#FridayFocus #RLSDay Happy 175th Birthday Robert Louis Stevenson 📖 '“You start a question, and it's like starting a stone. You sit quietly on the top of a hill; and away the stone goes, starting others...”
― Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde 📘 #silicasun 💐📗❤️
“Of what shall a man be proud, if he is not proud of his friends?” asked Robert Louis Stevenson, born on this day in 1850. #RLSDay
You can also listen to these stories being read online, by three of Scotland’s leading contemporary writers:
“Thrawn Janet”, read by Alan Bissett
“The Tale of Tod Lapraik”, read by James Robertson
“The Bottle Imp”, read by Louise Welsh
#RLSDay #gothic #horror 💙📚
www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rylw...
Strange Tales
Three eerie stories of witches, warlocks, & demonic pacts, by Robert Louis Stevenson – available as a free ebook
📙“Thrawn Janet”
📘“The Tale of Tod Lapraik”
📕“The Bottle Imp”
#RLSDay #gothic #horror 💙📚
asls.org.uk/publications...
“It is an RLS hallmark, the quicksilver evolution of thought and the fabular turn, the victory of original perception”
—Amdrew O’Hagan stays overnight in Robert Louis Stevenson’s childhood home, 17 Heriot Row, Edinburgh – via @lrb.co.uk
#RLSDay 💙📚
www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...
Ruth Richardson in THE LANCET, on how “The Body-Snatcher” shows Robert Louis Stevenson’s
“acute analysis of degrees of guilt; the complicit socialisation of maleness… the dark silences that can exist in social relations that pass as bonhomie”
#RLSDay #C19
4/4
www.thelancet.com/journals/lan...
“Markheim sees himself in a way the nineteenth century often failed to: the story exposes the awkward truths of trading stolen goods, murdering innocent people, and, as the antique-dealer’s death implies, being selective with connections to the past”
#RLSDay #C19
3/4
www.varsity.co.uk/arts/17647
“The watershed for the modern short story began in 1878 with … Stevenson’s ‘A Lodging for the Night’, with Allen going so far as to claim that the change to the specifically modern short story can be precisely dated at that point”
#RLSDay #C19
2/4
may-on-the-short-story.blogspot.com/2015/05/shor...
“In crime, as in all life, nothing is fixed or certain. Put another way, it is part of the mystery of being, which has its origin in religious faith, & Stevenson’s stories abound in mysteries”
🗡️ “A Lodging for the Night”
🪞 “Markheim”
💀 “The Body-Snatcher”
#RLSDay 💙📚
1/4
asls.org.uk/publications...
“Among the writers I have always read and, willy-nilly, have taken as a model is R. L. Stevenson”
—Italo Calvino
The Only Art is to Omit
Robert Louis Stevenson special issue (2012)
#RLSDay
1/6
www.thebottleimp.org.uk/2012/11/edit...
“How if this be the truth – that all are a little true?”
Stevenson’s FABLES offer what the author called “tail-foremost moralities”. In this presentation for the Beshara Trust, Robert-Louis Abrahamson considers the FABLES as “contemplative wisdom”
#RLSDay
www.youtube.com/watch?v=qMmN...
Robert Louis Stevenson’s FABLES – 20 short, flash, & microfiction masterpieces, including one where Long John Silver & Captain Smollett slip out between chapters for a smoke – are witty, graceful, sometimes eerie, & always beautiful. All can be downloaded free👇
#RLSDay 💙📚
asls.org.uk/publications...
“The sickness that once detached him from life had now made him greedy for experience… he accumulated several lifetimes worth of adventures”
—Trent B. Olsen on Robert Louis Stevenson’s Art of Living (& Dying), via @literaryhub.bsky.social
#RLSDay #C19th
lithub.com/robert-louis...
“Stevenson… could write his name on ice as readily as on paper, and could execute the most difficult figures with perfect grace and ease”
A loss to #FigureSkating was a gain to #Literature … Robert Louis Stevenson on ice at Saranac Lake
#RLSDay
www.adirondackdailyenterprise.com/opinion/colu...
Andrew O’Hagan & @moonjets.bsky.social on Robert Louis Stevenson, Henry James, & Bournemouth in this @lrb.co.uk podcast. When James first came to Skerryvore – RLS’s home, named for a Hebridean lighthouse – the maid mistook him for a carpet-fitter…
#RLSDay #C19
💙📚
www.lrb.co.uk/podcasts-and...
Annie – who had no children of her own – passed the birthday on to her niece, the Irish author Anita Leslie-King, who got much enjoyment from it, & who in turn left it to her granddaughter. Happy #RLSDay Heather Finn!
