Robert Louis Stevenson: A Biography

dandyish black velvet smoking jacket. He wore this constantly, so it soon lost whatever smartness it had: it was totemic, marking perfectly his difference from the waistcoated and tailed bourgeois of Edinburgh.

Stevenson had no need to behave like a poor man; he had ‘all his bills paid’, an allowance, ‘and his own study in a very hospitable home’

old pub frequented by sailors, criminals and ‘the lowest order of prostitutes – threepenny whores’, where he used to go and write.

years of darkness, deadness, and sinfulness’ when he committed ‘abominations’ and ‘slept about the brink of the bottomless pit

long hours of college truancy he quickly became a habitué of some of Edinburgh’s most disreputable dives. ‘The underworld of the Edinburgh

To minimise his parents’ total expenditure he came to the eccentric conclusion that so long as he doubted a full return to health, he would live very sparsely in ‘an upper room’, but when he perceived an improve

diving under the strict supervision of one Bob Bain. Stevenson recalled the experience as the best part of his whole engineering career. Wearing woollen underclothes, a nightcap and many layers of insulating

Nor was it the only time Thomas Stevenson pulled this trick, paying for his son’s work to be printed, then censoring it.

scarlatina, bronchitis, gastric fever, whooping cough, chickenpox and scarlet feve

high incidence of infant mortality: between them they had twelve live siblings and twelve dead ones.