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Robert Louis Stevenson: A Biography
Claire Harman


The most authoritative, comprehensive, perceptive biography of R. L. Stevenson to date, using for the first time his collected correspondence – which has been unavailable to all previous writers.The short life of Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-94) was as adventurous as almost anything in his fiction: his travels, illness, struggles to become a writer, relationships with his volatile wife and step-family, friendships and quarrels have fascinated readers for over a century. In his time he was both engineer and aesthete, dutiful son and reckless lover, Scotsman and South Sea Islander, Covenanter and atheist. Stevenson’s books, including ‘Treasure Island’, ‘The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde’ and ‘Kidnapped’, have achieved world fame; others – ‘The Master of Ballantrae’, ‘A Child’s Garden of Verses’, ‘Travels with a Donkey’ – remain all-time favourites. His unique gift for storytelling and dramatic characterisation has meant that some of his characters live in the consciousness even of those who have never read his work: Long John Silver, with his wooden leg and his parrot, is more real to most people than any historical pirate, while ‘Jekyll and Hyde’ has become a universally recognised term for a split personality.No biography has yet done justice to the complex, brilliant and troubled man who was responsible for so many remarkable creations. His interest in psychology, genetics, technology and feminism anticipated the concerns of the next century, while his experiments in narrative technique inspired post-modern innovators such as Borges and Nabokov. Stevenson's recently collected correspondence shows him to have been the least ‘Victorian’ of Victorian writers, a man of humour, resilience and strongly unconventional views. With access to this and much previously unpublished material, Claire Harman, the acclaimed biographer of Sylvia Townsend Warner and Fanny Burney, has written the most authoritative, comprehensive and perceptive portrait of ‘RLS’ to date.












ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

A Biography


CLAIRE HARMAN









Dedication (#ulink_44548bf2-e6c5-569f-8528-2feae09a3631)


To

Paul Strohm,

dear companion




Contents


COVER (#uffbebf5c-972d-54f8-9a84-9deef95c0f07)

TITLE PAGE (#u60830041-d809-5489-bade-7df0109df02e)

DEDICATION (#u18c70e30-d4ad-52fc-97a3-f54e7574e977)

PREFACE (#ud289b9f3-7b95-54c5-bcd0-f8e7fe958853)

1 Baron Broadnose (#u7cc09553-b56c-53c4-9896-3e0e3da85b1b)

2 Velvet Coat (#u0d2c44de-6fa0-5b6f-a837-66f8a7032363)

3 The Careless Infidel (#uac9c304e-2c93-5ffa-a9a3-9528d25a20b8)

4 Ah Welless (#u710ae0e0-7650-5ce3-a590-de88a72a96be)

5 Stennis Frère (#litres_trial_promo)

6 The Amateur Emigrant (#litres_trial_promo)

7 The Professional Sickist (#litres_trial_promo)

8 Uxorious Billy (#litres_trial_promo)

9 A Weevil in a Biscuit (#litres_trial_promo)

10 The Dreamer (#litres_trial_promo)

11 Below Zero (#litres_trial_promo)

12 Ona (#litres_trial_promo)

13 Tusi Tala (#litres_trial_promo)

14 The Tame Celebrity (#litres_trial_promo)

Postscripts (#litres_trial_promo)

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY (#litres_trial_promo)

INDEX (#litres_trial_promo)

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS (#litres_trial_promo)

ABOUT THE AUTHOR (#litres_trial_promo)

NOTES (#litres_trial_promo)

PRAISE (#litres_trial_promo)

BY THE SAME AUTHOR (#litres_trial_promo)

COPYRIGHT (#litres_trial_promo)

ABOUT THE PUBLISHER (#litres_trial_promo)




Preface (#ulink_0ade0ab3-44b6-5ec5-90f7-a49ff353ef5d)


Robert Louis Stevenson has always been a popular author but never a canonical one. The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Treasure Island, Kidnapped, A Child’s Garden of Verses – four very different popular classics – have not appeared on syllabuses of nineteenth-century literature until very recently. The critical consensus up to the last twenty years or so seems to have been that Stevenson’s works were not quite ‘literary’ enough to study.

This has been an odd fate for a man who was thought to be, by his contemporaries in the 1870s, the star of his generation, an English stylist of giddying promise, an Elia for the fin-de-siècle. In his hands, the personal essay seemed to be coming to perfection in an arresting combination of high polish and novel directness, while aphorisms poured from his young mouth straight into the dictionaries of quotations. His influential friends in the world of letters, William Ernest Henley, Sidney Colvin, Leslie Stephen, Henry James and Edmund Gosse, all waited eagerly for the masterpiece. Would he excel as an essayist? a playwright? a poet? a historical novelist to equal Sir Walter Scott? His rivals watched him carefully too, none more so than Thomas Hardy, Stevenson’s fellow heir-in-waiting to George Meredith in the 1880s, and Joseph Conrad, keen to distance himself, after Stevenson’s death, from a writer he feared had influenced him too much.

Stevenson’s impatience with his friends was clear when, after the publication of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, they began to lament his decline into mass popularity. Making money was of more immediate importance to the invalid author than the production of ‘damned masterpieces’, however much he would have liked to fuse the two if possible. Though he looked like a dilettante, a flimsy ‘Ariel’ (as Henley and Colvin both described him), Stevenson was a highly professional writer and produced hundreds of works: essays, poems and articles, melodramas, polemical pamphlets and some thirty full-length books, among which were works as diverse as New Arabian Nights, The Ebb-Tide, Prince Otto and In the South Seas. None of these is read much any more, but then neither are his most celebrated books: Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Treasure Island are so well-known that they hardly require to be read at all. We all understand what ‘Jekyll-and-Hyde’ signifies, and Long John Silver is more real to most people than any historical buccaneer. So in some senses, Stevenson’s neglect has come at him from more than one direction.

We think of writers’ careers in terms of what they publish; they think of what they have written, or intended to write. For a variety of reasons, Stevenson made a great many beginnings and relatively few ends. The extent of his unfinished works only began to be clear with the publication of Roger Swearingen’s Guide to the Prose Writings of Robert Louis Stevenson in 1980, and was dramatically confirmed by the wealth of new evidence presented in the eight-volume Yale edition of The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson, published in 1994–95, the most substantial and revealing addition to the Stevenson canon since the author’s death. Stevenson emerged from the new Letters not just as an outstanding practitioner of the form but as a man of penetrating intelligence and strong feelings, with a wide range of interests, a volatile attention span, powerful ambition to succeed and a constant, pressing desire to earn money. He appeared more quirkily humorous than before, but also more vulnerable, for this most eloquent of writers turns out to have been a slave to writer’s block, strangely fixated on his second-rate works and casual about his best ones, always anxious that his chosen profession was neither very admirable (unlike his engineer family’s) nor very sustainable.

The sense of urgency about establishing himself as a writer that Stevenson felt and his friends shared was sharpened by their concept of him as doomed to die young. From infancy, Stevenson’s health had been poor, his physique underdeveloped, his ailments (watched over with undue care by hypochondriac parents) legion. No wonder he became convinced of his own short lease on life, and perturbed at the thought of ‘outliving’ it into maturity, even old age. The effects on his writing were transparent: if difficulties presented themselves, he was tempted – felt almost licensed – to bail out. Hence his biography of Hazlitt, his history of the Act of Union, biography of Viscount Dundee and novel about the Peninsular War are just four of dozens of unfinished magna opera, and many of his published works blazon their own incompleteness and uncertainty with a brilliant insouciance. And while he liked to think he could have achieved much more in good health, the truth is probably the reverse. Just as Coleridge’s person from Porlock relieved the poet from the drudgery of having to finish ‘Kubla Khan’, chronic illness provided Stevenson with a constantly available excuse not to polish or even complete many of his works, leaving him free to do what he enjoyed most, which was to start something new.

What illness, or combination of illnesses, he suffered from becomes less clear as we discover more about Stevenson’s life. He was brought up in the fear and expectation of developing tuberculosis, and his chest ailments all pointed to that diagnosis, although on the occasions when tests were carried out (and Stevenson had access to the very best medical attention money could buy) they never proved positive. The blood-spitting that began when he was thirty certainly indicated consumption, but he might also have been suffering from hypertension, cardiac disease, syphilis, or a combination of all of those. The cause of his death, aged forty-four, was recorded as a cerebral haemorrhage.

The fact that some things become less knowable about a subject the more data accrues around them is of utmost importance to any biographer. Order – the existing order, the existing story – will break down to some extent and the edges of the familiar portrait blur. This is the point at which it becomes possible to see glimpses of the messiness and complexity of real life poking through. Stevenson provides a willing accomplice to this process: he was unusually greedy of experience and open to the widest possible interpretation of personality. Duality, the theme of his most famous work, is present in almost all his writing: The Master of Ballantrae, ‘Markheim’, Deacon Brodie, Catriona; he even introduced the theme into a topographical study of Edinburgh. He was a bilingual writer, too, in Scots and English, and ‘double-handed’, ambidextrous. Doubleness is central to his very theory of composition, as set out in his essay ‘A Chapter on Dreams’, where he claims that the inventive side of his writing was beyond his conscious control. He was fascinated by the uneven surface of ‘the self’, its endless ability to surprise the conscious man. In a letter of 1892 to F.W.H. Myers, one of the founders of the Society for Psychical Research (of which Stevenson was a member), Stevenson recalled various times in his life as an invalid when high fever had made him aware of having ‘two consciousnesses’. He characterised these as Myself and the other fellow; the latter irrational and absurd, the former, his right mind, painfully aware of its temporary subordination. It wasn’t the conflict between them that interested him so much as his awareness of their co-existence, at once scientific and poetic. More than any other nineteenth-century writer he might have said, along with his admired Walt Whitman, ‘I am large, I contain multitudes’.

Stevenson was an ironist and iconoclast, an admirer of Herbert Spencer, Darwin, Thoreau and Whitman and an influential thinker in his own right, much more than is recognised. His essays addressed the urgent scientific, moral and aesthetic questions of the day and his novels and stories dramatised them. He was one of the least ‘Victorian’ of all Victorian writers. As a young man, he longed to emulate the style and substance of the three-decker novel, but in fact he became part of the movement which supplanted that model, a prototype modern man of letters. His interest in psychology anticipated the concerns of the next century, his confessional tone was tuned to it, even the forms he liked best – those of short story and novella – have been more popular in our own day than in his. Writers as diverse as Graham Greene, Cesare Pavese, Italo Calvino, Vladimir Nabokov and Jorge Luis Borges have revered him as a master (it is said that Borges kept his collection of Stevenson’s works separate from all others on his bookshelves), and generations of readers have delighted in his wonderful powers of invention. It is this multitudinous character, inconsistent, original and constantly surprising, whom I wish to present.




1 BARON BROADNOSE (#ulink_a90399cf-bc6b-5c0e-919a-4617b64d096e)


Born 1850 at Edinburgh. Pure Scotch blood; descended from the Scotch Lighthouse Engineers, three generations. Himself educated for the family profession … But the marrow of the family was worked out, and he declined into the man of letters.

Robert Louis Stevenson, ‘Autobiographical Note’


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IN 1884 OR THEREABOUTS, Robert Louis Stevenson purchased a copy of a slim booklet by the scientist Francis Galton (grandson of Erasmus Darwin and inventor of the term ‘eugenics’), that purported to help members of the public forecast the mental and physical faculties of their children by arranging in tabular form as much data as could be gathered about their ancestors. No clear way of making deductions from this process was indicated; Galton seemed merely to be suggesting that the Record of Family Faculties would serve as a sort of life album for future perusal. In fact his design was more ‘to further the science of heredity’ than to enlighten individuals about their genes, for Galton was offering a prize of £500 to whichever reader compiled ‘the best extracts’ from the point of view of ‘completeness’, ‘character of evidence’, ‘cleanness’ and ‘conciseness’, to be sent, with accompanying documentation if possible, to his London address.

Robert Louis Stevenson did not oblige the insatiable statistician by posting off his copy of the booklet, and only filled in two pages of information, one for each of his parents. Like so many of his own books, this was one he couldn’t quite finish. But Galton’s introductory remarks, full of provocative assumptions about race, personality, inherited and acquired behaviour, touched subjects of perennial fascination to the scientist-turned-literary man. ‘We do not yet know whether any given group of different faculties which may converge by inheritance upon the same family will blend, neutralise, or intensify one another,’ Galton had written, ‘nor whether they will be metamorphosed and issue in some new form.’ The year in which the project was advertised, 1883, was a time when Stevenson himself thought he was going to be a father, an eventuality he had tried to avoid on the grounds of his poor health. But whether or not Stevenson bought Galton’s book in order to predict his expected child’s chances in the lottery of family attributes, the author’s words certainly resonated for himself.



Robert Louis Stevenson characterised his paternal ancestors as ‘a family of engineers’, which they were for the two generations preceding his own, but in the seventeenth century they had been farmers and maltsters near Glasgow, ‘following honest trades [ … ], playing the character parts in the Waverley Novels with propriety, if without distinction’, as Stevenson wrote satirically.


(#litres_trial_promo) In the mid-eighteenth century two Stevenson brothers, working in partnership as traders between Glasgow and the West Indies, both died suddenly from tropical fever within six weeks of each other while in pursuit of an agent who had cheated them. Jean, the twenty-three-year-old widow of the younger brother, was left almost destitute by his death, as her father also died in the same month and she had an infant son to support. Her second marriage, to a man called Hogg, produced two more sons but ended in desertion and divorce. By this time, Jean was living in Edinburgh and there met and married her third husband, a ship-owner, ironmonger and underwriter called Thomas Smith.

Smith was the founder of the ‘family of engineers’, or rather, the step-family, since it was his new wife’s teenaged son Robert Stevenson, not his own son, James Smith, who was grafted onto his thriving enterprise as heir. Thomas Smith seems to have been a man of enormous industry and ingenuity, setting up a business in lamps and oils, running something called the Greenside Company’s Works in Edinburgh (a kind of super-smithy) and inventing a new system of oil lamps for lighthouses to replace the old coal-lit beacons like that on the Isle of May. The lights of ‘lights’ remained a source of fascination in the step-branch of the family: Robert Stevenson experimented with revolving devices, his son Thomas developed both holophotal and condensing lights, and Robert Louis Stevenson’s one and only contribution to the Royal Scottish Society of Arts was a paper on a proposed new device to make lighthouse lights flash. But there was another reminder of this heritage, closer to home. One of Thomas Smith’s lamp-making projects was the design of the street lighting in Edinburgh’s New Town at the end of the eighteenth century. His parabolic reflector system quadrupled the power of oil-lit lamps and focused their beams, a revolutionary innovation that must have made the elegant Georgian streets look even more modern and sleek, even more of a contrast to the dark, narrow closes and wynds of the Old Town. And it was the successor to one of these lamps, just outside 17 Heriot Row, that Robert Louis Stevenson celebrated many years later in his poem about Leerie the Lamp-Lighter from A Child’s Garden of Verses:

For we are very lucky, with a lamp before the door,

And Leerie stops to light it as he lights so many more;

And O! before you hurry by with ladder and with light,

O Leerie, see a little child and nod to him tonight!3

But the original lighter of the lamps had been the poet’s ingenious forebear.


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Thomas Smith’s involvement in lighthouse-building began in 1787, five years before marrying Jean Stevenson, when he was appointed engineer to the new Board of Northern Lighthouses, a post his stepson and three grandsons would hold after him. Until this time, the Scottish coastline had been one of the most dangerous in the world, so jagged and treacherous that mariners used to steer well clear of it, keeping north of Orkney and Shetland and west of the Hebrides. There were no maps or charts of the coastline before the late sixteenth century, and the first lighthouse, built in 1636 on the Isle of May in the Firth of Forth, was one of only a handful in existence before the Industrial Revolution. The Spanish Armada, forced to go north when the English blockaded the Channel in 1588, lost half its vessels around the Scottish coast because of its perilousness, and the stormy Atlantic waters continued to claim lives for centuries after.

Little was done about the protection of ships around Scotland until a series of violent storms in the early 1780s led to public protests and the setting up of the Northern Lighthouse Board by an Act of Parliament in 1786, with a mandate to oversee a programme of lighthouse construction. Thomas Smith, whose parabolic reflectors had impressed the Board, was appointed its first chief engineer and sent south to pick up technical expertise from an English lighthouse-builder.


(#ulink_a9f789ff-9ecf-53d3-97cb-528a87723338) Smith needed all the help he could get; the Board had commissioned him to build four lighthouses, and he was totally inexperienced. He faced innumerable difficulties, from the very design of the structures to the organisation of labour and transport of materials to some of the bleakest spots around the coast. But the former lamp-maker rose to the challenge and through extraordinary persistence and hard work produced his first lights, at Kinnaird Head beyond Fraserburgh, Eilean Glas off Harris, North Ronaldsay and the Mull of Kintyre. None of them is elegant or ambitious in design, but the fact that they got built at all is quite remarkable.

Smith’s stepson Robert Stevenson was a keen assistant in the works. Jean Stevenson had intended her son for the Church, but engineering and surveying were far more to his taste and he was apprenticed to his stepfather in 1791. He proved fiercely motivated; all summer he was a director of works (superintending the construction of Little Cumbrae light on the Firth of Clyde when he was still only nineteen), while in the winters he studied mathematics and sciences at the Andersonian Institute and Edinburgh University. In Records of a Family of Engineers, Robert Louis Stevenson wrote with sympathetic admiration of his grandfather’s relish for the life:

The seas into which his labours carried the new engineer were still scarce charted, the coasts still dark; his way on shore was often far beyond the convenience of any road, the isles in which he must sojourn were still partly savage. He must toss much in boats; he must often adventure on horseback by the dubious bridle-track through unfrequented wildernesses; he must sometimes plant his lighthouse in the very camp of wreckers; and he was continually enforced to the vicissitudes of outdoor life. The joy of my grandfather in this career was strong as the love of woman.


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The step-relationship between young Robert Stevenson and Thomas Smith was close and admiring, and it makes one wonder where Smith’s natural son, James, fitted in – if at all. Thomas Smith was twice a widower before his marriage to Jean Stevenson and had five children by the first wife (only a daughter, Jane, and the son James survived infancy) and one daughter, Mary-Anne, by the second. Little information remains about James except that he left home to found his own ironmongery business, but whether this was the result of some rift with his father is not clear. Certainly to the outside world Robert Stevenson must have looked like Smith’s favourite, possibly only, son. The bond between them became even more complicated when Robert married his stepsister Jane in 1799. As Robert’s namesake wrote years later, ‘The marriage of a man of twenty-seven and a girl of twenty, who have lived for twelve years as brother and sister, is difficult to conceive’


(#litres_trial_promo) – but it was legal. The union was a sort of mirror-image of the parents’: in temperament and disposition Jane resembled her pious stepmother as much as Robert did his stepfather, who was now not just parent, employer and teacher, but also father-in-law.

Smith’s business, which built not only lighthouses but roads, bridges and harbours, set an intimidating example of industry and efficiency that Robert Stevenson was happy to match, or outdo. He became a full partner in 1800, the year after his marriage, and the next year went south to see for himself some of the English lighthouses and get ideas for the improvement of the firm’s designs, especially from John Smeaton’s handsome pharos at Eddystone. Stevenson’s additions to Thomas Smith’s work included adding silvered reflectors to the lights, experimenting with different oils and types of burner (he opted for a variant on the new Argand lamps that had glass chimneys above the flame, and which became standard in Victorian domestic interiors). He also tried to get the reflectors to revolve so that the lights seemed to flash (to make the lighthouse beacons easily distinguishable from lights on shore or at sea).

His ingenuity was great, and so was his ambition; in fact Stevenson turned out to be a ruthlessly single-minded man and greedy of fame. In the early years of the new century he became absorbed by the challenge of building a light on the Bell Rock, the notoriously dangerous reef in the North Sea twelve miles southeast of Arbroath, on the northern approach to the Firth of Forth. It was formerly called Inchcape Rock, but was renamed to commemorate the warning-bell which had been put there in the fourteenth century by the safety-conscious Abbot of Arbroath. At high tide the perilous outcrop, 1,400 feet at its widest, was submerged twelve feet, a death-trap to passing ships. Public pressure on the Board to build a lighthouse had met with little success, even after the loss of the warship York with all hands in the gales of 1799. The cost of the lighthouse programme had finally caught up with the Commissioners, and in any case they considered the Bell Rock simply too dangerous and difficult a location to build on. Their objections were music to the ears of young Stevenson, who relished the chance to overcome the obstacles involved; he surveyed the site independently and conducted a long campaign of letters to the Board, making the vaunting claim that his projected Bell Rock lighthouse was ‘a work which cannot be reduced to the common maxims of the arts and which in some measure stands unconnected to any other branch of business’.


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Stevenson’s lobbying seemed to have paid off when a Bill authorising construction of a lighthouse on the Bell Rock was passed in 1806, but it was not his design that the NLB chose, nor him as chief engineer: that honour went to John Rennie. Stevenson’s pride was given an extra knock by his appointment as Rennie’s assistant, but instead of making a loud protest he decided to get his own way by subtler means. Over the years it took to build the lighthouse, during which Stevenson was always on site and Rennie rarely, he took over the project bit by bit, and by the time it was finished, in February 1811, he had not only done almost all the work of the chief engineer but had amassed most of the credit too. God-like, he named various parts of the reef after himself, his father-in-law, the head workmen and – strategically – the Commissioners of the Board, and he encouraged the general perception of the project as entirely his own by publishing an Account of the Bell Rock Lighthouse Including the Details of the Erection and Peculiar Structure of that Edifice, a stirring record of the technical and human difficulties which had been overcome, in which Rennie was scarcely mentioned. The public and the newspapers were fascinated by the story, and delighted with the lighthouse that so thoroughly revolutionised the safety of the lanes into the Firth. Stevenson was suddenly famous and could be seen round Edinburgh proudly sporting the gold medal sent him by the King of Denmark for his services to seafarers.

Rennie, understandably, was piqued by Stevenson’s machinations and considered him dishonest, or at best self-deluding. His assistant engineer had a history of stealing credit, Rennie complained to a friend, and ‘has assumed the merit of applying coloured glass to lighthouses, of which Huddart was the actual inventor, and I have no doubt that he will assume the whole merit of planning and erecting the Bell Rock Lighthouse, if he has not already done so’.


(#litres_trial_promo) That was exactly what Stevenson did, and to this day he is credited with the design, which was nothing to do with him. No shadow of guilt or self-doubt troubled the assistant engineer; the carrying-through of a plan was, to him, far more difficult and important than merely generating it. It was an attitude inherited by his son Thomas, who displayed similar confidence in his own viewpoint and who was also accused of professional plagiarism when he ‘stepped in and brought to [ … ] perfection’ (his son’s generous phrase)


(#litres_trial_promo) a revolving light designed by the French inventor Leonor Fresnel. This makes it look as if the family ethos was one of raw self-interest, but the case was rather subtler than that. The Stevensons were old-fashioned, and refused to register for patent any of their lighthouse inventions, on the grounds that as government appointees ‘they regarded their original work as something due already to the nation’.


(#litres_trial_promo) They made a distinction between what was owed to the Northern Lighthouse Board (service) and what was right for the family business (maximum profit), and willingly gave up exclusive rights in their own inventions in order to be able to cash in on other people’s unexploited ideas. This family trait would work out interestingly in Robert Louis Stevenson, whose flexible attitude to matters of intellectual property led to the most traumatic quarrel of his life, and who remained high-minded about copyright right up to the moment when he wrote a bestseller.

