Stevenson's gift as an author and poet for children lay partly in his lack of condescension towards them, and he preserved a large element of the child in his own personality. He wrote many of these poems whilst ill in bed, and the illustrations were first published shortly after his death.



Perhaps one of the most popular of Stevenson's works, A Child's Garden Of Verses, first published in 1885, is regarded universally as one of the greatest recollections of childhood in verse.