biography

Robert Lewis (later: ’Louis’) Balfour Stevenson was born in Edinburgh in 13 November 1850. His father Thomas belonged to a family of engineers who had built many of the deep-sea lighthouses around the rocky coast of Scotland. His mother, Margaret Isabella Balfour, came from a family of lawyers and church ministers.She was bright and vivacious, and a tactful hostess. Between mother and son a strong attachment existed up to the end of his life. After the death of his father she accompanied him in his pursuit of health, first to America and then to the islands of the Pacific. In 1857 the family moved to 17 Heriot Row, a solid respectable house in Edinburgh’s New Town.

He was a precocious and imaginative child. And his memories of his childhood, of his plays and games, and especially of the child's view of the things about him seem to have been more vivid and lasting than is usual even in literary geniuses. No better portrayal of childhood exists than his Child's Garden of Verses. This book is fittingly dedicated to the nurse who was his attendant, friend, and teacher, Alison Cunningham.

He learned to read late--at seven or eight years--because he had been read to by his mother and nurse, and, as he has said, saw no reason then why he should read for himself. His formal instruction began in a private school in 1859. From 1861 to 1864 he went to the Edinburgh Academy: from 1864 to 1867 to another private school in Edinburgh, and then to the University of Edinburgh. One of his masters in the first school said of him: "He was without exception the most delightful boy I ever knew; full of fun, full of tender feeling; ready for his lessons, ready for a story, ready for fun." His fragile body was unfit for vigorous athletics; boating, riding and swimming were his only sports. But he found entertainment enough in life; for his mind was active. Even as a child his delight was intense in hearing, reading, and making imaginative stories. Of some of this early reading he has written most delightfully in A Penny Plain, Two Pence Coloured, a title taken from the price of the series of plays and stories that he and his schoolmates most affected.

He had shown a desire to write early in life, and once in his teens he had deliberately set out to learn the writer's craft by imitating a great variety of models in prose and verse. His youthful enthusiasm for the Covenanters (i.e., those Scotsmen who banded together to defend their version of Presbyterianism in the 17th century) led to his writing The Pentland Rising, his first printed work.

From the time he was twelve, this was his chief and most constant interest. In his essay A College Magazine occurs the oft quoted passage:

"All through my boyhood and youth I was known and pointed out for the pattern of an idler; and yet I was always busy on my own private end, which was to learn to write. I kept always two books in my pocket, one to read, one to write in. As I walked, my mind was busy fitting what I saw with appropriate words; when I sat by the roadside, I would either read, or a pencil and a penny version book would be in my hand, to note down the features of the scene or commemorate some halting stanzas. Thus I lived with words. And what I thus wrote was for no ulterior use, it was written consciously for practice. It was not so much that I wished to be an author (though I wished that too) as that I had vowed that I would learn to write. That was a proficiency that tempted me; and I practised to acquire it, as men learn to whittle, in a wager with myself."

He started several magazines in his boyhood. The earlier ones were in manuscript, but illustrated, and the later ones in print. Their contents were generally hair-raising tales of adventure. Altogether, it would be hard to find a better instance of a man's bent showing itself all through his life.

It had been understood in the family that Louis--as his friends always called him--should follow his father's profession, engineering. Accordingly, when he entered the University of Edinburgh, he chose his course with this in view. At various times he went with his father or alone to acquaint himself with the practical side of the profession. What he thought of these experiences he tells us in his usual interesting way:

"As a way of life, I wish to speak with sympathy of my education as an engineer. It takes a man into the open air; it keeps him hanging about harbour sides, which is the richest form of idling; it carries him to wild islands; it gives him a taste of the genial dangers of the sea; it supplies him with dexterities to exercise; it makes demands upon his ingenuity; it will go far to cure him of any taste (if he ever had one) of the miserable life of cities; and when it has done so, it carries him back and shuts him in an office. From the roaring skerry and the wet thwart of the tossing boat, he passes to the stool and desk; and with a memory full of ships, and seas, and perilous headlands, and the shining pharos, he must apply his longsighted eyes to the petty niceties of drawing, or measure his inaccurate mind with several pages of consecutive figures. He is a wise youth, to be sure, who can balance one part of genuine life against two parts of drudgery between four walls, and for the sake of the one, manfully accept the other."

