Robert Louis Stevenson Books Free Online: All 6, and the Order That Works
Stevenson wrote for about fifteen years and died at forty-four, and in that time produced the most famous adventure novel in English, the most famous horror novella in English, and a book of children's poems that people still recite. No other writer's short career covers that much ground, and the usual consequence is that readers meet one of him and never suspect the others exist.
Six of his books are free to read in the library. They divide cleanly into three writers.
The adventure novelist
- Treasure Island (1883) — the one that invented the furniture: the map with the X, the one-legged sea cook, the black spot, the parrot. What survives re-reading is not the treasure but Long John Silver, who is charming and murderous at the same time in a way children's books had not previously allowed. Nobody in the book, including Jim, comes out of it entirely clean. Start here if you are starting anywhere.
- Kidnapped (1886) — better written than Treasure Island and less loved, which is the standard fate of a sequel to a phenomenon that isn't one. David Balfour is shipped off by an uncle who wants him dead, and ends up crossing the Highlands after the Jacobite defeat with Alan Breck Stewart, who is vain, brave, touchy and the best character Stevenson made. The flight through the heather is the best sustained chase in Victorian fiction.
- The Black Arrow (1888) — the Wars of the Roses, an outlaw band, a girl in disguise as a boy, and a plot that moves fast. Stevenson himself thought little of it and called it tushery, meaning fake-archaic dialogue, and he was half right. Children generally do not care and enjoy it enormously. Read it third if the first two worked.
The horror writer
- The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) — about ninety pages, and worth reading precisely because the ending has been spoiled for everyone alive. The book is not a mystery about who Hyde is; it is a lawyer's slow, appalled investigation of a friend, told mostly through documents, and the horror is in the respectability. Hyde's actual crimes are few and small and much nastier than any film makes them. It sits with the rest of the shelf in gothic classics you can read free online.
The poet, and the one for the youngest reader
- A Child's Garden of Verses (1885) — sixty-odd short poems from inside a child's day: the counterpane, the lamplighter, the swing, being ill in bed, the shadow that goes in and out with you. Written by an adult who had spent much of his own childhood ill in bed and remembered it exactly. This is the book to read aloud to a three-year-old, a page at a time, and it is the only thing on this list that works at that age.
- Fables (1896, posthumous) — twenty very short, very strange pieces, published after he died. Not children's writing at all: closer to parables with the moral removed. A page each, and several of them are unsettling. Read it last, when you want to know what he was doing at the end.
What is not here
The Master of Ballantrae and Catriona — the direct sequel to Kidnapped — are not in the library yet, and Ballantrae is the one a Stevenson enthusiast will miss most. His South Sea stories are absent too. What is above is the whole of the popular Stevenson and nothing of the late, harder Stevenson.
The order, in one line
Treasure Island → Kidnapped → Jekyll and Hyde → The Black Arrow, with A Child's Garden of Verses read aloud to whoever is too small for the rest.
Two reading notes. The Scots dialect in Kidnapped is thick in Alan's speech and thin everywhere else, and reading it aloud solves it faster than a glossary does. And Stevenson's chapters are short — often five or six pages — which makes all four novels unusually good for a chapter a night; several of them appear in read-aloud chapter books that actually work out loud.
If you want more of the same shelf, books like Treasure Island is the direct follow-on, classic adventure novels is the wider one, and everything of his is on his author page.