Robert Louis Stevenson :: essays research papers

When one reads the nonfiction bailiwick of Robert Louis Stevenson along with the novels and short stories, a more complete portrait emerges of the fountain than that of the romantic vagabond one usually associates with his best-known fiction. The Stevenson of the nonfiction prose is a writer involved in the issues of his craft, his milieu, and his soul. Moreover, one can see the al-Quran of his maturation in critical essays, political tracts, biographies, and letters to family and friends. What Stevenson lacks, especially for the tastes of this age, is specificity and expertise he has not the depth of such writers as John Ruskin, Walter Pater, or William Morris. But he was a shrewd observer of humankind, and his essays reveal his energetic and perspicacious mind. Though he lacked originality, he created a rapport with the reader, who senses his impatient embrace of life and art. If Stevenson at first wrote like one who exclusively skimmed the surface of experience, by the end of his life he was stormily committed to his adopted land of Samoa, to his own history, and to the creation of his fiction. Robert Louis Stevenson was born to doubting Thomas and Margaret Isabella Balfour Stevenson in Edinburgh on 13 November 1850. From the beginning he was sickly. Through often of his childhood he was attended by his faithful nurse, Alison Cunningham, known as Cummy in the family circle. She told him morbid stories about the Covenanters (the Scots Presbyterian martyrs), read aloud to him nice penny-serial novels, Bible stories, and the Psalms, and drilled the catechism into him, all with his parents approval. Thomas Stevenson was quite a narrator himself, and his wife doted on their unaccompanied child, sitting in admiration objet dart her precocious son expounded on spiritual dogma. Stevenson inevitably reacted to the morbidity of his unearthly education and to the stiffness of his familys middle-class values, but that rebellion would come only after he en tered Edinburgh University. The juvenilia that survives from his childhood shows an observer who was already sensitive to religious issues and Scottish history. Not surprisingly, the boy who listened to Cummys religious tales first tried his give-up the ghost at retelling Bible stories "A History of Moses" was followed by "The Book of Joseph." When Stevenson was 16 his family published a pamphlet he had written entitled The Pentland Rising, a recounting of the murder of Nonconformist Scots Presbyterians who rebelled against their royalist persecutors.