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Portrait of Robert Louis Stevenson

Literature · Novelists

Robert Louis Stevenson

1850–1894 · Scottish

Victorian adventure fiction; Gothic; travel writing

Robert Louis Stevenson was an Edinburgh-born novelist, poet and travel writer from a family of lighthouse engineers. He wrote enduring classics across genres, including Treasure Island, Kidnapped and Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Dogged by lung illness, he travelled widely and settled in Samoa, where he died in 1894.

How to spot them

  • ▸Treasure Island: Jim Hawkins, Long John Silver, Ben Gunn, the Hispaniola and the Admiral Benbow inn
  • ▸Kidnapped: David Balfour and Alan Breck Stewart
  • ▸Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, investigated by the lawyer Mr Utterson
  • ▸Samoa, Vailima and the Samoan name Tusitala, 'teller of tales'
  • ▸Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes, with the donkey Modestine

Key works

Treasure Island (1883)

Jim Hawkins's hunt for Captain Flint's treasure, first serialised in Young Folks as 'The Sea Cook'

Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886)

Novella of a respectable doctor whose potion releases his evil other self

Kidnapped (1886)

David Balfour, cheated by his uncle Ebenezer, flees across the Highlands with Alan Breck after the Appin murder

A Child's Garden of Verses (1885)

Poems for children, including 'My Shadow' and 'The Lamplighter'

Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes (1879)

Account of a walking tour in southern France with a donkey named Modestine

The Master of Ballantrae (1889)

Tale of two feuding Scottish brothers on opposite sides in the 1745 Jacobite rising

Catriona (1893)

Sequel to Kidnapped, continuing the adventures of David Balfour

Weir of Hermiston (1896)

Unfinished novel left at his death, published posthumously

Key ideas

  • Jekyll and Hyde made 'split personality' and the duality of good and evil a byword
  • Treasure Island fixed the popular image of pirates: the one-legged cook with a parrot, treasure maps marked with an X, the Black Spot

Quick-fire facts

  • •Born in Edinburgh; his father Thomas and grandfather Robert Stevenson were celebrated lighthouse engineers
  • •Studied engineering and then law at Edinburgh, qualifying as an advocate in 1875, but never practised seriously
  • •Said his friend W. E. Henley, who had lost a leg, was the inspiration for Long John Silver
  • •Long John Silver's parrot is named Captain Flint
  • •Married the American Fanny Van de Grift Osbourne in San Francisco in 1880; her son Lloyd Osbourne co-wrote The Wrong Box with him
  • •Settled at Vailima on Upolu, Samoa, where Samoans called him Tusitala ('teller of tales')
  • •Died suddenly in December 1894 and was buried on Mount Vaea; his poem 'Requiem' is on his tomb: 'Home is the sailor, home from sea'

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Sources