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.