Of all the engineering works that the Stevenson family were involved in, the Bell Rock lighthouse was the most impressive, firing the public imagination with its combination of romantic endeavour and futuristic technology. It already had a celebrator in the Poet Laureate Robert Southey, whose ballad ‘The Inchcape Rock’, published in 1803, commemorated the story of the Abbot and the bell in thrumming lines:

When the rock was hid by the surge’s swell,

The mariners heard the warning bell;

And then they knew the perilous rock,

And blessed the Abbot of Aberbrothok.

Walter Scott also took a keen interest in the Bell Rock, which he visited in 1814. The NLB Commissioners had invited him on a tour of the lighthouses conducted by ‘the celebrated engineer’ (Scott’s phrase) Robert Stevenson. The party went all round the coast, from the Isle of May in the Firth to the Inner Hebrides, calling in at Bell Rock (where Scott wrote some verses in the visitors’ book) and getting out, with difficulty, to survey a jagged reef off Tiree called Skerry Vohr which Stevenson was trying to persuade the Commissioners to build a light on. The novelist was gathering material for his next book, The Pirate, and worked on his notes with an application which impressed Robert Stevenson, who had not at this date read any of Scott’s works. ‘[Scott] was the most industrious occupier of time,’ Stevenson recorded in his journal,

he wrote much upon deck – often when his seat on the camp stool was by no means steady. He sometimes introduced Rob Roy’s exploits in conversation so fully that when I read the Book many parts of it were like a second reading to me.


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The description is oddly prophetic of another industrious writer who composed much upon deck and was able to talk of his fictional creations as if they were real, Robert Stevenson’s grandson. But it was Scott’s work ethic, not his genius, that won Robert Stevenson’s approval; he clearly thought artists in general to be rather a waste of space. Two generations later, Robert Louis Stevenson judged himself by the same rigid family standards, which venerated professionalism, inventiveness, hard work and money-making and thought little of self-expression and art. He came to feel that he was a very inadequate heir to these active men, a mere ‘slinger of ink’, sunk in comparative idleness. When he was writing his Records of a Family of Engineers in the last year of his life, Stevenson burst out in a letter to his friend Will Low, ‘I ought to have been able to build lighthouses and write David Balfours too.’


(#litres_trial_promo) A poem Stevenson wrote in the 1880s (when, incidentally, he was living in a house named after his uncle’s most famous lighthouse and surrounded by lighthouse memorabilia) expresses the same feeling of having failed his inheritance:

Say not of me that weakly I declined

The labours of my sires, and fled the sea,

The towers we founded and the lamps we lit,

To play at home with paper like a child.

But rather say: In the afternoon of time

A strenuous family dusted from its hands

The sand of granite, and beholding far

Along the sounding coast its pyramids

And tall memorials catch the dying sun,

Smiled well content, and to this childish task

“Around the fire addressed its evening hours,


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How neatly the change in typeface separates what the poet would like to have said about himself from what he thinks will be said. And how much more striking than his engrossed images of the strenuous family and their colossal achievements is his bitter description of himself left ‘playing at home with paper like a child’.



The paternal line dominates Robert Louis Stevenson’s family history, for ‘the celebrated engineer’ made it one of the most respectable names in Edinburgh at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Robert and his sister-wife Jean had thirteen children, only five of whom survived infancy: one girl (Jane) and four sons, three of whom followed their father into the family business, with greater or lesser enthusiasm, and the youngest of whom, Thomas, became the father of our subject.


(#ulink_1d2561f2-f538-52c0-bb16-689250641256) They lived in the large house that Thomas Smith had built in 1803 in Baxter Place, fronting onto busy Leith Street, with a long garden at the back running to the bottom of the Calton Hill. The Stevenson children played in the cellars or the orchard, and hung around their father’s office or the specially-built workshops, where there was always ‘a coming and going of odd, out-of-the-way characters, skippers, lightkeepers, masons, and foremen of all sorts’.


(#litres_trial_promo) Though the Stevensons were not known for keeping a lavish table (Jean Stevenson, a strict Calvinist, made a habit of choosing both her butcher and her cook on religious grounds), the house was always open to employees of the Northern Lighthouse Board. Robert Stevenson was a paternalistic boss, minutely concerned with all aspects of the men’s lives: their wives’ confinements, their children’s schooling, the welfare of the sick and the conduct of prayers. ‘My grandfather was much of a martinet,’ Stevenson reported,

with his powerful voice, sanguine countenance, and eccentric and original locutions, he was well qualified to inspire a salutory terror in the service [ … ] In that service he was king to his finger-tips. All should go his way, from the principal lightkeeper’s coat to the assistant’s fender, from the gravel in the garden walks to the bad smell in the kitchen, or the oil-spots on the storeroom floor.


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Oddly enough, with this Jove for a father, young Thomas Stevenson managed for years to evade discovery that he was doing very little schoolwork. Being the youngest of many children, seventeen years his sister Jane’s junior, perhaps he just adopted the tactic of keeping his head down at home. He wasn’t a stupid boy (although he never mastered mathematics, which was a considerable handicap in his professional life), but early on developed a strong aversion to book-learning. This amounted to an obsession in later life, when he would stop schoolboys on the street and advise them to learn only what seemed to them good. ‘There seems to have been nothing more rooted in him than his contempt for all the ends, processes, and ministers of education,’ his son was to claim; ‘he bravely encouraged me to neglect my lessons, and never so much as asked me my place in school. What a boy should learn in school he used to say is “to sit on his bum”. It could scarcely be better put.’


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Thomas’s hatred and fear of school were due to the teachers’ constant use of the cane, and he was to say that the sufferings he endured there were worse than any he experienced in later life. His survival strategy was based on maintaining a low profile, as this spirited incident, related by his son, shows:

He never seems to have worked for any class that he attended; and in Piper’s took a place about half-way between the first and last of a hundred and eighty boys. Yet his friends were among the duxes. He tells most admirably how he once on a chance question got to the top of the class among all his friends; and how they kept him there for several days by liberal prompting and other obvious devices, until at last he himself wearied of the fierce light that beat upon the upper benches. ‘It won’t do,’ he said. ‘Goodbye.’


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Thomas, like his son, was a dreamy, quirky child with a strong vein of the perverse: ‘there was always a remarkable inconsequence, an unconscious spice of the true Satanic, rebel nature, in the boy. Whatever he played with was the reverse of what he was formally supposed to be engaged in learning. As soon as he went, for instance, to a class of chemistry, there were no more experiments made by him. The thing then ceased to be a pleasure, and became an irking drudgery.’


(#litres_trial_promo) It was not the temperament to mould easily to Robert Stevenson’s expectations. Thomas worked for a short time in a printing office and toyed with the idea of becoming a bookseller or publisher – a practical slant to his deeper ambition, which was to be a writer. But his father was furious at this notion and before he was out of his teens Thomas had succumbed to the family fate of engineering, joining his two older brothers.

Alan, the eldest of the boys, had also needed some coercion to become an engineer. He was the scholar and polymath of the family, and wanted to study Classics and enter the Church. He turned out to be an outstanding engineer, making important improvements in optics and designing and building several lights, including the family’s most beautiful lighthouse, Skerry Vohr, on that dismal Atlantic reef surveyed by his father and Scott in 1814. Skerry Vohr proved a challenge as great as Bell Rock, though Alan was not the man to brag about it. He took over when his father retired from the post of chief engineer in 1842, but found the burden of work intolerable and in 1852, when he was forty-five, suffered a ‘sudden shattering of his nervous system’ which forced him ‘to withdraw absolutely from his profession and the world’. The few remarks about this collapse in an anonymous but highly sympathetic obituary notice indicate a family tragedy of large proportions:

What a trial this must have been to one of his keen, intrepid temper, his high enthusiasm, and his delight in the full exercise of his powers, no one but himself and those who never left him for these long dreary years can ever tell – when his mind, his will, his affections survived, as it were, the organ through which they were wont to act – like one whose harp is all unstrung, and who has the misery to know it can do his bidding no more.


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The collapse happened when Alan had been married only six years and had four tiny children, two of whom, Katharine and the brilliant, mercurial Bob, were to be Robert Louis Stevenson’s close friends in adult life. All through their childhoods their father was a nervous invalid, who beguiled his ‘great sufferings’ by reading, learning languages, committing Homer to memory, and making a verse translation of the hymns of Synesius. ‘During many an hour the employment helped to soothe my pain,’ Alan wrote pathetically in the prologue to his privately printed translation. It was a startling example of how violently a sensitive nature could be shipwrecked by mental breakdown.

Thomas Stevenson was not as brilliant as his brother Alan, nor as versatile as his brother David, with whom he ended up running the family business. With his robust, serious, four-square face and figure, he looked every inch the Victorian paterfamilias, but there was instability at the centre of his character too: volatile, charming and puzzling, a straight-faced joker, he must have been a difficult man to have as father. In his obituary tribute, remarkable for its air of objectivity, his son characterised him as ‘a man of a somewhat antique strain’:

with a blended sternness and softness that was wholly Scottish and at first somewhat bewildering; with a profound essential melancholy of disposition and (what often accompanies it) the most humorous geniality in company; shrewd and childish; passionately attached, passionately prejudiced; a man of many extremes, many faults of temper, and no very stable foothold for himself among life’s troubles.


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Thomas was a staunch Tory and devout churchgoer, with a strong belief in ultimate salvation – not through any merits of his own, but through God’s infinite mercy. There was not a shred of complacency in his view of himself. In the speech he wrote to be read at his own funeral, he expressed the hope that he would not be ‘disowned by Him when the last trumpet shall sound’, a characteristically negative construction, and among the Bible verses to be read he chose ‘Who can bring a clean thing out of an unclean? Not one.’


(#litres_trial_promo) Over a lifetime’s constant service to the Kirk, he never accepted any sort of lay office, on grounds of a seemingly inexpungeable ‘unworthiness’.

Melancholic by nature, Thomas Stevenson’s awareness of his own sins seems morbid; like his son’s creation Dr Henry Jekyll, he had perhaps an over-fine conscience about his shortcomings, shown in the story as a mark of extreme moral vanity: ‘many a man would have even blazoned such irregularities as I was guilty of’.


(#litres_trial_promo) Sex seems to have been the focus of Thomas’s neuroses, as he held views so strong about the protection of women as to amount to a blanket condemnation of men. He believed, for instance, that any woman who wanted a divorce should be granted one automatically, whereas no man should ever have one. He also, intriguingly, set up a Magdalen Mission in Edinburgh for ‘fallen women’, which he supported financially all his adult life. Was this a gesture of general philanthropy or some private effort at atonement for real or imagined crimes against women – his own, or those of his sex in general? Thomas’s interpretation of chivalry did not lie anywhere on the usual axis between protectiveness towards women and the will to dominate them, but had a neurotic, slightly masochistic edge. It was taken on almost wholesale by his son.

In the autumn of 1847 this rather troubled man, then twenty-nine years old, was on a train to Glasgow when he met a young woman travelling with her uncle and aunt and got into conversation. Margaret Isabella Balfour was eighteen, cheerful, unaffected and a daughter of the manse. Thomas must have been looking out for a wife, for their first meeting was followed promptly by a brief formal courtship and a proposal; not the behaviour of an indecisive lover. On the brink of being thirty, Thomas was old enough to have had a considerable history of dealings with women, or a long-drawn-out history of wanting to have dealings with them.

Margaret came from genteel, Lowland stock and was the youngest surviving child of a family of thirteen, nine of whom had outlived infancy. Among her forebears were the Lairds of Pilrig and, possibly, the John Balfour who in 1656 was one of the religious zealots who murdered Archbishop Sharp. That notorious incident in the history of the ‘Covenanters’ (which became such an obsessive interest of her son Louis) formed part of Scott’s Tale of Old Mortality in which John Balfour appears as ‘Balfour of Burley’; so when Stevenson said that his father’s family played ‘the character parts in the Waverley Novels’ he might have added that his mother’s family appeared in the leading roles.

Margaret was good-looking (though not a beauty), intelligent and lively. She was known as an indefatigable optimist, ‘a determined looker at the bright side of things’, as Sidney Colvin described her, ‘better skilled, perhaps, to shut her eyes to troubles or differences among those she loved than to understand, compose, or heal them’.


(#litres_trial_promo) She had none of the accomplishments, such as musical or artistic ability, that were valued as bargaining counters in the marriage market (in worldly society at least), but her plainness of manner was in itself a recommendation to the God-fearing Thomas Stevenson. His surviving letters to his young bride-to-be show the tenderness and teasing tone of a man who really wanted to get married, addressing her as ‘My dearest Mag’ and indulgently calling her ‘child’. Margaret must have drawn attention to his behaviour around children (clearly a matter of some concern), for he writes to reassure her, ‘Don’t think my love that because I am strict or inclined to be strict with children that I like them less than other people. [ … ] I have the family failing of taking strong views and expressing those views strongly.’


(#litres_trial_promo) He ends the letter ‘Your ever affectionate and devoted lover’, an intensity that deepened after the marriage, when he wrote home frequently from his work trips, pining to be reunited with ‘my own dear wife’.


(#litres_trial_promo) Thomas remained extremely protective and anxious about his young bride, strenuously encouraging the idea of her frailty and poor health. Their daughter-in-law Fanny’s judgement when she met them in 1880 was that Margaret – then well into middle age – was ‘adored by her husband, who spoils her like a baby’.


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Thomas and Margaret were married about a year after they first met, on a date in August deliberately chosen to coincide with the anniversary of her father’s ordination (he, naturally, performed the ceremony). Margaret proved a most devoted wife to Thomas Stevenson, subservient to his wishes and interests, protective of his well-being, mainstay of his morale. Her chief talent, Louis declared, in one of his very few analytical remarks about his mother, was for organisation, and she was good at identifying and diverting possible starting points of domestic tension. This presumably came of years dealing with her husband’s sporadic dips into melancholia, and was a technique that her son would emulate closely in his dealings with an equally volatile spouse.

Although she became, in later life, a remarkably enthusiastic and adventurous traveller, tolerant of discomforts and extreme temperatures, game for anything, Margaret Stevenson spent her youth half in and half out of a sort of vaporous decline. She was encouraged in this first by a valetudinarian father, himself a sufferer from weak lungs, then by her hypochondriac husband. All through her son’s childhood, she varied between high spirits and sickliness: her chest was weak, her heart; she must rest, she must take the waters. She was only twenty-one when the baby was born, but stayed in bed most mornings and was unable to play or go out with him when she was up. Most of the active side of mothering was left to the child’s nurses, yet there were welcome, if perplexing, surges of energy: one of Stevenson’s earliest memories was of his mother rushing him up the stairs at their house in Inverleith Terrace to see his grandfather, as excitable and skittish as a girl.

In the summer of 1850, when Margaret was pregnant for the first and only time, old Robert Stevenson died. He had been ill for some months, but had been looking forward to his annual inspection tour of the lighthouses. When his sons tried to convince him that no more travelling was possible, the old man seemed to acquiesce, but on the day of departure ‘was found in his room, furtively packing a portmanteau’.


(#litres_trial_promo) Thomas Stevenson was deeply affected by the pathos of his father’s decline and death and when his first child was born four months later, on 13 November, had no hesitation in naming the baby for him.

The little boy’s name was in fact an amalgamation of both grandfathers’, one inside the other: Robert Lewis Balfour Stevenson. The names were in strong demand in the family: Alan Stevenson had also called his first son Robert (the little boy was known as Bob), and there was a veritable epidemic of Lewis Balfours on the other side of the family; two born in 1850 (the same year as RLS), another called Lewis Henry two years earlier, Lewis (‘Noona’) in 1842, Lewis Charles in 1851. Despite that, Thomas and Margaret stuck with ‘Lewis’ for the baby’s everyday name. Or ‘Smout’, or ‘Lou’, or ‘Signor Sprucki’, or ‘Baron Broadnose’: Thomas Stevenson was a great coiner of comical aliases.

Margaret, who was weakened and possibly traumatised by the experience of childbirth, was not put through that hazard again: there were no more children. This in a family that showed typical Victorian fecundity – little Lewis had fifty-four first cousins – must have marked out the Stevenson household as a trifle eccentric. It wasn’t easy to limit a family to one child; to avoid conception successfully during a marriage that lasted another thirty-seven years must have required strict regulation of both partners’ sexual appetites. But Thomas Stevenson was not the man to put anything before his young wife’s well-being, and a challenge of this sort suited his self-mortifying temperament. However they solved the contraception issue, the couple remained conspicuously devoted and dependent, and fussed contentedly about each other’s health.

The baby made a delicate third member of this hypochondriac household. He seemed healthy enough to begin with, but an attack of croup in his third year was so alarming that ever after his parents lived in fear of another chest infection carrying him off. Both Thomas Stevenson and his wife came from large families with a high incidence of infant mortality: between them they had twelve live siblings and twelve dead ones. Consumption was a threat – Margaret had developed a patch of ‘fibroid pneumonia’ after the baby’s birth – and incipient tuberculosis seemed an increasingly plausible explanation for the child’s uneven, rickety growth and extreme thinness.


(#litres_trial_promo) So whether from genuine danger, or from excessive solicitude, the child spent long stretches of time confined to bed. The catalogue of his ailments that appears in his mother’s diary is truly astonishing: in his first nine years, apart from numerous chills and colds, the boy had scarlatina, bronchitis, gastric fever, whooping cough, chickenpox and scarlet fever. But the persistent cough was what worried everyone most. It seems likely that the croup had damaged his lungs or that he suffered (among other possible things) from asthma, since his health often worsened in the damp, cold winters of smoggy Auld Reekie. The sound of his cough starting up was heard in the household with dread.

The Stevensons’ first home in Edinburgh was the one Thomas had prepared for his bride and where the baby was born, 8 Howard Place, on the northern fringes of the New Town, by the Botanic Garden. They moved in 1853 to 1 Inverleith Terrace, a larger property just around the corner. In the baby’s first years, Thomas and Margaret had a run of bad luck with nurses (or weren’t very good at choosing them): two left unbidden and the third took the infant Smoutie to a bar and left him wrapped in a shawl on the counter while she soaked up a few gins. But the fourth hire produced a family servant of the most reassuring type: sober, single and religious to a fault. Alison Cunningham was a weaver’s daughter from Fife, thirty years old when she came to the household (Margaret Stevenson was twenty-three that year) and an experienced nurse. ‘Cummy’ was given free rein with the toddler, and became a pivotal figure in the household.

Cummy was the type of servant who derived the keenest gratification from being indispensable, and turned down more than one suitor, it is said, to stay in the Stevensons’ service for twenty years. Her devotion to Lewis, intensified by his vulnerability and the emerging realisation that he was to be the Stevensons’ only child, went hand in hand with an equally powerful intention to mould the boy to her pattern. She could delight the child with her songs and dances and was selfless in the devotion of her time to his care (no trips to the bar for her, or even the usual nurse’s expedient of meeting with friends in the park). Her genuine interest in his company fed the child’s already pronounced egotism and her relation to him was – oddly enough – more that of companion than nanny, as Stevenson’s later description of her as ‘my first Wife’ would seem to corroborate.

In 1857 this compact household moved from Inverleith Terrace, which had proved damp and uncongenial, to a splendid house on Heriot Row in the heart of the elegant New Town, overlooking Queen Street Gardens from the south. Beyond the gardens, whose trees were only half-mature at this date, were the tall fronts of the houses on Queen Street and in the distance, beyond the great metal river of the railway line, the smoky wynds and tenements of the Old Town climbed towards the Castle. This was the view from Lou’s day and night nurseries on the top floor; Cummy’s room was at the back of the house on the same floor, with views, in clear weather, of the Firth and, distantly, the coast of Fife, her home. There was a wide landing, with other bedrooms and storerooms off, and then the grand spiral staircase running down the core of the house and lit from above by a large glazed cupola. As a student, Stevenson was to be grateful for the fact that the stairs were made of stone and made little or no sound when he crept past his parents’ bedroom on the first floor late at night.

Thomas and Margaret’s bedroom looked out to the back of the property and had a bathroom leading off it; at the front on the same level was the elegant drawing room, with its fireplace and recesses and twelve-foot-high windows looking out on the genteel greenery of the Gardens. Down the stairs again was the ground floor, with its high-ceilinged, panelled dining room and wide entrance hall. The kitchens and sculleries were in the basement, accessible to tradesmen by the area steps. Heriot Row was a truly substantial home, exuding an aura of wealth well-spent. Nobody seeing it could have the least doubt that the only son of the house was a privileged child.



Robert Louis Stevenson’s many autobiographical essays and memoirs leave vividly contrasting impressions of his childhood. On the one hand, it contained the idyllic pleasures described in essays such as ‘The Manse’ and ‘Child’s Play’ and poems such as ‘My Kingdom’ and ‘Foreign Lands’, on the other it was a time of chronic ill-health and piquant terrors. There is a temptation, given the subject’s own obsessive recourse to images and tropes of duality, and his ‘clinching’ creation of the Jekyll-Hyde poles, to see his life in terms of strong contrasts. But Stevenson was unusual – in those last days before Freud – in recognising not just the co-existence of states of mind (in childhood particularly), but their inextricability. The author of A Child’s Garden of Verses was to say of his own earliest memories, ‘I cannot allow that those halcyon-days or that time of “angel infancy” have ever existed for me. Rather, I was born, more or less, what I am now – Robert Louis Stevenson, and not any other, or better person.’


(#litres_trial_promo) The ‘good’ and ‘bad’ parts of his childhood could no more be pulled apart than could the child and adult self. In its puzzling variability and dizzying plunges into dark and light, life was all of a piece.

Looking back on his childhood when he was twenty-nine, Stevenson concluded that he had been ‘lovingly, but not always wisely treated’ by his parents.


(#litres_trial_promo) In fact, there were aspects of his upbringing that seem not only ill-advised, but even dangerous. It is a minor mystery, for instance, how the frail little boy survived the custom of the time to seal up a nursery ‘almost hermetically’


(#litres_trial_promo) so that it was always draught-free (i.e. airless), or how he ever slept, given Cummy’s treatment for insomnia, which was to give the fretful child a soothing drink of strong coffee in the middle of the night. Fanny Stevenson retrospectively blamed her husband’s ‘feverish excitement’ as a child on the powerful drugs he was given during bouts of gastric fever, and the regular use of antimonial wine, which Margaret Stevenson’s doctor brother George later believed had ruined the boy’s constitution. These remedies were held to be sovereign by the parents, and if the child seemed overwrought they would sooner remove his toys or send his playmates away to calm him, than lower the doses of strong or inappropriate medicine.

Even his parents’ happy marriage was problematic, for, as Stevenson was to say memorably in his essay ‘Virginibus Puerisque’, ‘the children of lovers are orphans’. Margaret gave over much of the childcare to Cummy, not thinking any harm could come of it, the nanny being such a religious body. But the strength of Cummy’s religious views (possibly a source of mild amusement to her employers) made hers a very troubling influence. Cummy was a devout member of the Free Church, and far more stringent in her interpretation of doctrine than Lou’s Church of Scotland parents. The theatre was the mouth of hell, cards were ‘the Devil’s Books’ and novels (meaning romances) paved the road to perdition. She filled the little boy’s head with stories of the Martyrs of Religion, of the Covenanters and the Presbyters and the blood-drenched religious fundamentalists of the previous two centuries, stories that were rendered, confusingly enough, in highly dramatic style. (Stevenson later told Cummy mischievously that her declamations had sparked his own obsessive interest in the drama.) The Bible and the Shorter Catechism were to Lou what Mother Goose might have been to a luckier child, visits to the Covenanters’ graves in Greyfriars churchyard were the substitute for playing in the park, and though there was opportunity to read adventure stories, Cassell’s Family Paper and (clandestinely) bound copies of Punch downstairs, Cummy’s regime of spiritual education was based around Low Church tract-writers and theologians, ‘Brainerd, M’Cheyne, and Mrs Winslow, and a whole crowd of dismal and morbid devotees’, as Stevenson recalled about twenty years later.

