Robert Louis Stevenson Trivia
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60 free Robert Louis Stevenson trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This Robert Louis Stevenson trivia quiz follows the author of Treasure Island from a sickly childhood in Edinburgh to a hillside grave in Samoa. The early questions cover the family of lighthouse engineers he refused to join, the nurse to whom he dedicated A Child's Garden of Verses, his rebellion against his parents' religion, the law degree he never used, and the canoe and donkey journeys that produced his first travel books. The middle of the quiz turns to Fanny Osbourne and the near-fatal journey to California to marry her, the honeymoon in a mining camp, the years in Bournemouth when most of the famous books were written, and the books themselves: the map drawn for a stepson that became Treasure Island, the dream that became Jekyll and Hyde and the manuscript that may have been burned, the Appin murder behind Kidnapped, and the models for Long John Silver. The last questions cover the Pacific: the yacht Casco, King Kalākaua, the leper colony on Molokaʻi, the estate at Vailima, the name Tusitala, his letters to The Times about Samoa, his sudden death at 44 and the epitaph on Mount Vaea. Every answer has been checked against the Wikipedia articles on Stevenson and his major novels.
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Q 01What was the family profession that Stevenson's father, grandfather and uncles all followed?
Lighthouse engineering
Lighthouse engineering. His grandfather Robert Stevenson built the Bell Rock lighthouse, but Louis, sent to learn the trade on harbour works, wrote that he already had a 'private determination to be an author'.
Q 02Which birth name, his mother's maiden name, did Stevenson drop and give to Kidnapped's hero David?
Balfour
Balfour. He also respelled Lewis as Louis at about 18, yet only the spelling changed: his family and close friends went on calling him Lewis all his life.
Q 03Which innkeeper's son, cabin boy of the Hispaniola, narrates most of Treasure Island?
Jim Hawkins
Jim Hawkins. Hiding in the ship's apple barrel, he overhears Long John Silver plotting mutiny, and his warning saves the squire's party.
Q 04To whom did Stevenson dedicate A Child's Garden of Verses (1885)?
His nurse Alison Cunningham
His nurse Alison Cunningham. 'Cummy' nursed him through his sick childhood nights, reading him the Bible and Bunyan, and his dedication thanks her as 'My second mother, my first wife'.
Q 05Stevenson's first publication, printed at his father's expense when he was 16, recounted which event?
The Covenanters' rebellion of 1666
The Covenanters' rebellion of 1666. Raised on tales of these Presbyterian rebels, he wrote The Pentland Rising for the 200th anniversary of their defeat at Rullion Green.
Q 06In Treasure Island, what do pirates hand a shipmate to depose him or mark him for death?
A black spot
A black spot. Stevenson invented the device for the novel; when Silver's crew hand him one cut from a Bible page, he warns them that spoiling a Bible will bring them bad luck.
Q 07Having abandoned his first degree, Stevenson qualified in July 1875 for what?
The Scottish bar
The Scottish bar. A brass plate reading 'R.L. Stevenson, Advocate' went up on the family door, but writing won: within two weeks he had left for France.
Q 08The year his father found his club's rule to disregard everything their parents had taught them, Stevenson confessed what to him?
Loss of faith
Loss of faith. He belonged to the LJR (Liberty, Justice, Reverence) League, founded with friends in an Edinburgh pub; the news that he no longer believed devastated his devout father and set off a bitter quarrel.
Q 09Which poet, met in hospital, did Stevenson call his model for Long John Silver?
W. E. Henley
W. E. Henley. Stevenson told him that 'the sight of your maimed strength and masterfulness' begot Silver, but the two quarrelled in 1888 and the friendship never fully recovered.
Q 10Stevenson's first travel book, An Inland Voyage (1878), recounts a journey by what means through Belgium and France?
Canoe
Canoe. On the flooded Oise a fallen tree swept Stevenson out of his canoe, the Arethusa; he clung to the trunk and proposed his own epitaph: 'He clung to his paddle.'
Q 11What was the name of the donkey in Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes?
Modestine
Modestine. He bought her for 65 francs and a glass of brandy to carry his huge sleeping sack, and wept after selling her twelve days later.
Q 12In which French village did Stevenson first meet his future wife Fanny Osbourne?
Grez-sur-Loing
Grez-sur-Loing. Fanny, an American separated from her husband, had come to its artists' colony to paint; three years later Stevenson crossed an ocean and a continent to join her in California.
Q 13Why did Stevenson pay extra for the Devonia's second cabin over steerage when crossing the Atlantic in 1879?
For a table to write at
Q 21Which watercolour from a wet 1881 holiday with his stepson set Stevenson writing Treasure Island?
