Robert Louis Stevenson was born in Edinburgh on November 13, 1850, into a family of lighthouse engineers. He was expected to join the business. He studied law instead, then abandoned that too, and good for him. He spent his adult life traveling in search of a climate that wouldn’t kill him.
He had a chronic lung condition that confined him for long stretches and made him a semi-invalid for decades. He died in Samoa in 1894, aged forty-four, of a cerebral hemorrhage while opening a bottle of wine. That’s a more sudden ending than the illness had ever managed.
In between he wrote two books that everybody knows and a great deal of work almost nobody reads, and the gap between those two categories tells you something about how reputations calcify. Stevenson gets a raw deal. He wrote two books so good they swallowed his name, then critics who mistook clarity for simplicity labeled him a boys’ adventure writer. I’d put him beside any of the Victorians critics take more seriously, and the essays alone should’ve earned him a better seat.
The traveling wasn’t tourism. He spent his adult life moving through France, California, Switzerland, the Adirondacks and finally the Pacific, chasing air his lungs could tolerate, and the moves were frequently made in poor health at considerable risk.
That produced a body of work with an unusually wide geography for a Victorian writer. Scottish historical novels, a California mining camp, a Pacific trading post, and an English gothic novella, written by somebody who had been in most of those places instead of reading about them.
He was also thirty-two when Treasure Island appeared and dead at forty-four. That means the entire famous body of work belongs to a twelve-year window. He also wrote constantly through illness, sometimes propped up in bed and forbidden to speak, dictating or writing left-handed when his right arm was strapped down. Writers who claim they can’t work through a head cold should read that sentence twice.
The illness defined the shape of his life more than any decision he made. He coughed blood from childhood, spent long stretches confined to bed, and was nursed through most of it by a family nurse whose stories of Covenanters and the Scottish supernatural he credited for his imagination.
The break with his father went beyond the lighthouses. He told him in his early twenties that he no longer believed in the family’s Presbyterianism, which in that household was a serious matter, and the relationship took years to recover. He met Fanny Osbourne, an American woman ten years older and separated from her husband, at an artists’ colony in France. When she returned to California he followed her across the Atlantic in steerage and then across America by emigrant train, arriving so ill he nearly died.
They married in San Francisco in 1880 and spent a honeymoon in an abandoned mining camp because it was what they could afford. She, her son and later her daughter went with him for the rest of his life.
Treasure Island itself began as a map drawn to entertain that stepson on a wet holiday in Scotland. A doodle for a bored kid on a rainy holiday ended up dictating pirate fiction ever since. That’s an enormous return on one map.
What pirate conventions did Treasure Island invent?
Nearly everything anybody thinks they know about pirates.
The one-legged sea cook with a parrot. The treasure map with an X. The black spot. The marooned man gone strange from solitude. The schooner, the stockade, the apple barrel. Before 1883 these things weren’t standard, and afterward they were compulsory.
What’s worth noticing is how little of it came from history.
Real piracy involved very few treasure maps and almost no buried gold, because a crew that stole money spent it. Stevenson invented a functional set of conventions and they displaced the actual record. That’s the same achievement Stoker managed with vampires fourteen years later.
The mechanism is identical in both cases. A scattered subject gets codified clearly enough by one writer that the clear version travels and the messy truth doesn’t.
I’ve got enormous respect for that kind of invention. Stevenson didn’t need the history to cooperate. He built something a reader could hold in one hand, and pirate stories have been borrowing from it ever since without paying rent.
Why is Long John Silver the whole of Treasure Island?
Because he’s the first ambiguous villain in popular adventure fiction, and the novel refuses to settle him. He’s charming, competent, fond of the boy narrator, and prepared to kill him. Those are simultaneous, and the book never resolves which is the real one because both are.
The convention before him was simpler. A villain was wicked and the hero saw through him. Stevenson gives Jim a man he likes, whose company is better than anyone else’s on the ship, who’s also organizing a mutiny, and lets the discomfort stand.
Silver is my favorite villain in adventure fiction, and I don’t think it’s close. He’s the man you’d want at your campfire and the man who’d cut your throat by morning, and Stevenson never lets you off the hook. Villains built from pure wickedness bore me by comparison.
That’s the technique behind every antagonist on the best film villains list. A creature the audience can dismiss is forgettable. One they can’t decide about stays.
What is Jekyll and Hyde really about?
Almost everybody uses the phrase to mean a split personality, two opposed selves in one body. That’s not the story.
The novella is about a respectable man who wants to do what he already wants to do, and invents a chemical way to do it without consequence to his reputation. Hyde is Jekyll with the social restraint removed and the accountability transferred to a different face. The horror is that the good man was a management strategy, and that given a mechanism for consequence-free behavior a respectable person would use it enthusiastically. Read that way it stops being a Victorian curiosity and becomes uncomfortably current. Anonymity as a chemical is a fair description of a great deal of modern behavior.
This reading unsettles me far more than any split-personality version could. Give decent people a mask and a way out of consequences and a lot of them turn out to be Hyde with better manners. Stevenson saw that in 1886, and the century since hasn’t proved him wrong.
He wrote the first draft in a matter of days, reportedly burned it after his wife objected to the treatment, and rewrote the book immediately. Whether the burning is literally true is disputed. The speed isn’t.
How is Jekyll and Hyde structured?
Jekyll and Hyde is told almost entirely from outside, by a lawyer investigating his friend’s odd behavior.
The reader is given documents, sightings and third-hand accounts, and the explanation arrives only at the end in a written statement. Modern readers know the twist before opening the book, so the architecture is invisible to them, but it was built as a mystery.
