Robert Louis Stevenson was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1850, into a family of lighthouse engineers. From his earliest years he was a sickly child, spending long winters in bed, where his imagination learned to roam far beyond the grey walls and cold skies of his native city. It was in those long, still hours of illness that he began to see that the world inside a book could be brighter and stranger and more alive than anything the body could reach on its own.
He studied engineering, and then law, to please his father — a serious man who built lighthouses and expected solid, practical things from his son. But Stevenson was not built for solid and practical. He was built for words. He travelled to France, to America, across the Pacific, always searching and always writing — in hotels, in lodgings, on ships, even flat on his back when his lungs gave way. He wrote essays, poems, short stories, and novels, and in each of them something of that early restlessness came through: the feeling that the world is wide and strange and worth exploring, even at great cost.
He is remembered today for books that have made generations of readers young again: Treasure Island, Kidnapped, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, and A Child’s Garden of Verses, among many others. In his last years he settled on the island of Samoa in the South Pacific, where the local people named him Tusitala — Teller of Tales. He died there in 1894, at only forty-four, still writing, still restless, still trying to set down on the page the full strangeness and adventure of a human life.
A short novel of Victorian London, written in a white heat and published to immediate fame in 1886, this is the book that gave a name to something readers already suspected about themselves. It has been copied and retold so many times that the original comes as a surprise: quieter, stranger, and more disturbing than any version that followed. To read it is to understand why no retelling has ever quite replaced it.