A little more than one week ago, precisely on 13th November, the Scottish writer Robert Louis Stevenson would complete 170 years-old, so this post is a tribute to him. He was an humanist. His writings makes us think about hypocrisy, truth, guilt, responsibility. And like others great writers show us moral, social and psychological issues. This post is a summary of four articles. The first was published at https://www.biography.com/writer/robert-louis-stevenson. The second was published at http://www.rlstevenson-europe.org/en/r-l-stevenson/. The third was published at https://www.businessdestinations.com/bd-portrait/robert-louis-stevenson-the-father-of-modern-travel-writing/. The fourth was published at file:///C:/Users/User/Downloads/BPTX_2008_2_11210_ASZK00306_132513_0_74386.pdf
Robert Louis Balfour Stevenson was born in Edinburgh, Scotland in 1850 to Thomas and Margaret Stevenson. At the age 17, he enrolled at Edinburgh University to study engineering. But this did not appealed to him, and he began studying law. He emerged from law school in 1875, but did not practice, as, by this point, he felt that his calling was to be writer. Stevenson's first book of short fiction, New Arabian Nights, marked the U.K. emergence into the realm of the short story, which would come to be his calling card. A turning point in Stevenson's personal life came during this period, when he met the woman who would become his wive, Fanny Osbourne, in 1876. She was a married American woman with two children. In 1878, she divorced and Stevenson set out to meet her in California. They remained together until Stevenson death in 1894. The 1880s were notable for both Stevenson's declining health and his prodigious literary output. He suffered from hemorrhaging lungs (likely caused by undiagnosed tuberculosis), and writing was one of the few activities he could do while confined to bed. The idea for Treasure Island was ignited by a map that Stevenson had drawn for his 12 year-old stepson; Stevenson had conjured a pirate adventure story to accompany the drawing. Treasure island was published in 1883, and by the end of the 1880s, it was one of the most popular and widely read books. The year 1886 saw the publication of what would be another enduring work, Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. which was an immediate success. The book went on to international acclaim, inspiring countless stage productions and more than 100 motion pictures. In June 1888, Stevenson and his family set sail from San Francisco, California, to travel the islands of the Pacific Ocean. In 1889, they arrived in the Samoan islands, where they decided to build a house and settle. Treasure Island and The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde are world-wise best sellers, frequently republished and translated, adapted as films and graphic novels. The writer's works go beyond these books. The Master of Ballantrae, Kidnapped and The Black Arrow are also widely read, as are all his novels, poetry and tales of the south seas. The writer left Scotland, where he was born, in search of a climate which would soothe his respiratory illness. He ended his days at the age of 44 amongst the inhabitants of Samoa in Oceania. For Stevenson travel was not a pretex or an escape, but an opportunity for encounters. The accounts of his travels in Europe are regarded as genuine ethnographic descriptions of peoples and lands. Robert Stevenson is at the heart of humanistic values, based on openness to others and tolerance of differences. Writer, traveller, adventurer, idealist, Stevenson left his mark on the places he visited through his literary work and his profound compassion for humanity. When asked of the impact Robert Stevenson had on the literary world, many would point ti his widely renowned works of fiction: Treasure Island and The Strange case of Dr jekill and Mr Hyde. However, fiction was not the source of his initial success. Stevenson's early travel writing was a driving force for his literary career and has continued to influence the way people write about travel even today. It was during his summer vacations that Stevenson found his niche in travel writing, with his earliest published works recounting his travels in France. His first volume, An Inland Voyage, was published in 1878, and recalled a canoe trip he made through Belgium and France with a friend. He was very focused on human individuality, as opposed to a lot of Victorian writers, who would tend to sort of homogenise groups, or nationalities or "types" of people. The works of Robert Stevenson are deeply immersed in social, psychological and moral issues peculiar not only to the Victorian age but also relevant to our time. In his prose he explores the character of human mind with its deformities as well as its virtues, for to be true to life is, in Stevenson's own words, much more estimable than to idealize it. An honest critique of social illnesses is worth a great deal than mere show of ggodness and morality often required by the publishers and expected by the reading public. The Strange Case of Dr Jekill and Mr Hyde primarily deals with something else than the struggle between the good and evil in oneself. More than anything else this book is a critique of the XIX century middle classes and the moral standards which conditioned the appearance of the discourses of criminality, degeneration and atavism as traits inherent to the lower classes. The very argument upon the novel is based is that man's character is not uniform, or made of one whole, but dualistic, containing the good and evil parts, is suggestive of Jekill's continued attempts at finding an excuse for his behavior, as well as blaming it on someone else, in his case, his other "evil" self, Hyde. Like all addicts, Jekill supposes himself unaffected by exercising the Hyde part of his character. He misinterprets Hyde as an evil clearly separated from his own good self. And as he perpetuates this self-delusion. he assures that he can be rid of Hyde any moment. Such proclamation of freedom from a drug are well known to anyone who has ever dealt with an addicted person. Jekill's addiction reaches its high point and the final stage of the cycle of addiction - despair, isolation and the realization of a certain degree of the truth. However, even until his last moments, Jekill refuses to acknowledge the full extent of his guilt and remains obstinately fond of his alter ego. The book rather than make us simply sympathetic with Jekill's burden, calls our attention to the more complex problems of responsibility and honesty, especially about one's attitude to, and the role in, society.