4/5
www.irishtimes.com/culture/birt...
"I am an abject idiot, which all things considered, is not remarkable." — Robert Louis Stevenson in a letter to a friend in 1873
Why I vibe hard with this man 🤣 #RLSDay
"Do not think me unhappy; I have not been so for years; but I am blurred, inhabit the debatable frontier of sleep, and have but dim designs upon activity. All is at a standstill; books closed, paper put aside, the voice, the eternal voice of R. L. S. silenced. Hence this plaint reaches you with no very great meaning, no very great purpose, and written part in slumber by a heavy, dull, somnolent, superannuated son of a bedpost." — Robert Louis Stevenson dealing with a bout of chronic illness
I know there are people in the world who cannot feel grateful unless the favour has been done them at the cost of pain and difficulty. But this is a churlish disposition. A man may send you six sheets of letter-paper covered with the most entertaining gossip, or you may pass half an hour pleasantly, perhaps profitably, over an article of his; do you think the service would be greater, if he had made the manuscript in his heart’s blood, like a compact with the devil? Do you really fancy you should be more beholden to your correspondent, if he had been damning you all the while for your importunity? Pleasures are more beneficial than duties because, like the quality of mercy, they are not strained, and they are twice blest. There must always be two to a kiss, and there may be a score in a jest; but wherever there is an element of sacrifice, the favour is conferred with pain, and, among generous people, received with confusion. There is no duty we so much underrate as the duty of being happy. By being happy, we sow anonymous benefits upon the world, which remain unknown even to ourselves, or when they are disclosed, surprise nobody so much as the benefactor.
Robert Louis Stevenson on happiness #RLSDay
It seems hardly possible to be both rich and honest; the millionaire is under a far more continuous temptation to thieve than the labourer who gets his shilling daily for despicable toils. Are you surprised? It is even so. And you repeat it every Sunday in your churches. ‘It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven’. Robert Louis Stevenson - Lay Morals
Feeling this one especially #RLSDay
Love should run out to meet love with open arms. Indeed, the ideal story is that of two people who go into love step for step, with a fluttered consciousness, like a pair of children venturing together into a dark room. From the first moment they see each other, with a pang of curiosity, through stage after stage of growing pleasure and embarrassment, they can read the expression of their own trouble in the other’s eyes. Robert Louis Stevenson on love (Virginibus Puerisque - 1912)
A few quotes for #RLSDay
For Robert Louis Stevenson’s 175th birthday, we are sharing this extract from Storyteller by Leo Damrosch, on the creation of the famed novella Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
yalebooks.co.uk/jekyll-and-h...
#RLSDay #RobertLouisStevenson
A photograph of Annie Ide as a young woman
So he decided that in 1891 when he was 40 years old he didn't need to celebrate his birthday anymore and gifted the date to Annie Ide, writing up an official document that passed the date from him to her so she could finally have a special birthday all to herself. #RLSDay
A black and white photograph of Robert Louis Stevenson
Today is #RLSDay which marks the birthday of the Scottish writer Robert Louis Stevenson who would have been 175 today.
It's also a good day to remember that it is NOT actually his birthday because in 1891 he gave it away to a young girl because she didn't like her birthday. 🧵
Happy #RLSDay! Today is the 175th birthday of the great Robert Louis Stevenson, and I celebrate by revisiting his classic Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde! kaggsysbookishramblings.wordpress.com/2025/11/13/i...
/…& Museum in Stirling, provided real-life background story to the House of Shaws and David Balfour in "Kidnapped" #RLSDay
“Of what shall a man be proud, if he is not proud of his friends?” asked Robert Louis Stevenson, born on this day in 1850. #RLSDay
“How if this be the truth – that all are a little true?”
Stevenson’s FABLES offer what the author called “tail-foremost moralities”. In this presentation for the Beshara Trust, Robert-Louis Abrahamson considers the FABLES as “contemplative wisdom”
#RLSDay
www.youtube.com/watch?v=qMmN...
Robert Louis Stevenson FABLES Against a background of handwritten text, sloping away into the distance, two ink-black silhouettes of eighteenth-century seamen – one with a crutch and only one leg – address each other. A few blobs of ink surround them.
Robert Louis Stevenson’s FABLES – 20 short, flash, & microfiction masterpieces, including one where Long John Silver & Captain Smollett slip out between chapters for a smoke – are witty, graceful, sometimes eerie, & always beautiful. All can be downloaded free 👇
#RLSDay
asls.org.uk/publications...
