Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin, 1888 Read the Virtual Book Summary: RLS wrote Memoir in tribute to his professor of engineering at Edinburgh University, Henry Charles Fleeming Jenkin. For more biographical information on Jenkin, see the page dedicated to him in the Friends section of website. In Memoir, RLS discusses Jenkin’s family ancestry in detail, outlining their careers. He then tells [...]

Father Damien: An Open Letter to the Reverend Doctor Hyde of Honolulu from Robert Louis Stevenson, 1890 Read the Virtual Book Summary: Father Damien (Damien de Veuster, 1840-1889) was a Roman Catholic missionary from Belgium. He went to the leper settlement at Molokai in 1873, where he helped the sufferers of the disease. Damien himself contracted [...]

A Footnote to History: Eight Years of Trouble in Samoa, 1892 Read the Virtual Book Summary: Fascinating not only as an account of Colonial skulduggery and duplicity but also as a background to Stevenson's great South Seas tales – “The Beach of Falesa” and The Ebb-Tide - this is possibly RLS's most unjustly neglected book. Immediately alert to [...]

Records of a Family of Engineers, 1896 Read the Virtual Book Summary: Stevenson was working on (what would be posthumously called) "Records of a Family of Engineers" from the early 1890s until his death. This unfinished piece focuses on RLS’s grandfather, Robert Stevenson (1772-1850). “Records” is a discussion of the Stevenson family history and their achievements in [...]