Robert Louis Stevenson was born in Edinburgh in 1850, into a family of lighthouse engineers. His father and grandfather literally shaped the Scottish coastline, and everyone expected him to follow in their footsteps. He began studying engineering at the University of Edinburgh, but quietly switched to law, qualifying as an advocate in 1875—though he never actually practiced. All along, he was focused on writing.
Stevenson dealt with serious respiratory issues for most of his life, likely due to tuberculosis, and that fragility influenced everything about him: his restlessness, his love for adventure, and his sense that time was fleeting and should be spent on meaningful pursuits. He traveled frequently—through France, across the United States by emigrant train, and eventually to the South Pacific—partly for health reasons and partly because he found staying in one place boring.
“He gained recognition as a prose writer. Treasure Island began as a game with his stepson, sparked by a map drawn on a rainy afternoon, which evolved into a novel.”
Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde reportedly came to him in a dream and was written in just a few days. Kidnapped tapped into Scottish history and landscape with an intimacy that only someone raised on those stories could achieve. These works made him famous on both sides of the Atlantic while he was still in his thirties.
His poetry, while quieter and less celebrated, still holds significance. A Child's Garden of Verses, published in 1885, is one of the few poetry collections for children that adults can enjoy without feeling embarrassed—these poems capture what childhood actually feels like from the inside, rather than what adults think it should feel like. Stevenson wrote many of them while bedridden, which adds a unique depth to the poems about play and freedom when you consider the context.
