Robert Louis Balfour Stevenson was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, in November 1850, the only child of a prosperous middle-class family. His father, Thomas, was a civil engineer who specialized in the design and construction of lighthouses, and his mother, Margaret, was the daughter of a well-known clergyman. Probably the two most important influences on Stevenson’s childhood were his family’s strict (although not for the time fanatical) Presbyterian religion and his own ill health. During his frequent illnesses, his loving nurse, Alison Cunningham, like to entertain him with stories of bloody doings, hellfire, and damnation, and this made him a frightened, guilt-ridden child and also apparently something of a little prude—a characteristic he certainly outgrew, however, by the time he reached his late teens. His illnesses, which seem to have been the result of a weak or damaged immune system, making him susceptible to regular and debilitating bouts of respiratory infection and eventually to tuberculosis, encouraged his parents to spoil him. His mother, too, was often ill, and given the family’s frequent winter trips from cold, wet Edinburgh to southern Europe, his father’s scorn of schoolteachers, and Stevenson’s own disinclination to go to school, his early education was spotty at best. He read widely if unsystematically, picked up languages with relative ease, and was occasionally tutored, but by the time he entered Edinburgh University at the age of sixteen, his background was anything but standard.
He did not suddenly become a model university student. His family expected that he would study engineering and join his father and uncle in the lighthouse business, and apparently Stevenson accepted this plan without protest. But he was not interested in construction or optics, and he studied as little as possible, skipped lectures, and was in general a lackluster student. He did, however, make the first real friends of his life, and he also joined a popular literary and debating society by invitation, which probably had more to do with his quirky but genuine personal attractiveness and his family name than with anyone’s perception of his academic brilliance.
He eventually confessed to his father that he did not hope to become an engineer, at which his father swallowed his disappointment and suggested that he study law; Stevenson obediently did so, but was no more interested in this than in engineering, and although he was admitted to the bar at the age of 24, he never practiced. Still, his late teens and early twenties were a period of great and solid growth. He continued to read voluminously, if seldom in accordance with what he had been assigned. He roamed the streets of Edinburgh, alone and with friends, and although he apparently frequented his share of taverns and brothels, he also became a close observer of human behavior and a close listener to human language. Stevenson’s youthful “dissipation” became much exaggerated in legend, after his fame and death; he was during these years on a strict allowance from his father and could not have afforded the wild life that gossip later attributed to him. He continued to travel, alone or with his parents, or sometimes with his cousin and good friend, Bob Stevenson. And always, from childhood on, he wrote—essays, poetry, descriptive sketches, and narrative accounts of historical events. His goal seems not to have been to make a living as a writer (which his family would not have considered a worthwhile profession) so much as to learn to write well. And learn he did.
