Robert Louis Stevenson

Robert Louis Stevenson's life is characterised by a geographical restlessness which marks him as a creature of the modern age, of swift and reliable transport by rail and sea, of global empires and the communication networks they created. Stevenson worked on more full-length fictions of Scottish history only after he had left Britain for good: The Master of Ballantrae was written in up-state New York, Catriona , a sequel to Kidnapped , in Samoa, and at his death in December 1894 Stevenson left unfinished two novels which open in early nineteenth century Edinburgh, Weir of Hermiston and St Ives . Stevenson's very first published fiction imagines just such a youthful running away, but as an example of the very impulse to renunciation that ‘Lay Morals’ condemns. This is a story called ‘An Old Song’, which appeared in London in four instalments in the Spring of 1877.