Robert Louis Stevenson

Childhood portrait of Stevenson as a childStevenson was born at 8 Howard Place, Edinburgh, Scotland, on 13 November 1850 to Thomas Stevenson (1818–1887), a leading lighthouse engineer, and his wife, Margaret Isabella (born Balfour, 1829–1897). He was christened Robert Lewis Balfour Stevenson. At about age 18, he changed the spelling of "Lewis" to "Louis", and he dropped "Balfour" in 1873. Lighthouse design was the family's profession; Thomas's father (Robert's grandfather) was the civil engineer Robert Stevenson, and Thomas's brothers (Robert's uncles) Alan and David were in the same field. Thomas's maternal grandfather Thomas Smith had been in the same profession. However, Robert's mother's family were gentry, tracing their lineage back to Alexander Balfour, who had held the lands of Inchrye in Fife in the fifteenth century. His mother's father, Lewis Balfour (1777–1860), was a minister of the Church of Scotland at nearby Colinton, Lewis Balfour and his daughter both had weak chests, so they often needed to stay in warmer climates for their health. Stevenson inherited a tendency to coughs and fevers, exacerbated when the family moved to a damp, chilly house at 1 Inverleith Terrace in 1851. The family moved again to the sunnier 17 Heriot Row when Stevenson was six years old, but the tendency to extreme sickness in winter remained with him until he was 11. Illness was a recurrent feature of his adult life and left him extraordinarily thin. or sarcoidosis. The family also summered in the spa town of Bridge of Allan, in North Berwick, and in Peebles for the sake of Stevenson's and his mother's health; "Stevenson's cave" in Bridge of Allan was reportedly the inspiration for the character Ben Gunn's cave dwelling in Stevenson's 1883 novel Treasure Island. Stevenson's parents were both devout Presbyterians, but the household was not strict in its adherence to Calvinist principles. His nurse Alison Cunningham (known as Cummy) was more fervently religious. Her mix of Calvinism and folk beliefs were an early source of nightmares for the child, and he showed a precocious concern for religion. But she also cared for him tenderly in illness, reading to him from John Bunyan and the Bible as he lay sick in bed and telling tales of the Covenanters. Stevenson recalled this time of sickness in "The Land of Counterpane" in ''A Child's Garden of Verses'' (1885), dedicating the book to his nurse. and he compulsively wrote stories throughout his childhood. His father was proud of this interest; he had also written stories in his spare time until his own father had found them and had told him to "give up such nonsense and mind your business." In November 1867, Stevenson entered the University of Edinburgh to study engineering. From the start he showed no enthusiasm for his studies and devoted much energy to avoiding lectures. This time was more important for the friendships he made with other students in The Speculative Society (an exclusive debating club), particularly with Charles Baxter, who would become Stevenson's financial agent, and with a professor, Fleeming Jenkin, whose house staged amateur drama in which Stevenson took part, and whose biography he would later write. Perhaps most important at this point in his life was a cousin, Robert Alan Mowbray Stevenson (known as "Bob"), a lively and light-hearted young man who, instead of the family profession, had chosen to study art. Holidays in Swanston In 1867 Stevenson's family took a lease on Swanston Cottage, in the village of Swanston at the foot of the Pentland Hills, for use as a summer holiday home. They held the lease until 1880. During their tenancy, the young Robert Louis made frequent use of the cottage, being attracted by the quiet country life and the feeling of remoteness. It is likely that the time he spent there influenced his later writing as well as his wider outlook on life, particularly his love of nature and of wild places. The house and its romantic location are thought to have inspired several of his works. Lighthouse inspections Each year during his university holidays, Stevenson also travelled to inspect the family's engineering works. In 1868 this took him to Anstruther and for a stay of six weeks in Wick, Caithness, where his family was building a sea wall and had previously built a lighthouse. He was to return to Wick several times over his lifetime and included it in his travel writings. He also accompanied his father on his official tour of Orkney and Shetland islands lighthouses in 1869 and spent three weeks on the island of Erraid in 1870. He enjoyed the travels more for the material they gave for his writing than for any engineering interest. The voyage with his father pleased him because a similar journey of Walter Scott with Robert Stevenson had provided the inspiration for Scott's 1822 novel The Pirate. "An Apology for Idlers" Justifying his rejection of an established profession, in 1877 Stevenson offered "An Apology for Idlers". "A happy man or woman", he reasoned, "is a better thing to find than a five-pound note. He or she is a radiating focus of goodwill" and a practical demonstration of "the great Theorem of the Liveableness of Life". So that if they cannot be happy in the "handicap race for sixpenny pieces", let them take their own "by-road". == Religious views ==

