevenson by J. C. Furnas, 1951; Portrait of a Rebel: The Life and Work of Stevenson by Richard Aldington, 1957; Stevenson and the Fiction of Adventure by Robert Kiely, 1964; Stevenson and the Romantic Tradition by Edwin M. Eigner, 1966; Stevenson by Compton Mackenzie, 1968; Stevenson by James Pope-Hennessy, 1974; Stevenson by Paul M. Binding, 1974; The Henley-Stevenson Quarrel edited by Edward H. Cohen, 1974; Journey to Upolu: Stevenson, Victorian Rebel by Edward Rice, 1974; Stevenson by Irving S. Saposnik, 1974; Stevenson in Hawaii by Martha Mary McGaw, 1978; RLS: A Life Story by Jenni Calder, 1980, and Stevenson and Victorian Scotland edited by Calder, 1981; The Prose Writings of Stevenson: A Guide by Roger G. Swearingen, 1980; Stevenson: The Critical Heritage edited by Paul Maixner, 1981; Stevenson in California: A Remarkable Courtship by Roy Nickerson, 1982; Stevenson edited by Andrew Noble, 1983; Stevenson and The Beach of Falesá: A Study of Victorian Publishing with the Original Text by Barry Menikoff, 1984; A Stevenson Companion by J. R. Hammond, 1984; RLS in the South Seas: An Intimate Photographic Record edited by Alanna Knight, 1986; Dead Man's Chest: Travels after Stevenson by Nicholas Rankin, 1987; Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde after One Hundred Years edited by William Veeder and Gordon Hirsch, 1988; Robert Louis Stevenson: Poet and Teller of Tales by Bryan Beven, 1993; The Teller of Tales: In Search of Robert Louis Stevenson by Hunter Davies, 1994; Robert Louis Stevenson and the Appearance of Modernism: A Future Feeling by Alan Sandison, 1996.

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Robert Louis Stevenson was a deliberate and painstaking stylist. In one of his essays he says that he was busy from his earliest years in learning to write by playing the "sedulous ape" to a large variety of writers. In his short life he achieved an international reputation for his essays, travel books, poetry, and novels, including one of the best-known of all children's books, Treasure Island. Throughout his whole career he was also a notable writer of short fiction.

It is misleading to regard Stevenson as an English writer, as does, for instance, an editor of some of his short fiction. He is very much part of the Scottish tradition. He once proposed to write a book, Four Great Scotsmen, on Knox, Hume, Burns, and Scott, to show the "strong current" of Scottish life "making itself felt underneath and throughout." The same is true of Stevenson, even if his poor health drove him to live in warmer climes. In his day the influence of Walter Scott was at its height. He, like Stevenson, was an Edinburgh man, and he was one of the originators of short fiction as well as a powerful force in the development of the novel. Stevenson himself said that he felt a particular kinship with Robert Fergusson, a poet of the eighteenth century who wrote in Scots about the convivial and boisterous side of Edinburgh life.

This is another clue to Stevenson. As the son of a prosperous and distinguished Edinburgh family, who had been lighthouse builders for several generations, he was part of respectable society. But Edinburgh has long been a city of contrasts, and Stevenson was drawn to the more Bohemian side of its life. This led to a break with his father, afterwards reflected in his great unfinished novel, Weir of Hermiston. Scottish literature is often said to be marked by a combination of opposites between the rational and the fantastic. Stevenson is no exception. Indeed his short novel The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is the classic parable of the split personality, set in Edinburgh.

The imagination of Stevenson, like that of Scott and many other Scottish writers to this day, was nourished on the Border ballads. These are narrative poems, which have been passed on in oral tradition, telling of love, battle, and the supernatural. They are direct, economical in words, and strongly evocative of mood and place. As a child Stevenson had a nurse, Alison Cunningham, of Presbyterian and Covenanting convictions, who told him stories in good Scots, often involving moral dilemmas and encounters with the devil. All of these influences were to appear later in Steven-son's fiction.

Walter Allen in The Short Story in English (1981) dates the beginning of the modern short story to one that Stevenson first published in October 1877 and that afterwards appeared in his first collection, New Arabian Nights, in 1882. This was "A Lodging for the Night," an imaginary episode in the life of the French poet François Villon. Nothing very much happens. Villon witnesses a murder; then, cold and penniless, he is taken in for the night by a man alone in a richly furnished house. Villon contemplates theft, but desists. That, in a sense, is all; but the atmosphere of the place and time and the suspense are striking.

Some of Stevenson's plots are ingenious and full of surprise, but he is a master of the story that depends for its effect more on its atmosphere and the tension of not knowing what might happen next than on the events or even character. He said in a letter from Samoa in 1891 about one of his last and finest stories, "The Beach at Falesa": "Now I have got the smell, and the look of the thing a good deal." That was evidently his chief aim and he very often succeeded.

Stevenson's short fiction varies in length. He made something of a speciality of the novella or short novel, divided into chapters and amounting to about 50 or 80 pages. In his first collection "The Pavilion on the Links" is of this kind and so is the title piece of a later collection, The Merry Men. Both of these draw on his knowledge of the force of the sea and its tides and rocks, derived from his travels round the lighthouses with his father. Both also deal with mysterious events for which natural causes are eventually revealed. The same might be said of "The Beach at Falesa." It is written throughout in the first person as if by a trader of limited intelligence and unfortunate attitudes. He reveals more than he realizes of the racist attitudes of the white settlers in the Pacific islands, a technique of self-revelation that Stevenson may have learned from the Scottish novelist John Galt, who was a past master in the art.

Stevenson's particular skills, and the influences from his childhood, appear very strongly in his tales of the supernatural. Naturally enough, two of the best of them, "Thrawn Janet" and "Tod Lapraik" (inserted in the novel Catriona) are in Scots. "Markheim," another chilling tale of the devil, is in English and so is "The Body-Snatcher," although it deals with a notorious episode in the life of Edinburgh.

An impressive story, "Olalla," fits into none of these categories. It tells of the hopeless love of a convalescing officer for a mysterious girl in a sinister household in Spain. It is a fine example of Stevenson's ability to create the feel of a place and to write in the language and personality of the assumed narrator.

—Paul H. Scott

See the essays on "Markheim" and "Thrawn Janet."