Robert Louis Stevenson: The bohemian boy from Edinburgh who created some of the world’s best stories, by Rab McNeil

Best known for Treasure Island, Kidnapped, and the Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, his scope was wider, his style a work in progress when he died at the age of 44, on the Polynesian island of Samoa.

Ill health – chronic bronchial disease – dogged him all his life, leaving him painfully thin but all the more striking a figure for that. An only child, his father Thomas was of the famous Stevenson lighthouse family. His mother, Margaret Balfour, came from gentry stock with lands in Fife.

His Calvinist nurse Alison Cunningham (“Cummy”) told him folk tales that gave him nightmares and, for light relief, read from the Bible and John Bunyan. He later dedicated his A Child’s Garden of Verses to her.

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His education was a mixture of private tutors, Edinburgh Academy and a term at boarding school in Middlesex, none of which damaged his urge to write, despite his father urging him to “give up such nonsense”. Later, Thomas funded his son’s first book, The Pentland Rising, about the Covenanters. Their rebellion was 200 years old. RLS was 16.

He entered the University of Edinburgh to study engineering, but enjoyed more the debates of The Speculative Society. In vacation time, he travelled with his father, inspecting the family’s engineering works – “The towers we founded and the lamps we lit” – on journeys like those that inspired Walter Scott to write The Pirate. When he said he wanted to dedicate himself to writing, his father accepted with good grace – and an agreement to study law as a plan b. Later, his father was more devastated by Louis’s conversion to atheism.

By now, Louis (as he was more intimately known) was dressing in a right bohemian manner – velveteen jacket! – and growing his hair long. Today, he’d be wearing “skinny” trousers that pinch at the knee.

Louis frequented low pubs and brothels and, worse still, literary London and French artistic communities, the latter partly for his health, as the warm sunshine proved mysteriously more invigorating than Edinburgh’s grey drizzle.

In 1876, at Grez, he met vivacious Fanny Van de Grift Osbourne, an American short story writer. They became lovers and settled in San Francisco, with Louis trying to support himself through writing while still hampered by ill-health. When they married in 1880, he described himself as “a mere complication of cough and bones”. In 1884, they returned to Britain, settling down for three years in – wait for it – Bournemouth, where he did some of his finest writing.

Treasure Island was already out, having first been serialised in the children’s magazine Young Folks from 1881 to 1882. Its tropes, if that’s the word, remain deeply embedded in modern culture and, to this day, pirates are legally obliged to have parrots on their shoulders.

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Kidnapped, set around the post-’45 Appin Murder and featuring some Lowland Scots dialogue, also started life in Young Folks, in 1886, but like Treasure Island, over the piece, is probably treasured more by adults.

The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, published in 1886, was arguably less suitable for Young Folks, the novella dealing with the good and evil that co-exists within us all, and passing into the language, with a “Jekyll and Hyde character” ascribed to dubious dudes with a dual personality.

Though I think we can safely say The Strange Case has a dark side, it’s still fair to observe, particularly but not exclusively of the earlier works, that in RLS, as in Scott, there’s a tone that I don’t want to describe as jejune, even in the best sense of innocent. Unpretentious? Decent? Not jaunty, not superficial.

Whatever the word – how embarrassing to give up trying to find it – we’re highlighting the fact that, even with jolly rotten baddies, RLS eschewed sordid and seedy detail, which he deplored in, for example, Zola and other French writers. In Treasure Island, he saw “no need of psychology”, believing novels should be “neat”, not “confusing”, like frequently “monstrous” reality.

Perhaps it was for that reason that, having been a literary celebrity in his own day, admired by great contemporary writers, for part of the grim 20th century he was relegated to the status of second-rate children’s storyteller. Today, rehabilitated, he’s compared to Joseph Conrad, Henry James and Jack London.

Back on his lifelong search for health, Louis and family spent three years sailing in the South Seas and Hawaiian islands, which restored him greatly. There’s yir cure if you’re feeling wabbit.

In 1880, the family settled in Vailima, Samoa, his own Treasure Island. Taking the name Tusitala, he threw himself into local life, including its politics, fearing the naive islanders ripe for exploitation by mercenary Europeans.

Politically, he was a socialist (youth) and a conservative (maturity), “the normal cycle” as he described it. Whatever the handle, he became active in defending the islanders’ rights.

These real matters were reflected in a new writing tone, perhaps less agreeable (almost the word sought earlier), as in The Beach of Falesá and The Ebb-Tide, with their duplicitous and greedy imperialists. Back on more familiar fictional territory, he also wrote Catriona and began Weir of Hermiston. Believing the latter, about a sensitive young man in a morally ambivalent world, “so good that it frightens me”, RLS died of a cerebral haemorrhage on 3 December 1894 before he could finish it.

His own words are inscribed on his tomb: “Glad did I live and gladly die/And I laid me down with a will.”

The Samoans, who had come to love him, laid him down with great respect.

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