, France|left|273x273px In other respects too, Stevenson was moving away from his upbringing. His dress became more Bohemian; he already wore his hair long, but he now took to wearing a velveteen jacket and rarely attended parties in conventional evening dress. In January 1873, when he was 22, his father came across the constitution of the LJR (Liberty, Justice, Reverence) Club, of which Stevenson and his cousin Bob were members, which began: "Disregard everything our parents have taught us." Questioning his son about his beliefs, he discovered the truth. Stevenson's declaration against his parents' faith did not appear to turn into lifelong atheism or agnosticism. In a conciliatory letter to his father in February 1878, the 27-year-old Stevenson wrote: Stevenson did not resume attending church in Scotland but did teach Sunday School during his final years in Samoa, and wrote and led prayers that were published posthumously. Yet before he embarked on the voyage in 1888 that took him to Samoa, ''Scribner's Magazine'' published "Pulvis et Umbra" (the title a line from Horace: "We are but dust and shadow"). It is an essay in which Stevenson proposes that "[o]ur religions and moralities have been trimmed to flatter us, ... and only please and weaken" and observes that "[t]he human race is a thing more ancient than the ten commandments". ==Early writing and travels==

Literary and artistic connections In late 1873, when he was 23, Stevenson was visiting a cousin in England when he met two people who became very important to him: Fanny (Frances Jane) Sitwell and Sidney Colvin. Sitwell was a 34-year-old woman with a son, who was separated from her husband. She attracted the devotion of many who met her, including Colvin, who married her in 1901. Stevenson was also drawn to her, and they kept up a warm correspondence over several years in which he wavered between the role of a suitor and a son (he addressed her as "Madonna"). Colvin became Stevenson's literary adviser and was the first editor of his letters after his death. He placed Stevenson's first paid contribution in The Portfolio, an essay titled "Roads". Stevenson was sent to Menton on the French Riviera in November 1873 to recuperate after his health failed. He returned in better health in April 1874 and settled down to his studies, but he returned to France several times after that. He qualified for the Scottish bar in July 1875, aged 24, and his father added a brass plate to the Heriot Row house reading "R.L. Stevenson, Advocate". His law studies did influence his books, but he never practised law; Stevenson had a long correspondence with his fellow Scot J.M. Barrie. He invited Barrie to visit him in Samoa, but the two never met. Marriage and California The canoe voyage with Simpson brought Stevenson to Grez-sur-Loing in September 1876, where he met Fanny Van de Grift Osbourne (1840–1914), born in Indianapolis in the United States. She had married at age 17 and moved to Nevada to rejoin her husband Samuel after his participation in the American Civil War. Their children were Isobel (or "Belle"), Lloyd and Hervey (who died in 1875). But anger over her husband's infidelities led to a number of separations. In 1875 she had taken her children to France, where she and Isobel studied art. Stevenson returned to Britain shortly after this first meeting, but Fanny apparently remained in his thoughts, and he wrote the essay "On falling in love" for The Cornhill Magazine. They met again early in 1877 and became lovers. Stevenson spent much of the following year with her and her children in France. He then travelled overland by train from New York City to California. He later wrote about the experience in The Amateur Emigrant. It was a good experience for his writing, but it broke his health. "), Monterey, California, where he stayed in 1879 ; Stevenson; his stepdaughter Isobel; and his mother, Margaret Balfour He was near death when he arrived in Monterey, California, where some local ranchers nursed him back to health. He stayed for a time at the French Hotel located at 530 Houston Street, now a museum dedicated to his memory called the "Stevenson House". While there, he often dined "on the cuff", as he said, at a nearby restaurant run by a Frenchman named Jules Simoneau, which stood at what is now Simoneau Plaza; several years later, he sent Simoneau an inscribed copy of his novel Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), writing that it would be a stranger case still if Robert Louis Stevenson ever forgot Jules Simoneau. While in Monterey, he wrote an evocative article about "the Old Pacific Capital" of Monterey. By December 1879, aged 29, Stevenson had recovered his health enough to continue to San Francisco where he struggled "all alone on forty-five cents a day, and sometimes less, with quantities of hard work and many heavy thoughts," in an effort to support himself through his writing. But by the end of the winter, his health was broken again and he found himself at death's door. Fanny was now divorced and recovered from her own illness, and she came to his bedside and nursed him to recovery. "After a while," he wrote, "my spirit got up again in a divine frenzy, and has since kicked and spurred my vile body forward with great emphasis and success." When his father heard of his son's condition, he cabled him money to help