Robert Louis Stevenson – Always in Edinburgh

By Colin Galbraith
In the 19th Century, poverty and disease were rife throughout Edinburgh's Old Town. Cobbled streets and narrow lanes harbored the dangerous and the delinquents; vagrants and beggars were aplenty and the threat of feces falling from the slums above, always a possibility.
In the New Town, fine Georgian houses with large gardens and butlers, contrasted the squalor on the other side of the city with a more sophisticated and salubrious way of life. Into this was born Robert Louis Stevenson on the 13th November 1850, and his impact on the literary world was nothing short of astoni...