The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson

His health led to sporadic schooling, with periods of boarding schools interrupted by bouts of illness that left him bedridden. During these times he was privately tutored by his governess named Alison Cunningham. She was affectionately known as….get this….Cummy. Talk about unfortunate. Cummy was a stern taskmaster, but you would probably be kind of grumpy as well if your nickname was Cummy.

“In November 1867, Stevenson entered the University of Edinburgh to study engineering. From the start he showed no enthusiasm for his studies and devoted much energy to avoiding lectures.” Considering that he wound up being famous, I guess the moral of the story is “Don’t stay in school, but only if your family is rich and you can spend your life doing whatever you want.” He gave up on school so he could focus on writing, but his dad was not having it. He was like “Oh you like letters? Well, practice the letter of the law, or I am canceling all your credit cards.” He was like “Ugh, you don’t understand the free spirit of the writer.” So they compromised and he studied law. He passed the bar at age 24, and, out of spite, did his best to never use his education.

He tootled all around Europe, as rich people are wont to do, and met a woman named Fanny Van de Grift Osbourne in France. Hawthorne was immediately attracted to the amount of fanciness that her name included. She had left her home of Indianapolis with her two children to escape her abusive husband. Stevenson fell in love, but then Fanny moved to San Francisco. In a totally-not-creepy move he followed her. He traveled by a second class steamship so he could learn how peasants lived, and then took a train all the way out to California. With his crappy health he was literally almost dead by the time he got to Monterey. He was nursed back to health by some local ranchers, and I am sure there is more to that story, but Wikipedia didn’t say and I was too lazy to investigate.

After that he worked his way to San Francisco, which almost killed him again. He reportedly lived on forty-five cents a day, which, according to the inflation calculator, is $14.14 USD in today’s money. When he finally arrived in San Francisco, Fanny nursed him back to health. The two soon married and they honeymooned in an abandoned mine in Napa Valley. Talk about romantic. I bet you never had exclusive alone time at an abandoned mine with a guy who followed you halfway across the globe.

Despite the obvious horror-movie setup of that escapade, they came back fine and decided to move back to Scotland to mend relations with his parents. You see, Stevenson had decided to reject Christianity in his early twenties, and as his parents were devout Presbyterians, this did not go over too well. They hadn’t really been on speaking terms even though his father kept wiring them funds, so Fanny urged him to patch things up. It apparently worked, since later in life he had a rekindling of faith and even taught Sunday School.

Things patched up, they realized that all the cold and damp was not great for Stevenson’s health. Who knew? They settled in Hampshire in England where the sea air could do him good. Warm, sunny beaches do everyone good! I’ve never been to England, but if the movies and pictures are to believed, English beaches are known worldwide for bikini-clad sunbathers, so that seemed like a good call.

Honestly, he should have stayed in San Francisco, methinks, but he didn’t want to be so far from family. Or, more likely, Fanny told him he was supposed to stay close. Luckily for Stevenson, when he was thirty-six, his father died. He was like “Screw you, England, I’ma do what I want.” His physician kept advising him to move to a warmer climate, so in yet another moment of good judgement, he decided to do the responsible thing and move to the mountains of Colorado. Really Stevenson? And you wonder why your health keeps being terrible?

They only made it as far as New York though before deciding to winter in a safe, warm, area. The Adirondack mountains. In a cabin nowhere near civilization or medical assistance. This guy is just winning at decision making.

Guess that was enough of the mountains for him because he skipped Colorado and went to South Pacific to tootle around islands for several years. He finally settled in Samoa in 1889 at the age of thirty-nine. This is when I guess he had his Come to Jesus moment and started teaching Sunday School. In a twist of irony, when he finally did what everyone had been telling him and moved somewhere warm, he was dead from a stroke at age forty-four – within five years of settling down. I guess maybe there was something to his terrible choices to live in awful climates after all.

 

About His Writing

Stevenson was described as a light-hearted, happy person. In 1877 he wrote “A happy man or woman is a better thing to find than a five-pound note. He or she is a radiating focus of goodwill and the great Theorem of the Liveableness of Life”. He pretty much avoided politics, which honestly is probably a good idea for happiness. He thought the best purpose of literature was to provide a happy escape from reality.

It’s sort of ironic then that when he settled in Samoa, he decided to become a political activist. Seeing European colonial pressure on the South Pacific and the affects on the local population heavily influenced his worldview, and he took to journalism and political activism. I suppose his rose-tinted view of island life and sailing adventures he had in earlier life was confronted with a less pleasant reality, and he wanted to do something about it.

It is important to keep in mind that Stevenson wrote Treasure Island in 1884 while he was traveling between North America and Europe and disdaining being serious. This was five years before traveling to the South Pacific and gaining hands-on experience of the settings or of sailing life. Treasure Island, and his other fiction, was primarily “[w]ritten as a story for boys, [and] Stevenson had thought it in ‘no need of psychology or fine writing’, but its success is credited with liberating children’s writing from the ‘chains of Victorian didacticism’.”

For a long time he was remembered primarily as a children’s book author and not held in high esteem. In the late 20th century, though, critics began to change their minds and consider his writing actually pretty good.

“On the subject of Stevenson’s modern reputation, American film critic Roger Ebert wrote in 1996,

I was talking to a friend the other day who said he’d never met a child who liked reading Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island.

Neither have I, I said. And he’d never met a child who liked reading Stevenson’s Kidnapped. Me neither, I said. My early exposure to both books was via the Classics Illustrated comic books. But I did read the books later, when I was no longer a kid, and I enjoyed them enormously. Same goes for Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

The fact is, Stevenson is a splendid writer of stories for adults, and he should be put on the same shelf with Joseph Conrad and Jack London instead of in between Winnie the Pooh and Peter Pan.”

Yeah! Take that old-timey critics! He is also apparently the twenty-sixth most translated author of all time, beating out Charles Dickens and Edgar Allen Poe, so Pftftppphtthhh!!!! Plus he had this sweet statue of him in Colinton, Scotland, outside Colinton Parish Church:

SylviaStanley, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

 

Diving Into the Story

I am writing this before ever opening the book, so I have zero expectations of it. I know that after reading this totally objective bio, you are all expecting a realistic piece of historical fiction with deeper themes of European colonization and Eurocentrism. This book, and my blog, will do our utmost to disappoint you. Best to look at it all in good fun and just do what Stevenson did when he wrote it: ignore the darker truths.

It’s a story designed as a fun romp for kids, written by someone who disdained politics and being serious, at least at the time of writing.  Sounds like a pretty good reprieve from the reality we all face today. As it was written by an Englishman far removed from the golden age of piracy, who never traveled to any of the tropical settings where it takes place, I have no doubt that it is historically accurate and true to life. It’s the fun illustrated edition too, so I will be sure to share all the pictures. Time to set sail for next week!!!!