Fun facts about the life and work of Robert Louis Stevenson, author of Treasure Island
1. We’ve been mispronouncing his middle name all this time. Stevenson – or ‘RLS’ as he is sometimes known – was born Robert Lewis Balfour Stevenson, in 1850. He later changed ‘Lewis’ to ‘Louis’, but continued to pronounce it ‘Lewis’. He also dropped the ‘Balfour’ middle name, although he would later use it as the surname for David Balfour, the protagonist of Stevenson’s adventure novel, Kidnapped (1886).