The Body Snatcher: About Robert Louis Stevenson

Robert Louis Stevenson, one of the masters of the Victorian adventure story, was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, on November 13, 1850. He was often sick as a child, and respiratory troubles plagued him throughout his life. He enrolled at Edinburgh University at the age of seventeen with the intention to study engineering but ended up studying law instead. He became a qualified lawyer but did not pursue the profession, choosing instead to become a full-time writer. As a young man, he traveled through Europe, leading a bohemian lifestyle and penning his first two books, both travel narratives. Stevenson felt constrained by the strict social norms of the Victorian era during which he lived, and many of his works demonstrate a sharp tension between upstanding duty and reckless abandon.

In 1876, he met Fanny Van de Grift Osbourne, and fell in love with her. At thirty-six, she was ten years older than he, and she had been married and had two small children. Two years later, he followed her as she returned to California to finalize her divorce, a journey he described in The Amateur Emigrant (1879). Stevenson and Osbourne married in California and spent their honeymoon at an abandoned silver mine.

Stevenson returned to London with his wife and wrote prolifically over the next decade, despite his poor health. He published many short stories and books over the early part of his life, but his first taste of real success came in 1883 with the publication of Treasure Island, a pirate-themed adventure novel originally published serially in Young Folks magazine. The magazine also published Kidnapped in 1886, the year that also saw the publication of Stevenson's most famous novel, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. It sold 40,000 copies in six months and ensured Stevenson’s fame as a writer.

By the late 1880s, Stevenson had become one of the leading figures of English literature. But even after garnering fame, he led a somewhat troubled life. He traveled often, seeking to find a climate more amenable to the tuberculosis that haunted his later days. In 1888, a doctor advised Stevenson to move to a warmer climate for his health. Stevenson and his family set sail for the South Seas, arriving in Samoa and taking up residence there in 1889. There, he died suddenly in 1894, at the age of forty-four.

Scotland was known as the center of anatomical study in the early 1800s. As a Scot, Stevenson would have grown up hearing stories of the infamous Burke and Hare murders that took place twenty-two years before his birth and inspired his story “The Body Snatcher.” He would also have been inspired by The Anatomy Act of 1832 that resulted from the Burke and Hare murders. The custom of studying dead bodies was essential to medical research and education at the time, though the means of procuring those bodies remained suspect.

Next section Historical Context: The Burke and Hare Murders