That’s the same found-document approach the gothic tradition ran on, and Stevenson used it for a reason. Keeping the transformation offstage until the final pages means the reader spends the novella assembling a horror from evidence. That’s more durable than being shown one.
What else did Robert Louis Stevenson write?
The reputation as a children’s writer is the thing that buried the rest of the work, and the rest of the work is major.
Kidnapped and its sequel are political novels about the aftermath of the Jacobite risings, with a real argument about loyalty and national identity underneath the chase. The Master of Ballantrae is a long, cold study of two brothers destroying each other across decades and continents. The Beach of Falesá is about a trader in the Pacific and is unusually direct about colonial commerce for its period.
The essays are excellent and almost entirely forgotten. He wrote about walking, about sleeping outdoors, about the ethics of writing for money, and the prose is looser and funnier than the fiction.
He also died mid-sentence on Weir of Hermiston, which the people who care most about him tend to argue would have been his best book.
Kidnapped and The Master of Ballantrae deserve far more readers than they get, and it frustrates me that a lot of people still shelve the man who wrote them next to picture books in their heads. The children’s-writer label did real damage to how he’s read.
Why did Stevenson leave the family lighthouse business?
The Stevensons built lighthouses, and they built most of the ones in Scotland.
His grandfather, father and uncles were engineers responsible for a network of towers on some of the worst coastline in Europe, several of them built on rocks that are submerged at high tide. It was difficult, dangerous, publicly useful work, and the family was distinguished for it.
He was expected to continue it, studied engineering to please his father, and quit. The compromise was law, which he qualified in and never practiced. His father took the eventual choice of writing badly, and the relationship stayed damaged for years. The engineering didn’t leave the work, though. His fiction is unusually attentive to how things are built and how physical spaces function: Stevenson describes the stockade in Treasure Island the way somebody describes a structure they’ve assessed, and the geography of Kidnapped is walkable.
For a writer with an abandoned first career there’s something usable in that. The training doesn’t go to waste when you leave the profession. It becomes the thing you notice that other writers don’t, and specific competence is the rarest ingredient in fiction.
What did Stevenson write in the Pacific?
He spent his last six years in the Pacific and it changed what he was writing about. I like this more than almost anything else in his life story. Nothing you learned in a first career goes to waste if you keep paying attention, and the engineer in him is why his stockade feels solid enough to lean against.
He chartered boats around the islands looking for a climate his lungs could survive, and eventually settled in Samoa, where he bought land, built a house and involved himself in local politics to a degree that made the colonial administration uncomfortable. He wrote letters to the Times about the way the islands were being carved up between Germany, Britain and the United States.
The late Pacific fiction is different from the adventure work. The Beach of Falesá is about a trader running a store on an island, and the subject is commerce, deception and what a European does when nobody is watching. Its first publisher, who objected to a fraudulent marriage contract being reproduced in the text, censored it.
The Samoans buried him on a mountain above his house. Whatever the colonial complications of a Scotsman owning land there, the relationship was real enough that they carried him up. What’s instructive is that he was still changing at forty-four. A writer with two enormous popular successes behind him went somewhere unfamiliar and started writing about something harder, and the unfinished book he left is the one the specialists rate highest.
Why did critics dismiss Stevenson for a century?
Because he was popular, because he wrote adventure, and because the critical fashion that followed him valued difficulty.
The modernists who came next were building a literature that announced its seriousness through form. Stevenson wrote clear prose with plots in it, sold enormously, and was consequently dismissed as a writer for boys. That judgment held for decades and has only been considerably revised in the last forty years. The pattern repeats constantly and is worth recognizing. A writer whose surface is accessible gets read as simple, and accessibility is a technical achievement that takes more work than difficulty does. Anyone writing clearly on purpose should expect the same discount.
This is the critical habit that makes me angriest. Clear writing is hard work, and treating a clear writer as a lightweight rewards fog. Stevenson paid for that snobbery for most of a century, and plenty of good writers are still paying for it.
What can a writer take from Stevenson?
Four things. Codify instead of research. Treasure Island beat the historical record because a clear invented system travels further than a messy accurate one. That’s available in any subject with scattered conventions. Refuse to settle the antagonist. Silver is charming and murderous at the same time and the book never chooses. A villain the reader can’t resolve stays with them.
Find the deeper fear under the obvious one. Jekyll and Hyde is about consequence-free behavior being extremely attractive. That’s a far more disturbing proposition and the reason it lasted. Write clearly and accept the discount. Clarity gets mistaken for simplicity by people who can’t produce it, and that’s always been the trade.
How should you mark Robert Louis Stevenson Day?
Read Jekyll and Hyde. It takes ninety minutes and is a different book from the one the phrase suggests. Or read Kidnapped if you want the novelist instead of the fabulist.
If you want the forgotten Stevenson, the essays are the place, and they’re short enough to read one on a bus.
If you write, do the exercise. Take your antagonist and write two scenes: one where the reader likes them, and one where the reader is frightened of them. Don’t reconcile the scenes. If both hold, you have Silver. If one cancels the other, the character isn’t built yet.
Give him a day of your time and read him as an adult. The man they sold you as a children’s author was writing about greed, charm, murder and the respectable faces people wear, and he deserves readers who notice. Critics shortchanged him for a century, and I think it’s long past time that debt got paid. For the rest of the gothic and adventure tradition I’ve written about Bram Stoker, Frankenstein Day and Edgar Allan Poe.