Robert Louis Stevenson is best known for adventure books like “Treasure Island” and “Kidnapped” and for the macabre novella “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.” He brought to his work both imagination and a serious dedication to craft, and his writing often seems strikingly modern – most notably in his willingness to plumb the inner lives of characters.
As Leo Damrosch explains in “Storyteller,” his new biography, Stevenson’s “stories have a driving energy – he called it ‘kinetic’ – that is sustained by a tactile experience of time and place, not as a description but as a re-creation of how it felt.”
Damrosch argues that the writer’s wider body of work deserves more attention and respect. “Stevenson’s novels and stories combine two different kinds of excellence that aren’t often found together: he is at once an exacting craftsman and a spellbinding narrator,” he writes. “Gerard Manley Hopkins, whose own poems are so knotty, said that ‘Stevenson is a master of a consummate style, and each phrase is finished as in poetry.’ There are no wasted words.”
From “Stevensoniana: An Anecdotal Life and Appreciation,” Edited by J.A. Hammerton, John Grant, 1910
Why We Wrote This
Robert Louis Stevenson’s willingness to plumb the inner lives of characters gives his stories a strikingly modern feel. In the new biography “Storyteller,” Leo Damrosch argues that Stevenson’s wider body of work – beyond his celebrated children’s novels and poems – deserves greater attention and respect.
Stevenson was born in 1850 in Edinburgh, Scotland, and died on a Pacific island in 1894, near the dawn of the 20th century. For many years following his death, he was widely disparaged as a quaint, velvet-jacketed, bohemian figure. In the literary world, he has been categorized – and often dismissed – as merely a children’s author and poet. After decades of exclusion from “The Norton Anthology of English Literature,” Stevenson’s “Dr. Jekyll” was added in 2000 – a curious selection, perhaps, since it “is far from typical of his writing and was known mainly in film adaptations,” Damrosch writes.
Damrosch’s book has arrived amid a brighter spotlight on Stevenson’s life and legacy. Camille Peri’s 2024 “A Wilder Shore” offered a dual biography of Stevenson and his American wife, Fanny, who has long been criticized as a drain on his career. Like Peri, Damrosch presents a more sympathetic view of Fanny as a key partner in his domestic and professional life.
Given Stevenson’s challenges, the presence of a helpmate became especially significant. Born into a prominent Scottish family best known for building lighthouses, he dealt with lung problems from childhood into adulthood, often following the common advice to travel as a remedy. Stevenson tried both cold and hot climates, seeing much of the world in the bargain. After traveling around the South Sea Islands, he lived the last four years of his life in Vailima, Samoa. Such destinations fueled his creativity and drive to succeed as a writer, a profession that marked a dramatic departure from the Stevenson family tradition of engineering.
From “The Life of Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson” by Nellie Van De Grift Sanchez, Scribner, 1921
Although he’s more celebrated today as a novelist, Stevenson’s first successes were travel books, including “Travels With a Donkey in the Cévennes,” his 1879 account of a ramble through the mountains of southern France with a donkey named Modestine. The generally charming tale is jarred by Stevenson’s confession that he beat Modestine to force her compliance, a detail that “casts a pall over the theme of interior pilgrimage,” Damrosch writes.
Such passages remind readers that Stevenson wasn’t always above the casual cruelties of his time. On many other levels, though, he could be visionary. His embrace of Indigenous culture during his final years in Samoa – and his support for the cause of Samoan independence – suggested an openness to worlds beyond his own, modeling our contemporary ideal of the global citizen.
As a traveler, he displayed a striking gift for capturing not only geographical detail but the essential character and personality of a locale. In “The Old Pacific Capital,” he reports from Monterey, California, on “the haunting presence of the ocean,” noting that “go where you will, you have to pause and listen to hear the voice of the Pacific.” A more conventional writer would have indulged the standard view of the California shore as a sunny idyll. But Stevenson is also alert to the ocean’s undeniable claims on a visitor’s attention – an insistence that’s not simply calming, but a bit eerie.
A faint note of melancholy gives much of Stevenson’s work, even his tales and poems that are ostensibly aimed at children, an arresting texture. In “The Land of Counterpane,” a poem about a boy in bed with his toys, the cheerful rhythm of the rhyme resonates with a poignant undercurrent because we sense the child’s loneliness. In the brightly expressed poem “My Shadow,” the dark doppelgänger that follows the reader everywhere is amusing and playful, but also somewhat spectral.
As an RLS scholar, Damrosch has many predecessors, including Frank McLynn and his magisterial 1994 biography. Damrosch writes: “I try to illuminate Stevenson’s achievement as a writer more fully than others have done; they seem often to assume that his works are already familiar to readers, which is generally not the case.”
“Treasure Island,” “Kidnapped,” and “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” still sell well and would not seem to desperately need a new champion. But Damrosch’s survey of the rest of Stevenson’s work, including his genius as an essayist and letter writer, is welcome. In “The Club,” Damrosch’s sharply observed 2019 book about the social circle surrounding 18th-century lexicographer Samuel Johnson, the author deftly placed readers within the teeming London milieu that quickened Johnson’s capacious intellect.
The Lamplighter
My tea is nearly ready and the sun has left the sky;
It’s time to take the window to see Leerie going by;
For every night at teatime and before you take your seat,
With lantern and with ladder he comes posting up the street.
Now Tom would be a driver and Maria go to sea,
And my papa’s a banker and as rich as he can be;
But I, when I am stronger and can choose what I’m to do,
Oh Leerie, I’ll go round at night and light the lamps with you!
For we are very lucky, with a lamp before the door,
And Leerie stops to light it as he lights so many more;
And O! before you hurry by with ladder and with light,
O Leerie, see a little child and nod to him tonight!
– Robert Louis Stevenson
“Storyteller” is a less immersive read than “The Club,” partly because some of Damrosch’s cultural references can seem glancing. One sometimes wishes for a deeper dive into characters such as Leslie Stephen, the influential magazine editor whose publication of Stevenson’s essays and stories was an early boost. As Damrosch notes, Stephen is best known today as the father of Virginia Woolf. The chance to sketch out Stephen more fully feels like a missed opportunity.
Stevenson was also an astute literary critic, and this aspect of his career also begs for more exploration in “Storyteller.” His closely argued, perceptive, and sometimes humorous essay on Henry David Thoreau gets only passing mention here. Like Thoreau, Stevenson had a reputation as a carefree dawdler, an image that in both men belied their industry and ambition.
“Stevenson’s published output was remarkable,” Damrosch writes, noting 11 novels, more than 100 essays, and several hundred poems. Such an oeuvre defies easy summary, though author Richard Holmes came close. Stevenson, he wrote, “made the dreams of childhood sing with adult possibilities.”
In “Storyteller,” those possibilities sing again.
