Robert Louis Stevenson: The Concept Of Home And Abroad

The Concept of home and abroad Robert Louis Stevenson was an important and renowned literary celebrity of his time. He was born in 1850 in Edinburgh and belonged to an upper middle class family. His father Thomas Stevenson was a well-known leading lighthouse engineer in the Victorian era while his mother was from a lawyers and clergymen family. In 1857 he with his parents moved to 17 Heriot Row a four story Georgian town house in Edinburgh’s new town. Stevenson had a prosperous life different from that of other writers of his time. But along with prosperity there were restrictions, He was a sick child with a respiratory illness due to which he had to spend most of the time in his room all alone. He wasn’t …show more content…
Stevenson’s parents were very concerned over his health, wanted to protect him from harsh, cold weather of Scotland as he wasn’t fit for that, never allowed him go out play with friends. They tried their best and tried hard to keep him away from the outside world. This environment brought him closer to the books. He was very much interested in reading about faraway lands. Thus this reading habit developed in him a strong imaginary power that we can see in his fiction work. In his early writings such as foreign lands and Travel we can view how had been interested in the world outside his home in his early childhood as he didn’t have the opportunity to go out. In such a confined and restricted environment Stevenson grew up to be the most distinguished writer of the era as well as a celebrated traveller. The idea of home and abroad are strongly inter related both in his life as well as his writing and his interest in wider world outside home started in his childhood. He travelled far from Edinburgh to the Pacific. In this essay I am going to discuss how Stevenson’s uses realism, …show more content…
The author used first person narrative to bring realism to his work in a better way. The way the story has been plotted, its characters natural approach makes the story seem real. The whole account is about a domestic life of Wiltshire with his wife Uma and how they deal with language, culture and color barrier. The first person narrative has been used in between the story that kept the readers stuck to the novella, maintained their interest throughout. It also represented the relationship between home and abroad where white English men goes abroad makes new homes and creates new mixed way of life and adopts new cultures. The best example of this is Case who spent so many years away from mother land that he doesn’t have any nationality except this that he speaks English. We can also see this in Wiltshire’s case that he makes a home for himself abroad and family too and no longer calls Britain as his home, he calls it a white man’s country. We believe that this story is realistic because it was based on Stevenson’s own experiences on the Samoa that he applied in his novella. From beach life to the local dialect he made it sure that everything is close to real if not actually