Robert Louis Stevenson

Biography

Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894) was a Scottish writer of chronic ill health who spent much of his adult life searching for climates that agreed with his lungs. He was a deeply moral man in an era of enormous hypocrisy — raised in Calvinist Edinburgh, trained as a lawyer (though he never practiced), chronically drawn between his proper upbringing and his bohemian instincts. The idea for Jekyll and Hyde came to him in a dream in 1885; his wife Fanny woke him from a nightmare and he was furious at being disturbed — he said he had been dreaming 'a fine bogey tale.' He wrote the first draft in three to six days. Fanny read it and said it was only a horror story; he burned the draft and rewrote it with the allegorical dimension explicit. Published in January 1886, it sold 40,000 copies in six months in Britain alone.

Robert Louis Stevenson at a glance