Robert Louis Balfour Stevenson Biography

Robert Louis Balfour Stevenson was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, in November 1850, the only child of a prosperous middle-class family. His father, Thomas, was a civil engineer who specialized in the design and construction of lighthouses, and his mother, Margaret, was the daughter of a well-known clergyman. Probably the two most important influences on Stevenson's childhood were his family's strict (although not for the time fanatical) Presbyterian religion and his own ill health. During his frequent illnesses, his loving nurse, Alison Cunningham, like to entertain him with stories of bloody doings, hellfire, and damnation, and this made him a frightened, guilt-ridden child and also apparently something of a little prude — a characteristic he certainly outgrew, however, by the time he reached his late teens. His illnesses, which seem to have been the result of a weak or damaged immune system, making him susceptible to regular and debilitating bouts of respiratory infection and eventually to tuberculosis, encouraged his parents to spoil him. His mother, too, was often ill, and given the family's frequent winter trips from cold, wet Edinburgh to southern Europe, his father's scorn of schoolteachers, and Stevenson's own disinclination to go to school, his early education was spotty at best. He read widely if unsystematically, picked up languages with relative ease, and was occasionally tutored, but by the time he entered Edinburgh University at the age of sixteen, his background was anything but standard.

He did not suddenly become a model university student. His family expected that he would study engineering and join his father and uncle in the lighthouse business, and apparently Stevenson accepted this plan without protest. But he was not interested in construction or optics, and he studied as little as possible, skipped lectures, and was in general a lackluster student. He did, however, make the first real friends of his life, and he also joined a popular literary and debating society by invitation, which probably had more to do with his quirky but genuine personal attractiveness and his family name than with anyone's perception of his academic brilliance.

He eventually confessed to his father that he did not hope to become an engineer, at which his father swallowed his disappointment and suggested that he study law; Stevenson obediently did so, but was no more interested in this than in engineering, and although he was admitted to the bar at the age of 24, he never practiced. Still, his late teens and early twenties were a period of great and solid growth. He continued to read voluminously, if seldom in accordance with what he had been assigned. He roamed the streets of Edinburgh, alone and with friends, and although he apparently frequented his share of taverns and brothels, he also became a close observer of human behavior and a close listener to human language. Stevenson's youthful "dissipation" became much exaggerated in legend, after his fame and death; he was during these years on a strict allowance from his father and could not have afforded the wild life that gossip later attributed to him. He continued to travel, alone or with his parents, or sometimes with his cousin and good friend, Bob Stevenson. And always, from childhood on, he wrote — essays, poetry, descriptive sketches, and narrative accounts of historical events. His goal seems not to have been to make a living as a writer (which his family would not have considered a worthwhile profession) so much as to learn to write well. And learn he did.

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R obert Louis Stevenson, one of the masters of the Victorian adventure story, was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, on November 13, 1850. He was a sickly child, and respiratory troubles plagued him throughout his life. As a young man, he traveled through Europe, leading a bohemian lifestyle and penning his first two books, both travel narratives. In 1876, he met a married woman, Fanny Van de Grift Osbourne, and fell in love with her. Mrs. Osbourne eventually divorced her husband, and she and Stevenson were married.

Stevenson returned to London with his bride and wrote prolifically over the next decade, in spite of his terrible health. He won widespread admiration with Treasure Island, written in 1883, and followed it with Kidnapped in 1886; both were adventure stories, the former a pirate tale set on the high seas and the latter a historical novel set in Stevenson’s native Scotland. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, which Stevenson described as a “fine bogey tale,” also came out in 1886. It met with tremendous success, selling 40,000 copies in six months and ensuring Stevenson’s fame as a writer.

In its narrative of a respectable doctor who transforms himself into a savage murderer, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde tapped directly into the anxieties of Stevenson’s age. The Victorian era, named for Queen Victoria, who ruled England for most of the nineteenth century, was a time of unprecedented technological progress and an age in which European nations carved up the world with their empires. By the end of the century, however, many people were beginning to call into question the ideals of progress and civilization that had defined the era, and a growing sense of pessimism and decline pervaded artistic circles. Many felt that the end of the century was also witnessing a twilight of Western culture.

With the notion of a single body containing both the erudite Dr. Jekyll and the depraved Mr. Hyde, Stevenson’s novel imagines an inextricable link between civilization and savagery, good and evil. Jekyll’s attraction to the freedom from restraint that Hyde enjoys mirrors Victorian England’s secret attraction to allegedly savage non-Western cultures, even as Europe claimed superiority over them. This attraction also informs such books as Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. For, as the Western world came in contact with other peoples and ways of life, it found aspects of these cultures within itself, and both desired and feared to indulge them. These aspects included open sensuality, physicality, and other so-called irrational tendencies. Even as Victorian England sought to assert its civilization over and against these instinctual sides of life, it found them secretly fascinating. Indeed, society’s repression of its darker side only increased the fascination. As a product of this society, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde manifests this fascination; yet, as a work of art, it also questions this interest.

By the late 1880s, Stevenson had become one of the leading lights of English literature. But even after garnering fame, he led a somewhat troubled life. He traveled often, seeking to find a climate more amenable to the tuberculosis that haunted his later days. Eventually he settled in Samoa, and there Stevenson died suddenly in 1894, at the age of forty-four.

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