Robert Louis Stevenson Memorial Plaque, inside St Giles’ Cathedral

High St, Edinburgh EH1 1RE

The most important American link in the life of Robert Louis Stevenson (RLS) occurred while he was visiting France in 1876, for it was there that he met an American art student, Fanny Osborne. When she moved to California two years later, he found himself unbearably unhappy without her, and so he sailed to join her in 1879. He was reunited with Fanny in California, and (despite his tuberculosis) they were married in the following year, spending their three-week honeymoon in the camp of an abandoned silver mine! Later that year, RLS came back to Edinburgh with Fanny, but the climate here was unsuited to his illness, and so, after brief stays in Europe and America, he and his family spent the rest of his life cruising the South Seas, eventually settling in Samoa.

There is no statue to RLS in Edinburgh for two reasons: one is that Stevenson himself said that he did not want one, and the other is that the principal mover in the planning of his memorial in the city of his birth, the Earl of Rosebery (who was Prime Minister at the time), had an intense dislike of statues. It was therefore decided to erect a large plaque instead. The sculptor was Augustus Saint-Gaudens, an American working in New York who was a great fan of Stevenson’s writings. The two men had met in 1887 and struck up an instant friendship. It took Saint-Gaudens several years to complete the work, which was eventually installed in 1902, eight years after Stevenson’s death.