Cummy had mutually respectful relations with her employers and was trusted implicitly, but her religious brainwashing of her charge clearly subverted their authority over him. She was a simple woman who undoubtedly meant no harm, but her anxieties about the religious liberalism of the household were always clear. The Stevensons gave dinner parties and were known to drink wine; Mrs Stevenson had been flagrantly evasive of the ban on Sunday recreation by sewing a little pack onto the back of Lou’s doll so that his game could pass as ‘Pilgrim’s Progress’. One of Stevenson’s early memories was of his nurse ‘comforting’ him at night by pressing him to her in a ferment of prayer for the souls of his parents, who had broken the Sabbath by playing a game of whist after dinner. The scene sounds ludicrous now, but to the child spelled eternal damnation for his mother and father. He was wound up to such a pitch that he sometimes thought none of them would be saved, for even Cummy had lapses: he remembers them both straining to make out the contents in the printer’s window of serial stories she herself had cut short on the grounds of them threatening to turn out to be ‘regular novels’.

Dread of judgement, midnight coffee and a predisposition to overheated dreaming and daydreaming made much of the sick little boy’s life a misery. He speaks of fevers that seemed to make the room swell and shrink, and ‘terrible long nights, that I lay awake, troubled continually with a hacking, exhausting cough, and praying for sleep or morning from the bottom of my shaken little body’.


(#litres_trial_promo) He had a recurring nightmare of standing before the Great White Throne and being asked to recite some form of words, on which salvation or damnation depended; ‘his tongue stuck, his memory was blank, hell gaped for him’,


(#litres_trial_promo) for the idea of eternal punishment had been ‘seared’, as he said, into his infant consciousness. When his night-horrors were particularly bad, Cummy would call for Thomas Stevenson, who would try to calm his son by sitting by the bed, or outside the bedroom door, feigning conversations with imaginary coachmen or inn-keepers. But, as the adult Louis recalled, ‘it was long, after one of these paroxysms, before I could bear to be left alone’.


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Though in time the severity of his nightmares lessened, Stevenson continued to dream vividly and with disturbing conviction of reality, so that he was unable to distinguish whether his conscious or subconscious was in control. By the time he was a student his dreams produced the impression in him, nightmarish in itself, of leading a double life, at which point he began to fear for his reason. He learned in time to control his night-terrors, more or less (partly by the use of drugs), but if he hadn’t been terrified by hellfire rantings as a child, this habit of feverish dreaming and neurotic invention, that was to prove important to his writing, might possibly never have set in.

Stevenson avoided much reference in his published works to his ‘Covenanting childhood’, but left some strong words about it in manuscript (some of which were published in posthumous collections or used by his first biographer). There is a controlled savagery in these fragments about the adults who infected his young mind with ‘high-strung religious ecstasies and terrors’:

I would not only lie awake to weep for Jesus, which I have done many a time, but I would fear to trust myself to slumber lest I was not accepted and should slip, ere I awoke, into eternal ruin. I remember repeatedly [ … ] waking from a dream of Hell, clinging to the horizontal bar of the bed, with my knees and chin together, my soul shaken, my body convulsed with agony. It is not a pleasant subject. I piped and snivelled over the Bible, with an earnestness that had been talked into me. I would say nothing without adding ‘If I am spared,’ as though to disarm fate by a show of submission; and some of this feeling still remains upon me in my thirtieth year.


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Of the ‘morbid devotees’ whose works were his constant diet, the adult Stevenson had this to say: ‘for a child, their utterances are truly poisonous. The life of Brainerd, for instance, my mother had the sense to forbid, when we [he and Cummy] were some way through it. God help the poor little hearts who are thus early plunged among the breakers of the spirit!’


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He makes it – for politeness’ sake – sound as if he was not one of those ‘poor little hearts’ himself, but the accusation of negligence against his parents and Cummy is unmistakable – especially against his mother for knowing better than Cummy, but being inattentive. Colvin’s description of Margaret Stevenson as ‘shutting her eyes to troubles’ seems pertinent here. The child’s precocious utterances, recorded faithfully in her diary notes, clearly struck the young mother as amusing and a source of pride, but to less sentimental readers they brim with complex fears. Little Lou worried constantly about the quality and quantity of his prayers, whether his family were good or bad in the Lord’s eyes, and whether he would be sufficiently adept at harp-playing during an eternity in heaven – and all this before the age of six. Adding to his discomfort was a strong rational streak and a quick intellect. His mother relates that when she told him of ‘the naughty woman pouring the ointment upon Christ’ he asked why God had made the woman so naughty,


(#litres_trial_promo) and, hearing it confirmed that Christ had died to save him, concluded, ‘Well, then, doesn’t that look very much as if I were saved already?’


(#litres_trial_promo) These exchanges, engaging so adroitly with Calvinist theology, were not intended as cute additions to the Baby Album. The child must have been puzzled why they only elicited fond smiles.

In the years following Stevenson’s death, a minor cult grew up around the figure of his old nurse, fuelled mostly by his emotional dedication to her of A Child’s Garden of Verses, and a passage in his fragmentary memoir in which Cummy is singled out for her tender care of him when he was sick:

She was more patient than I can suppose of an angel; hours together she would help console me in my paroxysms; and I remember with particular distinctness, how she would lift me out of bed, and take me, rolled in blankets, to the window, whence I might look forth into the blue night starred with street-lamps, and see where the gas still burned behind the windows of other sickrooms.


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But in all honesty, it hardly constitutes excess of attention or devotion to attend to a chronically sick child at night. ‘My second mother [ … ] angel of my infant life’; the epithets are cloyingly excessive, and one can’t help wondering if Stevenson’s retrospective praise of his nurse was a desperate attempt to accentuate the positive. His fond memories of his father soothing him with nonsense-stories are also in the context of the child on the other side of the door being too terrified to sleep. And the same Cummy who was ready to calm the child with cuddles and blankets was just as likely to wake him up and assault him with prayers. It was, to say the least, a confusing world.



The boy learned to read quite late (aged six), but was lazy about reading on his own and preferred to get Cummy to do it for him. He liked to be attended to as much as possible, especially by women. He had been composing his own stories some time before this, using his mother and aunt Jane Balfour as amanuenses, and his first recorded work was a history of Moses, which won him the prize of ‘The Happy Sunday Book of Painted Pictures’ in an informal competition among the cousins. The text is illustrated with some wonderful drawings by Lewis of the Israelites, all wearing mid-Victorian chimneypot hats, with pipes in their mouths, gathering in the manna or crossing the Red Sea.


(#litres_trial_promo) He was good at drawing, in a speedy, impressionistic style: one blotchy ink picture of ‘A steamer bound for Londonderry’ has written on it in Thomas Stevenson’s hand: ‘Note. This steamer may be bound for Londonderry but I fear she will never reach it.’


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Religion entered everything and dominated play; when he was aged two and a half, Lou’s favourite game was ‘making a church’, which he did by putting a chair and stool together to form a pulpit and conducting his own solitary services in the character of both minister and congregation. At ‘an astoundingly tender age’


(#litres_trial_promo) he voiced strong antipathy to a theological iconoclast then attending the Edinburgh Kirk assembly. His sayings, many of them parroted from his parents or nurse (such as Cummy’s constant refrain of ‘If I’m spared’), were noted and preserved by his mother with the utmost care. At home, this little ‘dictator’ strove to be the centre of attention, and he later remembered his young self unflatteringly: ‘I was as much an egotist as I have ever been; I had a feverish desire of consideration.’


(#litres_trial_promo) To other children he was a bit of a liability; being an only child, he didn’t know how to handle rivals and expected to dominate play. As so often with children who insist on taking the lead, he had a markedly sadistic streak too, devising a ritual involving whacks on the hand with a cane when he and his cousins were bartering items for their ‘museums’. If the ‘buyer’ flinched during the transaction, the whole procedure had to start again.


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Among the flocks of Balfour and Stevenson cousins with whom he played at Colinton Manse (his grandfather Balfour’s house), or Cramond (his uncle George Balfour’s house), or the Royal Crescent (Uncle David Stevenson’s house), or Heriot Row, Louis remained an essentially lonely figure. But school was worse, and schoolwork a great trouble. Fortunately for him, he had minimal exposure to it; the combination of his father’s views on pedagogy and his parents’ shared hypochondria ensured he was often at home, ‘too delicate to go to school’, as Margaret records.


(#litres_trial_promo) That was Mr Henderson’s in India Street, his first school. It didn’t last long. Perhaps Louis recited in his father’s hearing the unofficial school song:

Here we suffer grief and pain

Under Mr Hendie’s cane.

If you don’t obey his laws

He will punish with his tawse.


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At age ten, he went to the Edinburgh Academy for a while (contemporary with Andrew Lang, the future folklorist, although they had nothing to do with each other at this age). There was a brief attempt at a private tutor from England, but that didn’t work out either. In the interstices of these arrangements months at a time would be spent having informal lessons with Cummy, or simply being cosseted in bed, surrounded by picture books and toy soldiers and with a little shawl pinned round his shoulders. Indulged so thoroughly over the years, he could have become an appallingly spoilt brat.

His closest friend in childhood was his cousin Bob, three years his senior, a tall, dreamy boy ‘more unfitted for the world [ … ] than an angel fresh from heaven’.


(#litres_trial_promo) Bob spent the whole winter of 1856 with his relations at Inverness Terrace, possibly because of his father Alan’s mental breakdown. Louis was delighted; he had been praying for a brother or sister for years. ‘We lived together in a purely visionary state,’ he wrote in ‘Memoirs of Himself’; the two boys invented countries to rule over, with maps and histories and lead-soldier armies, they coloured in the figures for the pasteboard theatre – Skelt’s Juvenile Drama – that had been the inspired gift on Lewis’s sixth birthday from his aunt Jane Warden, they talked and daydreamed. ‘This visit of Bob’s was altogether a great holiday in my life,’ Louis recalled later.


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The acute sensibility that made his nights a torment also afforded the child intense pleasures. He loved going to his grandfather Balfour’s house, Colinton Manse, in a quiet village southwest of Edinburgh, where there was a large garden and other children of the family to play with, and his charming, devoted aunt Jane Balfour on call. His happiness there was ‘more akin to that of an animal than of a man’, he thought later:

The sense of sunshine, of green leaves, and of the singing birds, seems never to have been so strong in me as in that place. The deodar upon the lawn, the laurel thickets, the mills, the river, the church bell, the sight of people ploughing, the Indian curiosities with which my uncles had stocked the house, the sharp contrast between this place and the city where I spent the other portion of my time, all these took hold of me, and still remain upon my memory, with a peculiar sparkle and sensuous excitement.


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The garden was divided up into sections by a large beech hedge and adjoined the church and churchyard. This fascinated and horrified the child, a connoisseur of graves, who imagined ‘spunkies’ dancing among the tombstones at night and the glinting eye of a dead man looking at him through a chink in the retaining wall. The paper mill just upstream from the manse and the snuff mill next to it made a constant sound of industry, which was as much a part of the place’s charm for the child as the birdsong and running water. Stevenson recalled ‘the smell of water all around’, and admitted ‘it is difficult to suppose it was healthful’, an opinion stoutly shared by his wife Fanny, who wrote in her preface to A Child’s Garden of Verses rather crushingly that ‘in any other part of the world [the situation] would suggest malaria’.


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Aunt Jane lived at the manse with her widower father and was Margaret Stevenson’s only unmarried sibling, older by thirteen years and by far the more motherly of the two sisters. She had been ‘a wit and a beauty’ when young, ‘a wilful empress’ whose social and marriage prospects were reversed after some accident left her sight and hearing permanently damaged. She used to say that it was a riding fall that had effected the change, but that was accepted in the family as a euphemism, and the cause was probably a disease such as scarlet fever or typhus. She proved an invaluable matriarch, as Louis recalled with affection: ‘all the children of the family came home to her to be nursed, to be educated, to be mothered [ … ] there must sometimes have been half a score of us children about the Manse; and all were born a second time from Aunt Jane’s tenderness’.


(#litres_trial_promo) Stevenson had a charming, intensely sensual memory of sitting on the stairs at Colinton when he was a small boy and being passed over, rather than passed by, his aunt descending precipitately in her full-skirted dress:

I heard a quick rustling behind: next moment I was enveloped in darkness; and the moment after, as the reef might see the wave rushing on past it towards the beach, I saw my aunt below rushing downwards.


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Aunt Jane’s good spirits and kindness compensated for grandfather Balfour’s withdrawn and intimidating manner. The Reverend Lewis Balfour was a man of few words, and those mostly broad Scotch, which to his grandson Louis was almost a foreign language. Scotch had been thoroughly displaced in middle-class life by English by the 1850s, but Balfour was of the old school, and only spoke English in the pulpit as a concession to his bourgeois parishioners. Louis guessed that his sermons were ‘pretty dry’, for the minister was an unemotional and unapproachable man. His grandson regarded him with a certain discomfort, and recalled vividly his last sight of the old gentleman at Colinton in 1860, when the boy was nine and his dying grandfather eighty-three:

He was pale and his eyes were, to me, somewhat appallingly blood-shot. He had a dose of Gregory’s mixture administered and then a barley-sugar drop to take the taste away; but when my aunt wanted to give one of the drops to me, the rigid old man interfered. No Gregory’s mixture, no barley sugar, said he. I feel with a pang, that it is better he is dead for my sake; if he still see me, it is out of a clearer place than any earthly situation, whence he may make allowances and consider both sides. But had he lived in the flesh, he would have suffered perhaps as much from what I think my virtues as from what I acknowledge to be my faults.


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Colinton was a place of leisure and licence, where Lewis could root through the library unhindered. The child was particularly drawn to the four volumes of Joanna Baillie’s melodramas, since Cummy had always enticingly denounced plays.


(#litres_trial_promo) These he approached with such furtiveness that he didn’t so much read them as just let a few wicked words flash into his consciousness before shutting the book up quickly. Murders and murderers, a decapitation, a dark forest, a stormy night; the child took away these strong ideas and spun them together when he was alone into stories probably much more sensational and alarming than Miss Baillie’s originals. He was fond of frightening himself: at home, he used to go at night into the dark drawing room ‘with a little wax taper in my hand … a white towel over my head, intoning the dirge from Ivanhoe, till the sound of my voice and the sight of my face in the mirror drove me, in terror, to the gas-lit lobby’.


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The stolen pleasures of the Colinton library linked directly with his sanctioned obsession, Skelt’s Juvenile Drama. Skelt produced dozens of different printed cutouts for use in children’s toy theatres, ‘a penny plain and twopence coloured’, which Lewis bought in quantity at the stationer’s on Antigua Street. He loved them, not so much because of the potent, transient joy of buying and colouring in a new set of characters or scenes – ‘when all was painted, it is needless to deny it, all was spoiled’ – but on account of the playbooks, with their stirring up of the sense of adventure and romance, the exoticism of the scenes and situations, the heart-stopping allure of the characters, highwaymen, smugglers and pirates:

What am I? What are life, art, letters, the world, but what my Skelt has made them? He stamped himself upon my immaturity. The world was plain before I knew him, a poor penny world; but soon it was all coloured with romance. [ … ] Indeed, out of this cut-and-dry, dull, swaggering, obtrusive and infantile art, I seem to have learned the very spirit of my life’s enjoyment; met there the shadows of the characters I was to read about and love in a late future; got the romance of Der Freischütz long ere I was to hear of Weber or the mighty Formes; acquired a gallery of scenes and characters with which, in the silent theatre of the brain, I might enact all novels and romances[.]


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The Stevensons and their queer little son, with his unexpressive face and out-of-proportion head, made a close-knit, self-protective trio. Their shared hypochondria became a great comfort to them. When Thomas developed some unspecified complaint and was ordered to take the waters at Homburg in 1862, the family went with him. The next year it was Margaret’s turn to be chief invalid and the destination was the South of France, where they stayed three months, returning through Italy on a splendidly leisurely tour and home via the Alps and the Rhine. All this time Lewis had been off school, but when Margaret was advised to return south for the winter of 1863–64, the Stevenson parents realised that if the boy was ever going to get an education they would have to leave him out of the next health tour. Thomas enrolled him at Burlington Lodge Academy in Isleworth, Surrey, chosen because three Balfour cousins were day boys there, looked after at weekends by the obliging Aunt Jane from her brother’s rented house nearby. It was a well-intentioned scheme, but not a particularly good one. Lewis could only feel the separation from his parents more keenly in a boarding school so far from home (and in a foreign country), however many little Balfours were on hand.

The twelve-year-old’s letters during his first and only term in Isleworth are full of characteristic touches: his stoicism, his distractibility (several times stopping mid-sentence), his mixed interest in and fear of other children. ‘I am getting on very well, but my cheif amusement is when I am in bed then I think of home and the holidays,’ he wrote to his ‘dear Parients’ in September.


(#litres_trial_promo) As the weeks went by, there were signs of education going on – bits of Latin and French, along with devil-may-care touches of sophistication – but the dreaded time was approaching when both parents would leave the country without him, which they did on 6 November. On the eve of his thirteenth birthday the following week, Lewis wrote his mother a letter in demi-French to thank her for the huge cake she had sent him, which, he noted, weighed twelve and a half pounds and cost seventeen shillings. There had been some trouble during the fireworks on Guy Fawkes’ Night when some bad boys (‘les polissons’) ‘entrent dans notre champ et nos feux d’artifice et handkercheifs disappeared quickly but we charged them out of the feild. Je suis presque driven mad par un bruit terrible tous les garcons kik up comme grand un bruit qu’il est possible.’ Writing to his parents this first time truly alone, with only a monstrous cake for company, seems to have been too much for the boy: he ends his letter abruptly and to the point: ‘My dear papa you told me to tell you whenever I was miserable. I do not feel well and I wish to get home. Do take me with you.’


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Lewis must have guessed the effect this simple appeal would have: Thomas Stevenson wrote back quickly to comfort the boy with the promise of fetching him out at Christmas, and Lewis’s subsequent letters are crowingly cheerful, looking forward to the prospect of joining them in Menton. When Lewis left Spring Grove at the end of term (the last boy to be picked up, his father being so late that he almost gave up hope) it was for good: he stayed in France until his mother finally left for home in May the next year. Menton was lovely: months of lounging in sunshine, reading, being fussed over by his mother and Cummy (brought out to attend him), being carried up and down the hotel stairs by two waiters when he was feeling weak. The party came back via Rome, Naples, Florence, Venice and the Rhine: a great improvement on Isleworth and the company of les polissons.

Cummy’s diary of this trip, written at the request of (and addressed to) her friend Cashie, nurse to David Stevenson’s children, gives a vivid glimpse of the woman with whom Lewis had spent so much of his time. Cummy had not travelled abroad before, and was appalled at how lost the world was to ‘the Great Adversary’. In London, the sight of barges on the Thames on a Sunday made her lament, ‘God’s Holy Day is dishonoured!’,


(#litres_trial_promo) whereas France, with its sinister-looking priests and perpetual feeling of carnival, was even worse, a land ‘where the man of sin reigns’.


(#litres_trial_promo) She was shy of eating with or associating with Catholics and felt that contact with heathens was in some way eroding her capacity to reach out ‘in deep, heart-felt love to Jesus’.


(#litres_trial_promo) She therefore relished her minor ailments and frustrations as signs of interest from the deity, as this entry, on recovering from a slight sore throat, illustrates:

O how good is my Gracious Heavenly Father to His backsliding, erring child! He knows I need the rod, but O how gently does He apply it! May I be enabled to see that it is all in love when He sends affliction!


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Cummy was not wholly consistent, of course, and proved susceptible to certain temptations. In Paris, she wrote to Cashie, she had been intrigued by the sight of some specially white and creamy-looking mashed potatoes, of which she sneaked tiny portions whenever the waiter’s back was turned. Although they were French and possibly the work of the Devil, she had to admit, ‘I never tasted anything so good.’


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One good thing had come of Lewis’s time at Spring Grove; he had been able to indulge a growing mania for writing. ‘The School Boys Magazine’ ran to just one issue and all four stories were by the editor, but at least he had the possibility of an audience among his schoolfellows and cousins. An opera libretto followed the next year, with the promising title ‘The Baneful Potato’, and a very early version of his melodrama Deacon Brodie was also written at this period, telling the gripping tale of the real-life Deacon of the Wrights who in the 1780s had carried on a notorious double life: respectable alderman by day, thief by night. The Stevensons owned a piece of furniture made by Brodie that stood in Lewis’s bedroom, a tangible reminder of the criminal’s duality. The idea of being an author intrigued the boy, though when one of his heroes, the famous adventure writer R.M. Ballantyne, visited the house of David Stevenson while researching his novel The Lighthouse (about the Bell Rock) and was introduced to the family, Lewis was so awestruck that he couldn’t say a thing.

Stevenson’s relations with his father were never anything other than intense, complex and troubling. Thomas Stevenson had on the one hand unusual sympathy with the child, colluding instantly with his attempts to avoid school, while at the same time being in thrall to the strictest ideas of what it was to be a responsible parent. Lewis was on the whole frightened of being accountable to him, for the response was predictable. Years later he wrote to the mother of a new godson of his this heartfelt advice: ‘let me beg a special grace for this little person: let me ask you not to expect from him a very rigid adherence to the truth, as we peddling elders understand it. This is a point on which I feel keenly that we often go wrong. I was myself repeatedly thrashed for lying when Heaven knows, I had no more design to lie than I had, or was capable of having, a design to tell the truth. I did but talk like a parrot.’


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Lewis became artful enough to know when to keep his mouth shut, as an incident which he related to Edmund Gosse in 1886 illustrates. When he was about twelve years old, he was so gripped by the romance and mystery of an empty house with a ‘To Let’ sign on it that he broke in by climbing through a rear window. Elated by his burgling skills, the boy then took his shoes off and prowled round, but once in the bedroom, thought he could hear someone approaching. Panic overcame him and he scuttled under the bed with his heart pounding. ‘All the exaltation of spirit faded away. He saw himself captured, led away handcuffed,’ and worst of all in his vision of retribution, he saw himself exposed to his parents (on their way into church) and cast off by them forever. This was such an alarming image that he lay under the bed sobbing uncontrollably for some time before realising that no one was in fact coming to get him, so he crept out and went home ‘in an abject state of depression’. He was incapable of explaining to his parents what had happened, and their concern redoubled his guilty feelings, sending him into hysterics. During the evening, as he lay recuperating, he heard someone say ‘He has been working at his books a great deal too much,’ and the next day he was sent for a holiday in the countryside.


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More education was ventured sporadically, the last being at a private day-school in Edinburgh for backward and delicate children. Mr Thomson’s establishment in Frederick Street, which admitted girls as well as boys and whose regime did not include homework, was the softest possible cushion upon which to place young Lewis. As far as his father was concerned, the boy’s eventual career was never in doubt; he would join the family firm. Therefore formal schooling was of minor importance: the greater part of his training would be got by observation and example in an apprenticeship. To this end, Thomas took his son on the annual lighthouse tour one year, and attempted to share his own knowledge of engineering and surveying whenever opportunity allowed. There is a touching memory of this in Records of a Family of Engineers:

My father would pass hours on the beach, brooding over the waves, counting them, noting their least deflection, noting where they broke. On Tweedside, or by Lyne and Manor, we have spent together whole afternoons; to me, at the time, extremely wearisome; to him, as I now am sorry to think, extremely mortifying. The river was to me a pretty and various spectacle; I could not see – I could not be made to see – it otherwise. To my father it was a chequer-board of lively forces, which he traced from pool to shallow with minute appreciation and enduring interest. [ … ] ‘[S]uppose you were to blast that boulder, what would happen? Follow it – use the eyes that God has given you: can you not see that a great deal of land would be reclaimed upon this side?’ It was to me like school in holidays; but to him, until I had worn him out with my invincible triviality, a delight.


