Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894)
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Robert Louis Balfour Stevenson
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Robert Stevenson was born in the mid 1800s. To give you an idea of when he lived, I’ll list a few of his contemporaries. Charles Dickens was living at the same time as Stevenson. Louisa May Alcott and Jane Austin were also living at that time. Known as Robert Louis Stevenson, his full name was Robert Louis Balfour Stevenson. He was Scottish; born in Edinburgh. Every family in those days seemed to have a profession of their own. In Stevenson’s case, it was lighthouse design. Stevenson was not the healthiest off all children. He coughed a lot, and easily got fevers. The colder of a place that he lived, the worse it was. This gave his parents angst. Some think he had tuberculosis, but some are now saying he may have had bronchiectasis. After rejecting Christianity, he said he was curse to his parents. According to Stevenson, his father said “You have rendered my whole life a failure,” and his mother said “This is the heaviest affliction that has ever befallen me.” Stevenson says that his parents were probably the only two people in the world who cared about the Lord.
In his early twenties, he met his future wife: Fanny Sitwell. He married her seven years later. Stevenson was her second husband.
Stevenson wrote twelve novels (including Treasure Island and Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde), twenty short stories, and five poems before he died on December 3, 1894, when he was just 44 years old.
