Work Text
Robert Louis Stevenson was born in Edinburgh in 1850. The son of a prosperous civil engineer, he was expected to follow the family profession but finally was allowed to study law at Edinburgh University. Stevenson reacted violently against the Presbyterian respectability of the city’s professional classes and this led to painful clashes with his parents. In his early twenties, he became afflicted with a severe respiratory illness from which he was to suffer for the rest of his life; it was at this time that he determined to become a professional writer. In 1870 he traveled to California to marry Fanny Osbourne, an American ten years his senior. Together they continued his search for a climate kind to his fragile health, eventually settling in Samoa, where he died on 3 December 1894. Stevenson began his literary career as an essayist and travel writer, but the success of Treasure Island (1883) and Kidnapped (1886) established his reputation for tales of action and adventure. Kidnapped, and its sequel Catriona (1893), The Master of Ballantrae and stories such as ‘Thrawn Janet’ and ‘The Merry Men’ also reveal his knowledge and feeling for the Scottish cultural past. Stevenson’s Calvinistic upbringing gave him a preoccupation with predestination and a fascination with the presence of evil. In Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, he explores the darker side of the human psyche, and the character of the Master in The Master of Ballantrae (1889) was intended to be ‘all I know of the Devil’. During the last years of his life Stevenson’s creative range developed considerably and The Beach of Falesa´ brought to fiction the kind of scenes now associated with Conrad and Maugham. At the time of his death, Robert Louis Stevenson was working on Weir of Hermiston, at once a romantic historical novel and an emotional reworking of one of Stevenson's own most distressing experiences, the conflict between father and son. Robert Mihgall completed a Ph.D. on Gothic fiction and Victorian medico-legal science at the University of Wales and then spent three years as a post-doctoral fellow at Merton College, University of Oxford. In 1997 he became the editor ofPenguin Classics, and now works in London as a consultant. His publications include an edition ofOscar Wilde’s poems for Everyman Paperbacks, and a study of Victorian Gothic fiction for Oxford University Press (1999). He has also edited Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray for Penguin Classics. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society ofArts.