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Thomas Stevenson had seen a painting at the Royal Scottish Academy exhibition titled Portrait of Jamie by James Faed, depicting an adolescent boy posed with a microscope. He wrote to Faed asking if a similar portrait could be made of his son and was told that the artist didn’t do much in that line, but would take a look at the boy and see if he thought he could paint him. Faed was surprised to get a reply saying that Mr Stevenson had been back to look at the ‘Jamie’ portrait again and had changed his mind, feeling his son was ‘too stupid looking to make a picture like that’.


(#litres_trial_promo) The incident stuck in Faed’s mind and thirty years later he offered it to Stevenson’s cousin Graham Balfour as a biographical curiosity (Balfour didn’t use it): the father’s turn of phrase was so odd and unsentimental. Odder still is the thought of Thomas Stevenson veering so completely between two different images of his son, one minute picturing him as a budding scientist, the next as too stupid-looking to be scrutinised.




(#ulink_06163eac-b305-5705-a13b-998f98ff460f)I am grateful to John Macfie for telling me an interesting fact about the real lamplighter on Heriot Row in the 1850s: he was a piece-worker, and therefore habitually rushed his work. So the ‘hurrying by’ of the poem is more realism than romance.




(#ulink_1cd2a3dc-308f-54ea-8b32-779fc215bc5d)It is not known who Smith learned from, but it could have been John Smeaton, who built the third Eddystone light in the 1750s, and whose work was very influential on the whole Smith/Stevenson family.




(#ulink_1e05ff37-b30a-57f3-b445-288395bf7b05)The fourth son, Robert (1808–51), took a degree in medicine at Edinburgh University and became an army surgeon. He left his whole estate to his youngest brother, Thomas.




2 VELVET COAT (#ulink_730062ab-9fa4-54a7-be26-711951cd9784)


Facts bearing on precocity or on the slow development of the mental powers, deserve mention.

Francis Galton, Record of Family Faculties

WHEN BOB WENT UP to Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, in the autumn of 1866, fifteen-year-old Lewis was eager for details, and more than a little jealous: ‘Do Cambridge students indulge in a private magazine: if so, full particulars?’


(#litres_trial_promo) He himself was still at Mr Thomson’s school and bound on a different course, taking classes in practical mechanics and being given extra maths lessons in order to matriculate at Edinburgh University the next year as a student of engineering. Thomas Stevenson must have realised by this time that even if Lewis went through the hoops of getting a degree in sciences, he was temperamentally unsuited to become an engineer. Still they stuck to the known path, the father no doubt rationalising that his own reluctance to join the family firm years before had been proved wrong. His working life had been immensely useful and productive (not least of money), and his early leanings towards authorship had not been entirely abandoned. Had not his book on lighthouse illumination and his article on ‘Harbours’ for the Encyclopaedia Britannica been composed in hours of leisure, the proper place for letters?

Robert Louis Stevenson’s first publication, a privately-printed sixteen-page monograph called ‘The Pentland Rising: A Page of History’, fell entirely in the gentleman-amateur tradition that his father favoured. It would not have escaped a man like Thomas Stevenson, so keenly aware of the energy potential in a wave and the importance of building a structure of exactly the right size and shape to harness or withstand it, that the intellectual energy Lewis expended on his feverish recreation might be redirected towards some serious and worthy project. The boy’s interest in the Covenanters had been expressed in some highly inappropriate forms up to this point; he had started a romance based on the life of David Hackston of Rathillet, one of the fanatics who had murdered Archbishop Sharp, and in 1867–68 began a five-act tragedy on another Covenanting subject, ‘The Sweet Singer’. A work of a historical or overtly religious nature would have been far more suitable, and it was in such a direction that Thomas and Margaret Stevenson now steered their son,.offering to pay for the production of one hundred copies of a short history to coincide exactly with the two hundredth anniversary of the Covenanters’ defeat at Rullion Green on 28 November 1666. Getting the boy’s name into print, in a controlled and circumscribed way, was clearly a kind of reward and encouragement, but also an inoculation against becoming ‘literary’.

Lewis must have been happy with the arrangement, for he took care to make his account of the Rising as serious and scholarly as possible, with an impressive list of references (including Wodrow, Crookshank, Kirkton, Defoe, Bishop Burnet) and a stirring, sermon-like conclusion. Still it didn’t much resemble a conventional history. The facts were there, but re-imagined by the fifteen-year-old into gripping narrative:

The wind howled fiercely over the moorland; a close, thick, wetting rain descended. Chilled to the bone, worn out with long fatigue, sinking to the knees in mire, onward they marched to destruction. One by one the weary peasants fell off from their ranks to sleep, and die in the rain-soaked moor, or to seek some house by the wayside wherein to hide till daybreak. One by one at first, then in gradually increasing numbers, till at last at every shelter that was seen, whole troops left the waning squadrons, and rushed to hide themselves from the ferocity of the tempest. To right and left nought could be descried but the broad expanse of the moor, and the figures of their fellow-rebels, seen dimly through the murky night, plodding onwards through the sinking moss. Those who kept together – a miserable few – often halted to rest themselves, and to allow their lagging comrades to overtake them. Then onward they went again, still hoping for assistance, reinforcement, and supplies; onward again, through the wind, and the rain, and the darkness – onward to their defeat at Pentland, and their scaffold at Edinburgh.


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Stevenson’s later description of his apprenticeship as ‘playing the sedulous ape’ to a host of better writers seems needlessly self-mocking when one sees how expert and stylish he was already at the age of fifteen. The prose is very deliberately crafted, with cadences one could almost score, and there is something visionary about his imagination, as if he had personally witnessed the bullets dropping away from Dalzell’s thick buff coat and falling into his boots, seen the flames rising from a Covenanter’s grave on the moor and creeping round the house of his murderer. The boy’s engagement with his subject is so intense as to be almost disturbing. Just after relating the execution of the captured martyrs, he makes an emotional authorial interjection: perhaps it was as well that Hugh McKail’s dying speech to his comrades was drowned out by drums and the jeers of the crowd; these sounds, he wrote, ‘might, when the mortal fight was over, when the river of death was passed, add tenfold sweetness to the hymning of the angels, tenfold peacefulness to the shores which they had reached’. Lewis seems to have been as fervently pious in his mid-teens as in childhood.

It’s hard to imagine how such a performance could have failed to please the boy’s father, but according to a letter in the Balfour archive, the pamphlet was no sooner in type than Thomas Stevenson began to worry about potential criticism of it (from what quarter it is impossible to guess). He had criticised the first drafts himself, as Aunt Jane recalled, who had been at Heriot Row while Lewis was making alterations to the text ‘to please his Father’: ‘[Lewis] had made a story of it, and, by so doing, had spoiled it, in Tom’s opinion – It was printed soon after, just a small number of copies all of which Tom bought in, soon after.’


(#litres_trial_promo) So the little book’s literary qualities were its downfall; they ‘spoiled’ ‘A Page of History’ to the extent that it couldn’t even be circulated among the aunts, family friends and co-religionists who would have been its natural audience. It must have been hard for the young author to see his first work stillborn. Nor was it the only time Thomas Stevenson pulled this trick, paying for his son’s work to be printed, then censoring it. His solicitude for Lewis has the tinge of monomania, and tallies with what a family friend, Maude Parry, told Sidney Colvin about the relationship after the writer’s death: ‘Stevenson told us that his father had nagged him to an almost inconceivable extent. He thought it the most difficult of all relationships.’


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The following year Thomas Stevenson took out a lease on a house right in the heart of Covenanting country, the hamlet of Swanston on the edge of the Pentlands, only a few miles outside Edinburgh. The ‘cottage’ they rented there (in fact a spacious villa, almost as big as Colinton Manse) became their holiday home for the next thirteen years and a winter retreat for Lewis when he was a student. The battlefield of Rullion Green was within walking distance, as was the picturesque ruin of Glencorse Church, and Lewis, now old enough to be left to his own devices, spent days at a time walking the hills, writing and reading – especially adventure stories, caches of which the shepherd John Tod’s son later recalled having found in the whin bushes above the cottage.


(#litres_trial_promo) He was a keen, hardy walker and was able to make a long foot-study of the Pentlands in the years during which Swanston was the family’s second home. This was to become his favourite persona over the next decade or more, the romantic solitary walker, free from responsibility and respectability, watching, listening, picking acquaintance with strangers On the road, falling in with whatever adventures presented themselves.

To true Pentlanders, Lewis Stevenson would have appeared little more than a rich townie weekending on Allermuir, an English-speaking Unionist among terse mutterers of Lallans. No doubt some choice phrases of that dialect were shouted in his direction on the occasion, early in the Stevensons’ tenancy, when the boy barged through a field of sheep and lambs with his Skye terrier Coolin, infuriating the shepherd.


(#litres_trial_promo) Times had changed so rapidly in Scotland that in his late teens Stevenson knew no one of his own generation (certainly not of his class) whose primary language was Scots. ‘Real’ Scotsmen, like Robert Young, the gardener at Swanston, or John Tod the shepherd, or his late Grandfather Balfour, were distant, older figures who presented the paradox of being at once admirable and impossible to emulate. And with the language many temperamental traits and ‘accents of the mind’ were disappearing too, or seemed tantalisingly out of reach, as Stevenson’s loving description of shepherd Tod in his 1887 essay ‘Pastoral’ indicates:

That dread voice of his that shook the hills when he was angry, fell in ordinary talk very pleasantly upon the ear, with a kind of honied, friendly whine, not far off singing, that was eminently Scottish. He laughed not very often, and when he did, with a sudden loud haw-haw, hearty but somehow joyless, like an echo from a rock. His face was permanently set and coloured; ruddy and stiff with weathering; more like a picture than a face [ … ] He spoke in the richest dialect of Scots I ever heard; the words in themselves were a pleasure and often a surprise to me, so that I often came back from one of our patrols with new acquisitions; and this vocabulary he would handle like a master, stalking a little before me, ‘beard on shoulder’, the plaid hanging loosely about him, the yellow staff clapped under his arm, and guiding me uphill by that devious, tactical ascent which seems peculiar to men of his trade. I might count him with the best of talkers; only that talking Scotch and talking English seem incomparable acts. He touched on nothing at least, but he adorned it; when he narrated, the scene was before you; when he spoke (as he did mostly) of his own antique business, the thing took on a colour of romance and curiosity that was surprising.


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The ‘romance and curiosity’ of Scotsness haunted Stevenson all his life; he never tired of it. But the fact that his own culture could be romantic and curious to him he knew to be an unfortunate state of affairs. His writing about Scotland is therefore strongly melancholic and valedictory, quite unlike the language-revival movements of the following century which sought to resuscitate the culture by creating synthetic Scots. Within 150 years, the literary language waxed, waned and then reappeared again in the form of a sort of composite ghost of itself in the ‘Scottish Renaissance’ of the mid-twentieth century (pioneered by the poet Hugh MacDiarmid). But in the 1860s and ’70s, the language seemed beyond revival, and what Burns had used both naturally and daringly, Stevenson could only lament and pastiche, writing of his later attempts at Scots vernacular verse, ‘if it be not pure, what matters it?’


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Nevertheless, what Stevenson says of John Tod’s quintessentially Scots trait of ‘adorning’ his talk and making it startlingly vivid is egregiously true of Stevenson himself; ‘when he narrated, the scene was before you’. The irony is, of course, that Stevenson became known as a superlative English stylist because he was so alert to the power of his unknown native tongue. And as for the ‘romance and curiosity’ of Scotland, Stevenson’s version of it in novels such as Kidnapped, Catriona, The Master of Ballantrae and Weir of Hermiston did almost as much to promote and perpetuate the Scottish myth in the twentieth century as his great forerunner Walter Scott had done in the nineteenth.

In the autumn of 1867, the bullet had to be bitten and an engineering degree begun. The contrast between Lewis’s technical education at Edinburgh and Bob’s ‘semi-scenic life’ in Cambridge, with its gentlemanly atmosphere of ancient quadrangles and cultured conversation, could hardly have been stronger. As the bell rang them in to lectures from the city streets or pubs, all classes of raw Scots youth shuffled together on the ‘greasy benches’, as Stevenson recalled vividly in ‘The Foreigner at Home’:

The first muster of a college class in Scotland is a scene of curious and painful interest; so many lads, fresh from the heather, hang round the stove in cloddish embarrassment, ruffled by the presence of their smarter comrades, and afraid of the sound of their own rustic voices.


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No proctors, privileges or grand ceremonials here. When the classes broke up, many of the students had to hurry home to get back to work in the fields in order to earn their next winter’s college fees. It must have been an eye-opener to Lewis, whose school life (such as it was) had been spent wholly among middle-class children, and though he approved of the ‘healthy democratic atmosphere’ of the university, and admired those of the staff who strove to put the parish boys at ease, he made no close friends among his fellow engineering students, indeed felt increasingly isolated and lonely.

Around this time (1868–69) Stevenson changed his name from Lewis to the Frenchified ‘Louis’. It is said that the impetus behind the change was Thomas Stevenson’s sudden and overpowering dislike of an Edinburgh radical and dissenter called David Lewis, who embodied, in the engineer’s view, ‘everything dangerous in Church and State’.


(#litres_trial_promo) But as the pronunciation remained identical, Lewis – or Louis as we must now call him – may have intended it more as a joke than as a gesture of political solidarity, and it took a while to stick.


(#ulink_3b648e35-1267-5002-9009-42f5a3792109) 1868 was also the year in which Thomas Stevenson published an essay in the Church of Scotland Home and Foreign Missionary Record (later produced as a pamphlet by Blackwood’s) on ‘The Immutable Laws of Nature in Relation to God’s Providence’. This short work is notable for several reasons: for its slightly simple-minded grappling with the evolutionary controversies of the day and for its ardent struggle to develop a response to them consistent with Church doctrine. The author argues, for example, that a falling stone falls from two causes, ‘first, proximately, in virtue of the law of gravitation; but second, primarily, by the supreme will of God, who has called the law of gravitation into existence’ (one can catch the author’s pleasure in coining that ‘second, primarily’). And if man ‘has been raised from the gorilla, as is hinted at by the new school of naturalists, how comes it to pass that the dog, although resembling man so little physically, should be so much more than the gorilla akin to him in all his nobler feelings and affections?’ The style of argument gives one an idea of what Louis was up against when he and his father began to discourse ardently at the dinner table on matters of religion and science, for the youth had been reading Darwin, and Herbert Spencer, whose works his father would never countenance. But there is another passage in Thomas’s booklet of even greater relevance, one which may well have come to haunt his son:

Men of literature and science may therefore well pause ere they lift their pen to write a word which tends to shake the faith of others [ … ] How terrible will it be to such an author, when toiling all alone through the dark valley of the shadow of death, should conscience remind him, when thus entering the dark portals of the tomb, of the pernicious legacy which he has left to mankind!


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Publication fascinated the young student of engineering, who had secretly become fixated on the consumption and production of literature. ‘I had already my own private determination to be an author,’ he wrote in ‘The Education of an Engineer’.


(#litres_trial_promo) But the acquisition of technique, that seemed to him all-important, was difficult. Three of the four stories in his juvenile ‘School Boys Magazine’ had ended on a cliffhanger with the words ‘To Be Continued’. The pleasure in writing the beginnings of stories (natural enough in an apprentice) and a revulsion from the work involved in finishing them would remain the most marked characteristics of Stevenson’s creative life.

To be continued … by whom? One solution to the problem was to share the burden with a collaborator. In the spring of 1868, while he was also trying to write his ‘covenanting novel’, Louis wrote to Bob, ‘Don’t you think you and I might collaborate a bit this summer. Something dramatic, blank verse and Swinburne choruses.’


(#litres_trial_promo) Just the idea of collaboration then set him off in the same letter on a long sketch of two possible plays, the second of which, a tragedy about the Duke of Monmouth, got so elaborate as to put off any potential helper from the start:

Scene, a palace chamber. Without famine and revolt and an enemy investing the plains. A. found making love to B. Enter Prince who overhears. P. and A. quarrel, P. being also in love with B. Swords are drawn but D., who resembles A. very closely separates them. Exit P., cursing and muttering

– and so forth. ‘Write me your opinion of the thing and I will write the first scene which nothing can alter. I’ll then send it to you for alteration, amendment and addition, and we can parcel out the rest of the thing or alter it,’ he wrote humorously, acknowledging how tenacious he was likely to be of all his own ideas. What he really wanted was not a co-author, but a goad – or at the very least an enthusiastic audience. No wonder Bob didn’t jump at the offer, and apart from friendly encouragement contributed nothing to ‘Monmouth: A Tragedy’. But the object was achieved: the play was one of the few projects of the scores started during his teens that Louis managed to complete.

In his demanding, self-imposed and self-policed apprenticeship, Louis tried on a dizzying variety of literary styles, as he recalled satirically many years later:

Cain, an epic, was (save the mark!) an imitation of Sordello: Robin Hood, a tale in verse, took an eclectic middle course among the fields of Keats, Chaucer and Morris: in Monmouth, a tragedy, I reclined on the bosom of Mr. Swinburne; in my innumerable gouty-footed lyrics, I followed many masters; in the first draft of The King’s Pardon, a tragedy, I was on the trail of no lesser man than John Webster; in the second draft of the same piece, with staggering versatility, I had shifted my allegiance to Congreve [ … ] Even at the age of thirteen I had tried to do justice to the inhabitants of the famous city of Peebles in the style of the Book of Snobs.


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‘Nobody had ever such pains to learn a trade as I had; but I slogged at it, day in, day out; and I frankly believe (thanks to my dire industry) I have done more with smaller gifts than almost any man of letters in the world,’ Stevenson wrote modestly.


(#litres_trial_promo) What he needed no time to learn, however, was what to write about: his subject was always, somehow, himself.

Whenever I read a book or passage that particularly pleased me, in which a thing was said or an effect rendered with propriety, in which there was either some conspicuous force or some happy distinction in the style, I must sit down at once and set myself to ape that quality. I was unsuccessful, and I knew it; and tried again, and was again unsuccessful and always unsuccessful; but at least in these vain bouts, I got some practice in rhythm, in harmony, in construction and the co-ordination of parts. I have thus played the sedulous ape to Hazlitt, to Lamb, to Wordsworth, to Sir Thomas Browne, to Defoe, to Hawthorne, to Montaigne, to Baudelaire and to Obermann.


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Study, practice, impersonation; ‘that, like it or not, is the way to learn to write’. One can hear in these heartening words a rallying cry for millions of would-be writers, and it may be no coincidence that much of the worst prose of the coming generation was written in imitation of Stevenson. Anyone can do it, he seems to be saying; all you need is persistence and humility. What is easy to miss (because the expression is so original) is that anyone who can coin a phrase such as ‘playing the sedulous ape’ to describe his debt to other authors owes nothing to anyone. The term passed straight into common parlance, and the essay itself, as Balfour averred a mere fourteen years after its first appearance in an American periodical, quickly ‘became classical’.



To be continued … It wasn’t simply a matter of by whom, but when? For three consecutive summers, Louis was obliged to attend engineering works in his capacity as apprentice to the family firm. Instead of travelling, as Bob was doing, to Paris or Fontainebleau, he found himself stuck for weeks in a series of inaccessible locations on the Scottish coast, with no company but that of the men on the works, and no entertainments other than tobacco, drink and letters from his mother. The men must have found him an odd specimen, a skinny teenager with no real interest in or aptitude for engineering, quite unlike his father and uncle, the firm’s obsessively dedicated partners. When there was an accident at the works in Anstruther, where Louis had been sent in July 1868 to observe the construction of a breakwater, the seventeen-year-old found himself in the middle of a minor uproar. Writing to his father about the incident, he reported how a little girl had pointed him out on the street, saying, ‘There’s the man that has the charge o’t!’, an identification that must have rung strangely in everyone’s ears.

Louis spent most of his time in Anstruther loitering on the quay, vaguely recording the progress of the works, or biting his pencil over calculations. ‘All afternoon in the office trying to strike the average time of building the edge work,’ he wrote home at the end of his first week. ‘I see that it is impossible. [My computation] is utterly untrustworthy, looks far wrong and could not be compared with any other decision.’


(#litres_trial_promo) In the evenings, Louis retreated to his lodgings at the house of a local carpenter, and tried to make up the lost time: ‘As soon as dinner was despatched,’ he recorded twenty years later, ‘in a chamber scented with dry rose-leaves, [I] drew in my chair to the table and proceeded to pour forth literature, at such a speed, and with such intimations of early death and immortality, as I now look back upon with wonder.’


(#litres_trial_promo) Believing himself to be doomed to die young, and doomed, what’s more, to spend what little time he had hanging around windswept harbour works, he felt compelled to sit up long into the night, ‘toiling to leave a memory behind me’.


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The scent of dead rose-leaves, the intimations of mortality and the burden of his unwritten masterpieces weighed heavily. The works were weighty too; the sonorously-named ‘Voces Fidelium’ was to be a dramatic monologue in verse, presumably on a religious theme; ‘Monmouth: A Tragedy’ was still in progress, as was the novel about the Covenanter, Hackston. He had come a long way from ‘The Baneful Potato’. But it was difficult to keep up a secret nocturnal career of writing, that must at times have reminded him of Deacon Brodie’s double life. The nights were warm that July in Anstruther, the rose-leaves and bowls of mignonette overpowering, and the window had to be kept open. Thus moths flew in continually and scorched themselves on the candles, dropping onto ‘Voces Fidelium’ in a manner so disgusting that the author was driven to blow out the lights and go to bed, seething with rage and frustration. Immortality was deferred yet again.

After an evening watching a wretchedly bad performance by strolling players at Anstruther Town Hall, Louis got into a dispute with a fellow engineering apprentice about the troupe’s pathetic actor-manager. His companion felt that the man would be better employed as an ordinary labourer, but Stevenson disagreed ardently, saying the player must be happier ‘starving as an actor, with such artistic work as he had to do’. The parallel with his own life and frustrated ambition was all too clear, and Louis left the scruffy hall ‘as sad as I have been for ever so long’.


(#litres_trial_promo) By the end of the month he was writing home in unusually forcible terms:

I am utterly sick of this grey, grim, sea-beaten hole. I have a little cold in my head which makes my eyes sore; and you can’t tell how utterly sick I am and how anxious to get back among trees and flowers and something less meaningless than this bleak fertility.


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But his parents chose to interpret this repugnance as temporary and specific, a symptom of ‘the distressing malady of being seventeen years old’,


(#litres_trial_promo) and Louis was packed off again the next month to spend six weeks in the ‘bleak, God forsaken bay’ of Wick, a fishing port only ten miles away from the most northerly point on the Scottish mainland, John o’ Groats. Anstruther had been a mere forty miles from home, across the Firth from North Berwick, where the Stevensons had taken many family holidays; Wick was a much more serious exile, far beyond the reach of the railway system, cold, bare and implacably foreign. In the herring season, the town was full of men from the Outer Hebrides, mostly Gaelic speakers, while the mainlanders spoke mostly Scots-English and both communities were heavily influenced by their common Norse ancestry. Louis listened to a wayside preacher in total incomprehension of all but one word, ‘Powl’ (the apostle), and was incapable of conversing with one of the Highland workmen at the harbour works. ‘What is still worse,’ he wrote home to his mother, ‘I find the people here about – that is to say the Highlanders, not the northmen – don’t understand me.’