But, though Stevenson was never the man to shirk drudgery, "genuine life" lay for him in another field of work. The call to write was as strong in him as ever. And so, in 1871, he decided to relinquish the profession of engineering. His father was, of course, disappointed. As his friends could not yet be brought to regard authorship as a profession and a means of livelihood, it was now decided that he should become a lawyer. During 1871-2 he pursued the study of law. This was interrupted by ill health; and how he was sent to Southern France because of incipient consumption he has told in Ordered South. In the spring of 1874 he returned, resumed his law studies, and was admitted to the bar. As he felt no more strongly drawn to this life than to engineering, he never engaged in the practice of the law.

During his years at the university he rebelled against his parents' religion and set himself up as a liberal bohemian who abhorred the alleged cruelties and hypocrisies of bourgeois respectability.

From this period, the years just before and beyond twenty five, date the beginnings of many of his life-long friendships. Among these friends were W. E. Henley, Charles Baxter, Sidney Colvin, Edmund Gosse, and Fleeming Jenkin. He made various trips to Fontainebleau, and formed close ties with many of the artists gathered there. Of the charm of his talk at this period Mr. Gosse has written delightfully:

"[Gaiety] was his cardinal quality in those early days. A childlike mirth leaped and danced in him; he seemed to skip upon the hills of life. He was simply bubbling with quips and jests; his inherent earnestness or passion about abstract things was incessantly relieved by jocosity; and when he had built one of his intellectual castles in the sand, & wave of humor was certain to sweep in and destroy it."

It was during this period that he went on the canoe trip that he made famous in The Inland Voyage. While on one of his sojourns with the artist colony at Grez, near Fontainebleau, he met his future wife, Mrs. Osbourne, who had come there from San Francisco to study art. After her return to San Francisco Stevenson crossed the Atlantic to visit her. Of this voyage, made partly in the steerage, and of his journey across the United States in an emigrant car, he has told in The Amateur Emigrant. The journey made him ill. He lived for a time in Monterey and San Francisco in poverty, ill health, and loneliness, but working with persistence upon various books.

Soon after his return, Stevenson, accompanied by his wife and his stepson, Lloyd Osbourne, went, on medical advice (he had tuberculosis), to Davos, Switz. The family left there in April 1881 and spent the summer in Pitlochry and then in Braemar, Scot. There, in spite of bouts of illness, Stevenson embarked on Treasure Island (begun as a game with Lloyd), which started as a serial in Young Folks, under the title The Sea-Cook, in October 1881. Stevenson finished the story in Davos, to which he had returned in the autumn, and then started on Prince Otto (1885), a more complex but less successful work. Treasure Island is an adventure presented with consummate skill, with atmosphere, character, and action superbly geared to one another. The book is at once a gripping adventure tale and a wry comment on the ambiguity of human motives.

In 1881 Stevenson published Virginibus Puerisque, his first collection of essays, most of which had appeared in The Cornhill. The winter of 1881 he spent at a chalet in Davos. In April 1882 he left Davos; but a stay in the Scottish Highlands, while it resulted in two of his finest short stories, "Thrawn Janet" and "The Merry Men," produced lung hemorrhages, and in September he went to the south of France. There the Stevensons finally settled at a house in Hyères, where, in spite of intermittent illness, Stevenson was happy and worked well. He revised Prince Otto, worked on A Child's Garden of Verses(first called Penny Whistles), and began The Black Arrow: A Tale of the Two Roses (1888), a historical adventure tale deliberately written in anachronistic language.

The threat of a cholera epidemic drove the Stevensons from Hyères back to England. They lived at Bournemouth from September 1884 until July 1887, but his frequent bouts of dangerous illness proved conclusively that the British climate, even in the south of England, was not for him. The Bournemouth years were fruitful, however. There he got to know and love the American novelist Henry James. There he revised A Child's Garden (first published in 1885) and wrote "Markheim," Kidnapped, and Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The poems in A Child's Garden represent with extraordinary fidelity an adult's recapturing of the emotions and sensations of childhood; there is nothing quite like them in English literature. In Kidnapped the fruit of his researches into 18th-century Scottish history and of his feeling for Scottish landscape, history, character, and local atmosphere mutually illuminate one another. But it was Dr. Jekyll--both moral allegory and thriller--that established his reputation with the ordinary reader.

