12 Nov 2025
On This Day
12 November 2025 Cheryl

13 November 1850: Robert Louis Stevenson is born

Robert Louis Stevenson as a young child, and at age 10, with his father

Despite his success as a writer, Robert Louis Stevenson began to study piano and composition at the age of 36. He also took up playing the penny whistle two years later and went on to write 123 original compositions. Stevenson’s musicianship was not as sought-after as his literature – only three compositions were ever published. [1]

In the grey stone city of Edinburgh, on 13 November 1850, a fragile, bright-eyed boy was born who would one day become one of Scotland’s most beloved writers. Robert Louis Stevenson entered the world at 8 Howard Place (today, it is marked with a plaque, but you can’t get inside), the only child of Thomas Stevenson, a respected lighthouse engineer, and his wife Margaret. He was christened Robert Lewis Balfour Stevenson. At about age 18, he changed the spelling of “Lewis” to “Louis”, and he dropped “Balfour” in 1873. The Stevensons were a family of engineers and inventors; their brilliance was in lighting the perilous coasts of Scotland, but their son, had other kinds of lights in mind: those of the imagination.

From infancy, Stevenson’s health was precarious. He suffered chronic lung trouble, long before the word “tuberculosis” was whispered in his sickrooms. His devoted nurse, Alison Cunningham — “Cummy,” as he called her — became both caretaker and storyteller. While she nursed him through endless fevers, she filled his mind with tales from the Bible and the Scottish kirk, ghost stories, and legends of good and evil. Those stories sank deep, later re-emerging in his writing.

While young, illness kept Stevenson away from school much of the time and he was educated by private tutors. Following an improvement in his health, the 13-year-old was sent to Robert Thomson’s private school in Edinburgh, where he remained until he went to university. His father hoped he would follow the family profession, and for a time Louis dutifully studied engineering. But it was words that captured his heart, and soon he abandoned engineering for law, and then abandoned law for literature.

Stevenson’s life took him to many parts of the world, and I have followed in his footsteps to several of them. I have seen the Swiss chalet style house where he lived in Hyères in the South of France, I have visited the Hôtel Chevillon in Grez-sur-Loing in northern France, where he first laid eyes on Fanny, the woman he married, and I have visited Vailima, the house in Samoa, and climbed to see his grave at the top of Mt Apia. A club in Sydney still has the chair he sat in on his visits to Australia, and I’ve sat in that too.

He was such a wonderful writer. Kidnapped has to be one of my favourite books of all time, and the scene depicting the death of Blind Pew in Treasure Island is one of the greatest ever pieces of dramatic writing. His verses for children are wonderful, and I love Requiem, the poem which is on his gravestone.