This article was written by Colin Galbraith
In the 19th Century, poverty and disease were rife throughout Edinburgh's Old Town. Cobbled streets and narrow lanes harbored the dangerous and the delinquents; vagrants and beggars were aplenty and the threat of feces falling from the slums above, always a possibility.
In the New Town, fine Georgian houses with large gardens and butlers, contrasted the squalor on the other side of the city with a more sophisticated and salubrious way of life. Into this was born Robert Louis Stevenson on the 13th November 1850, and his impact on the literary world was nothing short of astonishing.
It was in the New Town that Stevenson grew up from the age of six. He lived at 17 Heriot Row with his father, Thomas, a lighthouse engineer of some fame and his mother, Margaret. (please see www.stevenson-house.co.uk) for details of this remarkable building in the heart of the Scottish capital.
Edinburgh is an inspirational city for a writer; its architecture and contrasting groups of people who live in it. It was the same for the young Stevenson, as he looked out over the large gardens of Queen Street and beyond to the magnetic allure of the Old Town.
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