His childhood
was so full of sickness that it reads like a hospital report. His life
was probably preserved by the assiduous care and rare devotion of an
old Scotch nurse, Alison Cunningham, whom he has immortalized in his
letters and in his _A Child's Garden of Verse_. The sickly boy was an
eager reader of everything that fell in his way in romance and
poetry. Later he devoted himself to systematic training of his powers
of observation and his great capacity for expressing his thoughts.
His youth was spent in migrations to the south in winter and in
efforts to thrive in Scotland's dour climate in the summer. His school
training was fitful and brief, but from the age of ten the boy had
been training himself in the field which he felt was to be his own.
His first literary work was essays and descriptive sketches for the
magazines. Then came short stories in which he revealed great
capacity. Recognition came very slowly. He was comparatively unknown
after he had produced such charming work as _An Inland Voyage_ and
_Travels With a Donkey_, not to mention the _New Arabian Nights_.
Popularity came with _Treasure Island_, written as a story for boys,
and the one work of Stevenson's in which his creative imagination does
not flag toward the end; but fame came only after the writing of _The
Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde_--the most remarkable story of
a dual personality produced in the last century.
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