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The firm had been commissioned to build a new breakwater in Wick harbour and work was well advanced, despite the permanently bad sea conditions, which led eventually to the abandonment of the whole project in 1874.


(#ulink_1a167db8-c32a-5613-8bc0-ada6850c25df) In 1868, however, the scene was full of men and industry; wooden scaffolding was in place all along the unfinished stonework, and there was a platform of planks at the end on which stood the cranking equipment for the divers’ air supply. The masons’ hammers chimed continually, the air-mills turned, and every now and again a diver’s helmet would surface from the choppy water and a man dressed bizarrely in a huge helmet and diving suit hoist himself up the sea-ladder.

Here was something to capture young Louis’s imagination, and despite his father’s strong reservations (and insistence that a doctor’s opinion be sought in advance), he was eventually allowed to go diving under the strict supervision of one Bob Bain. Stevenson recalled the experience as the best part of his whole engineering career. Wearing woollen underclothes, a nightcap and many layers of insulating material, with a twenty-pound lead weight on each foot, weights hanging back and front and bolted into a helmet that felt as if it would crush him, Louis went down the ladder:

Looking up, I saw a low, green heaven mottled with vanishing bells of white; looking around, except for the weedy spokes and shafts of the ladder, nothing but a green gloaming, somewhat opaque but very restful and delicious. Thirty rounds lower, I stepped off on the pierres perdues of the foundation; a dumb helmeted figure took me by the hand, and made a gesture (as I read it) of encouragement; and looking in at the creature’s window, I beheld the face of Bain.


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Encouraged to try jumping up onto a six-foot-high stone, Louis gave a small push and was amazed to find himself soaring even higher than the projected ledge: ‘Even when the strong arm of Bob had checked my shoulders, my heels continued their ascent; so that I blew out sideways like an autumn leaf, and must be hauled in hand over hand, as sailors haul in the slack of a sail, and propped upon my feet again like an intoxicated sparrow.’


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The weightlessness, silence and dreamlike seclusion made diving memorable and delightful, but Wick was otherwise short on delights. The countryside was flat and treeless, exposed for miles at a time, and Louis would shelter from the biting wind in small rock crevices, listening to the seabirds and repeating over and over to himself the lines of the French poet Pierre-Jean de Béranger, ‘mon coeur est un luth suspendu/sitôt qu’on le touche, il résonne’.


(#litres_trial_promo) Wick was a place of storms and shipwrecks, and one morning Louis was woken by the landlady of the New Harbour Hotel with news that a ship had come ashore near the new pier. The sea was too high to get near the works to assess the possible damage, but Louis reported back to his father the scene from the cope:

Some wood has come ashore, and the roadway seems carried away. There is something fishy at the far end where the cross wall is building; but till we are able to get along, all speculation is vain. [ … ]

So far, this could just pass for a technical report, but he goes on:

The thunder at the wall when it first struck – the rush along ever growing higher – the great jet of snow-white spray some forty feet above you – and the ‘noise of many waters’, the roar, the hiss, the ‘shrieking’ among the shingle as it fell head over heels at your feet. I watched if it threw the big stones at the wall: but it never moved them.


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It is hardly the language of a technocrat; even Burns managed to be less poetical than this in his work as a surveyor.

Evenings in the New Harbour Hotel Louis again spent alone with his ‘private determination’. He finished ‘Monmouth’, and dedicated it, with professional seriousness, to Bob; he was also experimenting with prose sketches and metrical narratives, one based on the biblical story of Jeroboam and Ahijah, another on Chaucer’s Pardoner’s Tale. He wrote of his literary projects to Bob in a series of agitated letters, revealing the depth of his desires:

Strange how my mind runs on this idea. Becoming great, becoming great, becoming great. A heart burned out with the lust of this world’s approbation: a hideous disease to have, even though shielded, as it is in my case, with a certain imperturbable something – self-consciousness or common sense, I cannot tell which, – that would prevent me poisoning myself like Chatterton or drinking like Burns on the failure of my ambitious hopes.


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Bob was irritatingly slow to respond, but when he did, expressed similar doubts about his ability to succeed as an artist, which was his own secret intention. The two of them were in a ferment of fears and ambition, but Bob’s was at once the easier and the more hopeless case: no one was forcing him to join the family firm (the example of his father’s breakdown must have allowed that), but he was self-confessedly indolent and depressive. Louis’s neuroses went the other way, towards overwork, having to live two lives in tandem if he wanted to be a writer at all. Nor did Louis need to drum up suicidal tendencies in order to be recognised as a full-blown romantic genius; death by natural causes seemed likely to get there first.

The most marked characteristic of Stevenson’s years as a student of engineering was loneliness. He seems to have made no lasting friendships at all at the university, or in the pubs and streets of the Old Town where he was most often found loitering instead of attending class. He was intimidated by the diligence of the ploughboys and earnest burghers’ sons who were his fellow students in natural philosophy or the dreaded mathematics. One of these students, it turned out, had only one shirt to his name and was forced to stay away from class on the days when it was being washed. Stevenson was ashamed to reflect that he needed no reason at all to stay away, but did so ‘as often as he dared’. He joined the University Speculative Society in March 1869, but didn’t make much of an impression there at first among the confident young future advocates and doctors who made up most of its membership. ‘The Spec’ was an exclusive debating club limited to thirty members, who met by candlelight and in full evening dress in a series of comfortable rooms in South Bridge. ‘A candid fellow-member’ (presumably Walter Simpson, brother of the lady who recorded this) said of the newly-recruited young engineer, ‘I cannot remember that Stevenson was ever anything as a speaker. He was nervous and ineffective, and had no power of debate; but his papers were successful.’


(#litres_trial_promo) His happier days at the Spec were still to come.

Thomas and Margaret Stevenson had bought their son a set of barbells to develop his chest, but no amount of callisthenics could perform that miracle; the boy didn’t have an ounce of either muscle or fat. As his body grew taller and thinner, it made his head look unusually large by comparison, and his eyes, that had always been wide-set and interestingly misaligned, began to look more than ever like those of an intelligent hare. In view of how quickly his health improved in warm, dry places, it was unfortunate, to say the least, that Stevenson lived so many years in one of the ‘vilest climates known to man’, in the damp and cold and dark of Auld Reekie. He used to hang over the bridge by Waverley station, watching the trains taking luckier people away from his native city, and remembered with piquant dislike ‘the solo of the gas burner in the little front room; a knickering, flighty, fleering and yet spectral cackle. I mind it above all on winter afternoons, late, when the window was blue and spotted with rare raindrops, and looking out, the cold evening was seen blue all over, with the lamps of Queen’s and Frederick’s Street dotting it with yellow and flaring eastward in the squalls. Heavens, how unhappy I have been in such circumstances.’


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Louis’s isolation made it difficult for him to fight back fits of morbid melancholy. ‘My daily life is one repression from beginning to end, and my letters to you are the safety valve,’ he told Bob bluntly, just after his eighteenth birthday. He managed to be tormented with scruples, mostly about his waste or abuse of the opportunities his parents had provided him with, and attempted once to leave home on the principle that he might ‘free himself from the responsibility of this wealth that was not his’.


(#litres_trial_promo) To minimise his parents’ total expenditure he came to the eccentric conclusion that so long as he doubted a full return to health, he would live very sparsely in ‘an upper room’, but when he perceived an improvement he would go back to being pampered and paid for, in order to make the quickest exit from dependence.

His plans for self-improvement all turned on renunciation of his true desires, and in these moods his single-minded pursuit of authorship struck him as not merely a feeble self-indulgence but actively wrong. Perhaps, as he wrote to Bob on a particularly gloomy day, ‘to do good by writing [ … ] one must write little’:


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I am entering on a profession which must engross the strength of my powers and to which I shall try to devote my energies. What I should prefer would be to search dying people in lowly places of the town and help them; but I cannot trust myself in such places. I told you my weak point before and you will understand me.


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The pious young man was imagining himself as some sort of Jesus of the streets – and yet, he was too unworthy for that. Sunday school teaching was perhaps the only option open to him, he mused – but no, that also required a purer spirit.

The dark talk of not being trustworthy in ‘lowly places of the town’ refers (not without a tinge of pride) to Louis’s rapid escalation of worldly knowledge during his student years. He later said that his childhood piety had gone hand in hand with its correlate, ‘precocious depravity’,


(#litres_trial_promo) which ranged from trying to summon up the Devil to solemn, secret experiments in blasphemy. Writing about his childhood at the age of twenty-two, Stevenson was in no mood to dismiss these traits, but saw them as consistent with his adult behaviour: ‘I find that same morbid bias, [ … ] the same small cowardice and small vanity, ever ready to lead me into petty falsehood.’


(#litres_trial_promo) He saw ‘a parallel case’ between his own early years and those of the Covenanter Walter Pringle of Greenknow, whose memoirs had been one of Cummy’s permitted texts. This is an extraordinary thing to say. Pringle’s Memoirs are stuffed with the harshest language: he describes his youth as ‘years of darkness, deadness, and sinfulness’ when he committed ‘abominations’ and ‘slept about the brink of the bottomless pit’,


(#litres_trial_promo) all in the context of later conversion, in other words, all in a priggish context. Stevenson could certainly be priggish too: the Covenanting childhood left deep divisions in his mind between good and evil, heaven and the pit, and ‘something of the Shorter Catechist’ hung about him, as W.E. Henley was to observe, even in his most apparently easy-going, atheistic days.

Just as in childhood Stevenson had found himself drawn fascinatedly towards the wickedness that his puritan upbringing taught him to revile, so in the freedom of adulthood and the long hours of college truancy he quickly became a habitué of some of Edinburgh’s most disreputable dives. ‘The underworld of the Edinburgh of 1870 had its sharp and clear geographical limits,’ one historian of the town has written. ‘It began in certain streets within a space of scarcely more than a few yards, and ended as abruptly.’


(#litres_trial_promo) What could have been more grimly satisfying to the young moralist than the ease with which he could traverse these boundaries?

Many years later, Stevenson told his cousin Graham Balfour that he felt his rather shabby forms of youthful dissipation were linked to the short allowance he was kept on:

You know I very easily might have gone to the devil: I don’t understand why I didn’t. Even when I was almost grown up I was kept so short of money that I had to make the most of every penny. The result was that I had my dissipation all the same but I had it in the worst possible surroundings.


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His ‘headquarters’ at this time, he told Balfour, was an old pub frequented by sailors, criminals and ‘the lowest order of prostitutes – threepenny whores’, where he used to go and write. Eve Simpson, rather missing the point, protested later that Stevenson had no need to behave like a poor man; he had ‘all his bills paid’, an allowance, ‘and his own study in a very hospitable home’.


(#litres_trial_promo) But the dingy old pub clearly pleased him, with its interesting human traffic: ‘[the girls] were really singularly decent creatures, not a bit worse than anybody else’.


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And he made an interesting figure himself, affecting a ‘scruffy, mountebankish appearance’ and cultivating notoriety among the neighbours in the New Town by his ‘shabby dress and dank locks’.


(#litres_trial_promo) ‘Hauf a laddie, hauf a lassie, hauf a yellow yite!’ boys called after him on the street, not visibly ruffling the young man at all.


(#litres_trial_promo) A poem of 1870 celebrates the effect his clothes and demeanour had on the average Edinburgh bourgeois:

I walk the streets smoking my pipe

And I love the dallying shop-girl

That leans with rounded stern to look at the fashions;

And I hate the bustling citizen,

The eager and hurrying man of affairs I hate,

Because he bears his intolerance writ on his face

And every movement and word of him tells me how much he hates me.


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Perhaps Stevenson was trying to become a Scottish symboliste; he habitually, at this date, made marginal comments on his own poetry in French: ‘pas mal’ or ‘atroce’. The choice of free verse for this and the whole series of poems that he wrote in 1870 seems very bold and challenging, especially as Stevenson became known later as a rather conventional poet (when he was thought of in that role at all). None of these early verses – written when he was most serious about verse – was published in his lifetime, however.

The ‘bustling citizen’ most offended by Louis’s eccentricities of behaviour and dress was, of course, his father. Thomas Stevenson was always begging his son to go to the tailor, but when Louis finally succumbed and had a garment made, he chose a dandyish black velvet smoking jacket. He wore this constantly, so it soon lost whatever smartness it had: it was totemic, marking perfectly his difference from the waistcoated and tailed bourgeois of Edinburgh. It declared that although young Stevenson was sometimes confusable with a privileged brat from the New Town, his real milieu was the Left Bank, his true home among artists, connoisseurs, flâneurs.


(#ulink_6234ef9c-e2b7-5d0d-956b-834434f83f57) And in the sanded back-kitchen of the Green Elephant, the Gay Japanee or the Twinkling Eye, ‘Velvet Coat’ became his nickname; the boy of genius, perhaps even the poète maudit.

For a person brought up in such fear for his soul, Stevenson displayed a remarkable fund of basic common sense about sex. Despite their piety, neither of his parents was a prude, and his father’s generous opinions about fallen women predisposed the son to think well of this class of female. Stevenson lost his virginity to one of them while still in his teens, and probably had relations with many more, as this fragment from his 1880 autobiographical notes makes clear:

And now, since I am upon this chapter, I must tell the story of Mary H –. She was a robust, great-haunched, blue-eyed young woman, of admirable temper and, if you will let me say so of a prostitute, extraordinary modesty. Every now and again she would go to work; once, I remember, for some months in a factory down Leith Walk, from which I often met her returning; but when she was not upon the streets, she did not choose to be recognised. She was perfectly self-respecting. I had certainly small fatuity at the period; for it never occurred to me that she thought of me except in the way of business, though I now remember her attempts to waken my jealousy which, being very simple, I took at the time for gospel. Years and years after all this was over and gone, when I was walking sick and sorry and alone, I met Mary somewhat carefully dressed; and we recognised each other with a joy that was, I daresay, a surprise to both. I spent three or four hours with her in a public-house parlour; she was going to emigrate in a few days to America; we had much to talk about; and she cried bitterly, and so did I. We found in that interview that we had been dear friends without knowing it; I can still hear her recalling the past in her sober, Scotch voice, and I can still feel her good honest loving hand as we said goodbye.


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His respectful, even loving, manner must have endeared him to the tarts of the Old Town and encouraged him to develop what was already strong – a romantic sensuousness. He was clearly rather sentimental about women, although he had no neuroses about his dealings with them. But bringing his sexual experience to bear in his writing was another matter altogether.

Prostitutes weren’t the only kind of women that Stevenson associated with; he had plenty of pretty and spirited girl-cousins (there is more than a touch of gallantry in his letters to his cousin Henrietta Traquair), and liked to practise his charm on friends’ sisters. A ‘lady with whom my heart was [ … ] somewhat engaged’ dominated his thoughts in the winter of 1870,


(#litres_trial_promo) and if his poems of the time reflect actual experiences, she may have been the girl with whom he played footsie at church (‘You looked so tempting in the pew’


(#litres_trial_promo)), or the one with whom he skated on Duddingston Loch:

You leaned to me, I leaned to you, Our course was smooth as flight –

We steered – a heel-touch to the left,A heel-touch to the right.

We swung our way through flying men,Your hand lay fast in mine,

We saw the shifting crowd dispart,The level ice-reach shine.

I swear by yon swan-travelled lake,By yon calm hill above,

I swear had we been drowned that dayWe had been drowned in love.


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Stevenson later admitted to having considered marrying one of the Mackenzie girls (who were neighbours of his engineering professor, Fleeming Jenkin), or Eve, the sister of his friend Walter Simpson, among whose possessions was a lock of the author’s hair. But on the whole he was little attracted to ladylike girls, for reasons suggested by this passage in his 1882 essay, ‘Talk and Talkers’:

The drawing-room is, indeed, an artificial place; it is so by our choice and for our sins. The subjection of women; the ideal imposed upon them from the cradle, and worn, like a hair-shirt, with so much constancy; their motherly, superior tenderness to man’s vanity and self-importance; their managing arts – the arts of a civilised slave among good-natured barbarians – are all painful ingredients and all help to falsify relations.


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In the wake of his later fame, many colourful stories of ran-stam laddishness grew up around Stevenson, mostly revealing an undercurrent of regret that he failed to marry a Scotswoman and died childless.


(#ulink_d8bd1c50-83e7-5b16-8149-af491bc5d422) In 1925, Sidney Colvin was disgusted at the claim in a book (called, baldly, Robert Louis Stevenson, My Father) that Louis had an illegitimate son by the daughter of the blacksmith at Swanston. But while doubting there was any truth in the Swanston claim, even Colvin had to admit ‘we all knew [ … ] that Louis as a youngster was a loose fish in regard to women’.


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Loose fish is better than cold fish (the accusation often aimed at Colvin himself), and however uninhibited Louis was about sex, he retained high notions about chivalry and ‘what is honorable in sentiment, what is essential in gratitude, or what is tolerable by other men’


(#litres_trial_promo) in regard to women. This did not include political rights, however. When there were student disturbances in Edinburgh late in 1870 over the admission of women to medical classes, Stevenson wrote to his cousin Maud that he had little sympathy with the ‘studentesses’ who had been hissed at and jostled: ‘Miss Jex-Blake [the lead campaigner] is playing for the esteem of posterity. Soit. I give her posterity; but I won’t marry either her or her fellows. Let posterity marry them, if posterity likes – I won’t.’


(#litres_trial_promo) He was to revise his views about New Women somewhat in the coming years.

Stevenson was often subject to fits of morbid melancholy during these years, and wrote to Bob of aimless days looking for distractions, trying to buy hashish, thinking about getting drunk, or hanging round Greyfriars churchyard for hours at a time ‘in the depths of wretchedness’,


(#litres_trial_promo) reading Baudelaire, who, he told Bob, ‘would have corrupted St Paul’. The exquisitely self-tormenting notion struck him that he might have already used himself up, that his imagination was, in the potent word of the time, ‘spent’. Alone in an inn at Dunoon in the spring of 1870, he wrote a notebook entry which explicitly links this idea of ‘over-worked imagination’ with the addictive effects of drug-taking:

He who indulges habitually in the intoxicating pleasures of imagination, for the very reason that he reaps a greater pleasure than others, must resign himself to a keener pain, a more intolerable and utter prostration. It is quite possible, and even comparatively easy, so to enfold oneself in pleasant fancies, that the realities of life may seem but as the white snow-shower in the street that only gives a relish to the swept hearth and lively fire within. By such means I have forgotten hunger, I have sometimes eased pain, and I have invariably changed into the most pleasant hours of the day those very vacant and idle seasons which would otherwise have hung most heavily upon my hand. But all this is attained by the undue prominence of purely imaginative joys, and consequently the weakening and almost the destruction of reality. This is buying at too great a price. There are seasons when the imagination becomes somehow tranced and surfeited, as it is with me this morning; and then upon what can one fall back? The very faculty that we have fostered and trusted has failed us in the hour of trial; and we have so blunted and enfeebled our appetite for the others that they are subjectively dead to us. [ … ] Do not suppose I am exaggerating when I talk about all pleasures seeming stale. To me, at least, the edge of almost everything is put on by imagination; and even nature, in these days when the fancy is drugged and useless, wants half the charm it has in better moments. [ … ] I am vacant, unprofitable: a leaf on a river with no volition and no aim: a mental drunkard the morning after an intellectual debauch. Yes, I have a more subtle opium in my own mind than any apothecary’s drug; but it has a sting of its own, and leaves one as flat and helpless as the other.


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Stale, flat, unprofitable: these seem familiar words from a young man intrigued by his own existential dilemmas, and there is more than a touch of speech-making about them, from the expository first sentence to the anticipation of a listener’s responses – ‘Do not suppose I am exaggerating when I talk …’, ‘Yes, I have a more subtle opium …’ For a diary entry it is wonderfully oratorical. Perhaps Stevenson was right to fear losing touch with his imaginative powers, but not through lack of ideas so much as from a surfeit of style.

Stevenson later served up accounts of his youth (in his autobiographical essays) in a manner so inherently witty and objectified that the real pain of it is diluted, but there is a passage in his ‘Chapter on Dreams’ which is revealing about how divided a life he was living at this time. The dream examples in the essay are written in the third person (with the revelation at the end that all the examples are in fact from the writer’s own experience), but the trick seems, if anything, to make the piece more confessional. While ‘the dreamer’ was a student, Stevenson explains, he began to dream in sequence, ‘and thus to live a double life – one of the day, one of the night – one that he had every reason to believe was the true one, another that he had no means of proving to be false’:

[ … ] In his dream-life, he passed a long day in the surgical theatre, his heart in his mouth, his teeth on edge, seeing monstrous malformations and the abhorred dexterity of surgeons. In a heavy, rainy, foggy evening he came forth into the South Bridge, turned up the High Street, and entered the door of a tall land, at the top of which he supposed himself to lodge. All night long, in his wet clothes, he climbed the stairs, stair after stair in endless series, and at every second flight a flaring lamp with a reflector. All night long, he brushed by single persons passing downward – beggarly women of the street, great, weary, muddy labourers, poor scarecrows of men, pale parodies of women – but all drowsy and weary like himself, and all single, and all brushing against him as they passed. In the end, out of a northern window, he would see day beginning to whiten over the Firth, give up the ascent, turn to descend, and in a breath be back again upon the streets, in his wet clothes, in the wet, haggard dawn, trudging to another day of monstrosities and operations.


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Two things are immediately striking about this vivid account: one, that it anticipates so much of Stevenson’s most famous story, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde – from the medical context, with its ‘monstrous malformations’ to the dismal cityscapes and degrading double-life; the other is the reappearance on every second flight of that endless upward staircase of a flaring ‘lamp with a reflector’, presumably stamped with the maker’s mark, ‘Stevenson and Sons’.

Stevenson implies that these nightmares ‘came true’ in as much as they hung so heavily on him during the day that he never seemed able to recover before it was time to resubmit to them. The account ends bathetically with the information that everything cleared up once he consulted ‘a certain doctor’ and was given ‘a simple draught’ (shades of Jekyll again), but what hangs in the reader’s mind, like the nightmare itself, is what Stevenson admits just before this, that the experience left ‘a great black blot upon his memory’ and eventually made him begin to doubt his own sanity.



In June 1869, Thomas Stevenson took his son with him on the annual tour of inspection aboard the lighthouse steamer Pharos, calling at Orkney, Lewis and Skye. There was plenty to fascinate Louis, but of a romantic, not a technical, nature. At Lerwick he heard all about tobacco and brandy smuggling, and at Fair Isle saw the inlet in which the flagship of the Armada had been wrecked: ‘strange to think of the great old ship, with its gilded castle of a stern, its scroll-work and emblazoning and with a Duke of Spain on board, beating her brains out on the iron bound coast’.


(#litres_trial_promo) Not much survives apart from lists of his projected writings from this date, but they show another novel, sketches, stories and rough plans for at least eleven plays (listed in the notebook he took to P.G. Tait’s natural philosophy lectures, the only course he attended with any regularity). But the impression that his engineering experiences (or rather, the long observation of the sea and the Scottish coast they afforded) made on him fuelled his lifetime’s writing. It lies behind many of the autobiographical essays (‘The Coast of Fife’, ‘Rosa Quo Locorum’, ‘Memoirs of an Islet’, ‘On the Enjoyment of Unpleasant Places’, ‘The Education of an Engineer’), short stories such as ‘The Merry Men’, ‘Thrawn Janet’, ‘The Pavilion on the Links’, and the novels Treasure Island, Kidnapped and The Master of Ballantrae.

