Creative Learning

Robert Louis Stevenson’s 160th  Birthday

Robert Louis Stevenson, Scottish essayist, poet, and author of fiction and travel books, known especially for his novels of adventure, was born in Edinburgh, Scotland on November 13, 1850, and wrote the famous adventure novel, Treasure Island, which was first published as a book in 1883.Treasure Island is a tale of pirates and buried gold, and Stevenson was said to have start writing it when he was 30 years old.
Stevenson’s characters often prefer unknown hazards to everyday life of the Victorian society.
Robert Lewis Balfour Stevenson was born in Edinburgh. He was the only son of Thomas Stevenson, a prosperous joint-engineer to the Board of Northern Lighthouses, and Margaret Balfour, daughter of a Scottish clergyman. Thomas Stevenson invented, among others, the marine dynamometer, which measures the force of waves. Thomas’s grandfather was Britain’s greatest builder of lighthouses.Stevenson was largely raised by his nanny, Alison Cunningham, whom he devoted A CHILD’S GARDEN OF VERSES (1885). Cunningham had strong Calvinist convictions and praying became part of Stevenson’s early life, and later reflected in such pieces like the poem ‘A Thought’: “It is very nice to think / The world is full of meat and drink, / With little children saying grace / In every Christian kind of place.”
Since his childhood, Stevenson suffered from tuberculosis. During his early years, he spent much of his time in bed, composing stories before he had learned to read. At the age of sixteen, he produced a short historical tale.
As an adult, there were times when Stevenson could not wear a jacket for fear of bringing on a haemorrhage of the lung. In 1867, he entered Edinburgh University to study engineering. Due to his ill health, he had to abandon his plans to follow in his father’s footsteps. Stevenson changed to law and in 1875 he was called to the Scottish bar. By then he had already started to write travel sketches, essays, and short stories for magazines. His first articles were published in The Edinburgh University Magazine (1871) and The Portofolio (1873).
In a attempt to improve his health, Stevenson travelled on the Continent and in the Scottish Highland. These trips provided him with many insights and inspiration for his writing, although sometimes could take a long time before Stevenson edited for publication his notes and sketches.Stevenson‘s tone in his travelogues is often jovial or satirical. However, constant voyaging was not always easy for him. In a letter, written on his journey across the Atlantic in 1879, he complained: “I have a strange, rather horrible, sense of the sea before me, and can see no further into future. I can say honestly I have at this moment neither a regret, a hope, a fear or an inclination; except a mild one for a bottle of good wine which I resist”.
Due to his poor health, Stevenson spent much time in warmer countries.Stevenson‘s own early favorite books, which influenced his imagination and thinking, included Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Dumas’s adventure tale of the elderly D’Artagan, Vicomte de Bragelone, and Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, “a book which tumbled the world upside down for me, blew into space a thousand cobwebs of genteel and ethical illusion, and having thus shaken my tabernacle of lies, set me back again upon a strong foundation of all the original and manly virtues.” (from Reading in Bed, ed. by Steven Gilbar, 1995) Also Montaigne’s Essais and the Gospel according to St. Matthew were very important for him.