The voices / 186 fragments
Robert Louis Stevenson
1850 AD — 1894 AD
Robert Louis Stevenson wrote essays as well as fiction. His reflections on hopeful work and ordinary kindness reward reading in context, with anthology variants kept visible.
Author and source reference ↗Life and writing
The Robert Louis Stevenson website’s timeline records his birth in Edinburgh in November 1850 and death in December 1894. It places the publication of Virginibus Puerisque in April 1881 and describes his later move to Samoa. These lifetime and publication dates orient the writer’s career; they do not date the composition of the archive’s individual excerpts. The archive retains its original undated source records rather than replacing their dates with the profile’s independently referenced lifetime.
Robert Louis Stevenson — biographical timeline ↗ Timeline: heading, 1850 birth, April1881 publication, 1889–1890 Samoa and December1894 death
Two historical selections lead into different essay arguments. El Dorado ends by placing hopeful effort above the imagined final satisfaction of arrival. A Christmas Sermon presents honesty, kindness, restraint and friendship as demanding ordinary responsibilities. The linked editions preserve differences from the anthology: the journey passage has hands and ye where the anthology has bands and we, while the sermon includes grim condition and all that. Reading those paragraphs in place shows their rhetorical setting without silently rewriting the archive or treating either sentence as an unconditional rule.
Historical related reading — Virginibus Puerisque, and Other Papers ↗Historical related reading — Across the Plains, with Other Memories and Essays ↗ El Dorado: final paragraph; A Christmas Sermon: paragraph beginning To be honest
Reading this voice
Start with El Dorado’s last paragraph in the 1897 edition, then read XII, A Christmas Sermon, in the 1915 Across the Plains. Both selected anthology paragraphs differ from these linked texts. The journey passage changes bands/hands, we/ye and labor/labour; the sermon omits grim and that and adds to before be embittered. Existing wording and URLs stay intact. The profile does not independently authenticate the contributor-supplied quotations associated with this name, and the lifetime years are not excerpt composition dates.
Subjects to explore
Editorial reading connections, distinct from the archive’s word matching.
A work to read
Begin with these archive passages
Editorial starting points from this author’s existing entries.
- O toiling bands of mortals! O unwearied feet, travelling we know not whither! Soon, soon, it seems to you, you must come forth on some conspicuous hilltop, and but a little way further, against the setting sun, descry the spires of El Dorado. Little do ye know your own blessedness; for to travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive, and the true success is to labor.
Complete signed selection 405; printed byline: Robert Louis Stevenson; Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1911; printed copyright 1907
- To be honest, to be kind, to earn a little, and to spend a little less, to make upon the whole, a family happier for his presence, to renounce when that shall be necessary and not to be embittered, to keep a few friends, but these without capitulation; above all, on the same condition, to keep friends with himself, here is a task for all a man has of fortitude and delicacy.
Complete signed selection 585; printed byline: Robert Louis Stevenson; New York: Dodge Publishing Company, 1901
Profile sources and editorial status
Original agent-assisted editorial profile, checked 2026-10-05. No human review is recorded. Life dates are recorded to the year; they do not date individual quotations.