By James Aitchison

A few paces from Edinburgh’s famous Golden Mile, nestling in tiny Makars’ Court by Lady Stair’s Close, you will find the Scottish Writers’ Museum.  Within its ancient walls are portraits, literary works and personal objects of Scotland’s three greatest writers: Robert Burns, Walter Scott and Robert Louis Stevenson.

The atmosphere is palpable.  Here is the national poet Robbie Burns who penned the 1785 poem To a Mouse:

“Wee, sleeket, cowran, tim’rous beastie,
O, what a panic’s in thy breastie!
Thou need na start awa sae hasty,
Wi’ bickerin brattle!
I wad be laith to rin an’ chase thee
Wi’ murd’ring pattle!”

Burns also wrote Address to a Haggis, in praise of the national dish of haggis.  His poem is traditionally recited before the dish is cut and served.  It begins:

“Fair fa’ your honest, sonsie face,
Great chieftain o’ the puddin’-race!
Aboon them a’ ye tak yer place,
Painch, tripe, or thairm.”

          (Translated: Good luck to you and your honest, plump face, / Great chieftain of the sausage race! / Above them all you take your place, / Belly, tripe or intestine.”

….

The museum boasts Sir Walter Scott’s slippers, chessboard and chessmen, not to mention the hand-operated Ballantyne press that once printed his books.  James Ballantyne was a friend of Scott’s and printed much of the author’s work.

Scott established the genre of the historical novel.  He wrote such classics of European and Scottish literature as Ivanhoe, Rob Roy and Waverley, and the narrative poem The Lady of the Lake.

Scott profoundly influenced European and American literature, and he was the long-serving president of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.

Arguably, Robert Louis Stevenson steals the show at the museum.  Like Scott, Stevenson was born in Edinburgh in 1850.  The Scottish novelist, essayist, poet and travel writer is best known for Treasure Island, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Kidnapped, and A Child’s Garden of Verse. 

Beyond a display of various books he owned, you can experience his presence here in the heart of the old town where the soot-blackened walls are testimony to centuries of pollution.  Stevenson was raised in these narrow, huddled streets; the damp, chilly air filled with smoke from thousands of chimneys exacerbated his extreme bronchial problems.  It is almost possible to picture his thin frame, wracked with bronchitis, making its way through the twisted laneways of “Auld Reekie” (“Old Smoky”) as Edinburgh was called.

Sickness marred Stevenson’s childhood; he frequently missed school and required private tuition.  Bedridden for long spells, he began writing stories, at first dictating them to his mother and nurse.  By the time he was 22, Stevenson had become a Bohemian, wearing his hair long, and declared himself an atheist.  He married Fanny Van de Grift Osbourne in 1880; she was 40, he was 29.  They settled in the English coastal town of Bournemouth, where Stevenson hoped the sea air would improve his health.  However, despite writing the bulk of his most popular novels in Bournemouth, he remained mostly bedridden.

June 1888 found the Stevensons chartering a yacht to cruise the Pacific Ocean, stopping for extended stays at the Hawaiian Islands.  In December 1889 the family reached Apia in the Samoan Islands and decided to make it their home.

Stevenson died aged 44 in 1894.  He was buried on Mount Vaea, overlooking the sea, carried there by devoted Samoans who called him “Tusitala” (“Teller of Tales”).  He wrote his own epitaph which is inscribed on his tomb:

“Under the wide and starry sky
Dig the grave and let me lie
Glad did I live and gladly die
And I laid me down with a will
This be the verse you grave for me
Here he lies where he longed to be
Home is the sailor home from the sea
And the hunter home from the hill.”