By the summer of 1870, when Louis was sent on his third consecutive engineering placement, he had begun to enjoy the trips much more. For one thing, there was plenty of sea travel, which he loved, and public steamers allowed him to charm and flirt with new acquaintances in a holiday manner. On the way to the tiny islet of Earraid, which the firm was using as a base for the construction of Dhu Heartach lighthouse, he met the Cumbrian artist Sam Bough, a lawyer from Sheffield, and a pretty and spirited baronet’s daughter called Amy Sinclair: ‘My social successes of the last few days [ … ] are enough to turn anyone’s head,’ he wrote home to his mother.


(#litres_trial_promo) The party stopped at Skye and boarded the Clansman returning from Lewis, where their high spirits and monopolisation of the captain’s table were observed by a shy young tourist called Edmund Gosse, son of the naturalist P.H. Gosse, whose struggles to square fundamentalist religious views with the emerging ‘new science’ mirrored very closely those of Thomas Stevenson. Years afterwards, Gosse recorded his initial impressions of the young man who ‘for some mysterious reason’ arrested his attention: ‘tall, preternaturally lean, with longish hair, and as restless and questing as a spaniel’.


(#litres_trial_promo) Gosse watched the youth on deck as the sun set, ‘the advance with hand on hip, the sidewise bending of the head to listen’. When the boat stopped unexpectedly a little while later, Gosse saw that they had come up an inlet and that there were lanterns glinting on the shore:

As I leaned over the bulwarks, Stevenson was at my side, and he explained to me that we had come up this loch to take away to Glasgow a large party of emigrants driven from their homes in the interests of a deer-forest. As he spoke, a black mass became visible entering the vessel. Then, as we slipped off shore, the fact of their hopeless exile came home to these poor fugitives, and suddenly, through the absolute silence, there rose from them a wild keening and wailing, reverberated by the cliffs of the loch, and at that strange place and hour infinitely poignant. When I came on deck next morning, my unnamed friend was gone. He had put off with the engineers to visit some remote lighthouse of the Hebrides.


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What they were witnessing in the half-darkness was a latter-day form of Highland ‘clearance’, strongly similar to the notorious forced evictions of the eighteenth century. Stevenson does not mention Gosse at all or this incident in his letters home (which were too taken up with Miss Amy Sinclair), but it must surely be the inspiration for the scene in Chapter 16 of Kidnapped – written sixteen years later – when David Balfour sees an emigrant ship setting off from Loch Aline:

the exiles leaned over the bulwarks, weeping and reaching out their hands to my fellow-passengers, among whom they counted some near friends. [ … ] the chief singer in our boat struck into a melancholy air, which was presently taken up both by the emigrants and their friends upon the beach, so that it sounded on all sides like a lament for the dying. I saw the tears run down the cheeks of the men and women in the boat, even as they bent at the oars.


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Earraid itself, where Stevenson was headed on the Clansman, figured prominently in Kidnapped as the isle of Aros, on which David Balfour believes himself to be stranded. It was his first view of Earraid, isolated and empty except for one cotter’s hut, that Stevenson reproduced in the novel; when the firm was there in 1870, the islet had been transformed into a bustling work-station, with sheds, a pier, a railway, a quarry, bothies for the workmen, an iron hut for the chief engineer and a platform on which parts of the lighthouse were preconstructed. The reef where the lighthouse was to be built, fifteen miles away, was watched through a spyglass, and when the water was low, the engineers would put out for it in a convoy of tenders and stone-lighters. The scene on Dhu Heartach was another one of industrial despoliation: ‘the tall iron barrack on its spider legs, and the truncated tower, and the cranes waving their arms, and the smoke of the engine-fire rising in the mid-sea’.


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Stevenson’s letters home to his parents from Earraid were typically charming, affectionate and frank. He sought to be a good son, and bore his parents’ feelings in mind to an extraordinary degree, perhaps too much for his own good. He did not share all their values by any means, found many of their strictures infuriating or risible, deceived them to the usual degree in such cases, yet felt what amounts to a profound sympathy for their predicament qua parents and never ceased to respect and love them. ‘It is the particular cross of parents that when the child grows up and becomes himself instead of that pale ideal they had preconceived, they must accuse their own harshness or indulgence for this natural result,’ he wrote in an uncollected essay.


(#litres_trial_promo) ‘They have all been like the duck and hatched swan’s eggs, or the other way about; yet they tell themselves with miserable penitence that the blame lies with them; and had they sat more closely, the swan would have been a duck, and home-keeping, in spite of all.’


(#litres_trial_promo) Thus he continued – for the time being – to be a staunch religionist (writing to the approved Church of Scotland paper on subjects such as foreign missions), a good Tory (he was treasurer of the University Conservative Club in 1870) and a passable student of engineering. But it couldn’t last long, and didn’t.

The winter of 1870–71 saw Stevenson’s first real opportunity to associate with other would-be writers, and the effect was galvanising. Three law students in the Speculative Society, James Walter Ferrier, Robert Glasgow Brown and George Omond, approached Stevenson to join them in editing a new periodical, the Edinburgh University Magazine. They had already found a publisher (the local booksellers), and were going to share the expenses and the profits. Of course, the likelihood of there being profits was nil and the magazine only ran for four issues, but in those four Stevenson published six articles and edited one whole number on his own. Being recognised as a fellow writer was ‘the most unspeakable advance’, he said later: ‘it was my first draught of consideration; it reconciled me to myself and to my fellow-men’.


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Ferrier, the golden youth of this group, was to become one of Stevenson’s best friends. Witty, wealthy and devastatingly handsome, he seemed destined for great things and was the first of these ambitious young writers to publish a book, a novel called Mottiscliffe: An Autumn Story. Robert Glasgow Brown also had early literary success, founding a weekly magazine called London in 1877, to which Stevenson and most of their group contributed. Louis’s best friend, however, was a young lawyer whom he had known socially through attending the same Edinburgh church, St Stephen’s. Charles Baxter was two years older than Louis and had graduated from the university in 1871, entering his father’s chambers as an apprentice. Temperamentally the two young men had much in common: Baxter was idle, sentimental, and ready for any sort of practical joking. He was the ideal drinking companion and had a droll turn of phrase that was a perfect foil for Louis’s high spirits and semi-hysterical flights of fancy. An anecdote that Baxter told of his first visit to Swanston makes it easy to see what Louis valued in this amiable youth:

That night, late, in his bedroom, after reading to me (I think) ‘The Devil on Crammond Sands’, he flung himself back on his bed in a kind of agony exclaiming, ‘Good God, will anyone ever publish me!’ To soothe him, I (quite insincerely) assured him that of course someone would, for I had seen worse stuff in print myself.


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Baxter was put up for the Spec by Stevenson and became Secretary (he was always good with procedure, as befitted his profession). But their happiest times were spent on the streets of Edinburgh, engaged in jokes against fogeys such as the ill-tempered wine merchant Brash, whom Stevenson made the hero of a set of ribald verses, or talking to each other in ludicrously broad Scots, in the character of two old Edinburgh lawyers, Johnson and Thomson. Spontaneous jokes were their speciality, like the time they followed six men carrying a wrapped sheet of glass down George Street, as if they were chief mourners, hats off and heads bowed. As Louis wrote in one of his ‘Brasheana’ poems, ‘Let us be fools, my friend, let us be drunken,/Let us be angry and extremely silly.’


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In the spring of 1871 Louis was called on to give a paper to the Royal Scottish Society of Arts, and made a fair effort at pleasing both the examining committee and his father. One of the examiners was his professor of engineering, Fleeming” Jenkin, whose early dealings with the student had not been promising. Stevenson had applied to him for one of the necessary certificates of attendance at the end of the first year, only to be told that as far as the professor was aware, his attendance had been nil. ‘It is quite useless for you to come to me, Mr Stevenson,’ Jenkin had said. ‘There may be doubtful cases; there is no doubt about yours. You have simply not attended my class.’


(#litres_trial_promo) The frankness of this impressed the truant, and Jenkin turned out to be one of the few older men towards whom Louis showed admiration and respect.

‘On a New Form of Intermittent Light’ is very short for a paper – ten pages of large writing, the last sentences of which have been written in a different ink and possibly a different hand: ‘It must however, be noted, that none of these last methods are applicable to cases where more than one radiant is employed: for these cases either my grandfather’s or Mr Wilson’s contrivance must be resorted to’


(#litres_trial_promo) – an anxious note, which suggests Thomas Stevenson looking over his boy’s first contribution to science. The substance of Louis’s proposal is that a revolving hemispherical mirror could be used in conjunction with a fixed mirror to make lighthouse lights flash. The ‘revolving’ part of this idea was ingenious, though from his very rudimentary diagrams it is clear that the student had given little thought to the technical and logistical difficulties. Nevertheless, Jenkin and his colleagues judged the paper ‘specially noteworthy’ and later in the year awarded this latest scion of the Stevenson family a silver medal for his trouble.


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Thomas Stevenson was, presumably, not so impressed by his son’s performance, for it was only about ten days later that he chose an evening walk as the occasion to grill Louis on his intentions. The conversation was painful and upsetting for both, for the youth, ‘tightly cross-questioned’,


(#litres_trial_promo) confessed that he cared for nothing but literature. Thomas had at last to swallow the fact that the experiment had gone on long enough, and had been a failure. Louis had spent four years studying at the university, three summers on the works, he had worked in a carpenter’s shop, a foundry and a timberyard, and still couldn’t tell one kind of wood from another or make the most basic calculations. They were flogging a dead horse.

An alternative career on ‘the devious and barren paths of literature’, as Thomas described it,


(#litres_trial_promo) was out of the question, however. If the boy was going to abandon the family business, he had at least to train for a similarly dignified and worthy profession. He would have to study for the Bar. ‘Tom wonderfully resigned’, his wife noted in her diary on hearing the news, but though he had to accept the defeat as well as he could, Thomas Stevenson never got over the bitter disappointment of this day, and was still complaining about it in the last years of his life.

So Stevenson, after almost four years, was released from the yoke of engineering. He was going back to the university in the autumn to begin all over again as a student of law. Which was not to say he had any intention of becoming a lawyer.




(#ulink_1bdaf937-32ac-550e-b03c-9a098597dd11)W.E. Henley, who didn’t meet RLS until six years after this change, always attempted to use the earlier spelling, though this might have been as much affectation as anything.




(#ulink_c4b932ba-6b6e-5fe7-a402-49d6fd4aecab)Storms in the winters of 1868, 1871 and 1872. destroyed large parts of the breakwater. The failure of the project was later described by RLS as ‘the chief disaster of my father’s life’.


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(#ulink_3724a7ba-706d-5c57-9532-a6ae06ae28b4)RLS reminisced so warmly about his original velvet jacket once he was married that his wife got him a replacement made of velveteen, renewed serially thereafter.


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(#ulink_85d35b61-a92d-5320-9709-a94578777dd0)There was a long-running myth that a mysterious lassie called ‘Kate Drummond’ was the love of the young RLS’s life, and the mistaking of one of RLS’s names for Mrs Sitwell – ‘Claire’ – also led to confusion until J.C. Furnas showed that she and Mrs Sitwell were one and the same.




(#ulink_1e049880-98f6-5db4-9e16-60684c9d4f59)David Stevenson junior had a much curter judgement of the paper when approached by Graham Balfour for his professional opinion many years later, saying there were ‘several objections’ to his dilettante cousin’s notion.


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3 THE CARELESS INFIDEL (#ulink_2bda7831-bc5b-527e-bccb-bebff665f664)


Was early life laborious? Why and how? [ … ] The ‘how’ will distinguish various forms of mental fret and exhaustion from one another and from muscular fatigue.

Francis Galton, Record of Family Faculties

THE CHANGE TO reading for the Bar did not improve Stevenson’s study habits. As Charles Guthrie recalled, ‘We did not look for Louis at law lectures, except when the weather was bad.’


(#litres_trial_promo) A notebook that survives from his law studies is peppered with caricatures and doodles, and the few notes there are on Roman citizenship segue with comical readiness into a much more engaging daydream containing lines of a later poem:

People could appear as Cognitas, on whom full [?forms] had been conferred in a form of words before the magistrate. Odonot let me sleep, kind God or let me dream of her. There is summer of the time of hearts When insolvent, gent imprisoned to make friends dub up.

O thou, still young at heart,

Still quick to see and feel,

Thou whose old arm takes yet the better part

An arm of steel.


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Around the university, Stevenson and Baxter made a comical duo in manner and appearance: Baxter was tall, fair and square-built ‘with what seemed to be an aggressively confident deportment’, as one fellow student, John Geddie, recalled;


(#litres_trial_promo) ‘one was somehow reminded of a slim and graceful spaniel with a big bull-dog, jowled and “pop-eyed”, trotting in its wake’.


(#litres_trial_promo) The pair would sit together near the exit of the lecture hall, poised for escape, or stage stunts in class guaranteed to disquiet the lecturer, coming in late, sitting down for as long as it took for the class to resume, staring about them ‘with a serious and faintly speculative air’, then getting up again and leaving.

Louis’s most regular appearances were at meetings of the Spec on Tuesday evenings, and he was often found loafing in the society’s library and rooms the rest of the week. Stevenson loved its exclusivity and gentlemen’s club comforts, but also the fact that no one took it too seriously. Guthrie remembers him ‘always in high spirits and always good-tempered, more often standing than sitting (and, when sitting, on any part of the chair except the seat), chaffing and being chaffed, capping one good story with another’.


(#litres_trial_promo) Stevenson was prepared to talk casually about any subject under the sun, it seemed (apart from the law), but the papers which he read to the Spec still harped on religious themes. The influence of the Covenanting prosecution on the Scotch mind, John Knox, Paradise Lost, the relation (or lack of it, we can guess) of Christ’s teaching to modern Christianity: these were the topics upon which Stevenson held forth to his fellow would-be advocates. The little minister vein was still running strong in him, though it would have been hard to ascertain his attitude to the Church from his behaviour in public. One minute he would be mocking and provocative, as when, in Baxter’s company, he mischievously interrupted three ministers sitting down to dinner at a hotel and forced a long, elaborate grace on them; the next he would be in deadly earnest, stopping a group of colliers on a Sunday to harangue them for Sabbath-breaking.

Stevenson was fortunate to have found a mentor and surrogate father at this time in Fleeming Jenkin, the professor whose painful duty it had been to oversee his engineering studies. Jenkin had recognised something in the truant (remarkably enough), and drew him into his circle of friends. The Jenkin coterie was the most lively and entertaining in Edinburgh, ‘a haven, an oasis in a desert of convention and prejudice’, as one of Jenkin’s colleagues, Alfred Ewing, put it.


(#litres_trial_promo) Jenkin was only sixteen years Louis’s senior and had arrived at Edinburgh University from London in 1868 with his wife Anne, a striking and talented woman, with whom he organised elaborate private theatricals every year in their house on Great Stuart Street. The repertoire was eclectic – Shakespeare, Sheridan, Aeschylus, Charles Reade – and each play had five performances, preceded by weeks of strenuous rehearsal, directed and stage managed by Fleeming. Jenkin’s ingenuity was enormous; he researched and designed costumes, went to the lengths of learning beard-making ‘from an ancient Jew’,


(#litres_trial_promo) and engineered the wall between the dining room and the children’s playroom to pivot back on hinges to form a stage, so that the dining room became an auditorium. Louis, a favourite of both the professor and his charismatic wife, was soon part of the company (as was Charles Baxter), and took part in several productions.

Jenkin was as unlike Thomas Stevenson as two men in the same profession and the same Church could be; he was an intellectual, an inventor and a teacher as well as a marvellously versatile electrical engineer, responsible for laying miles of cable under the sea and doing the preliminary work on modes of electrical transportation (which he called ‘telpherage’). He had run an engineering business in London and built his own steam yacht for touring the coast with his wife and children.


(#litres_trial_promo) Ten years after Stevenson first met him, Fleeming developed a passionate interest in Edison’s new phonograph, which had not yet been manufactured or even exhibited outside the United States. With only a report in The Times to go on, he was able to replicate two versions of a machine like Edison’s, which he showed at a fund-raising bazaar for the university cricket club. Mrs Jenkin was established in one booth, charging two and six for a view and trial of the new marvel, Jenkin and his friend Ewing were in another, taking turns to lecture every half hour. A farmer visiting the bazaar and trying his voice on the phonograph prepared for the ordeal by rolling up his sleeves. His address to the machine was short and eulogistic: ‘What a wonderrrful instrrrument y’arrre!’, but when the recording was played back to him, he turned and fled at the sound of his own voice, exclaiming ‘It’s no canny!’


(#litres_trial_promo) When Louis got the chance to play with the amazing gadget, he and his friend W.B. Hole recorded ‘various shades of Scotch accent’ onto its tremulous tinfoil ‘with unscientific laughter’.


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Louis’s enthusiasm for the ‘new science’ of the evolutionists may well have been inspired by Jenkin, a keen follower of current controversies, who had a little-known but highly significant correspondence with Charles Darwin following the publication of the first edition of On the Origin of Species. Jenkin made the point to Darwin that his theory implied not a concentration or winnowing effect in the inheritance of characteristics, but a dilution or blending – quite the opposite of what Darwin was seeking to prove. This anomaly exercised the scientist for decades and was partly answered in later editions of his work. Jenkin had made another of his brilliant coups.

No doubt the unspoken rivalry between Jenkin and Thomas Stevenson (present in Louis’s mind, if nowhere else) worked itself into the contentions between father and son over what was becoming known as the Higher Criticism (though Thomas Stevenson would never have called it that). It is highly unlikely that Thomas Stevenson had read the works of Charles Darwin or Herbert Spencer when he attacked evolutionary theory in his stolid little pamphlet, but his son had read them and found Spencer in particular a revelation: ‘no more persuasive rabbi exists’.


(#litres_trial_promo) In an incident recalled by Archibald Bisset, Louis held forth once about Spencer’s Theory of Evolution on a walk to Cramond with his father and the tutor:

At length his father said, ‘I think, Louis, you’ve got Evolution on the brain. I wish you would define what the word means.’ ‘Well, here it is verbatim. Evolution is a continuous change from indefinite incoherent homogeneity to definite coherent heterogeneity of structure and function through successive differentiations and integrations.’ ‘I think,’ said his father, with a merry twinkle in his eyes, ‘your friend Mr Herbert Spencer must be a very skilful writer of polysyllabic nonsense.’


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Louis had plenty of other ‘friends’, including Spinoza, part of whose Tractatus Theologico-Politicus he had read in a pamphlet picked up at a bookstall.


(#litres_trial_promo) These were some of the ‘unsettling works’ which he later said ‘loosened his views of life and led him into many perplexities’.


(#litres_trial_promo) One of the most unsettling works of all was the New Testament, especially the gospel of Saint Matthew, which demonstrated to the young man that what was called Christianity had little to do with Christ’s teaching. ‘What he taught [ … ] was not a code of rules, but a ruling spirit; not truths, but a spirit of truth [ … ] What he showed us was an attitude of mind,’ Stevenson wrote in ‘Lay Morals’; the ethics of Christians, he said satirically, were far nearer those of Benjamin Franklin than Christ.

Another ‘gospel’ he was deeply affected by was that of Walt Whitman, whose poetry was treated with either caution or derision by the majority of the reading public in the 1870s. Stevenson had discovered Leaves of Grass soon after its publication in 1867, and kept a copy hidden at the tobacconist’s shop that was his equivalent of a poste restante. While he acknowledged Whitman’s want of ‘literary tact’ – the quality Stevenson himself had spent years trying to perfect – Stevenson admired, even venerated, the poet’s philosophy and hugely ambitious design. He later described Whitman as ‘a teacher who at a crucial moment of his youthful life had helped him to discover the right line of conduct’,


(#litres_trial_promo) and echoes of the electric bard can be heard all through the essays of the 1870s and eighties that gained Stevenson his reputation as an ‘aggressive optimist’:

Life is a business we are all apt to mismanage, either living recklessly from day to day, or suffering ourselves to be gulled out of our moments by the inanities of custom. [ … ] It is the duty of the poet to induce [ … ] moments of clear sight. He is the declared enemy of all living by reflex action, of all that is done betwixt sleep and waking, of all the pleasureless pleasurings and imaginary duties in which we coin away our hearts and fritter invaluable years.


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Stevenson was looking for a new definition of ‘the spiritual’ as he began to detach himself from the established Church, and he became one of the first members of the Psychological Society of Edinburgh, precursor of the Spiritualist Society, made up mostly of medical men, artists and university students. Bob was also a member (later vice-president), Stevenson himself was secretary briefly, and in 1873 he planned an article on spiritualism, probably to read to the Spec.


(#litres_trial_promo) When he told his parents later that he had not come lightly to his views about religion, he hardly did justice to the rigour he had applied during these years to questions of belief and ethics. It turned out to be a lifetime’s preoccupation, and at no point did he warrant his father’s intemperate description of him as merely ‘a careless infidel’.

The atmosphere at Heriot Row struck some observers as rather lax: both Thomas Stevenson and his son were loud, domineering talkers, and Louis shocked one set of visitors by ‘contradicting his father flatly before every one at table’.


(#litres_trial_promo) At a dinner party in the early 1870s, Flora Masson, daughter of Jenkin’s friend Professor David Masson, remembered being placed between the father and son and being amazed (and perhaps a little wearied) at how they took exactly opposing views on every subject. Louis’s talk that evening was ‘almost incessant’ (it was clearly one of his hyperactive days): ‘I felt quite dazed at the amount of intellection he expended on each subject, however trivial in itself,’ she wrote. ‘The father’s face at certain times was a study; an indescribable mixture of vexation, fatherly pride and admiration, and sheer bewilderment at his son’s brilliant flippancies and the quick young thrusts of his wit and criticism.’


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Flora was a fellow member of the Jenkins’ theatrical group, but remembered meeting Louis first (in the early 1870s) on a skating expedition with the professor and his family to Duddingston Loch, just to the south of Arthur’s Seat. She noted how the Jenkins always stayed in a couple, while Louis skated alone, ‘a slender, dark figure with a muffler about his neck; [ … ] disappearing and reappearing like a melancholy minnow among the tall reeds that fringe the Loch’.


(#litres_trial_promo) Perhaps he was auditioning for Hamlet. At the Jenkins’ theatricals Stevenson never managed to bag a major role. One year he was the prompt, another a bit player in Taming of the Shrew, another time he played the part of the dandy Sir Charles Pomander in Charles Reade and Thomas Taylor’s sentimental comedy Masks and Faces with ‘a gay insolence which made his representation [ … ] most convincing’.


(#litres_trial_promo) The highlight of his acting career came in 1875 as Orsino in Twelfth Night, but though the Heriot Row servants were mightily impressed with his appearance, and Margaret Stevenson glowed with maternal pride, the actor himself knew that in the process of being allotted a role of substance ‘one more illusion’ had been lost.


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Even though he wasn’t able to command it through acting ability, Stevenson was always likely to make a bid to arrest attention at the Jenkin plays. One time when he was in charge of the curtain, he mischievously raised it while two members of the cast were larking around on stage just after finishing a particularly intense tragic scene. Though some of the audience laughed, Stevenson didn’t escape a sharp reprimand from Jenkin. Flora, an intelligent young woman who later wrote novels and became the friend of both Browning and Florence Nightingale, seems to have escaped Stevenson’s notice even though she was put in his way so regularly by their mutual friends. But she was watching him, and remarked how he liked to keep his costume on as long as possible after a performance (preferably right through supper). She also remembered once seeing him walk up and down the Jenkins’ drawing room, watching himself in a mirror ‘in a dreamy, detached way’, ‘as if he were acting to himself being an actor’.


