Allison Cunningham ("Cummy" )
Stevenson's incessant illnesses mandated the hiring of a nurse. After two others proved less than completely competent, the Stevensons hired Alison Cunningham ("Cummy") when Stevenson was about eighteen months old. Cummy's fervent Calvinism and the stories she told of the Covenanters--strident seventeenth-century Presbyterians who opposed encroaching Anglicanism--would prove quite influential in the author's career.
A Cloud of Witnesses for the Royal Prerogatives of Jesus Christ; or, The Last Speeches and Testimonies of Those Who Have Suffered for the Truth in Scotland, Since the Year 1680
Edinburgh, [1714].
An example of the heroic stories of the Scottish Covenanters and their religious persecution in the seventeenth century, which "Cummy" read to her young charge. Stevenson's grasp of stylistic archaism and his interest in historical romances can be traced to such early religious reading. He wrote to J. M. Barrie in 1893 that "My style is from the Covenanting writer."
The Pentland Rising: A Page of History
Edinburgh, Andrew Elliot, 1866.
Stevenson's first pamphlet, privately published at his father's expense, tells the story of the bloody Covenanting battle at Rullion Green in 1666.