"Liliuokalani and Robert Louis Stevenson", P. 42

Category

Museums & Galleries Item

Item no

19368

Title

p. 42, Liliuokalani and Robert Louis Stevenson

Description

Princess Liliuokalani and Robert Louis Stevenson look thoughtful as they sit beside an open window. They both have garlands of flowers around their necks.

The image is from the photograph album entitled 'The Cruise of the Casco' of Robert Louis Stevenson's travels around Hawaii and French Polynesia in 1888.

Artist / maker

Osbourne, Lloyd

Date

1889

Size

16 x 20.8 cm

Type

Photograph

Location

Writers' Museum

Liliuokalani (1838-1917) was the last monarch of Hawaii; reigning from 1891 to her forced abdication in 1895. She was Hawaii's crown princess when she met Robert Louis Stevenson.

Hawaii is a state of the United States of America, located in the central Pacific Ocean. It became part of the Union in 1959, making it the 50th state. Its capital is Honolulu on the island of Oahu. When Stevenson visited Hawaii it was an independent kingdom. The 1887 Constitution of the Kingdom of Hawaii however stripped the Hawaiian monarchy of much of its authority, disenfranchised most of the native population and transferred power to American, European and native Hawaiian elites. This was followed by the forced creation of the Republic of Hawaii in 1893, the abdication of Queen Liliuokalani and Hawaii's annexation by the United States of America in 1898.

Born in Edinburgh on 13th November 1850, Robert Louis Stevenson was a Scottish novelist, poet, essayist, playwright and travel writer. Although he was plagued by ill health all his life, he was extraordinarily well-travelled, visiting Europe, America and the South Seas. He married American born Fanny Van de Grift Osbourne in 1880 and is best-known for works like Treasure Island (1883), Kidnapped and The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (both 1886). From the late 1880s, Stevenson stayed in the South Pacific with his family on his own estate in Vailima in Samoa. He died here on the 3rd December 1894 of a brain haemorrhage at the age of 44, leaving what many consider his best work, Weir of Hermiston (1896) unfinished.

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"Liliuokalani and Robert Louis Stevenson", p. 42