Five Fascinating Facts about Robert Louis Stevenson (2025)

Fun facts about the life and work of Robert Louis Stevenson, author ofTreasure Island

1. We’ve been mispronouncing his middle name all this time. Stevenson – or ‘RLS’ as he is sometimes known – was born Robert Lewis Balfour Stevenson, in 1850. He later changed ‘Lewis’ to ‘Louis’, but continued to pronounce it ‘Lewis’. He also dropped the ‘Balfour’ middle name, although he would later use it as the surname for David Balfour, the protagonist of Stevenson’s adventure novel,Kidnapped (1886).

Literature in many of its branches is no more than the shadow of good talk. – Robert Louis Stevenson

2. He was something of a literary superstar.Stevenson sometimes bemoaned the sensationalist way in which publishers promoted his work to the public: his 1884 Christmas story, ‘The Body Snatcher’, had been advertised by six men who had been paid to roam the streets wearing huge coffin-shaped sandwich boards and plaster skulls (these figures caused such a stir among the people of London that the police were called in to ‘suppress the nuisance’ … the power of advertising!). His first novel,Treasure Island, even helped to inspire another of the great Victorian adventure novels of the 1880s. (Treasure Island would also invent many of the classic tropes we associate with pirates.)

3. He gifted his birthday to someone. While he was living in the South Seas – where he would die in 1894 – Stevenson discovered that the 12-year-old daughter of Henry Clay Ide, the US Commissioner to Samoa, had her birthday on Christmas Day and disliked this. All her friends had a birthdayandChristmas Day (and so two lots of presents!), whereas she had to make do with one special day each year. Stevenson nobly signed away all ‘rights’ to his birthday to the girl, as a letter of 1891 makes clear: ‘I …Have transferred, and do hereby transfer to the said A. H. Ide, All and Whole of my rights and privileges in the 13th day of November, formerly my birthday, now, hereby, and henceforth, the birthday of the said A. H. Ide, to have, hold, exercise and enjoy the same in the customary manner, by the sporting of fine raiment, eating of rich meats and receipt of gifts, compliments and copies of verse, according to the manner of our ancestors.’ What a nice man!

4. According to his stepson, he destroyed the first draft ofJekyll and Hyde and rewrote it from scratch.The idea for the story ofStrange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886)came to Stevenson in a dream. His wife criticised the initial manuscript, which was produced in just three days, and it has been suggested that Stevenson burnt the manuscript following this adverse verdict from his beloved wife, and her suggestion that he had ‘missed the allegory’ of the story he was writing. However, we must be wary of taking this story at face value, since it has become part of the mythology surrounding the creation of the novel, and was told, at any rate, by Stevenson’s stepson, Lloyd Osbourne, who was not a reliable storyteller by any means. At any rate, Stevenson rewrote the tale after that, again very rapidly (it appears to have taken him about six weeks this time), and it was sent off for publication soon after. The rest, as they clichaically say, is history. Though much of what we think we know about the book – including how to pronounce ‘Jekyll’ – is shrouded in the sort of thick mist that hangs over the dark London streets in the novella itself.

If you are going to make a book end badly, it must end badly from the beginning. – Robert Louis Stevenson

5. Robert Louis Stevenson had a donkey called Modestine which he took on his travels with him. He published an account of his adventures hiking through France with a recalcitrant donkey, titledTravels with a Donkeyin the Cévennes, in 1879. This makes it one of Stevenson’s earliest published works. Indeed, Stevenson began his book-writing career as a travel writer: his first book, published a year before Travels with a Donkey, wasAn Inland Voyage(1878), about his journey canoeing through France and Belgium a couple of years earlier.

Image: Photo of Robert Louis Stevenson (by Lloyd Osbourne, date unknown), Wikimedia Commons.

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