In August 1887, still in search of health, Stevenson set out for America with his wife, mother, and stepson. On arriving in New York, he found himself famous, with editors and publishers offering lucrative contracts. He stayed for a while in the Adirondack Mountains, where he wrote essays for Scribner's and began The Master of Ballantrae. This novel, another exploration of moral ambiguities, contains some of his most impressive writing, although marred by its contrived conclusion.

In June 1888 Stevenson, accompanied by his family, sailed from San Francisco in the schooner yacht Casco, which he had chartered, on what was intended to be an excursion for health and pleasure. In fact, he was to spend the rest of his life in the South Seas. They went first to the Marquesas Islands, then to Fakarava Atoll, then to Tahiti, then to Honolulu, where they stayed nearly six months, leaving in June 1889 for the Gilbert Islands, and then to Samoa, where he spent six weeks.

During his months of wandering around the South Sea islands, Stevenson made intensive efforts to understand the local scene and the inhabitants. As a result, his writings on the South Seas (In the South Seas, 1896; A Footnote to History, 1892) are admirably pungent and perceptive. He was writing first-rate journalism, deepened by the awareness of landscape and atmosphere, such as that so notably rendered in his description of the first landfall at Nuku Hiva in the Marquesas.

In October 1890 he returned to Samoa from a voyage to Sydney and established himself and his family in patriarchal status at Vailima, his house in Samoa. He bought land, built a house, and established a plantation there; and there he spent three busy, helpful and, on the whole, happy years, until his death in August, 1894. He called his home Vailima, a Samoan word meaning "five waters," from the five streams upon the estate. The climate suited him; he led an industrious and active life; and, when he died suddenly, it was of a cerebral hemorrhage, not of the long-feared tuberculosis. His work during those years was moving toward a new maturity. While Catriona(U.S. title, David Balfour, 1893) marked no advance in technique or imaginative scope on Kidnapped, to which it is a sequel, The Ebb-Tide(1894), a grim and powerful tale written in a dispassionate style (it was a complete reworking of a first draft by Lloyd Osbourne), showed that Stevenson had reached an important transition in his literary career. The next phase was demonstrated triumphantly in Weir of Hermiston(1896), the unfinished masterpiece on which he was working on the day of his death. "The Beach of Falesá" (first published 1892; included in Island Night's Entertainments, 1893), a story with a finely wrought tragic texture andalso filled with the spirit of the region, as well as the first part of The Master of Ballantrae, pointed in this direction, but neither approaches Weir. Stevenson achieved in this work a remarkable richness of tragic texture in a style stripped of all superfluities. The dialogue contains some of the best Scots prose in modern literature. Fragment though it is, Weir of Hermiston stands as a great work and Stevenson's masterpiece.

One of the most significant things in his life was his relation to the natives there. His native servants idolized him. To the chiefs and the other islanders Tusitala ("the teller of tales"-so they called him) was as a brother. To the missionaries and traders, and brother Europeans there, he was a friend and counsellor. With their own hands the natives, chiefs and all, built a road from the seaport, Apia, to Stevenson's house; and they named it Ala Loto Alofa, The Road of the Loving Heart.

Twice, at least, he used his powers as a writer in a public protest against injustice. Father Damien, a devoted young Catholic priest, who was giving his life to the service of the lepers in their colony at Molokai had been basely slandered. Stevenson took up his cause, and denounced his traducers. Again, seeing the incompetence and injustice existing in Samoa under the three-fold government of Germany, England, and the United States, Stevenson wrote a series of vigorous letters to the London Times, which, though they made enemies for him, eventually helped to bring to an end a bad condition of government. An account of these events may be read in his A Footnote to History. It was for this crowning service that the chiefs built The Road of the Loving Heart.

The authorial persona had changed from the debonair flâneur of the early works, but retained a joy in his craft and a consciousness in the shaping of his own life.Unfortunately, Stevenson died suddenly, at the pinnacle of his writing career. Throughout his life he had suffered from a strange lung condition hampered by the cold, wet climates in which he lived. Despite his family’s relocation to Samoa after his father’s death, Stevenson soon passed away in December 1894 at the age of forty-four and even shaped the manner of his burial: as he had wished, he was buried at the top of Mount Vaea above his home on Samoa. Appropriately it was his own short poem, ‘Requiem’ (from an 1887 collection), that was written on his tomb: