Stevenson, Robert Louis

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STEVENSON, ROBERT LOUIS

STEVENSON, ROBERT LOUIS (1850–1894), Scottish novelist, poet, essayist, travel writer.

Robert Louis Balfour Stevenson was born in Edinburgh into a well-known family of lighthouse engineers. However, he did not follow the family tradition and, at the age of twenty-one, he began to write travel tales and essays. He quickly established himself as a writer of promise.

Troubled by ill health from early childhood, Stevenson sought a climate that would be conducive to the treatment of his respiratory ailment. He traveled in France and in 1876 he met the American Fanny Osbourne, a married woman with two children. She made a strong impression on Stevenson and, despite his poor health, he followed her to the United States when she returned there. His account of that life-threatening journey appeared as The Amateur Emigrant (1879) and Across the Plains (1892). Following Fanny's divorce, she and Stevenson married in San Francisco in May 1880. The couple spent some time after the marriage in the abandoned mining camp of Silverado. This period is detailed in The Silver-ado Squatters (1884). The Stevensons arrived in England in August 1880 and Stevenson's father bought Fanny a house in Bournemouth as a wedding present. Persistent health problems necessitated the couple spending the successive winters of 1881 and 1882 in the Swiss Alps at Davos.

Stevenson embarked on a spell of prolific output. "Thrawn Janet," "The Merry Men," the essays published in Familiar Studies of Men and Books (1881), Virginibus Puerisque (1881), and the tales collected in New Arabian Nights (1882) ensured his growing status as a writer. Treasure Island was serialized in Young Folks during 1881–1882 but it did not bring Stevenson immediate popular acclaim. That came in 1886 with Kidnapped and Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. These works established Stevenson's reputation alongside Rudyard Kipling and H. Rider Haggard as a writer of adventure fiction.

Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde concerns the strange fate of the well-respected Dr. Henry Jekyll, a man of scientific curiosity who releases his terrible alter ego, Edward Hyde, by a chemical process. Hyde, a troglodytic figure, is the polar opposite of the genteel and refined Jekyll. Hyde commits two violent crimes against innocent citizens, a young girl and an elderly man. Dr. Jekyll's transformation releases him from the obligations of profession and social class but it also compromises his close relationship with his exclusively male companions. In order to resist the temptation to become Hyde, Henry Jekyll commits suicide in his laboratory.

The novella was well received by its late-Victorian audience and was considered to be a moral tale. Publication of the novella coincided with a growing interest in the sciences and with the pioneering work of Jean-Martin Charcot and Sigmund Freud in their exploration of human personality and identity. It also chronicled the late-nineteenth-century obsession with regression and atavism (the recurrence in an organism of a trait typical of an ancestral form) that was linked to Charles Darwin's conclusions in Origin of Species (1859). The text has continued to generate critical comment and is frequently compared to Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) and to Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897). "Jekyll and Hyde" has entered into common usage to describe an individual of split personality.

Following the death of his father in 1887, Stevenson, his mother, Fanny, and his stepson Lloyd Osbourne set off for the United States. They stayed at Saranac Lake in the Adirondack Mountains. Stevenson conceived the outline of The Master of Ballantrae, subtitled "A Winter's Tale," while at Saranac. The novel conveys the bleak wilderness of the physical landscape in a metaphorical wasteland. There are striking resemblances to James Hogg's The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824), which also deals with the politico-religious division of Scotland in the aftermath of the Jacobite Uprising of 1745. The Master of Ballantrae was completed in Samoa and published in 1889.

Stevenson's American publishers, Scribner's, commissioned a book on the South Seas and the family sailed from San Francisco and visited the islands of the Marquesas, the Paumotus, Tahiti, and finally Hawaii. They sailed on a further voyage to the Gilbert Islands and on to Samoa, where Stevenson settled on the island of Upolu in 1889. He built the house at Vailima where he resided and wrote until his death.

Stevenson soon became embroiled in the local politics of Samoa, and his writing developed an aggressive rejection of the values of the Victorian imperial project. "The Beach of Falesá" (1892) and The Ebb Tide (1893) together constitute a critique of imperialism that stands comparison with Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1899). In this regard Stevenson offers his readers an alternative to the views of empire expressed by both Kipling and John Buchan.

Catriona, or David Balfour, as the novel was marketed in the United States, is the sequel to Kidnapped and was published in 1893. The novel explores the same theme of duality that fascinated Stevenson throughout his life and intertwines the often antagonistic cultural traditions of the Scottish Highlands and Lowlands.

Stevenson was working on Weir of Hermiston when he suffered a cerebral hemorrhage and died at Vailima on 3 December 1894. This unfinished novel examines the issues of ancestry and heredity, seduction, murder, and injustice and bears close similarity to Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles (1891).

Since the 1980s, Stevenson has been reevaluated as a late-nineteenth-century writer. He is one of a very few writers to have succeeded in all of his chosen genres. In addition, he contributed essays that establish him as an intellectual, a deep-thinking theoretician on writing and on art in the broader sense.