A map of an island
A map of an island. Its harbours and names suggested the plot, and the whole household joined in: his father spent most of a day listing the contents of Billy Bones's sea chest, which went into the book.
Q 22What is the name of the inn where Treasure Island opens and where Billy Bones lodges?
The Admiral Benbow
The Admiral Benbow. The old seaman Billy Bones hides out there, paying the landlord's son a silver fourpenny a month to watch for 'a seafaring man with one leg'.
Q 23Who captains the Hispaniola on the voyage to Treasure Island?
Alexander Smollett
For a table to write at. The second cabin was almost indistinguishable from the steerage around it, but on the voyage he finished 'The Story of a Lie' before the journey broke his health.
Q 14Goat ranchers near which California town nursed Stevenson back to health after he crossed America in 1879?
Monterey
Monterey. Camping in the hills, he fell so ill that two ranchers took him in, and one, an old bear-hunter, acted as his doctor; in town he lodged at the French Hotel, since preserved as the Stevenson House museum.
Q 15In which American city did Stevenson marry the newly divorced Fanny Osbourne in May 1880?
San Francisco
San Francisco. He called it 'a sort of marriage in extremis': Fanny, 40, wed him at 29 when he was 'a mere complication of cough and bones', and he credited her care with keeping him alive.
Q 16Where did Stevenson and Fanny spend their 1880 honeymoon?
An abandoned mining camp on Mount Saint Helena
An abandoned mining camp on Mount Saint Helena. Short of money, the couple and Fanny's son squatted rent-free in the deserted Silverado mine's bunkhouse, hauling water past rattlesnakes; the book is The Silverado Squatters.
Q 17Which name did Stevenson give his Bournemouth house, after a Hebridean landmark?
Skerryvore
Skerryvore. His father bought the house as a present for Fanny; there Louis wrote Jekyll and Hyde and Kidnapped while so often bedridden that he recalled living 'like a weevil in a biscuit'.
Q 18Which American novelist came most evenings to talk at the Stevensons' Bournemouth dinner table from 1885?
Henry James
Henry James. He was in Bournemouth to be near his invalid sister Alice, and the Stevensons kept an armchair that had been Louis's grandfather's as 'Henry James's chair'.
Q 19Which working title did Stevenson give Treasure Island, after Long John Silver's job on the Hispaniola?
The Sea Cook
The Sea Cook. Stevenson named the tale for his one-legged cook; by his own account it was the editor of Young Folks who deleted that first title.
Q 20Under what pseudonym was Treasure Island first serialised in the magazine Young Folks?
Captain George North
Captain George North. Under that name the serial ran an obscure course in Young Folks, drawing 'not the least attention' by Stevenson's account, and the book followed two years later under his own name.
Alexander Smollett. Before sailing he tells the squire he likes neither the cruise nor the men, and complains that every hand aboard already knows they are after treasure.
Q 24Which marooned former pirate on Treasure Island has a craving for cheese?
Ben Gunn
Ben Gunn. Marooned for three years, he dreams of toasted cheese; he had already dug up the treasure and carried it to his cave, which is why the pirates find the pit empty.
Q 25Long John Silver's parrot is named after which dead pirate captain?
Flint
Flint. Silver's parrot, Cap'n Flint, shrieks 'Pieces of eight!', and that cry in the dark gives the young narrator away when he stumbles into the pirates' camp.
Q 26Stevenson admitted that Long John Silver's parrot 'once belonged to' which earlier castaway of fiction?
Robinson Crusoe
Robinson Crusoe. Stevenson shrugged off that debt and the skeleton 'conveyed from Poe', but confessed that Billy Bones and his chest came straight from Washington Irving, a borrowing he spotted only years later.
Q 27What is the profession of Gabriel John Utterson in Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde?
Lawyer
Lawyer. Utterson keeps Jekyll's will, which leaves everything to the unknown Mr Hyde, and his unease about that document is what sets him hunting for Hyde.
Q 28By Stevenson's own account, where did the central idea for Jekyll and Hyde come from?
A dream
A dream. Short of money and racking his brains for a plot, he dreamed the scene at the window and Hyde swallowing the powder to change in front of his pursuers; the rest, he said, he wrote awake.
Q 29What did Stevenson reportedly do with the first draft of Jekyll and Hyde after Fanny criticised it?
Burned it
Burned it. By the family's account he threw the draft on the fire after Fanny said he had missed the allegory, then rewrote the whole tale within days; no direct evidence of the burning survives.
Q 30Whom does Mr Hyde beat to death with a cane in Jekyll and Hyde?
Sir Danvers Carew
Sir Danvers Carew. A maid at her window watches Hyde club the old MP in the lane; half the broken cane, left in the gutter, is one Utterson had given Jekyll.