Robert Stevenson Interesting Facts

Robert Stevenson will learn interesting facts from the life of a writer in this article.

Robert Stevenson Interesting Facts

Stevenson was a sickly child as a child. At the age of three, he fell ill with croup, which led to serious consequences. According to most biographers, Stevenson suffered from severe pulmonary tuberculosis.

He learned to read late , but even before that he began to invent various stories and tell them to his mother and nanny, demanding that they be recorded.

In his youth, he wanted to marry Kat Drummond, a singer from a night tavern, but did not do this under pressure from his father.

In France, he met an American, a married woman with two children, Fanny Osbourne. And although she was 10 years older than him, love for her did not give the writer peace. Returning home and unable to bear the separation, the writer secretly goes to her in California, almost dying on the road. Soon Fanny divorced and in 1880 they got married. Their marriage was happy, although they lived poorly.

The disease made Stevenson travel a lot in search of a suitable climate. The island of Samoa in the Pacific Ocean (one of the smallest island states in Polynesia) was the only place on a huge planet where he could live, forgetting about diseases.

A house with a fireplace was built on the island, although it was completely unnecessary here. The temperature in Samoa rarely drops below + 40 ° C. But as a true Englishman, Stevenson could not give up his national love for the fireplace. Until now, the writer's house remains the only house with a fireplace in the whole state.

And one more lesson of Stephenson’s courage and civic position: he made friends with the local population, studied the language of Samoans , wrote articles about them in London newspapers, trying to draw general attention to the problems of the islanders. He became the national hero of Samoa. Since then, everyone has called his name in Western Samoa - hotels and streets, restaurants and cafes.

Stevenson said that if he wanted to, he could dream of the plot of history and claimed that he dreamed about the plot of Doctor Jekyll.

The first manuscript of "The Strange Story of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" by Stevenson was burned by his wife . The biographers have two versions of why she did this: some say that she considered such a story unworthy of a writer, others say that she was unhappy with the incomplete disclosure of the topic of personality split. Nevertheless, in three days with a tuberculosis patient, Stevenson re-wrote this short story, which became one of his most commercially successful works and allowed his family to get out of debt.

When Stevenson died, 60 Samoans carried his coffin to the top of the mountain, where they buried him. They say that it offers a beautiful view of the sea. On the writer's grave lies a gravestone with the last three lines from the poem “Requiem”.
A sailor from the seas returned home
The hunter from the mountains returned home
He is where he went for a long time.

Many of the manuscripts of Robert Lewis Stevenson were sold by his heirs during the First World War, and have since been considered lost.