Robert Louis Stevenson in Edinburgh

9 Inverleith Terrace

As a consequence of his ill health, Robert Louis Stevenson’s formal education was intermittent and probably not of great value to him. This probably didn’t cause his father much concern. Thomas Stevenson had a low opinion of the sort of education one got at school. Stevenson was later to claim his father ‘ … bravely encouraged me to neglect my lessons, and never so much as asked me my place in school.’ During the periods when he was unable to attend school, he sometimes had informal lessons from Cummy, and on one occasion a private tutor was engaged.

(January 1853 – May 1857)

According to at least one biographer, the house at Howard Place had turned out to be too small for the Stevenson family. I’m not sure I believe that, as it’s clear from the recent estate agent’s listing that the house is actually quite large – certainly big enough for a family of three. Perhaps one drawback was that it was too close to the Water of Leith, the river that runs through Edinburgh. At that time, the river was polluted – it was clogged with sewage and with effluent from a tannery. Robert Louis Stevenson suffered from poor health throughout his life and the list of ailments he endured as a child is long and saddening. So moving away from that first house was a wise thing for his parents to do. What’s rather surprising is that they didn’t move very far.

The house they moved into at Inverleith Terrace is only a few minutes walk from their first house at Howard Place. It’s a bit farther away from the Water of Leith, so the stench would undoubtedly have been less. The new house, which had been built less than twenty years earlier, was certainly larger. At the time the Stevensons moved into it, it was actually No. 1 Inverleith Terrace. The houses have been renumbered since then and it’s now No. 9. The house is unique among the three in Edinburgh where Robert Louis Stevenson lived in that it doesn’t have a plaque on the wall commemorating his connection with the place. I believe Historic Environment Scotland rejected the idea in 2022 on the grounds that there were already a number of tributes to the author. I hope they’ll reconsider at some point.

By this time, the Stevensons had engaged the services of Alison Cunningham, known as ‘Cummy’, as the family nurse or nanny. Cummy was to have a profound effect on the young Robert Louis Stevenson. Whenever the young boy was ill, she was wonderful at taking care of him.

Unfortunately, Cummy, whom one biographer has called a ‘religious maniac’, also frightened the young Stevenson with stories of hellfire, ghosts, body-snatchers and Covenanters. At the age of thirty, he recalled how he would awake from dreams of hell ‘‘my knees and chin together, my soul shaken, my body convulsed with agony …’.

So Cummy was a blessing but a mixed one. Despite the fact that her stories sometimes terrified him, Stevenson regarded her as the ‘angel of his infant life’. When he was unwell, she looked after him very tenderly indeed. Later, he dedicated his marvellous volume of poetry A Child’s Garden of Verses to her:

Dedication

TO ALISON CUNNINGHAM

FROM HER BOY

For the long nights you lay awake And watched for my unworthy sake:

For your most comfortable hand

That led me through the uneven land:

For all the story-books you read, For all the pains you comforted, For all you pitied, all you bore, In sad and happy days of yore:-My second Mother, my first Wife, The angel of my infant life – From the sick child, now well and old, Take, nurse, the little book you hold!

And grant it, Heaven, that all who read May find as dear a nurse at need, And every child who lists my rhyme, In the bright fireside, nursery clime,

May hear it in as kind a voice

As made my childish days rejoice!

R. L. S.

Later in life, Stevenson recalled “… with particular pleasure running upstairs in Inverleith Terrace with my mother — herself little more than a girl — to the top flat of this our second house, both of us singing as best we could “We’ll all go up to Gatty’s room, to Gatty’s room, etc.,” ad lib.; Gatty being contracted for Grandpapa, my mother’s father, who was coming to stay with us. I mention that because it stands out in stronger relief than any other recollection of the same age. I have a great belief in these vivid recollections: things that impress us so forcibly as to become stereotyped for life have not done so for nothing.”

Unfortunately, the house at Inverleith Terrace turned out to be cold and damp, circumstances which might well have contributed to the young Robert Louis Stevenson’s ongoing chest ailments. In May 1857, the family moved to a much more congenial house at 17 Heriot Row, about three-quarters of a mile away, in the heart of the New Town.

Next … 17 Heriot Row