him through this period. Fanny and Robert were married in May 1880. She was 40; he was 29. He said that he was "a mere complication of cough and bones, much fitter for an emblem of mortality than a bridegroom." He travelled with his new wife and her son Lloyd north of San Francisco to Napa Valley and spent a summer honeymoon at an abandoned mining camp on Mount Saint Helena (today designated Robert Louis Stevenson State Park). He wrote about this experience in The Silverado Squatters. He met Charles Warren Stoddard, co-editor of the Overland Monthly and author of South Sea Idylls, who urged Stevenson to travel to the South Pacific, an idea which returned to him many years later. In August 1880 he sailed with Fanny and Lloyd from New York to Britain and found his parents and his friend Sidney Colvin on the wharf at Liverpool, happy to see him return home. Gradually, his wife was able to patch up differences between father and son and make herself a part of the family through her charm and wit. England, and back to the United States The Stevensons shuttled back and forth between Scotland and the Continent (twice wintering in Davos) before finally, in 1884, settling in Westbourne in the English south-coast town of Bournemouth. Stevenson had moved there to benefit from its sea air. They lived in a house Stevenson named 'Skerryvore' after a Scottish lighthouse built by his uncle Alan. From April 1885, 34-year-old Stevenson had the company of the novelist Henry James. They had met previously in London and had recently exchanged views in journal articles on the "art of fiction" and thereafter in a correspondence in which they expressed their admiration for each other's work. After James had moved to Bournemouth to help support his invalid sister, Alice, he took up the invitation to pay daily visits to Skerryvore for conversation at the Stevensons' dinner table. Largely bedridden, Stevenson described himself as living "like a weevil in a biscuit." Yet, despite ill health, during his three years in Westbourne, Stevenson wrote the bulk of his most popular work: Treasure Island, Kidnapped, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (which established his wider reputation), ''A Child's Garden of Verses and Underwoods''. " in Saranac Lake, New York Thomas Stevenson died in 1887, leaving his 36-year-old son feeling free to follow the advice of his physician to try a complete change of climate. Stevenson headed for Colorado with his widowed mother and family. But after landing in New York, they decided to spend the winter in the Adirondacks at a cure cottage now known as Stevenson Cottage at Saranac Lake, New York. During the intensely cold winter, Stevenson wrote some of his best-known essays, including "Pulvis et Umbra". He also began The Master of Ballantrae and lightheartedly planned a cruise to the southern Pacific Ocean for the following summer. ==Reflections on the art of writing==

Stevenson's critical essays on literature contain "few sustained analyses of style or content". In "A Penny Plain and Two-pence Coloured" (1884) he suggests that his own approach owed much to the exaggerated and romantic world that, as a child, he had entered as proud owner of Skelt's Juvenile Drama—a toy set of cardboard characters who were actors in melodramatic dramas. "A Gossip on Romance" (1882) and "A Gossip on a Novel of Dumas's" (1887) imply that it is better to entertain than to instruct.Man's one method, whether he reasons or creates, is to half-shut his eyes against the dazzle and confusion of reality...Life is monstrous, infinite, illogical, abrupt and poignant; a work of art, in comparison, is neat, finite, self-contained, rational, flowing, and emasculate...The novel, which is a work of art, exists, not by its resemblances to life, which are forced and material ... but by its immeasurable difference from life, which is designed and significant. It is not clear, however, that in this there was any real basis for disagreement with James. ==Political and social commentary==

Stevenson has a contested reputation as a political radical. As the author of a succession of "rebellion novels" (concluding in 1893 with Catriona, the sequel to Kidnapped), Stevenson is said to have spent his "entire writing life" inciting against tyranny, empire and corruption. Stevenson recalled the college youth who authored the first of these novels, the Covenanter adventure Pentland Rising (1866), as a "red-hot socialist". Yet already by age 26, Stevenson was writing of looking back on his early political enthusiasms "with something like regret. ... Now I know that in thus turning Conservative with years, I am going through the normal cycle of change and travelling in the common orbit of men's opinions." In the one election in which he is known to have participated, a student ballot for the Lord Rectorship of the University of Edinburgh, Stevenson did favour a Tory, the future prime minister Benjamin Disraeli, but it was in a contest against a notoriously illiberal challenger, the historian Thomas Carlyle. In each story, "an orphaned or fatherless boy of genteel stock" contends with a "lower-class rabble and vicious ruffians in a zero-sum, survival-of-the-strongest" battle to secure or recover wealth. This celebration of "self-reliant individualism" is said to be the "cornerstone" of a "right-wing ideology" further