Robert Louis Stevenson

See also: Robert Stevenson, Stevenson

Robert Louis Stevenson , born the November 13rd 1850 with Edinburgh and deceased the December 3rd 1894 with Vailima (Samoa), is a Scottish writer and a large traveller, famous for his novel the Island with the treasure like for its news the Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde .

Biography

Childhood and youth

Robert Lewis Balfour Stevenson is born on November 13rd, 1850 to the 8, Howard Place at Edinburgh where his/her parents settled, Thomas Stevenson and Margaret Balfour, after their marriage two years earlier, on August 28th, 1848. His/her Maggie mother is the girl junior by the reverend Lewis Balfour, a family of the Borders. His/her Thomas father, as for him, is an enthusiast calvinist pertaining to the famous line of Engineer S which is the Stevenson family: his/her grandfather Robert, his father Thomas, his uncles Alan and David, all is originators of headlights and contributed their share to the security of the Scottish maritime littoral.

December 13rd, 1850 in the purest respect of the Scottish tradition, it is baptized “Robert Lewis” by her own grandfather, the reverend Lewis Balfour.

Enough quickly, Maggie Stevenson is unable to deal fully with his/her son. In addition to its inexperience of youth - it does not have whereas 21 years - it suffers from pulmonary problems probably inherited her father, to which are added nervous disorders. It appears necessary to engage a nurse for the child. Three follow one another, but it is the last, entry with the service of Stevenson in May 1852, which marks Stevenson all its life: Alison Cunningham, affectionately called “Cummy”. December 14th, 1852, the small “Smout”, as his/her parents call it, fall very sick, victim of a cooling and strong a Fièvre. Allotting that to the too great proximity of the Toilets off Leith, Thomas and Maggie move in January 1853 to settle to the 1, Inverleith Terrace, in a house considered to be healthier for the child. Alas, the residence appears even wetter than the preceding one and after a short improvement, Louis makes a relapse much more serious: March 10th, 1853, the doctor diagnoses to him an attack of Croup. Consequently, new the years which follow make live a martyrdom with the child: Cold S, Bronchitis S, Pneumonia S, fevers and lung infections follow one another each winter in addition to the more traditional infantile diseases. It is only in February 1857 that a doctor establishes a bringing together between the moisture of the house and the health of the child. Stevenson move then as of the month of May to the 17, Heriot Row. This new residence, healthier and more comfortable than the preceding one, is also more in adequacy with the new social position of Thomas, become meanwhile, in 1854, engineer appointed in Northern Lights Board. But it is already too late: the health of Louis is definitively ruined.

Because of his frequent diseases and his fragile health, Louis left very little at his place, it unpleasant climate from Edinburgh risking of him to be fatal. Its life is thus organized in the house of Heriot Row whose Thomas frequently absent, is called by its function in Northern Lights with rounds of inspection. Maggie, it also often sick, déresponsabilise little by little of the child, the Cummy brave woman being to assume it there. Vis-a-vis parents too often absent, nothing of astonishing then so that the latter, equipped in addition with a strong personality, becomes for Louis “his second mother, its first wife, the angel of her life of child”. It is it which keeps the bedside of small Smout whose diseases cause painful and feverish nights filled of nightmares and insomnia, night terrors evoked in its poem “North-West Passage” like in its text “a chapter on the dreams”. And it is still it which distracts it during the long days when there remains nailed with the bed, by making him the reading: the Bible, the Voyage of the pilgrim of Bunyan, the biography of Pasteur Me Cheyne, the writings covenantaires like those of Wodrow or Peden; or by telling him the history of Scotland and particularly that of the persecutions undergone by the Covenanter S lasting the Killing Time, as well as popular tales of phantoms and ghosts. They are also very fond of delicacies accounts of Aventure S appearing in the review Cassel' S Family .

October 7th, 1856, comes to settle in Inverleith his/her young cousin Bob which its family wishes to save the sad spectacle of the crises of insanity of her father Alan. From three years older than Louis, he becomes the playmate of Louis: together, they have fun to invent stories or to paint figurines of the theater of Skelt, whose evocative titles ignite the imagination of the Louis young person.

Other consequences of its failing health, periods of cure or of convalescence in his/her grandfather, with the Presbytery of Colinton (Colinton Manse). It is there that is sound Golden age . Located a few kilometres from Edinburgh, Louis finds his many cousins there and cousins and all is only plays and recreations under the benevolence of Jane Whyte Balfour - famous “the Auntie” of which it is made mention in has Child' S Garden off Pour -, oldest daughter of Lewis Balfour. To died from the latter on April 30th, 1860, a new reverend comes to replace it and it is finished by it of Colinton. “Auntie” leaves the presbytery to settle with Spring Grove close to London.

