All About Scotland

The new home presented a change not just for the family, but more radically from the way people had lived down the centuries in the Old Town. 

For one thing, in houses so grand and spacious, the wealthy could entertain in style at home. Heriot Row, seen initially as 'mad speculation', became a prized address, its gardens well-tended and its austere frontages glinting with the letter-boxes of judges and lawyers. No. 17 is in many ways a typical Georgian New Town house. Dating from between 1802-08, it gives us clues about the hierarchy inside. Like the rest of the New Town it is built from local Craigleith sandstone. In the basement, containing the servants' quarters and kitchens, the stone-work looks rough, a style known as 'rock-faced'. That on the upper floors has a smooth polished finish known as 'ashlar'; with the deep v-shaped gaps between each block, styled 'rusticated'

Usually on the ground floor were the dining room and perhaps a bedroom. The rooms on the first floor are the most important, grand reception rooms with impressive high ceilings, the setting for such fashionable activities as music, dancing and cards. Children were kept away at the top of the house. The only real decoration, aside from the rectangular brass door handle peculiar to Edinburgh, is provided by the wrought-iron railings and balconies, and above the door a fanlight or door-light, to cast light into the hallway. Many New Town streets have their own astragal patterns for these, to add variety to their otherwise uniform appearance.

Even as a small boy Stevenson had a febrile imagination.  His adult poems would reveal his childhood fancies ... and a fear of the dark:

The shadow of the balusters, the shadow of the lamp,
The shadow of the child that goes to bed –
All the wicked shadows coming, tramp, tramp, tramp,
With the black night overhead.

In his bedroom (its window on the top right), his nanny Cummy instilled in him stories, images ... and a precocious grasp of sin. The gas street-lighting outside provided him with inspiration, and consolation, immortalised in his beautiful poem of childhood, ‘The Lamplighter’:

For we are very lucky, with a lamp before the door,
And Leerie stops to light it as he lights so many more;
And O! Before you hurry by with ladder and with light,
O Leerie, see a little child and nod to him tonight!

The tiny island in the pond in the gardens opposite, which he looked out on, may have helped to implant the idea for Treasure Island. From Heriot Row Stevenson trailed snail-like to school: first round the corner to 'Cocky' Henderson's at 36 India Street ...

Here we suffer grief and pain
Under Mr Hendi's cane
If you don't obey his laws
He will punish with the tawse.

Then briefly and without pleasure or distinction Stevenson attended Edinburgh Academy  In due course he would make his forays, wearing his familiar velvet jacket, to the Calton Hill, Lothian Road and down Leith Walk, in search of an Edinburgh very different from the one on offer in the spacious yet insulated respectability of the New Town.

I love night in the city,
The lighted streets and the swinging gait of harlots.
I love cool pale morning
In the empty bye-streets.

After sojourns abroad, and his marriage to American divorcee Fanny Osbourne, Stevenson was reconciled with his father towards whom he had sensed a lifetime's ambivalence; and on whose last illness he came back to Edinburgh. Too sick to attend the funeral, he left Heriot Row shortly after, in an open cab, for good. Ahead lay fame, the South Seas, and his place secure in the literary pantheon (and in the heart) of the Scotland he yearned for... but which he knew he would always be exiled from. Yet Stevenson remained a child of Edinburgh and its stark contrasts of light and dark- never more so than in these words, as chilling as any in fiction: "At the sight that met my eyes, my blood was changed into something exquisitely thin and icy. Yes, I had gone to bed Henry Jekyll, I had awakened Edward Hyde".

This material was commissioned and produced by Edinburgh World Heritage and Edinburgh UNESCO City of Literature Trust, with support from the Scottish Arts Council.  The scripts were written by Edinburgh poet and author, Stewart Conn, and performed by Shonagh Price and Donald Smith, with additional editorial material by Donald Smith.

All material is copyright Edinburgh World Heritage and Edinburgh UNESCO City of Literature Trust unless otherwise stated.

Robert Louis Stevenson portraits, Scottish National Portrait Gallery & Edinburgh City Libraries and Information Services Image Library