Robert Louis Stevenson Wrote Adventure Stories from His Sick Bed

When we read Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped or Treasure Island, we may think of him as a robust adventurer, as active as the characters in his children’s books. In truth, Stevenson suffered ill health most of his life, often writing the imaginative fiction from his sick bed. 

He died at age 44 on this date, December 3, in 1894, in the Samoan Islands where he had gone in search of a healthful climate.

Stevenson, who was born in 1850, in Edinburgh, Scotland, is often stereotyped as a writer of children’s verses and youth adventure stories. But he wrote in a wide variety of literary forms including plays, poems, essays, biography, travel, romance novels, and short stories.

His poems included works both for adults and for children, including the well-known A Child’s Garden of Verses.

Though he was in ill health, Stevenson was not a helpless invalid. He traveled a great deal through most of his adult life. Much of his later travel was in search of a healthful climate, with the hope of prolonging his life against a disease that was probably tuberculosis, although it was never formally diagnosed as such. With hemorrhaging  from his lungs, he nicknamed his condition, “Bluidy [Bloody] Jack.”

In the seven-year period from 1880 to 1887, as Stevenson was confined to bed most of the time, there was little he could do besides write. During this time, he wrote several of his most famous and enduring books, including the youth adventures, Treasure Island and Kidnapped and the mystery, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. He also wrote essays and collaborated with W. E. Henley on plays.

Stevenson met a married American woman, Fanny Osbourne, who was living away from her husband and was studying art in Paris. She divorced Mr. Osbourne and married Stevenson in California in 1880, when he was 30 and she was 41.

With this ready-made family, Stevenson wrote Treasure Island to entertain his 12-year-old stepson, Lloyd.

Through a life of suffering, Stevenson was able to produce many enduring literary works, perhaps not in spite of but because of his suffering.

In the Advent season, we can see in Stevenson’s suffering a frail, flawed, limited picture of the One who came to suffer and die and, through his suffering, do great things for us.

A Verse for Today

“Although he was a Son, he learned obedience through what he suffered; and having been made perfect, he became the source of eternal salvation for all who obey him” (Hebrews 5:8).

Each day through New Year’s Day, January 1, 2013, daily inspirational thoughts will appear on this website, in keeping with Thanksgiving, Advent, Christmas, and New Year’s Day.  These are from my book, Reflections for the Festive Seasons.  © 2002.  All rights reserved.