Its first attempts at schooling stop well quickly because of health issue: in 1856, fits of coughing and fevers discourage his/her parents for the remainder of the year, then in 1857, after two weeks of class, a gastric fever followed by bronchitis incapacitent it during all of winter. It enters in October 1861 the small class of Edinburgh Academy, but it is shown rather solitary: its weak constitution preventing it from taking share with the plays, he pains to be integrated into the other children. In spring 1862, it is Thomas who is taken coughing fits and Louis once again left the school in order to accompany his parents in the south by the England, before spending one month to Hombourg in July. Then holidays are prolonged until in autumn while taking hiring with North Berwick, which constitutes the first true contact with the sea for Louis in what was still a small village of fishermen on the Firth off Forth, close to Dunbar. When the return to school arrives, Maggie falls sick almost at once requiring a more radical cure. January 2nd, 1863, all the small family accompanied by Cummy, leaves then for a long tour: they cross initially the France and settle starting from the February 4th with Menton. At the end two months of cure, during which Louis studied with a French tutor, the health condition of Maggie improved considerably. They thus set out again all on March 31st, 1863 to visit the Italy during more than one month, before taking the way of the return the May 8th via the Austria and the Germany. May 29th, 1863, after 5 months of voyage and expatriation, Louis regains finally Heriot Row and sees to approach without much enthusiasm the prospect for the re-entry in Academy. In front of the distress of his son, Thomas decides to change the ideas to him and proposes to him to accompany it during the summer in its round of inspection by the headlights on the coast by Fife. Louis accepts with joy it first voyage in the capacity as man, without underskirts to assist . On their return, they discover Maggie again suffering and a new stay in the South of France seems to be essential for it. In order not to not disturb the schooling of Louis again, his parents decide to send it in pension to Burlington Lodge Academy close to “Auntie” to Spring Grove. In addition to a first rather negative contact with the English company, it is there that he writes his first accounts of adventures for the magazine of the school preceding his work already to come. But he saw this distance rather badly and claims with his father to be able to return. Thomas yields: he joined his son on December 19th, 1863 and both will find Maggie and Cummy with Menton. Thomas sets out again for Edinburgh at the end of January 1864 after having promised with his son not to return it to Spring Grove. They leave Menton in May 1864 to spend the holidays on banks of the Tweed close to Peebles. When it does not spend its days to be had fun with his cousins, Louis invests himself seriously in several projects of writing.

In October 1864, Thomas registers it in a school for problem childs. Its integration among the other pupils occurs better, but it does not show a great interest for the studies. It is that the goal that it set is already very different and which it devotes the majority of its time to reach that point: to learn how to write. He works in particular on a play inspired of the life of Deacon Brodie, businessman respected the day, criminal and robber the night. Being discovered with another pupil of the school, the same influences and the same passion of the literature, they are read their compositions in turn and collaborate in the publication of a magazine. Its meeting with one of its idols, the author of famous the The Coral Island , Robert Michael Ballantyne, is not to arrange its exaltation for the writing. In February 1865, new interruption of schooling to follow Maggie in cure to Torquay until in October. During the school New Year's Day, Louis launches out, only this time, in another project of review, whose three numbers appear with the beginning of the year 1866. The review does not survive the new stay with Torquay, of April to May, which the health of his/her mother requires. During the summer which followed, Stevenson undertakes to write a novel with in backdrop rising covenantaire of 1666 in the Pentland Hills: the Insurrection of Pentland. But his/her father, with the reading of his first drafts, qualifies the work of failure and encourages it to give up the way of the fiction to the profit of a simple historical account. Louis, to give pleasure with his father, passes all the autumn to the rewriting of Pentland Rising . In reward, Thomas makes print the work of his son with hundred specimens in a bookseller of Edinburgh and repurchases the totality of pulling.

This double influence which was his, it summarizes it besides very well: A small Scot hears much about shipwrecks, fatal reefs, beachcombers without pity and large headlights, as well as covered mountains of heather, wild clans and of covenantaires pursued. .

Predestined to perpetuate the dynasty of Stevenson, it enters at the 17 years age, in October 1867, with the Université of Edinburgh to prepare a diploma for the occupation of engineer there.