amplified in Stevenson's two most popular novels for adults, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) and The Wrong Box (1889). These are characterised as tales in which fallen individuals are destined to defy society in pursuit of their own ends, with selfishness lurking behind seeming acts of altruism that are often the cause greater misfortune. on the strength of a rare piece of social-philosophic prose, "The Day After Tomorrow", submitted in 1887 to The Contemporary Review. Following an unprecedented "burst of social legislation" during Disraeli's last term of office, Stevenson proposed that "we are all becoming Socialists without knowing it". Legislation "grows authoritative, grows philanthropical, bristles with new duties and new penalties, and casts a spawn of inspectors, who now begin, note-book in hand, to darken the face of England". The "new waggon-load of laws" points to a future in which our grandchildren might "taste the pleasures of existence in something far liker an ant-heap than any previous human polity". Sometimes omitted from references to the essay is the concession Stevenson makes to critics of the classic Whiggish notion of laissez faire. "Liberty", Stevenson wrote, "has served us a long while" but like all other virtues "she has taken wages". In 1883, Stephenson wrote privately of the chief propagandist and organiser of the Fenian dynamite campaign in England, Jeremiah O'Donovan Rossa: "If that is the new world ... damn, deracinate and destroy him, root and branch, self and company, world without end". This fury was a prelude to "The Dynamiter" (1885), one of a collection of linked stories (More New Arabian Nights: The Dynamiter), that Stephenson (confined at the time by a number of ailments to a bed in a darkened room) wrote in an acknowledged collaboration with his wife, Fanny. A satirical tale, it reduced the Fenian struggle against British rule in Ireland to a "'private and barbarous war' rinsed of any ideological motivation". Rather he protests the readiness to pass "lightly" over crimes—"unmanly murders and the harshest extremes of boycotting"—where these are deemed "political". This he argues is to "defeat law" (which is ever a "compromise") and to invite "anarchy": it is "the sentimentalist preparing the pathway for the brute". Stevenson withdrew the essay before publication, and it did not appear in his lifetime. It was only, in his last years, when witness to colonial encroachments in the South Seas, that he began to make direct political representations. ==Final years in the Pacific==

Pacific voyages in Hawaii ca. 1889 of Hawaii, c. 1889 , c. 1892 in Samoa, 1894 In June 1888 Stevenson chartered the yacht Casco from Samuel Merritt and set sail with his family from San Francisco. The vessel "plowed her path of snow across the empty deep, far from all track of commerce, far from any hand of help." The sea air and thrill of adventure for a time restored his health, and for nearly three years he wandered the eastern and central Pacific, stopping for extended stays at the Hawaiian Islands, where he became a good friend of King Kalākaua. He befriended the king's niece Princess Victoria Kaiulani, who also had Scottish heritage. He spent time at the Gilbert Islands, Tahiti, New Zealand and the Samoan Islands. During this period he completed The Master of Ballantrae, composed two ballads based on the legends of the islanders, and wrote The Bottle Imp. He preserved the experience of these years in his various letters and in his In the South Seas (which was published posthumously). He made a voyage in 1889 with Lloyd on the trading schooner Equator, visiting Butaritari, Mariki, Apaiang and Abemama in the Gilbert Islands. They spent several months on Abemama with tyrant-chief Tem Binoka, whom Stevenson described in In the South Seas. Stevenson left Sydney, Australia, on the Janet Nicoll in April 1890 for his third and final voyage among the South Seas islands. He intended to produce another book of travel writing to follow his earlier book In the South Seas, but it was his wife who eventually published her journal of their third voyage. (Fanny misnames the ship in her account The Cruise of the Janet Nichol.) A fellow passenger was Jack Buckland, whose stories of life as an island trader became the inspiration for the character of Tommy Hadden in The Wrecker (1892), which Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne wrote together. Buckland visited the Stevensons at Vailima in 1894. Political engagement in Samoa In December 1889, 39-year-old Stevenson and his extended family arrived at the port of Apia in the Samoan islands and there he and Fanny decided to settle. In January 1890 they purchased at Vailima, some miles inland from Apia the capital, on which they built the islands' first two-storey house. Fanny's sister, Nellie Van de Grift Sanchez, wrote that "it was in Samoa that the word 'home' first began to have a real meaning for these gypsy wanderers". In May 1891, they were joined by Stevenson's mother, Margaret. While his wife set about managing and working the estate, 40-year-old Stevenson took the native name Tusitala (Samoan for "Teller of Tales"), and began collecting local stories. Often he would exchange these for his own tales. The first work of literature in Samoan was his translation of The Bottle Imp (1891), No longer content to be a "romancer", Stevenson became a reporter and an agitator, firing off letters to The Times which "rehearsed with an ironic twist that surely owed something to his Edinburgh legal training", a tale of European and American misconduct.