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His parents’ watchfulness grew more intense as Louis grew up and their hold over him loosened. His health became the language in which the family communicated, and was fussed over continually; uncle George Balfour, Mrs Stevenson’s distinguished doctor-brother, was always being sought for out-of-hours opinions, and several times prescribed his nephew short breaks at the Bridge of Allan or Swanston. ‘Rest’ was the favoured cure, though from what malady is hard to tell, apart from the perennial threat of ‘weakness’. Louis was very susceptible to catching viruses, and was always appallingly thin; today his appearance would suggest an immune deficiency syndrome. But when he was well, he bubbled over with vitality; his bright-eyed look, ready wit and endless appetite for talk were all legend. The collapses, when they came, were as often to do with depressed spirits as anything else.

Nevertheless, levels of fearfulness ran high in the household, and on hearing that her son wished to spend the summer of 1872 in Germany improving his knowledge of the language, Margaret Stevenson went into hysterics, saying she might never see him again. The plan was duly modified, and when Louis set out for Frankfurt that July in the company of Walter Simpson, it was for a three-week holiday, made over into another invalid tour by a rendezvous with his parents afterwards at Baden-Baden. Margaret’s fears seem to have been much more to do with Louis becoming independent than becoming ill.

This tightening of parental concern may have been a response to the new friendships that Louis was enjoying, mostly with lively law students like Baxter, and people in the Jenkin circle, from which his parents were excluded. Added to this was the return to Edinburgh from Cambridge of Bob Stevenson in the summer of 1871. Bob’s aimless brilliance and energy were a tonic to his younger cousin, who immediately drew him into the group of friends – Louis, Baxter, Simpson and Ferrier – who together formed a society called ‘LJR’. The initials stood for ‘Liberty – Justice – Reverence’, fervent discussion of which – over many rounds of drinks in Advocates’ Close – was one of their raisons d’être. (A manuscript note by Stevenson links ‘LJR’ with ‘Whitman: humanity: [ … ] love of mankind: sense of inequality: justification of art: decline of religion’.) More often, though, the members of LJR were to be found planning elaborate practical jokes, and devised a term, ‘Jink’, to describe their activities: ‘as a rule of conduct, Jink consisted in doing the most absurd acts for the sake of their absurdity and the consequent laughter’.


(#litres_trial_promo) They invented a character called John Libbel in whose name they carried out fake correspondences with prominent Edinburgh citizens, and for whom they printed calling cards: ‘I have spent whole days going from lodging-house to lodging-house inquiring anxiously, “If Mr Libbel had come yet?”’, Stevenson related, ‘and when the servant or a landlady had told us “No”, assuring her that he would come soon, and leaving a mysterious message.’


(#litres_trial_promo) On another occasion, they started a rumour that Libbel had inherited a fortune and that they were agents of the estate. ‘Libbelism’ was really a form of subversive performance art, and ‘Jink’ a kind of Dadaism avant la lettre, set in 1870s Edinburgh. Stevenson’s own remarks corroborate this, with their echo of ‘art for art’s sake’: ‘we were disinterested, we required none of the encouragement of success, we pursued our joke, our mystification, our blague for its own sake’.

Once, to their amazement, Louis and Bob were caught out by a jeweller in whose shop they had been attempting to act out ‘some piece of vaulting absurdity’.


(#litres_trial_promo) The shopman’s eyes lit up when he realised what was going on: ‘“I know who you are,” he cried; “you’re the two Stevensons.”’ The man said that his colleague would be vexed; he’d been dying to see them in action. Would the young men come back later for tea? And thus, bested by one of their own victims and astonished that their real names were known to anyone, the cousins beat a hasty retreat. Just as Libbelism anticipates some of the fantastic plots of Stevenson’s New ArabianNights, so this scene in the jeweller’s is like a comic version of his story ‘Markheim’. ‘Jink’ was an imaginative release in more ways than one.

At this date, Bob was living at home in the Portobello district of Edinburgh with his widowed mother and sisters and studying at the city’s School of Art. He was going to be an artist, and had been travelling in France for the past few summers with other painter-friends. He had always been a hero-figure to Louis, and now seemed more fortunate than ever: of the two youths, Bob was by far the more attractive, with his fine tall figure and well-grown moustaches (Louis’s weedy lip-hair was the butt of jokes for years). Women all fell for him at a glance, and men loved him for his exuberant erudition and excitable character. The word ‘genius’ was often applied, especially with regard to his talk, though Louis’s characterisation of it perhaps better suggests the description ‘manic’: ‘the strange scale of language, flying from Shakespeare to Kant, and from Kant to Major Dyngwell [ … ] the sudden, sweeping generalisations, the absurd irrelevant particularities, the wit, wisdom, folly, humour, eloquence and bathos, each startling in its kind, and yet all luminous in the admired disorder of their combination’.


(#litres_trial_promo) But this sort of wild verbal exhibitionism had another charm for Louis; as he said in the same essay, ‘there are always two to a talk, giving and taking, comparing experience and according conclusions. Talk is fluid, tentative, continually “in further search and progress”.’


(#litres_trial_promo) In other words, impromptu, collaborative, and always To be continued.

Thomas and Margaret Stevenson had less reason to delight in their nephew’s return to Edinburgh. With his flagrant pursuit of something that hardly had a name yet – la vie bohème – his art studies, his affectations of dress and his insolent wordiness, Bob must have looked like the least appropriate companion possible for their son. The parents didn’t know, of course, about the long drinking sessions in Advocates’ Close, the excesses of Libbelism or the long walks on which Louis and Bob behaved like a couple of mad tramps, singing and dancing on the moonlit roads out of sheer high spirits. They also, presumably, hadn’t heard the story which went about a few years later, that Bob had divided his patrimony into ten equal parts and was going to allot himself one part a year for a decade, at the end of which he would commit suicide.


(#litres_trial_promo) But they knew enough to be worried, and when Thomas Stevenson, snooping among his son’s papers, came upon the comically-intended ‘constitution’ of the LJR – beginning ‘Ignore everything that our parents have taught us’ – he was thrown into a state of angry panic. This was presumably before the evening (31 January 1873) when Thomas decided to challenge his son with some straight questions about his beliefs.

The timing of the interview was unfortunate. Louis had been ill for weeks with diphtheria, and was freshly impressed with the fragility of life and a sense of carpe diem. In the spirit of honest dealing, he decided not. to temporise as usual but to answer his father’s questions as truthfully as he could, saying to Thomas’s face that he no longer believed in the established Church or the Christian religion. ‘If I had foreseen the real Hell of everything since,’ he wrote miserably to Baxter after this spontaneous outburst, ‘I think I should have lied as I have done so often before.’


(#litres_trial_promo) For what began as an attempt at family openness turned into as traumatic an act of ‘coming out’ as can be imagined: a thunderbolt to the bewildered parents, to whom confirmation of Louis’s atheism was of course much more than a devastating personal rebuke or act of filial aggression; to believers like them, it meant the eternal damnation of their only child’s soul, and the possible contamination of other souls. The chagrin they felt when he abandoned the family profession was nothing to him turning his back on salvation. ‘And now!’ Louis continued in his outpouring to Baxter,

they are both ill, both silent, both as down in the mouth as if – I can find no simile. You may fancy how happy it is for me. If it were not too late, I think I could almost find it in my heart to retract; but it is too late; and again, am I to live my whole life as one falsehood? Of course, it is rougher than Hell upon my father; but can I help it? They don’t see either that my game is not the light-hearted scoffer; that I am not (as they call me) a careless infidel: I believe as much as they do, only generally in the inverse ratio: I am, I think, as honest as they can be in what I hold.

[ … ] Now, what is to take place? What a damned curse I am to my parents! As my father said, ‘You have rendered my whole life a failure.’ As my mother said, ‘This is the heaviest affliction that has ever befallen me.’ And, O Lord, what a pleasant thing it is to have just damned the happiness of (probably) the only two people who care a damn about you in the world.


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The household became eerily quiet, like ‘a house in which somebody is still waiting burial’. His parents went into a state of hushed emergency, Margaret pathetically suggesting that her son join the minister’s youth classes, Thomas locked in his study, reading up Bishop Butler’s Analogy of Religion in order to rejoin the fray. ‘What am I to do?’ Stevenson wrote despairingly to his friend. ‘If all that I hold true and most desire to spread, is to be such death and worse than death, in the eyes of my father and mother, what the devil am I to do?’


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The fallout from Louis’s confession continued for months, his father’s anger and his mother’s distress erupting uncontrollably all through the spring and summer of 1873. Margaret wept at church, Thomas was full of dark threats and despairing glances, and condemned his son’s attempts at cheerfulness as ‘heartless levity’.


(#litres_trial_promo) When Bob went off to Antwerp to study art in the spring, Louis felt his misery at home even more sharply, and by the summer was almost prostrated by illness. This was one area where the youth could still count on a sympathetic response from his parents. They agreed that he should have a holiday, somewhere quiet in the countryside, with friendly, trustworthy people. Their choice was Cockfield Rectory in Suffolk, the home of Margaret’s niece Maud and her husband, Professor Churchill Babington.

Frances Sitwell was lying on a sofa near a window at her friend Maud Babington’s home when she saw a young man approach up the drive. He was wearing a straw hat and velvet jacket, carried a knapsack and looked hot, having just walked from Bury St Edmunds, a good eight miles away. ‘Here is your cousin,’ she remarked to Maud, who went out through the french window to meet him. The young man – very boyish, and with a strong Scottish accent – seemed shy to begin with, and jumped at the chance to go and visit the moat in the company of Mrs Sitwell’s ten-year-old son, Bertie. But by the end of the day, when he and she began to talk seriously to each other, ‘an instantaneous understanding’ sprang up between them,


(#litres_trial_promo) and strong mutual attraction. ‘Laughter, and tears, too, followed hard upon each other till late into the night,’ Mrs Sitwell wrote, ‘and his talk was like nothing I had ever heard before, though I knew some of our best talkers and writers.’


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Frances Sitwell was thirty-four when she met Stevenson, and had been married since the age of twenty to the Reverend Albert Sitwell, sometime private secretary to the Bishop of London and vicar of Minster, in Kent, since 1869. They had met in Ireland, where both grew up, and spent the earliest part of their marriage in India; Frances had also lived in Australia. The marriage was not a success, at least not from Mrs Sitwell’s point of view. No one seems to have had a good word to say for her husband, ‘a man of unfortunate temperament and uncongenial habits’, according to E.V. Lucas.


(#litres_trial_promo) The euphemism hints at cruelty and vice (was Sitwell an adulterer? a drinker?), but all we can be sure of is that by the time the couple moved to Minster with their two little boys, Frederick and Bertie, Frances was finding it necessary to spend long periods of time away from home visiting friends, of whom Maud Babington was the closest. Like Louis, she was an exile at Cockfield from an intolerable home life.

When Stevenson met her in the summer of 1873, Mrs Sitwell was mourning the death of her elder son only three months before, aged twelve. The tragedy seems to have catalysed her thoughts about a permanent separation from her husband, though she knew it would be difficult to effect one without Sitwell’s agreement. She and her surviving son were tied to ‘the Vicar’ indefinitely unless she could become financially independent, which meant finding a job, a very daunting prospect for a woman of her social standing at the time.

One thing she didn’t consider, and which speaks volumes about her character, was to throw herself into the arms of one or other of her many admirers. They were, on the whole, adorers rather than suitors, in whom she inspired devotion that verged on idolisation. ‘Divining intuition like hers was genius. Vitality like hers was genius,’ one of them wrote; another, ‘she was the soul of honour, discretion and sympathy’, ‘waiting for her smile is the most delightful of anticipations, and when it comes it is always dearer than you remembered, and irradiates all who are in her company with happiness’.


(#litres_trial_promo) Over the years she nurtured a string of needy young men, including Stevenson, Sidney Colvin, Cotter Morrison, Stephen Phillips and latterly Joseph Conrad, all of whom left ardent tributes to her virtues: a ‘good angel’, ‘a priceless counsellor’; a ‘deity’.


(#litres_trial_promo) But above and beyond the superlatives, a genuinely extraordinary character emerges: not a wit, a beauty or a coquette, but a woman of quiet, tender and very ardent feelings, who retained a childlike capacity for simple pleasures and the subtlest appreciation of sophisticated ones. Colvin remembers her clapping her hands for joy and ‘leaping in her chair’ at the anticipation of a gift or treat, and described her sympathy thus: ‘She cools and soothes your secret smart before ever you can name it; she divines and shares your hidden joy, or shames your fretfulness with loving laughter; she unravels the perplexities of your conscience, and finds out something better in you than you knew of; she fills you not only with generous resolutions but with power to persist in what you have resolved.’


(#litres_trial_promo) It was this paragon with whom Stevenson spent the month of August 1873. Sibylline, sensitive, brave, tender, distressed, bereaved, abused: he would have fallen in love with a tenth of her.

Mrs Sitwell, as we have seen, was delighted by the young Scot and within three days of his arrival at Cockfield had written to her friend Sidney Colvin to urge him to hurry if he wanted to meet ‘a brilliant and to my mind unmistakable young genius’


(#litres_trial_promo) who had ‘captivated the whole household’


(#litres_trial_promo) at Cockfield. Colvin had been a friend of hers (how good a friend I will discuss presently) since the late 1860s. They probably met through the Babingtons: Churchill Babington was made Professor of Archaeology at Cambridge during Colvin’s time there as an undergraduate. Mrs Sitwell intuited that Colvin and Stevenson would find each other interesting, but she also realised that Colvin, with his influential London literary connections, could be of use to her excitable new friend, who made no bones about the fact that the law was a bore and that he lived only for writing.

Sidney Colvin was only five years Stevenson’s senior, but had the air of a much older, more sedate person. Tall and thin, with papery dry skin, a rather ponderous manner and a speech impediment, he did not seem readily appealing. On graduating from Cambridge in 1867 he began a career as an art critic and literary commentator, writing for the Pall Mall Gazette, the Globe and the Fortnightly Review, three of the most prestigious periodicals of the day. In 1871 he became the Portfolio’s main art critic and had already published a short book; he was a member of the Savile Club (as was Fleeming Jenkin) and a friend of Burne-Jones and Rossetti (whose work he promoted avidly), and when Stevenson met him in 1873 he had just been appointed Slade Professor of Fine Arts at Cambridge. A young man so well-placed in the world might well have adopted a superior air with Maud Babington’s scruffy student cousin, but Colvin’s manner was always respectful, courteous and hesitant – he was a very English Englishman, and though not charming himself, highly appreciative of charm. It is hard to say who was more pleased when the train pulled in at Cockfield on 6 August, the ‘young genius’ from Edinburgh, excited to be meeting the sage of the Fortnightly Review, or Colvin himself:

If you want to realise the kind of effect [Stevenson] made, at least in the early years when I knew him best, imagine this attenuated but extraordinarily vivid and vital presence, with something about it that at first sight struck you as freakish, rare, fantastic, a touch of the elfin and unearthly, an Ariel. [ … ] he comprised within himself, and would flash on you in the course of a single afternoon, all the different ages and half the different characters of man, the unfaded freshness of a child, the ardent outlook and adventurous day-dreams of a boy, the steadfast courage of manhood, the quick sympathetic tenderness of a woman, and already, as early as the midtwenties of his life, an almost uncanny share of the ripe life-wisdom of old age.


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The weeks at Cockfield passed in simple pleasure trips and long lounging days. Louis was already a favourite with Maud and Professor Babington (who called him ‘Stivvy’), and was a welcome companion to Bertie Sitwell, with whom he played at toy theatres and piggyback rides. The party visited Lavenham and Melford, and Louis was so ardent a helper at the school picnic that he blistered his hand slicing bread for the sandwiches. Colvin came and went, having discussed at length possible essay and book projects that Stevenson could put forward to the publisher Alexander Macmillan, and Stevenson was so excited at the prospect that he was already composing a piece on ‘Roads’ as he walked the lanes around Cockfield. ‘Roads’ seems a very apt subject for this pivotal moment in Stevenson’s career, when at last there appeared to be some alternative to the path he had been set on by his parents. Soothed by Mrs Sitwell and sponsored by Colvin, Stevenson was on the brink of enjoying the literary life he craved.

‘Roads’ wasn’t the only piece of writing Stevenson began at Cockfield; there was also an epistolary novel, or perhaps the resuscitation of an earlier attempt at a novel under the encouragement of Mrs Sitwell. Nothing remains of it now, but the heroine’s name was Claire and the project seems to have been closely tied to Louis’s burgeoning feelings for Mrs Sitwell herself, framed around an imagined or anticipated correspondence with her.


(#litres_trial_promo) This may explain why the novel faltered pretty quickly after Louis and Mrs Sitwell were separated and began their real correspondence, which was to form such an important part of his output in the coming years. At the end of September, Louis was writing to Mrs Sitwell, ‘Of course I have not been going on with Claire. I have been out of heart for that; and besides it is difficult to act before the reality. Footlights will not do with the sun; the stage moon and the real, lucid moon of one’s dark life, look strangely on each other.’


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The record of the five weeks that Stevenson spent in Suffolk that summer is sparse but from the flood of correspondence that began as soon as he was separated from Mrs Sitwell at the end of August it becomes clear that he had in that time fallen deeply in love. In those first few days at Cockfield he must have felt that he had at last met the perfect woman, the endlessly sympathetic and eager listener he had craved all his life. Mrs Sitwell loved his high spirits, laughed at his jokes, but also encouraged his confidence, and understood immediately and without judging them his mood swings and volatile spirits. Her melting eyes seemed to see into his soul, her rendition of Bizet’s ‘Chant d’Amour’ in the long summer evenings left him swooning. In their walks around the village and during the long days in the Rectory gardens, Mrs Sitwell had confided her marital unhappiness and he the painful rift with his parents; she stroked his hair as he sat with his head on her lap; they were fellows in suffering and in sympathy. And Louis seems to have hoped and expected that they would become more than that. His early letters call her ‘my poor darling’, ‘my own dearest friend’, and refer to the complete candour and trust that they have shared as ‘all that has been between us’.


(#litres_trial_promo) In the early days, at least, he must have believed that once ‘that incubus’ Albert Sitwell was out of the way, and once he, Louis, had become a self-supporting writer, he would be free to pursue this love of a lifetime.

Mrs Sitwell’s feelings for Stevenson are very much harder to divine, as in later years she asked for all her side of their correspondence to be destroyed, and he obliged. The only surviving remarks about him by her are in a very short contribution to a collection of reminiscences called I Can Remember Robert Louis Stevenson, first published in 1922. There she describes them becoming ‘fast friends’ for life on first acquaintance, and briefly describes how she introduced him to Sidney Colvin. By the time this little article appeared, Stevenson’s letters (edited by Colvin) had been in print for a couple of decades, and it was no news to the reading public that he had been in thrall to his ‘Madonna’, as he later called her, in the early 1870s, nor that she had later – much later – married the editor of the letters.

Even with the evidence of Stevenson’s powerful feelings towards her, and the reciprocity implied by some chance remarks in his letters, even given the fact that she withheld (not surprisingly) some letters ‘too sacred and intimate to print’ from the Colvin editions,


(#litres_trial_promo) it seems unlikely that Frances Sitwell was in love with Stevenson in the erotic sense at this or any other time. Her relation to him seems consistently to have been that of an inordinately affectionate woman rather than a woman of passion. She reciprocated his feelings in intensity but not in kind, perhaps not correcting his romantic hopes or assumptions at first because she didn’t quite understand or admit them. From what Colvin says in a tribute to his by-then wife (published, anonymously, in 1908), Mrs Sitwell might be described as serially naïve or disingenuous about her sexual attractiveness:

In the fearlessness of her purity she can afford the frankness of her affections, and shows how every fascination of her sex may in the most open freedom be the most honorably secure. Yet in a world of men and women, such an one cannot walk without kindling once and again a dangerous flame before she is aware. As in her nature there is no room for vanity, she never foresees these masculine combustions, but has a wonderful art and gentleness in allaying them, and is accustomed to convert the claims and cravings of passion into the lifelong loyalty of grateful and contented friendship.


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‘Masculine combustions’ covers a lot of Stevenson’s behaviour around Mrs Sitwell, but none of Colvin’s, which perhaps explains why he won the lady in the end. Nothing about Colvin was combustible. It took nine years from the death of Albert Sitwell in 1894 for him to get round to marrying the widow, who was by then sixty-four years old. The reason for the delay was given as Colvin’s financial straits – he had an elderly mother to support – but this seems thin, or at the very least coldly prudent. For as E. V. Lucas remarked, by the turn of the century ‘all London knew’ that Colvin and Mrs Sitwell were a couple: they were constant companions though they lived apart.


(#litres_trial_promo) How this arrangement was cheaper or more convenient than getting married is hard to figure. The answer to the long nuptial delay seems much more likely to be Colvin not wanting to upset his mother, who died in 1902.

It is necessary to look so far ahead, into the next century, to get some idea of the network of relationships that developed between Stevenson, Mrs Sitwell and Colvin in the 1870s. The triangular pattern usually suggests strife and rivalry, but at Cockfield Stevenson met two friends who were separately very important to him and whose relationship with each other was strengthened, possibly cemented, by their mutual concern for him. What were Colvin’s relations with Mrs Sitwell in the 1870s? It is hard to tell, but I would guess that their liaison was not sexual to begin with (perhaps not ever), but an ardent friendship of the kind Mrs Sitwell also enjoyed with Stevenson. Colvin was less trouble than the young Scot, a gentle and undemanding devotee. He was her frequent companion in London and they spent time together privately (a risky business in the 1870s), including a holiday to Brittany in 1876, which Colvin wrote up lyrically in an article for the Cornhill.


(#litres_trial_promo) By 1884, when Colvin got his job at the British Museum and with it the Museum residence where Mrs Sitwell always appeared as hostess, it seems safe to assume that they were lovers. They could have been lovers any time from meeting in the late 1860s, of course, though somehow the whole affair seems more slow-burning than that, more discreet, rarefied and tentative. Also more honest: nothing was signalled to Stevenson when he began his doomed onslaught of devotion late in 1873, and if Colvin was already having an affair with Mrs Sitwell then, one might have expected him to stand guard carefully over all new ‘masculine combustions’ near his mistress, even if she was incapable of recognising them herself.


(#litres_trial_promo) Either way, Colvin’s selflessness in doing all he could to further Stevenson’s career is remarkable. For there was never a shadow of jealousy or pique in his dealings with the younger man, despite the fact – which must have been obvious to Colvin the minute he saw them together at the Rectory – that Louis was a serious rival for Mrs Sitwell’s attentions, not to say a potential monopoliser of them.

Nevertheless, there are a few intriguing scraps of evidence which could be made to argue the contrary. One is a letter which Bob Stevenson wrote to Louis on 6 February 1874, having met Colvin for the first time. He and Colvin had spoken, at cross purposes, about Stevenson’s situation, provoking this confidence from the professor:

He said [ … ] that he had been much grieved to observe the effect that certain emotions you had gone thro’ lately had had upon you. He said it was a first class thing for you to do and that he knew no other man who was so game for being on the spot as you and that whatever you had lost you had gained in him such a friend for life as it is difficult to gain. I thought he was not supposed to be cognizant of what had gone on at all. I am mystified first by you, more by him.