The university and bohemian life

In spite of promising work (of the drawings of headlights with accompanying notes eulogistically), it applies in fact little to the studies, aspiring already to becoming writer. It carries out a life then very dissolue, scandalizing family and professors, in particular by his relation with a prostitute of Edinburgh. It is at that time that it transforms the C-W communication “Lewis” of its name into “Louis” with the Frenchwoman, the pronunciation remaining the same one. It adopts thus the name of Robert Louis Stevenson and uses from now on initials “R.L.S.” to be indicated. It gives up its studies of engineer in 1871, its bad health agreeing definitely badly with the builder's trade of headlights. It is reorientated then towards the Droit - received with the examination of the Barreau the July 14th 1875, it however followed never this occupation - thus thinking of laying out of more than leisures in order to devote itself to its secret vocation: the writing. In September 1872, it attends club “L.J.R.” (Liberty, Justice, Reverence) founded with his/her cousin Bob, a company of students in rebellion preaching the atheism and the rejection of parental education. Obviously, that is very little with the taste of his/her father. The family scandal reaches its paroxysm beginning 1873, when he announces to him that he lost the faith.

In 1876, it furrows the channels of Antwerp to Pontoise, travelling through the France and the Belgium. It published its voyage, in 1878, in the book a voyage in the Grounds .

In August, stay with Barbizon where it meets Fanny Osbourne, born Van de Grift, itself in stay with Grez (close to Fontainebleau). This American ten years its elder is a artist-painter who lives separate of her husband Samuel Osbourne and only raises his two Isobel children and Lloyd. Between them two, the love at first sight is immediate. They again find during the summer 1877 with Grez, then with Paris in October. They want to marry but Fanny is not divorced her husband. In 1878, it sets out again in California, to obtain this divorce. On its side, Stevenson would like to follow it well but its finances do not allow him. In addition, his/her father threatens to cut the vivres to him if it persists in this idea of marriage.

Disappointed and in prey with the doubt, it leaves to be insulated with the Monastier-on-Gazeille. Since this locality, it carries out an excursion in company of a she-ass, named Modestine , the pack fixed on the animal is a bag being used to contain its effects and its bag of bed. Party the September 22nd 1878 of Haute-Loire, it reaches twelve days later the small town of Saint-Jean-of-Gard. Its course walked on in the Velay, Lozere or old country of Gévaudan (Mont Lozere and the Cevennes), while passing by the communes of Langogne, Luc, Bleymard, Bridge-of-Montvert, Florac and St-Germain de Calberte, in country Camisard. Today this excursion of 230 km is known under the name of “Chemin of Stevenson” and is referred like path of great excursion GR70. The account of this tour, Voyage with an ass in the Cevennes published in 1879, remains today still the book of bedside of many hikers.

Marriage

In 1879, in spite of the adverse opinion of its family, it leaves to join Fanny Osbourne in California. On the basis of Glasgow the August 7th, it reaches New York the 18 and finds Fanny with Monterey, after railway journey. In March 1880, it misses dying of a pneumonia and owes its safety only for submission to Fanny, which is devoted 6 weeks to its bedside. Hardly restored, he marries it the May 19th with San Francisco and they leave out of honeymoon, accompanied by the son by Fanny, Lloyd. This honeymoon, that they pass to Calistoga to California in a money mine closed down, is reported Squatters de Silverado and is published in 1883.

Between 1880 and 1887 Stevenson travelled much in Scotland, and England, remained with Davos, seeking a beneficial climate with its health. It spent two years in 1883 and 1884 to Hyères in a country cottage called Solitude . He wrote then: “This corner, our garden and our sight are sub celestial. I sing the every day with Bunian the large bard. I reside close to the Paradise. Later he wrote “Happy, I was it once and it was in Hyères”

In 1887, after the death of his/her father, it left to the the United States, where it was accommodated by the New Yorkean press like a high-speed motorboat, following success " the Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde " (1886). It spent the winter in the mounts Adirondacks to look after its tuberculosis, and decided in spring to carry out a cruising in Oceania where it visited the Marquesas Islands, the islands Gilbert and the Samoa S.

Last years

In 1890, its health worsening, it settles definitively in Vailima with the Samoa whose tropical climate is beneficial with its respiratory problems. Without neglecting its literary career, it is invested much near the Samoans: at the time of a civil war in 1893, it takes even their defense against the German Impérialisme. Full with gratitude, the natives build in his honor a road leading to its plantation. He becomes even a chief of tribe, called respectfully Tusitala (“the storyteller of stories”) by his members. He dies of a crisis of Apoplexie at the 44 years age.

He is buried according to his desire vis-a-vis the sea at the top of the Mont Vaea overhanging Vailima. Its tomb carries in epitaph the first towards its poem Requiem composed to Hyères in 1884:

Under the wide and starry sky,
Dig the serious and let binds me,
Glad did I live and gladly die,
And I ugly me down with has will.