—Stevenson felt himself obliged to take sides. He openly allied himself with chief Mataafa, whose rival Malietoa was backed by the Germans whose firms were beginning to monopolise copra and cocoa bean processing. through improving management and labour. In 1894 just months before his death, he addressed the island chiefs:There is but one way to defend Samoa. Hear it before it is too late. It is to make roads, and gardens, and care for your trees, and sell their produce wisely, and, in one word, to occupy and use your country... if you do not occupy and use your country, others will. It will not continue to be yours or your children's, if you occupy it for nothing. You and your children will, in that case, be cast out into outer darkness". He had "seen these judgments of God", not only in Hawaii where abandoned native churches stood like tombstones "over a grave, in the midst of the white men's sugar fields", but also in Ireland and "in the mountains of my own country Scotland".These were a fine people in the past brave, gay, faithful, and very much like Samoans, except in one particular, that they were much wiser and better at that business of fighting of which you think so much. But the time came to them as it now comes to you, and it did not find them ready... Five years after Stevenson's death, the Samoan Islands were partitioned between Germany and the United States. ==Last works==

, 1893 Stevenson wrote an estimated 700,000 words during his years on Samoa. He completed The Beach of Falesá, the first-person tale of a Scottish copra trader on a South Sea island, a man unheroic in his actions or his own soul. Rather he is a man of limited understanding and imagination, comfortable with his own prejudices: where, he wonders, can he find "whites" for his "half caste" daughters. The villains are white, their behaviour towards the islanders ruthlessly duplicitous. Stevenson saw "The Beach of Falesá" as the ground-breaking work in his turn away from romance to realism. Stevenson wrote to his friend Sidney Colvin: The Ebb-Tide (1894), the misadventures of three deadbeats marooned in the Tahitian port of Papeete, has been described as presenting "a microcosm of imperialist society, directed by greedy but incompetent whites, the labour supplied by long-suffering natives who fulfil their duties without orders and are true to the missionary faith which the Europeans make no pretence of respecting". It confirmed the new Realistic turn in Stevenson's writing away from romance and adolescent adventure. The first sentence reads: "Throughout the island world of the Pacific, scattered men of many European races and from almost every grade of society carry activity and disseminate disease". No longer was Stevenson writing about human nature "in terms of a contest between Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde": "the edges of moral responsibility and the margins of moral judgement were too blurred". With his imagination still residing in Scotland and returning to earlier form, Stevenson also wrote Catriona (1893), a sequel to his earlier novel Kidnapped (1886), continuing the adventures of its hero David Balfour. Although he felt, as a writer, that "there was never any man had so many irons in the fire". by the end of 1893 Stevenson feared that he had "overworked" and exhausted his creative vein. His writing was partly driven by the need to meet the expenses of Vailima. But in a last burst of energy he began work on Weir of Hermiston. "It's so good that it frightens me," he is reported to have exclaimed. He felt that this was the best work he had done. Set in eighteenth century Scotland, it is a story of a society that (however different), like Samoa is witnessing a breakdown of social rules and structures leading to growing moral ambivalence. ==Death==

On 3 December 1894, while resting at his home in Vailima, Stevenson was talking to his wife and straining to open a bottle of wine when he suddenly exclaimed, "What's that?", then asked his wife, "Does my face look strange?", and collapsed. (Some sources have stated that he was, instead, attempting to make mayonnaise when he collapsed.) He died within a few hours, at the age of 44, possibly as the result of a brain haemorrhage. According to research published in 2000, Stevenson might have suffered from hereditary haemorrhagic telangiectasia (Osler-Rendu-Weber Syndrome). This would explain his chronic respiratory complaints, recurrent episodes of pulmonary haemorrhage, and his early death. It might also explain his mother's hitherto unreported but apparent stroke, at age 38 years. After his death, the Samoans insisted on surrounding his body with a watch-guard during the night and on bearing him on their shoulders to nearby Mount Vaea, where they buried him on a spot overlooking the sea on land donated by British Acting Vice Consul Thomas Trood. Based on Stevenson's poem "Requiem", the following epitaph is inscribed on his tomb: Stevenson was loved by the Samoans, and his tombstone epitaph was translated to a Samoan song of grief. The requiem appears on the eastern side of the grave. On the western side the biblical passage of Ruth 1:16–17 is inscribed: The ensign flag draped over his coffin in Samoa was returned to Edinburgh and now resides in a glass case over the fireplace of rooms in Edinburgh University's Old College owned by The Speculative Society, of which he was a member. ==Artistic reception==

