STEVENSON, ROBERT LOUIS BALFOUR (1850 1894), British essayist, novelist and poet, was the only child of Thomas Stevenson, civil engineer, and his wife, Margaret Isabella Balfour. He was born at 8 Howard Place, Edinburgh, on Nov. 13, 185o. He suffered from infancy from great fragility of health, and nearly died in 1858 of gastric fever, which left much con stitutional weakness behind it. He went to school, mainly in Edinburgh, from 1858 to 1867. As his health improved it was hoped that he would be able to adopt the family profession of civil engineering, and in 1868 he went to Anstruther and then to Wick as a pupil engineer. In 1871 he had so far advanced as to receive the silver medal of the Edinburgh Society of Arts for a paper suggesting improvements in lighthouse apparatus. His earliest publication, the anonymous pamphlet of The Pentland Rising, had appeared in 1866, and The Charity Bazaar, a trifle in which his future manner is happily displayed, in 1868. Though he greatly enjoyed the outdoor business of the engineer's life it strained his physical endurance too much, and in 1871 it was re luctantly exchanged for study at the Edinburgh bar, to which he was called in 1875. In 1873 he first met Sidney Colvin, who was to prove the closest of his friends and at last the loyal and admirable editor of his works and his correspondence.
He was now labouring, with extreme assiduity, to ground him self in the forms and habits of literary style. In 1875 appeared, anonymously, his Appeal to the Clergy of the Church of Scot land, and in that year he made the first of many visits to the forest of Fontainebleau. Meanwhile at Mentone in the winter of 1873-1874 he had grown in mind under the shadow of 'extreme physical weakness, and in the following spring began to contribute essays of high originality to one or two periodicals, of which the Cornhill, then edited by Leslie Stephen, was at first the most important. Stevenson made no attempt to practise at the bar, and the next years were spent in wanderings in France, Germany and Scotland. Records of these journeys were published as An Inland Voyage (1878), and as Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes (1879). During these four years Stevenson's health, which was always bettered by life out of doors, gave him little trouble. At Fontainebleau in 1876 Stevenson had met Mrs. Osbourne, the lady who afterwards became his wife; she re turned to her home in California in 1878, and in August of the following year, alarmed at news of her illness, Stevenson hur riedly crossed the Atlantic. He travelled, from lack of means, as a steerage passenger and then as an emigrant, and in December, after hardships which seriously affected his health, he arrived in San Francisco. In May 188o he married, and moved to the
desolate mining-camp which he has described in The Silverado Squatters. Some of his most poignant and most enchanting let ters were written during this romantic period of his life. In the autumn of 188o he returned to Scotland, with his wife and step son, who were received at once into the Edinburgh household of his parents. But the condition of his health continued to be very alarming, and they went almost immediately to Davos, where he remained until the spring of 1881. In this year was published Virginibus puerisque, the earliest collection of Stevenson's essays. He spent the summer months in Scotland, writing articles, poems, and above all his first romance, The Sea-Cook, afterwards known as Treasure Island; but he was driven back to Davos in October. In 1882 appeared Familiar Studies of Men and Books and New Arabian Nights. His two winters at Davos had done him some good, but his summers in Scotland invariably undid the benefit. He therefore determined to reside wholly in the south of Europe, and in the autumn of 1882 he settled near Marseilles. This did not suit him, but from March 1833 to July 1884 he was at home at a charming house called La Solitude, above Hyeres; this was in many ways to be the happiest station in the painful and hurry ing pilgrimage of Stevenson's life. The Silverado Squatters was published in 1883, and also the more important Treasure Island, which made Stevenson for the first time a popular writer. He planned a vast amount of work, but his schemes were all frus trated in January 1884 by the most serious illness from which he had yet suffered. The attack was followed by long prostration and incapacity for work, and by continued relapses. In July he was brought back to England, and from this time until August 1887 Stevenson's home was at Bournemouth. In 1885 he pub lished, after long indecision, his volume of poems, A Child's Gar den of Verses, an inferior story, The Body Snatcher, and that admirable romance, Prince Otto, in which the peculiar quality of Stevenson's style was displayed at its highest. He also col laborated with W. E. Henley in some plays, Beau Austin, Admiral Guinea and Robert Macaire. Early in 1886 he struck the public taste with precision in his wild symbolic tale of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. In the summer of the same year he published Kidnapped, which had been written at Bournemouth.