Robert Louis Stevenson Visits Cramond and Edinburgh Castle
Poet involved
What happened
Robert Louis Stevenson, a native of Edinburgh, wrote extensively about Scotland's castles and their relationship to his sense of Scottish identity and history. His essays in Virginibus Puerisque (1881) and his poetry in A Child's Garden of Verses (1885) drew on the Edinburgh Castle that dominated his childhood skyline, the ruined towers of the Lothian coast, and the military history embedded in Scotland's fortifications. His later adventure fiction — Kidnapped, The Master of Ballantrae — used the castle landscape of Scotland as a moral and narrative space.
Literary impact
Stevenson's engagement with Scottish castles as places of childhood imagination, historical memory, and adventure narrative gave the castle a specifically domestic and psychological dimension in late Victorian literature. A Child's Garden of Verses brought the castle — as a place of toy-soldier play and imaginative projection — into the nursery poetry tradition. His historical novels placed the castle at the centre of Scottish identity in ways that influenced later twentieth-century Scottish writers.
Source: Wikipedia