in 1893, sent by Stevenson to J. M. Barrie Half of Stevenson's original manuscripts are lost, including those of Treasure Island, The Black Arrow and The Master of Ballantrae. His heirs sold his papers during the First World War, and many of his documents were auctioned off in 1918. Stevenson was a celebrity in his own time, being admired by many other writers, including Marcel Proust, Arthur Conan Doyle, Henry James, J. M. Barrie, Rudyard Kipling and Emilio Salgari, and later Cesare Pavese, Bertolt Brecht, Ernest Hemingway, Jack London, Vladimir Nabokov and G. K. Chesterton, who said that Stevenson "seemed to pick the right word up on the point of his pen, like a man playing spillikins". Stevenson was seen for much of the 20th century as a second-class writer. He became relegated to children's literature and horror genres, He is now evaluated as a peer of authors such as Joseph Conrad (whom Stevenson influenced with his South Seas fiction) and Henry James, with new scholarly studies and organisations devoted to him. Throughout the vicissitudes of his scholarly reception, Stevenson has remained popular worldwide. According to the Index Translationum, Stevenson is ranked the 26th-most-translated author in the world, ahead of Oscar Wilde and Edgar Allan Poe. On the subject of Stevenson's modern reputation, the American film critic Roger Ebert wrote in 1996, ==Monuments and commemoration==

United Kingdom , Edinburgh , Edinburgh in Edinburgh The Writers' Museum near Edinburgh's Royal Mile devotes a room to Stevenson, containing some of his personal possessions from childhood through to adulthood. A bronze relief memorial to Stevenson, designed by the American sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens in 1904, is mounted in the Moray Aisle of St Giles' Cathedral, Edinburgh. Saint-Gaudens' scaled-down version of this relief is in the collection of the Montclair Art Museum in New Jersey. Another small version depicting Stevenson with a cigarette in his hand rather than the pen he holds in the St. Giles memorial is displayed in the Nichols House Museum in Beacon Hill, Boston. In the West Princes Street Gardens below Edinburgh Castle a simple upright stone is inscribed: "RLS – A Man of Letters 1850–1894" by the sculptor Ian Hamilton Finlay in 1987. In 2013, a statue of Stevenson as a child with his dog was unveiled by the author Ian Rankin outside Colinton Parish Church. The sculptor of the statue was Alan Herriot, and the money to erect it was raised by the Colinton Community Conservation Trust. A garden was designed by the Bournemouth Corporation in 1957 as a memorial to Stevenson, on the site of his Westbourne house, "Skerryvore", which he occupied from 1885 to 1887. A statue of the Skerryvore lighthouse is present on the site. Robert Louis Stevenson Avenue in Westbourne is named after him. The small hotel in Wick where Stevenson stayed in the summer of 1868 is now called Stevenson House and is marked by a plaque. The house is near the harbour, in the part of Wick known as Pultneytown. Two million notes were issued, each with a serial number beginning "RLS". The first note to be printed was sent to Samoa in time for their centenary celebrations on 3 December 1994. In 2024 it was announced that a Jekyll and Hyde–themed sculpture would be built near where Skerryvore once stood. United States The Stevenson House at 530 Houston Street in Monterey, California, formerly the French Hotel, memorialises Stevenson's 1879 stay in "the Old Pacific Capital", as he was crossing the United States to join his future wife, Fanny Osbourne. The Stevenson House museum features a bas-relief depicting the sickly author writing in bed. Spyglass Hill Golf Course, originally called Pebble Beach Pines Golf Club, was renamed "Spyglass Hill" by Samuel F. B. Morse (1885–1969), the founder of Pebble Beach Company, after a place in Stevenson's Treasure Island. All the holes at Spyglass Hill are named after characters and places in the novel. The Robert Louis Stevenson Museum in St. Helena, California, is home to over 11,000 objects and artifacts, the majority of which belonged to Stevenson. Opened in 1969, the museum houses such treasures as his childhood rocking chair, writing desk, toy soldiers and personal writings among many other items. The museum is free to the public and serves as an academic archive for students, writers and Stevenson enthusiasts. The Robert Louis Stevenson Cottage is a small memorial museum to Stevenson, densely packed with both artifacts and information which provide an excellent introduction to the author and his works. It is located in Saranac Lake, NY, a few miles from Lake Placid. In San Francisco there is an outdoor Robert Louis Stevenson Memorial in Portsmouth Square. In 2024, there was controversy about the San Francisco statue. Jenny Leung, executive director of the Chinese Culture Center, stated "There were a lot of vocal opinions about how ... Robert Louis Stevenson had nothing to do with Chinatown." At least six US