Edinburgh's best museum

          Robert Louis Stevenson was once told by his doctor ‘not to have his hair cut unless both the state of his health and the weather were propitious’. Looking at the portrait in front of me, by the American painter John Singer Sargent, I conclude that it was sound advice. The great Scottish writer cuts an alarmingly thin figure, his legs spindly and his wrist and fingers positively skeletal.  

          This striking print is found in the fascinating Writers’ Museum, which is located in a fine four hundred year old house in a quadrangle off the Mound, in the heart of the city. The building was bought and renovated at the end of the nineteenth century by the Earl of Rosebery, and donated to the city for use as a museum. The literary theme extends into the adjacent courtyard, where quotes from Scottish writers are etched into paving slabs.  

          My favourite section is in the basement, which is devoted to Stevenson and reached via a very low staircase. Romance and adventure burst from the black and white pictures of the gaunt Edinburgh native and the far-flung destinations he visited on his travels: Honolulu, Sydney, San Francisco, the Gilbert Islands, Samoa. 

          These monochrome images open up an exotic and vanished world. In one photograph an unsmiling Hawaiian missionary sits against a jungle backdrop, flanked by his equally serious wife. ‘I have never known a more engaging creature’, Stevenson wrote of him, but it’s very hard to imagine this stern man slapping backs and cracking jokes.

          There are silhouettes of men hauling copra from a distant three-mast ship through the shallows to a beach on Butaritari in the Gilberts. Another picture shows the wide bay of Apia, capital of Samoa, where low houses line the shore before a fringe of tropical trees, and a dark range of hills looms in the background.  

          As a fan of Stevenson, the displays on Sir Walter Scott and Robert Burns hold less appeal for me. Still, they feature interesting curios, like Scott’s chess board and pipe, and aged editions of their books. There is also a somewhat ghoulish plaster cast of the top half of Burns’ skull. Attractive paintings and engravings grace the walls, and there are pictures of the Scott Monument during its construction. 

          Recordings of passages from their books play as you study the exhibits; in the basement, you can enjoy an excerpt from Treasure Island as you peer at photographs of Stevenson lounging on a veranda with the Hawaiian king, or sitting up in bed playing the flageolet in ‘a grim little wooden shanty’. 

          It’s a great place, but I do have a suggestion for the curator: get rid of the centuries-old locks of hair! Does anyone really want to see these grim remnants of the departed?