Its work

With wrong way of its contemporaries naturalists, the poetic one of Stevenson is resolutely anti-realistic. It privileges the laws and the requirements of the fiction against those of reality, without to be locked up in any ivory tower. On the one hand, it is while working for the effectiveness of the account that this one will be able to claim to provide a readable representation of reality; in addition, Stevenson represents less reality even reality in a descriptive way, which it does not give to reading the representations and the speeches of the beings of this world: in testifies the recurring delegation to the account to characters narrators, by whom Stevenson gives to even reading less reality as the speeches and the points of view held on this reality. Often, these speeches are those of the bad faith, the lies and the hypocrisy of its contemporaries of the time victorienne; contrary, the choice of an atypical narrator is the occasion to present an idealistic and innocent point of view. In both cases, this setting in scene of the narration exerts a critical function of this time victorienne, which it is allocated to the reader to interpret like such.

Its news and novels of adventure, lovesong and horror express a deep intelligence of the narration, its means and its effects. Stevenson is also a very lucid theorist of the account and its own practice, and some of its critical articles, in particular " Humble a remontrance" , authentic tests of poetic account constitute. Stevenson exploits all the springs of the account: it carries out the multiplication of the narrators and the points of view while inserting in its account reports or letters of characters ( the Island with the treasure , the Master of Ballantrae , the Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde ), which causes to give versions different from the same history and to leave open the appreciation of the characters and events like the significance even of the account. Thus, the Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is completed significantly on the confession of Jekyll, without the preceding narrators not taking again the word, is to draw the direction from this adventure and the ethical questions which it poses, that is to say to accredit or refute the version of the events that Jekyll gives: with the reader to decide. Stevenson resorts often to narrators to comprehension limited or to of point of view lacunar (the notary and the surgeon in the Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde ), which ensures a maximum suspense and supports an incomprehension initial favourable with the fantastic one, and put in scene in same time the skimped limits of the scientistic comprehension of the phenomena (thus of fantastic phenomena) or hypocrisy and the bad faith all victorienne of its time (thus as for the strongly tinted reports/ratios of homosexuality between the characters of the Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and of Mr. Hyde ). This narrative play finds its apogee with the narrators unworthy of confidence, who by their deliberated silences and their lies leave shares of shade and ambiguity in the account and require an active reader, likely to read between the lines ( the Master of Ballantrae ). Stevenson also shows its formal virtuosity in News Thousand and One Nights : this collection of news proposes only one history, but burst in a series of accounts, each one giving a stage of the history with which a main character is associated; all the play and the prowess rest on the wide variation which Stevenson household enters the autonomous account of each news and the general screen of the history common to each one of them: each news seems to propose an entirely different account and ends up joining and to make progress in a central way the principal intrigue.

The art of the account of Stevenson doubles of an extremely visual writing, favourable with the scenes particularly striking, the very rich capacity of suggestion and strongly symbolic systems: the duel between the two brothers in the Master of Ballantrae , the trampling of the young girl, the murder of notable with blows of cane or the metamorphosis in the Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and of Mr. Hyde . According to a paradox which is only apparent, this visibility of the writing stevensonienne passes by a very great saving in means, and the process rests more on the suggestion starting from very a small number of details that on an exhaustive description which would be less effective: there also, Stevenson entrusts to the reader an active role. Stevenson theorized itself this practice in its Essais on the art of the fiction , where it reveals in particular how a chart, visual object nonnarrative, provided the matrix of the Island to the treasure . This control can pass unperceived insofar as its objective is not to point out itself for itself nor to even innovate to innovate, but to serve the effectiveness, the power and the significance of the account. Stevenson suffers so especially in France where the concept of avant-garde largely determined the esthetic judgment, of a reputation of author of novels of adventure or accounts fantastic for teenagers. One should not be mistaken there: he was greeted with enthusiasm by largest of his contemporaries and of its successors, Henry James which regarded it as the largest novelist of its time, Marcel Schwob and Alfred Jarry which translated it, André Gide, Antonin Artaud (author of a scenario adapting the Maître of Ballantrae ), Vladimir Nabokov which made course on the Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde , Jorge Luis Borges (of which the foreword of the invention of Morel , of Adolfo Bioy Casares, takes again exactly the theses of the article " Humble a remontrance"), Italo Calvino, Georges Perec and more recently Jean Echenoz.

Lastly, at the end of its life, Stevenson was one of the first to be described with precision and fascination the landscapes and manners of the regions of the Pacific. Its many literary and sociological contributions were worth to him the regard of the people of the Pacific. In full period of triumphing colonialism, it defended the cause of the separatists against the colonial powers, especially once installed in Samoa. It was honoured with the recognition of the inhabitants of the Kiribati where its unloading, one July 12th, was taken again like starting point of independence, 90 years afterwards. To Samoas, on its tomb, a moving epitaph, recalls it to the memory his. The popularity of its accounts dropped forever, and many are the adaptations, as well delivers some (to be noted in particular the editions for young people magnificiently illustrated by Pierre Joubert or Rene Follet) that with the cinema.

Books

Novels and news