Robert Louis Stevenson

Robert Louis Stevenson was born in Edinburgh on 13 November 1850 into a family of lighthouse engineers; his grandfather and father built many of the lighthouses on the Scottish coast. He was a sickly child with a lung condition that troubled him all his life, and he was raised partly by a devout nurse, Alison Cunningham, whose tales of Covenanters and hellfire went into his imagination early. He studied engineering at the University of Edinburgh to please his father, switched to law, and was called to the Scottish bar in 1875. He never practised.

He wrote travel books and essays first, then fiction. In 1880 he married Fanny Van de Grift Osbourne, an American he had met in France, after following her to California. His great successes came in the 1880s: Treasure Island (1883), Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) and Kidnapped (1886). Hoping a warmer climate would help his lungs, he took his family to the South Pacific in 1888 and finally settled on Upolu in Samoa, where he built a house called Vailima. He died there of a cerebral hemorrhage on 3 December 1894, at the age of forty-four.

Stevenson’s horror is mostly moral horror. He was fascinated, as Jekyll and Hyde shows, by the idea of a second self and by the way a respectable life can rest on something buried. The Body Snatcher, first published in the Pall Mall Gazette’s Christmas extra for 1884, draws on the real Edinburgh scandal of Burke and Hare, who murdered people to sell their bodies to an anatomy school. Markheim is a Christmas Day murder followed by a conversation with a visitor who may be the Devil, and it reads like a sketch for Jekyll and Hyde. Olalla is a Gothic romance about an old Spanish family in decline.

Thrawn Janet (1881), first published in The Cornhill Magazine, is the outlier and arguably the best. It is told almost entirely in Scots, and it uses the kirk, the witch-fear and the moorland weather of Stevenson’s childhood stories. The Scots takes a page or two to get used to (“thrawn” means twisted, and also stubborn), and the Reader’s Companion helps. If you’d rather begin in English, start with “The Body Snatcher.”