A new website about the life and work of Robert Louis Stevenson is now live on the internet. With full information about RLS’s life, pictures never before seen by the public and downloadable e-texts of all his books, it is the most comprehensive site concerned with the Edinburgh writer. The site also provides resource packs for schools, including one on the Scots language.

Stevenson is best known as the author of Kidnapped, Treasure Island and The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Besides the fine Scots dialogue in many of his novels, Stevenson wrote and published poems in the language. Book II of his 1887 collection Underwoods is entirely in Scots, a radical decision for his time. The collection is prefaced by a note about writing in Scots and Book II by a table of vowel sounds that the website cries “a valuable source of information on the pronunciation of Lallans Scots in the late nineteenth century”.

You can visit the website at http://www.robert-louis-stevenson.org/