Real Reads: Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson (author)

Robert Louis Stevenson was born in 1850 in Edinburgh. He suffered from illness throughout his life and had to spend large parts of his childhood in bed. As a result, he didn’t learn to read until he was seven or eight, but he loved to tell stories to his mother and nurse. Robert loved to travel and he spent a lot of time in his twenties travelling in Europe and writing about his experiences. When he was 26, Robert met an American woman called Fanny. They married in San Francisco in1880 and returned to Britain with Fanny’s twelve-year-old son Lloyd. That same year, during a rainy holiday in Scotland, Robert and Lloyd drew a treasure map for fun and it was this that inspired Robert to write Treasure Island. When the book was published in 1883 he dedicated it to Lloyd. In 1888 the family set off for a three-year-long tour of the South Pacific which eventually ended when they bought a house in Samoa. Robert was loved by the Samoan people and continued to write until the day he died, very suddenly, aged just 44.