STEVENSON’S LIFE

Family background
Family background is very important because this novelist felt very oppressed by his family:
men in his family were all respectable engineers, and they expected Stevenson to do the same;
all the women were deeply religious and strict Calvinist (they gave him puritanism). He
belongs to a conservative family and even his father was the typical respectable and
professional man.

Calvinism
We are talking about puritanism, and puritans were followers of Calvin, and the
Stevenson was Calvinist, so puritans, the basic idea is the theory of predestination: man is not
what he wants to be but what God wants him to be. Every human being, according to this
religion, is deprived of his free will, so man can’t decide according to his will and even into
the choice between good and evil, fundamental for his novel Dr jekill and mr hyde.
For this religion material success and prosperity were regarded as consequence and signs of
God’s grace (as for Robinson), so the bad actions were a kind of witness because of the lack
of God’s grace. The duty of human being is that anybody must perform his duty, in specific
his profession in the best way he could because it was a decision by God. We are talking about
the idea of the human nature and everybody is bound with damnation, so man was not really
able to act freely.
- The street difference between good and evil
- Importance of work, discipline and morality (Robinson Crusoe, for example, had to
show to God that he deserved to be saved - the salvation was for the soul)
According to puritanism, who betrays his own vocation doesn’t deserve to be saved and so to
live, so man became morally death. This was very important for Stevenson as a novelist, even
because he had a very bad and miserable childhood, since he was isolated and spent his
childhood in a bed where he couldn’t sleep because he suffered of tuberculosis and
consumptions. Isolation was just inside a dark room, and he felt very different from the other
children, and since he was isolated he got just the influence of his family, in fact when the
time came to make the choice of his career, he had to accomplish the expectation of his family
and his class and started to study engineer, but this wasn’t a free choice. He reacted and also
had changed this university and graduated in law. He had an upsetting into his life because of
the oppression, of the religious upbringing within his family., and above all he was against
the false respectability and hypocracy of Victorian age and society.
Upsetting
He suffered from consumptions and he was obliged to be isolated, without getting in touch
with the others rather than his family. He was persecuted by this duality between good and
evil. He was the first example of bohemian (long hair and an eccentric way to behave in his
life): he refuses his family and its obligation, the religion, his disease that decided for his life
=> he refuses that God is above anybody and anything in life, and man is not free to act, so
to depend just on God’s will (so he didn’t accept that the mankind is corrupted and everybody
is bound to damnation, only God can save him).