Robert Louis Stevenson

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.

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.

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

Words to begin with

• 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.
• 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.