He may be the nineteenth-century travel writer whose footsteps have been most avidly followed by subsequent writers in this genre.
Robert Louis Stevenson was born on 13 November 1850 to a respectable Edinburgh family--"a family of engineers," as he called them in his autobiographical Records of a Family of Engineers, an unfinished work first published in the Edinburgh Edition (1896). His father, Thomas Stevenson, was a civil engineer, whose own father, Robert Stevenson, was a particularly well-known builder of lighthouses and harbors along the Scottish coast. The writer's mother, Isabella Balfour Stevenson, was a cleric's daughter. Stevenson's childhood home was, in fact, animated by Calvinist religious feeling. Not only was Thomas Stevenson a stern practitioner, but young Louis's nurse, Alison Cunningham, "Cummy," also filled his mind with religious literature and stories tinged with her Calvinism.
From infancy Stevenson was a sickly child, suffering from recurrent respiratory illnesses and coughs. These illnesses, which made him feel fragile and isolated as a youth, persisted throughout his life, taking the form of fevers, coughing, bronchial infections, and eventually "Bluidy Jack," a hemorrhage of the lungs that results in blood issuing from the mouth. Stevenson's delicate health dictated his being sent south to warmer climates at an early age, and his contributions to the art of travel writing derive significantly from his poor health and his interminable wanderings in quest of a salutary climate.
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