Robert Louis Stevenson
Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894), born as Robert Lewis Balfour Stevenson, was a novelist, essayist, travel writer and poet. He was born in Edinburgh's New Town on November 13th 1850, and died 44 years later Stevenson of a brain haemorrhage, on December 3, 1894, on Vailima, a small Samoan island; there he was known as "Tusitala" ("Teller of Tales"). He was buried at the summit of Mount Vaea (475m). [1]
His father, Thomas Stevenson was a joint-engineer to the Board of Northern Lighthouses, and inventor of, among other things, the marine dynamometer, which measures the force of waves. His mother, Margaret Balfour, was the daughter of a Scottish clergyman. [2] His grandfather, Robert Stevenson was Britain's most famous builder of lighthouses, whose achievements include the Bell Rock LighthouseCite error: Closing </ref> missing for <ref> tag.
From the age of six, Stevenson lived at 17 Heriot Row, an elegant Georgian house in Edinburgh's New Town. This home is now a hospitality venue known as "The Stevenson House"[3]
Since his childhood Stevenson suffered from tuberculosis. In 1867 he entered Edinburgh University to study engineering, but changed to law and in 1875 was called to the Scottish bar. His first works were published in The Edinburgh University Magazine (1871).
Instead of practicing law, Stevenson turned to writing travel sketches, essays, and short stories. He published an account of his canoe tour of France and Belgiumin 1878 as An Inland Voyage, and Travels With A Donkey In The Cervennes was published in 1879. In France Stevenson met Fanny Osbourne, and in 1879 he moved with her to California marrying her in 1880. After a short stay at Calistoga (recorded in The Silverado Squatters), they returned to Scotland, and then moved often, searching for a climate that would be better for Stevenson's precarious health.
His best known works are Treasure Island (1883) and The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886).[4] His best known poem is the epitaph he wrote for himself, Requiem:
- UNDER the wide and starry sky
- Dig the grave and let me lie:
- Glad did I live and gladly die,
- And I laid me down with a will.
- This be the verse you 'grave for me:
- Here he lies where he long'd to be;
- Home is the sailor, home from the sea,
- And the hunter home from the hill.
References
- ↑ Robert Louis Stevenson Museum Villa Vailima, Samoa
- ↑ 'Thomas Stevenson - civil engineer' by Robert Louis Stevenson ("He was a man of a somewhat antique strain: with a blended sternness and softness that was wholly Scottish and at first somewhat bewildering; with a profound essential melancholy of disposition and (what often accompanies it) the most humorous geniality in company; shrewd and childish; passionately attached, passionately prejudiced; a man of many extremes, many faults of temper, and no very stable foothold for himself among life's troubles.")
- ↑ The Stevenson HouseEdinburgh
- ↑ Online Books by RL Stevenson