DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE
Robert Louis Stevenson – A Man Who Dared Everything
by Erin Treat
“No man is any use until he has dared everything.” Robert Louis Stevenson
Robert Louis Balfour Stevenson was born to a respectable, middle-class Edinburgh family on November 13, 1850. His father, Thomas Stevenson, was a lighthouse engineer, the heir of a long family tradition of civil and marine engineering. His mother, Margaret, was the daughter of a Presbyterian minister, Lewis Balfour, after whom she named her only son.
Louis, as his family came to call him, had a somewhat lonely childhood. He had inherited his mother’s tendency toward ill health, which prevented him from attending school regularly. As a boy, he was attended by his devoted mother and his nurse, Alison Cunningham, whom he called “Cummy.”
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From her, even more than from his parents, he acquired a strong sense of Calvinism, a type of Protestantism that included strong beliefs in sin, evil, and the works of the devil. This Calvinistic upbringing influenced many of his later works.
Stevenson’s earliest literary influences included stories from the Old Testament, John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, and pious verses that told the story of Scotland’s religious and historical feuds. He learned to read for himself at age seven and began to peruse his father’s library for reading material. His favorite books as a child were travel narratives and adventure novels, including Rob Roy, Guy Mannering, The Voyages of Captain Woodes Rogers, and the Arabian Nights Entertainments, among others.
At age 17, Stevenson entered Edinburgh University to study science. His family assumed that he would follow in his father’s career footsteps and become an engineer; however, it soon became apparent that his interests and personality were imaginative and literary, rather than practical and scientific. At age 21, he confided to his father that he had no desire to become an engineer and wanted to try his hand at writing instead. Although his parents were disappointed, they reached a compromise: Stevenson would read for the Bar, so that if his literary ambitions came to nothing, he would be able to fall back on the law as a respectable profession.
As a young man in Edinburgh, Stevenson lived in two worlds: the formal propriety of his parents’ neighborhood in New Town, and the seedy, bohemian world of Leith Walk and Lothian Road. He frequently visited both the alehouses and the brothels of Old Town in his days as a student, earning himself the nickname “Velvet Coat” among the ladies of some of his favorite establishments. He found both happiness and freedom in the bohemian world; he saw it as more honest and less hypocritical than the conventional world in which he was raised.
Stevenson’s life experiences and vastly expanded reading during these years caused him to doubt his parents’ dogmatic religious views. The issue came to a head in 1873, when Stevenson revealed his agnosticism to his father. The resulting argument strained their relationship for years afterward.
Stevenson’s literary career began in the fall of that year. He had taken ill with nervous exhaustion, and his doctors ordered him to take a prolonged rest abroad. He spent six months convalescing at Mentone, in the South of France, where he wrote essays, fables, and short stories. Some of these early works include an essay on Edgar Allen Poe and a short story entitled “When the Devil was Well.” He also wrote journalistic pieces that appeared in the Cornhill Magazine and the Fortnightly Review.
From 1875 to 1876, Stevenson spent much of his time at Fontainebleau, where his cousin was a member of an informal artist colony. There he met Mrs. Fanny Vandegrift Osbourne, an American traveling in Europe with her two children. She was estranged from her husband, and though she was ten years older than Stevenson, the two were powerfully attracted to each other. Their relationship escalated for several years through correspondence and periodic meetings at Fontainebleau. In 1878, Fanny returned to California to seek a divorce from her husband. Worried about reports of her ill health, Stevenson followed her across the Atlantic traveling from Scotland to Monterey. The stress of the long journey nearly killed Stevenson, and it took Fanny several weeks to nurse him back to health. The two were married in San Francisco in May of 1880.
During this period, Stevenson’s writing career began to flourish. He published his first book in April 1878. The book, entitled An Inland Voyage, detailed a canoeing holiday he had taken along the rivers and canals of Belgium. He published a second travel book, Travels with a Donkey, in 1879. He also wrote a great many short stories and essays, several of which would be collected in Virginbus Puerisque (1881) and New Arabian Nights (1882).
Stevenson was quickly becoming a writer of note. His literary pieces earned him the respect of his contemporaries, including the American novelist Henry James, British poet Edmund Gosse, and countryman Andrew Lang. He also made a name for himself as a journalist in the late 1870s, with help from William Ernest Henley, who worked as an editor for many of England’s most respected periodicals. Henley and Stevenson also collaborated on several plays and were close friends until Stevenson’s marriage.
After marrying Fanny Osbourne, Stevenson spent most of the rest of his life in a constant search for a suitable climate. His trek across the United States and the return journey to Scotland with his bride exacerbated his delicate health, and he spent much of his time from 1880 to 1887 as a semi-invalid. His ill health did not, however, prevent him from writing. These years mark some of Stevenson’s finest writing achievements; Treasure Island was published in 1883 and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Kidnapped both appeared in 1886. This period also saw the publication of some of his most respected essays and short stories.
Stevenson’s father died in May of 1887. The two had reconciled some years before, and that relationship kept Stevenson and his new family in Scotland. Upon his father’s death, Stevenson no longer felt tied to the British Isles, so he and his family left for the United States. They lived for a year in New York State, where he wrote The Master of Ballantrae. In 1889, a newspaper magnate offered to fund a cruise of the Pacific in exchange for a series of letters from Stevenson that would be published in syndication in the U.S. Stevenson and his wife agreed to the voyage, and they traveled throughout the Pacific Islands until 1890.
After more than a year of a nomadic, sea-faring life, Stevenson and his family settled in Samoa in January of 1890. He purchased a 300-acre property, where he would live out the last five years of his life. Although his responsibilities as patriarch to Fanny’s children and property owner were great, Stevenson’s writing continued to flourish. From 1890 to 1894, he wrote two novellas, two novels, several short stories, a history of the Stevenson family, and a summary of Samoan politics. He also began a number of novels that he never completed, including St. Ives, The Young Chevalier, and Heathercat.
In 1892, he began what he anticipated to be his masterpiece, a novel entitled Weir of Hermiston. He worked enthusiastically on the novel until he died of a cerebral hemorrhage on December 3, 1894. He was buried at the summit of Mount Vaea. Stevenson was a consummate adventurer at heart; the final lines of his poem “Requiem,” which are engraved on his tombstone, reflect the peace at the end of his wanderlust:
This be the verse you grave for me:
Here he lies where he longed to be;
Home is the sailor, home from the sea,
And the hunter home from the hill. |