public and private schools are named after Stevenson, including on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in New York City, in Fridley, Minnesota, in Burbank, California, in Grandview Heights, Ohio, in San Francisco, California, and in Merritt Island, Florida. There is an R. L. Stevenson middle school in Honolulu, Hawaii and in Saint Helena, California. Stevenson School in Pebble Beach, California, was established in 1952 and still exists as a college preparatory boarding school. Robert Louis Stevenson State Park near Calistoga, California, contains the location where he and Fanny spent their honeymoon in 1880. A street in Honolulu's Waikiki District, where Stevenson lived while in the Hawaiian Islands, was named after his Samoan moniker, Tusitala. Samoa Stevenson's former home in Vailima, Samoa, is now a museum dedicated to the later years of his life. The Robert Louis Stevenson Museum presents the house as it was at the time of his death along with two other buildings added to Stevenson's original one, tripling the museum in size. The path to Stevenson's grave at the top of Mount Vaea starts at the museum. France The Chemin de Stevenson (GR 70) is a popular long-distance footpath in France that approximately follows Stevenson's route as described in Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes. There are numerous monuments and businesses named after him along the route, including a fountain in the town of Saint-Jean-du-Gard where Stevenson sold his donkey Modestine and took a stagecoach to Alès. ==Gallery==

File:Count Girolamo Nerli - Robert Louis Stevenson, 1850 - 1894. Essayist, poet and novelist - Google Art Project.jpg|Portrait by Girolamo Nerli, 1892 File:Robert Louis Stevenson and Kalakaua in the King's boathouse (PP-96-14-008).jpg|With Kalakaua in the King's boathouse File:Robert Louis Stevenson by Sargent.jpg|Portrait by John Singer Sargent, 1887 File:Sargent - Robert Louis Stevenson and His Wife.jpg|Stevenson paces in his dining room in an 1885 portrait by John Singer Sargent. His wife Fanny, seated in an Indian dress, is visible in the lower right corner. File:Robert Louis Stevenson's Photograph.jpg|Alternate portrait in 1893 by Barnett, subtly different from the more familiar shot. File:Robert stevenson.JPG|Portrait by William Blake Richmond, 1886 File:Robert Louis Stevenson c.1890 slnsw.jpg|Robert Louis Stevenson and his wife Fanny, Nan Tok and Natakanti, Butaritari Island, Kiribati, c 1890 ==Works==

Novels ''. Caption: "Hoseason turned upon him with a flash" (chapter VII, "I Go to Sea in the Brig "Covenant" of Dysart") • The Hair Trunk or The Ideal Commonwealth (1877) – unfinished and unpublished. An annotated edition of the original manuscript, edited and introduced by Roger G. Swearingen, was published as The Hair Trunk or The Ideal Commonwealth: An Extravaganza in August 2014. • Treasure Island (1883) – his first major success, a tale of piracy, buried treasure and adventure; has been filmed frequently. In an 1881 letter to W. E. Henley, he provided the earliest-known title, "The Sea Cook, or Treasure Island: a Story for Boys". • Prince Otto (1885) – Stevenson's third full-length narrative, an action romance set in the imaginary Germanic state of Grünewald. • Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) – a novella about a dual personality; much adapted in plays and films; also influential in the growth of understanding of the subconscious mind through its treatment of a kind and intelligent physician who turns into a psychopathic monster after imbibing a drug intended to separate good from evil in a personality. • Kidnapped (1886) – a historical novel that tells of the boy David Balfour's pursuit of his inheritance and his alliance with Alan Breck Stewart in the intrigues of Jacobite troubles in Scotland. • The Black Arrow (1888) – a historical adventure novel and romance set during the Wars of the Roses. • The Master of Ballantrae (1889) – a tale of revenge set in Scotland, America and India. • The Wrong Box (1889) – co-written with Lloyd Osbourne. A comic novel of a tontine; filmed in 1966 starring John Mills, Ralph Richardson and Michael Caine. • The Wrecker (1892) – co-written with Lloyd Osbourne: the last part was filmed in 1957 as a television series episode of Maverick starring James Garner and Jack Kelly, with full credit to Stevenson and Osbourne. • Catriona (1893) – also known as David Balfour; a sequel to Kidnapped, telling of Balfour's further adventures. • The Ebb-Tide (1894) – co-written with Lloyd Osbourne. • Weir of Hermiston (1896) – unfinished at the time of Stevenson's death; considered to have promised great artistic growth. • St Ives (1897) – unfinished at the time of Stevenson's death; completed by Arthur Quiller-Couch. Short story collections • New Arabian Nights (1882) (11 stories) • More New Arabian Nights: The Dynamiter (1885) (co-written with Fanny Van de Grift Stevenson) • The Merry Men and Other Tales and Fables (1887) (6 stories) • ''Island Nights' Entertainments'' (1893) (3 stories) • Fables (1896) (20 stories: "The Persons of the Tale", "The Sinking Ship", "The Two Matches", "The Sick Man and the Fireman", "The Devil and the Innkeeper", "The Penitent", "The Yellow Paint", "The House of Eld", "The Four Reformers", "The Man and His Friend", "The Reader", "The Citizen and the Traveller", "The Distinguished Stranger", "The Carthorses and the Saddlehorse", "The Tadpole and the Frog", "Something in It", "Faith, Half Faith and No Faith at All", "The Touchstone", "The Poor Thing" and "The Song of the Morrow") • Tales and Fantasies (1905) (3 stories) • South Sea Tales (1996) (6 stories: "The Beach of Falesá", "The Bottle Imp", "The Isle of Voices", "The Ebb-Tide: A Trio and Quartette", "The Cart-Horses and the Saddle-Horse" and "Something in It") Short stories This is a chronological list of his short stories (omitting the collaborations with Fanny found in More New Arabian Nights: The Dynamiter). Non-fiction , 1888 • – first published in the 9th edition (1875–1889). • Virginibus Puerisque, and Other Papers (1881), contains the essays Virginibus Puerisque i (1876); Virginibus Puerisque ii (1881); Virginibus Puerisque iii: On Falling in Love (1877); Virginibus Puerisque iv: The Truth of Intercourse (1879); Crabbed Age and Youth (1878); An Apology for Idlers (1877); Ordered South (1874); Aes Triplex (1878); El Dorado (1878); The English Admirals (1878); Some Portraits by Raeburn (previously unpublished); ''Child's Play (1878); Walking Tours (1876); Pan's Pipes (1878); A Plea for Gas Lamps'' (1878). • Familiar Studies of Men and Books (1882) containing Preface, by Way of Criticism (not previously published); ''Victor Hugo's Romances (1874); Some Aspects of Robert Burns (1879); The Gospel According to Walt Whitman (1878); Henry David Thoreau: His Character and Opinions (1880); Yoshida-Torajiro (1880); François Villon, Student, Poet, Housebreaker (1877); Charles of Orleans (1876); Samuel Pepys (1881); John Knox and his Relations to Women'' (1875). • Memories and Portraits (1887), a collection of essays. • On the Choice of a Profession (1887) • The Day After Tomorrow (1887) • Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin (1888) • Father Damien: an Open Letter to the Rev. Dr. Hyde of Honolulu (1890) • A Footnote to History: Eight Years of Trouble in Samoa (1892) • Vailima Letters (1895) • Prayers Written at Vailima (1904) • Essays in the Art of Writing (1905) • The New Lighthouse on the Dhu Heartach Rock, Argyllshire (1995) – based on an 1872 manuscript, edited by R. G. Swearingen. California. Silverado Museum. • Sophia Scarlet (2008) – based on an 1892 manuscript, edited by Robert Hoskins. AUT Media (AUT University). Poetry • Moral Emblems (1882) • ''A Child's Garden of Verses'' (1885) – written for children but also popular with their parents. Includes such favourites as "My Shadow" and "The Lamplighter". Often thought to represent a positive reflection of the author's sickly childhood. • Underwoods (1887), a collection of poetry written in both English and Scots • Ballads (1891) – includes "Ticonderoga: A Legend of the West Highlands" (1887), based on a famous Scottish ghost story, and "Heather Ale", arguably Stevenson's most famous poem • Songs of Travel and Other Verses (1896) • Poems Hitherto Unpublished, 3 vol. 1916, 1916, 1921, Boston Bibliophile Society, republished in New Poems Plays • Three Plays (1892), co-written with William Ernest Henley. Includes the theatre pieces Deacon Brodie, Beau Austin and Admiral Guinea. Travel writing • An Inland Voyage (1878), travels with a friend in a Rob Roy canoe from Antwerp (Belgium) to Pontoise, just north of Paris. • Edinburgh: Picturesque Notes (1878) – a paean to his birthplace, it provides Stevenson's personal introduction to each part of the city and some history behind the various sections of the city and its most famous buildings. • Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes (1879), two weeks' solo ramble (with Modestine as his beast of burden) in the mountains of Cévennes (south-central France), one of the first books to present hiking and camping as recreational activities. It tells of commissioning one of the first sleeping bags. • The Silverado Squatters (1883). An unconventional honeymoon trip to an abandoned mining camp in Napa Valley with his new wife Fanny and her son Lloyd. He presciently identifies the California wine industry as one to be reckoned with. • Across the Plains (written in 1879–80, published in 1892). Second leg of his journey, by train from New York to California (then picks up with The Silverado Squatters). Also includes other travel essays. • The Amateur Emigrant (written 1879–80, published 1895). An account of the first leg of his journey to California, by ship from Europe to New York. Andrew Noble (''From the Clyde to California: Robert Louis Stevenson's Emigrant Journey'', 1985) considers it to be his finest work. • The Old and New Pacific Capitals (1882). An account of his stay in Monterey, California in August to December 1879. Never published separately. See, for example, James D. Hart, ed., From Scotland to Silverado, 1966. • Essays of Travel (London: Chatto & Windus, 1905) • Sawyers, June Skinner (ed.) (2002), Dreams of Elsewhere: The Selected Travel Writings of Robert Louis Stevenson, The In Pin, Glasgow, Island literature Although not well known, his island fiction and non-fiction is among the most valuable and collected of the 19th century body of work that addresses the Pacific area. • In the South Seas (1896). A collection of Stevenson's articles and essays on his travels in the Pacific. • A Footnote to History, Eight Years of Trouble in Samoa (1892). ==See also==