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Colvin was acknowledging an extreme act of generosity on Stevenson’s part – one that would deserve his never-ending fidelity in return (which he gave). What could this have been other than ceding to ‘the first-comer’, as Louis elsewhere calls Colvin, his love-interest in Mrs Sitwell? But in February 1874 whatever Stevenson might have ‘lost’ was not obvious from his letters or his demeanour (although he clearly did try hard to sublimate his feelings for Mrs Sitwell later that and the following year). This could (just) be because his ‘loss’ occurred before the letters to Mrs Sitwell begin, i.e. during the month at Cockfield in 1873. Stevenson himself referred in his first letters to her of ‘all that has passed between us’, and here is Bob talking of how he thought Colvin ignorant of ‘what had gone on’. Mrs Sitwell herself became oddly jealous when a rival for Louis’s attention appeared on the scene in the spring of 1874: her possessiveness then seems suggestive.

Then there is the ambiguous evidence of a letter from Graham Balfour to his wife Rhoda on the day in 1899 when he was appointed by Robert Louis Stevenson’s estate to write the official biography of the author. Fired up with excitement at the prospect of writing Stevenson’s life, and perhaps to test the extent to which he was going to be trusted, Balfour asked the widow, Fanny Stevenson, ‘straight out about F. Sitwell’:

and she says Yes. F.S. used to tell people whom she knew well, as she wished not to be on false pretences. But I fancy the fat is nearly in that fire.

Tamaitai [Fanny Stevenson] is rather bitter.


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The answer was Yes, but what was the question? It could only have been ‘Are Colvin and Mrs Sitwell lovers?’ if Graham Balfour was really out of the loop, for E.V. Lucas says that ‘all London knew’ about the relationship by this date, and the elderly-looking couple were discreet, hugely respectable and beyond the reach of harmful gossip, Albert Sitwell being five years dead. If the question was ‘Were Colvin and Mrs Sitwell lovers back in the 1870s?’ – which would explain the phrase ‘F.S. used to tell people whom she knew well, as she wished not to be on false pretences’ – what is this fat that is nearly in the fire? The exposure of Mrs Sitwell’s long-term adultery? No one was likely to do that, certainly not a biographer (and cousin) of Robert Louis Stevenson, to whom both Colvin and Mrs Sitwell had been devoted. And what was ‘Tamaitai’ ‘rather bitter’ about?


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But what if the question was ‘Were Stevenson and Mrs Sitwell ever lovers?’ Apart from Mrs Sitwell herself, and Colvin, only Fanny Stevenson could have been expected to know the answer to that one, and it seems a more pressing question for Balfour to ask at this point of maximum favour with the widow than whether or not an obvious couple were a couple. The question cannot be confidently resolved one way or the other, but it does leave open some intriguing possibilities.



The end of August came; it was time to go home, but Stevenson strung out his departure from Cockfield by staying a few days on the way back to Edinburgh at Colvin’s cottage in Norwood, with a visit to the Sitwells’ house in Chepstow Place in Bayswater. There he met ‘le chapelain’, Mrs Sitwell’s problematic husband, and was able to observe secretly the marriage he had begun to know very well from one side.


(#ulink_0b3aebdf-70b1-58c9-87cb-6c4636b75a8a) When they sat together under a tree in Suffolk, or walked around Kensington Gardens on their last day in London, the gentle, tender looks of Mrs Sitwell were a balm to Louis’s heart. His first letter to her, written when he got back to Heriot Row, shows an intimacy that had been requited fully in spirit, if not in deed:

I am very tired, dear, and somewhat depressed after all that has happened. Do you know, I think yesterday and the day before were the two happiest days of my life. It seems strange that I should prefer them to what has gone before; and yet after all, perhaps not. O God, I feel very hollow and strange just now. I had to go out to get supper and the streets were wonderfully cool and dark, with all sorts of curious illuminations at odd corners from the lamps; and I could not help fancying as I went along all sorts of foolish things – chansons – about showing all these places to you, Claire, some other night; which is not to be. Dear, I would not have missed last month for eternity.


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Louis’s new, dizzying intimacy with Mrs Sitwell in some senses precipitated the upheavals that were to take place in the Stevenson household that year, as he had for the first time someone – some woman – in whom to confide everything, and more. There seems to have been no limit to Mrs Sitwell’s capacity for confidences, and the resulting flood of emotion from her young correspondent makes remarkable reading. The letters are highly stylised, self-indulgent monologues, in which passages of elaborate description are punctuated with long rhapsodies about his feelings. Perhaps, having been anticipated in his stillborn fiction, ‘Claire’, Stevenson had trouble establishing a non-rhetorical tone. Set beside his letters to Baxter, which are full of salty jokes, raucous verses and long vernacular rambles in the character of Tam Johnson (ancient drunken venial Writer to the Signet), those to Mrs Sitwell seem the work of another person altogether. Their humourlessness is striking. Chagrined that there was no quick response to one letter, he wrote on 27 September:

I have a fear that something must have happened, and so I write frankly and fully, because I fear I may never write to you again; but O my dear, you know – you see – you must feel, in what perfect faith and absolute submission I am writing. You must feel that I shall still feel as I have felt and will work as well for you and towards you, without any recognition, as I could work with all recognition. Remember always that you are my Faith. And now, my dearest, beautiful friend, good night to you. I shall never feel otherwise to you, than now I do when I write myself

Your faithfullest friend R.L.S.


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So much fear, and so much feeling. Pages and pages went off every day to his ‘friend in London’ (which is all he told Baxter of the connection


(#litres_trial_promo)), and every day he itched to get down to the Spec, where Mrs Sitwell was sending her replies so as not to arouse enquiry at Heriot Row. Stevenson was rather fascinated by the spectacle of himself in love, and at times asked Mrs Sitwell for copies of his letters to be sent back, for him to work into possibly saleable prose. And in the constant exercise of sensibility, he made some interesting discoveries, such as this reason for not being able ‘to bring before you, what went before me’:

There are little local sentiments, little abstruse connexions among things, that no one can ever impart. There is a pervading impression left of life in every place in one’s memory, that one can best parallel out of things physical, by calling it a perfume. Well, this perfume of Edinburgh, of my early life there, and thoughts, and friends – went tonight suddenly to my head, at the mere roll of an organ three streets away. And it went off newly, to leave in my heart the strange impression of two pages of a letter I had received this afternoon, which had about them a colour, a perfume, a long thrill of sensation – which brought a rush of sunsets, and moonlight, and primroses, and a little fresh sentiment of springtime into my heart, that I shall not readily forget.


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Love had brought out the aesthete in Stevenson with a vengeance, for what is this reminiscent of more than Proust and his madeleine? – except that Proust was still an infant.

While Louis was enjoying his Suffolk idyll, a dramatic scene had been played out in Edinburgh around the deathbed of one of his same-name cousins, Lewis Balfour, son of Margaret Stevenson’s elder brother Lewis. The dying thirty-year-old had decided that this was the right moment to tell his uncle Thomas Stevenson his opinion of Bob Stevenson: a filthy atheist, he believed, a ‘blight’, and ‘mildew’, whose pernicious influence on Louis had led the younger man astray.


(#litres_trial_promo) Thomas Stevenson latched onto this at once, for it played straight to his own desire to find a scapegoat for his son’s heretical opinions, and by the time Louis returned home from Suffolk, Bob had become the new persona non grata and Louis himself was almost exonerated. His parents were suddenly relieved and pleasant again; all that was necessary was to keep the wicked Bob out of their way.

This state of affairs clearly couldn’t last long, and when Thomas Stevenson met his nephew on the street just a few days later, he let fly with sonorous condemnations. Bob responded spiritedly, as Louis wrote later to Mrs Sitwell, ‘that he didn’t know where I had found out that the Christian religion was not true, but that he hadn’t told me. [ … ] I think from that point, the conversation went off into emotion and never touched shore again.’


(#litres_trial_promo) The hurt generated by this public row was enormous; Bob had had to bear the brunt of his uncle’s wrath (an intimidating spectacle, as he was now ready to concede), and Louis heard, second-hand, many painful things, including his father’s opinion that he had ceased to care for his parents and that they in turn were ceasing to care for him. Margaret Stevenson, on hearing of the interview, went into hysterics again and Louis was left to reflect miserably that ‘even the calm of our daily life is all glossing; there is a sort of tremor through it all and a whole world of repressed bitterness’.


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A shred of good came out of this explosive day: because his father’s rage had been directed against Bob instead of himself, Louis was better able to judge how violent and threatening it really was: ‘There is now, at least, one person in the world who knows what I have had to face,’ he wrote to Mrs Sitwell that evening, ‘– damn me for facing it, as I sometimes think, in weak moments – and what a tempest of emotions my father can raise when he is really excited.’


(#litres_trial_promo) Margaret Stevenson, who always hated any kind of confrontation, seems to have been finding her husband’s behaviour alarming too. Her loyalty to Tom was such that she usually sided with him regardless; thus her only way of communicating to Louis that she felt he had been ill-treated was by paying him small compensatory attentions. In the month following his return home, mother and son had a pleasant lunch together in Glasgow while Thomas was at a business meeting, and she gave him a kiss spontaneously one day. The fact that Stevenson noted these things gratefully is an indication of how withheld his mother must have been normally.

The truth is that both Louis and his mother were cowed by Thomas Stevenson’s rages, which were always accompanied by dramatic gestures (falling to his knees, for instance) and over-emphatic language. He was known as a melancholic man, but at times the family must have feared for his sanity too, especially with the example of his elder brother Alan before them. David Stevenson, Thomas’s other brother and senior partner in the firm, was also subject to mood swings that made him difficult to work with sometimes, and in the 1880s was to suffer a mental collapse similar to Alan’s. So with the threat of over-straining his father’s temper, and having done – as he was constantly reminded – so much damage already, Louis was keen to placate whenever he could, acquiescing to Thomas’s bizarre (and aggressive) demand that he write to the papers on the subject of Presbyterian Union – the last thing on Louis’s mind at the time – and trying his best to ‘make him nearly happy’.


(#litres_trial_promo) His attempts were usually failures, and one time went spectacularly wrong. On an evening when his mother was away, Louis thought his father might be interested to hear some passages from a paper he had given at the Spec on the Duke of Argyll, but even in such diluted form the articulation of Louis’s views on free will were too much for Thomas, who said he was being tested too far. He then launched into renewed recriminations, as Louis, shaky and upset, reported to Mrs Sitwell later that night:

He said tonight, ‘He wished he had never married’, and I could only echo what he said. ‘A poor end’, he said, ‘for all my tenderness.’ And what was there to answer? ‘I have made all my life to suit you—I have worked for you and gone out of my way for you – and the end of it is that I find you in opposition to the Lord Jesus Christ – I find everything gone – I would ten times sooner have seen you lying in your grave than that you should be shaking the faith of other young men and bringing such ruin on other houses, as you have brought already upon this’.


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There were more scenes of this sort, and ‘half threats of turning me out’, along with some flashes of extraordinary peevishness and pique on the part of the father towards the son. Stevenson told Mrs Sitwell in early October of an incident when his mother (hearing, Louis imagined, of the row that had taken place in her absence) had given him a little present which Thomas then coveted. ‘I was going to give it up to him, but she would not allow me,’ Louis wrote. What an odd family scene this conjures up: the father sulking over his wife’s little gesture of kindness, the son scrambling to mollify his feelings. ‘It is always a pic-nic on a volcano,’ he concluded sadly.


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The strain of living in ‘our ruined, miserable house’ was telling on Louis. His spirits were very low, his health consequently poor, and he reported to Mrs Sitwell on 16 September 1873 that he weighed a mere eight stone six (118 pounds). This was a man who was about five foot ten high and almost twenty-three years old. Bob was appalled at what was happening to his cousin, and advised him strongly to leave home. But Louis couldn’t do this cleanly, partly because of his own dependence on his parents for money, partly because of their astonishing dependence on him. When Louis suggested that he should transfer to an English university (perhaps he argued that the climate would be better for him) he met with point-blank refusal: ‘I must be kept, don’t you see, from persons of my own way of thinking.’


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Edinburgh was beginning to look like a prison. Bob was leaving in October for Antwerp; ‘Roads’, for all Colvin’s sponsorship, had been rejected by the Saturday Review. Colvin had arranged the necessary forms of admission to the English Bar on Louis’s behalf, but as the date for the preliminary examinations in London drew nearer, Stevenson began to fear he would miss that chance too, as he was too ill in the preceding week to go anywhere (and, predictably, had done no preparation for the exam at all). He got away on 24 October by telling his parents he wanted a change and was going to Carlisle, from where he went on to London.

From this point, events moved rapidly: he went straight to Mrs Sitwell at Chepstow Place, who took one look at him and insisted that he be seen by a specialist in lung diseases. The doctor, Andrew Clark, insisted that he should think neither of sitting the law exam nor of returning to Edinburgh but go immediately to the South of France to convalesce. It was not his lungs that were the problem (though the lungs were ‘delicate and just in the state when disease might very easily set in’


(#litres_trial_promo)), but his nerves, which were ‘quite broken down’.

Clark’s diagnosis was so adamant that one wonders if Mrs Sitwell primed him on the patient’s situation, for when Thomas and Margaret Stevenson hurried down to London to consult him themselves, he seemed to have understood the source of Louis’s nervous collapse very well and renewed his insistence that the patient have a complete change of scene and travel alone. The parents were upset at this wresting of the initiative from their hands, but couldn’t question the opinion of such an eminent and expensive doctor, and arrangements were made immediately for Louis to spend the winter in Menton. ‘Clark’, Louis wrote to Mrs Sitwell from the hotel where his parents had taken him, ‘is a trump.’


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Thus, in the first week of November 1873, Stevenson found himself on a train out of Paris, heading for the lemon groves and white villas of the south coast of France.




(#ulink_c96a6fc5-62c4-5ae4-8616-b3ce8582c88c)Fanny Stevenson’s feelings towards Colvin were, by this date, not ‘bitter’ so much as implacably antagonistic. Her letters to Graham Balfour during the period when he was writing Stevenson’s biography (1899–1901) are full of scorn for Colvin’s method and accusations of conspiracy against Colvin and RLS’s old friends. She refers to Fanny Sitwell as ‘a pigface’ and anticipates ‘heartrending wails’ from the couple over the loss of control of the biography. Fanny Sitwell had written to Fanny Stevenson, the latter notes sarcastically, asking her to suppress ‘“Youthful things that he [RLS] would have burned if he were here”’.


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(#ulink_7afd3673-122f-57aa-9bba-5ed61ffbfff3)I am assuming RLS did meet Albert Sitwell at this time because his letter of 1 September sends greetings to Bertie and instructs FJS to ‘say what is necessary, if you like, or if you think anything necessary, to the Curate of Cumberworth and the Vicar of Roost’.


(#litres_trial_promo) There would have been no necessity for greetings of any kind had RLS not been introduced to him.




4 AH WELLESS (#ulink_0e1d7b8b-6348-5a9e-b5b8-0df6f8be48b0)


The mental powers, like the bodily ones, must be measured by achievement; relatively as in competition with others, or absolutely by the amount and quality of intellectual work actually accomplished.

Francis Galton, Record of Family Faculties

‘BY A CURIOUS IRONY OF FATE, the places to which we are sent when health deserts us are often singularly beautiful,’ Stevenson wrote in the essay that came out of his exile to the Riviera in 1873, ‘Ordered South’: ‘I daresay the sick man is not very inconsolable when he receives sentence of banishment, and is inclined to regard his ill-health as not the least fortunate accident of his life.’ Stevenson was certainly not inconsolable; at least, not until it began to dawn on him quite what his illness signified. Clark’s diagnosis of ‘nothing organically wrong whatever’


(#litres_trial_promo) sounded like the all-clear, but in some ways his troubles were only just beginning.

For although he danced for joy in the sunshine on his arrival in Menton, Stevenson soon began to feel oppressed and oddly incapacitated. Instead of being free to bask in warmth, to read and write, he felt that his faculties had become blunted and stupid, ‘like an enthusiast leading about with him a stolid, indifferent tourist’.


(#litres_trial_promo) After the fantastic flights of sensibility he had indulged in the first rush of intimacy with Mrs Sitwell, he now felt that he was played out, nervously exhausted – perhaps irreversibly ‘spent’. Unlike the other invalids he met in and around the Hôtel du Pavillon – who included a number of middle-class British consumptives, the Dewars, the Napiers and a charming family called Dowson – Stevenson’s symptoms were not of incipient tuberculosis but of depression. In the sanatorium atmosphere of Menton, his condition deteriorated rapidly into a profound enervation and melancholia. A game of billiards, or even reading a novel, became exhausting to him, and after a short walk he needed a day to recover. He had to leave a concert early because the sound of the brass was intolerable. Stevenson describes this nervous condition in ‘Ordered South’:

The happiness of [a sensitive person] comes to depend greatly upon those fine shades of sensation that heighten and harmonise the coarser elements of beauty. And thus a degree of nervous prostration, that to other men would be hardly disagreeable, is enough to overthrow for him the whole fabric of his life, to take, except at rare moments, the edge off his pleasures, and to meet him wherever he goes with failure, and the sense of want, and disenchantment of the world and life.


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‘The whole fabric of his life’ did indeed seem threatened. Writing was out of the question, but worse than that, pleasure seemed out of the question too: he felt himself facing not the approach of death but a slow withdrawal from life. In ‘Ordered South’ he argues that this sort of withdrawal helps make death acceptable to the sick man; is, in effect, a means to ‘persuade us from a place we have no further pleasure in’. But the very decadence of this line of thought was another of his symptoms. Sometimes Stevenson struggled against it, apologising to Mrs Sitwell for ‘the deformity of my hypochondriasis’ and ‘the sickly vanities [ … ] of a person who does not think himself well’.


(#litres_trial_promo) But by December he had embraced the idea of becoming a chronic invalid, writing to Baxter: ‘I do somewhat portend that I may not recover at all, or at best that I shall be long about it. My system does seem extraordinarily played out.’


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Stevenson was smoking opium frequently during his months in Menton, and his drug experiences were among the most entertaining he had there. Writing to Mrs Sitwell of the first time he felt the full effect of the drug, he reported ‘a day of extraordinary happiness; and when I went to bed there was something almost terrifying in the pleasures that besieged me in the darkness. Wonderful tremors filled me; my head swam in the most delirious but enjoyable manner; and the bed softly oscillated with me, like a boat in a very gentle ripple.’


(#litres_trial_promo) He was under the influence of the drug when he wrote one his most rapturous letters to Mrs Sitwell on 7 December, sending her a single violet the scent of which had afforded him ‘a princely festival of pleasure’: ‘No one need tell me that the phrase is exaggerated, if I say that this violet sings; it sings with the same voice as the March blackbird; and the same adorable tremor goes through one’s soul at the hearing of it.’


(#litres_trial_promo) This was not published in Colvin’s selection of Stevenson’s letters that appeared in the 1890s, or it might have been read with interest by Ernest Dowson, the archetypal poet of the Nineties School, whose work owes so much to Stevenson’s own. It was he, aged five, who had picked the violets on a walk with his father and Stevenson in the olive yards of Menton and presented them to the strange long-haired Scotsman.

Stevenson’s sense of removal from life was increased by missing a milestone in his own career, his first appearance in print. ‘Roads’, rejected by the Saturday Review, had been accepted by the Portfolio and appeared in the issue of 4 December 1873. Margaret Stevenson had bought up dozens of copies and was sending them out as Christmas presents to friends, presumably with a note to explain the author’s pseudonym, ‘L.S. Stoneven’. No one could visit Heriot Row without her springing up to read from the article, though she and Louis’s father had, as usual, a number of criticisms of its style.


(#litres_trial_promo) Compared with the compact brilliance of some of Stevenson’s essays of the next few years (such as ‘John Knox and his Relations to Women’ or his pieces on Burns and Whitman), ‘Roads’ seems a wispy and wordy debut. He isn’t really saying much when he remarks that sehnsucht – ‘the passion for what is ever beyond’ – ‘is livingly expressed in that white riband of possible travel that severs the uneven country; not a ploughman following his plough up the shining furrow, not the blue smoke of any cottage in a hollow, but is brought to us with a sense of nearness and attainability by this wavering line of junction’.


(#litres_trial_promo) Nevertheless, when he eventually saw the piece in print four months after publication, he thought it represented a peak of artistic achievement that he would never regain or surpass. But this had less to do with ‘Roads’s intrinsic merits than with the fact that it was brimful of optimism, having been conceived and written in Cockfield, ‘when my life was in flower’.


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Colvin came to the Riviera for several weeks that winter (he too had fragile health) and met Stevenson in Monaco, cheering the invalid enormously. They stayed in Monte Carlo until Colvin witnessed a man shooting himself at the gaming tables, after which they decided to retreat to Menton, and spent the days talking, writing and sitting in public gardens by the sea, like a couple of prematurely aged men. Mrs Sitwell’s situation was a matter of vital concern to both of them (and doubtless Colvin brought with him the latest news of her struggle to separate from ‘the Vicar’), but it is highly unlikely that they spoke explicitly about their feelings for her. Stevenson’s references in letters to Colvin are always reserved and respectful – he calls his idol ‘Mrs Sitwell’


(#litres_trial_promo) – and in letters to her, he treats Colvin as one with superior claims to her attention. Part of Colvin’s charm for Stevenson was the incongruity between his manner and the depth of his feelings; ‘he burns with a mild, steady cold flame of exaggeration towards all whom he likes and regards’, Louis described it once to Bob. ‘He is a person in whom you must believe like a person of the Trinity, but with whom little relation in the human sense is possible.’


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(#litres_trial_promo) Colvin’s very presence in the South of France, and his generous sponsorship of Stevenson’s career, were proofs of his earnest goodwill towards the young Scot. Their friendship had none of that bantering intimacy that marked Stevenson’s relationships with Bob or Charles Baxter; in fact, it contained no intimacy at all ‘in the human sense’. However, it proved much stronger and more durable than any other friendship, and far outlasted Stevenson’s relationship with Mrs Sitwell, though nothing of the sort would have seemed possible to either young man as they sat side by side on a bench by the sea, writing separate letters to their distant ‘Madonna’.

Soon after Colvin’s departure from Menton, Stevenson found himself happily distracted by the company of a group of Russians living in a nearby villa who dined daily at his hotel. These were a pair of sisters, Nadia Zassetsky and Sophie Garschine (the latter an invalid), and two little girls, Pelagie, aged eight, and two-year-old Nelitchka, both daughters of Madame Zassetsky (a mother of ten), though Pelagie had been adopted by her aunt. The women were some ten or fifteen years older than Stevenson, according to Colvin’s guess, and both ‘brilliantly accomplished and cultivated’,


(#litres_trial_promo) with a fascinatingly forthright and colourful turn of phrase (in French) which was unlike anything Stevenson had experienced from female company before. After an initial frostiness towards them, when he believed, correctly, that Madame Garschine was trying to seduce him, Stevenson gave himself over to their charm and novelty, and was soon spending all his time with these exotic, sexy, bored, clever women.

A great part of his delight with the Russians, news of which stuffed his letters back to England, was centred on the toddler Nelitchka, who could say words in six languages and had already learned how to catch and hold the attention of an interested stranger. She at first called Stevenson ‘polisson’ for staring at her at table, then ‘Mädchen’ on account of his long hair, but soon was bringing him a flower every morning and chattering away confidingly in her polyglot babble. This played right to Stevenson’s partiality; the winning little Russian was halfway to breaking his heart. ‘A quand, les noces?’ Madame Zassetsky asked mischievously as she watched Nelitchka feeding Louis bread.


(#litres_trial_promo) ‘Nellie’, her sister and friend performed a tarantella for him and allowed him to join in their games; he in turn wrote them verses, sent them little presents and laughed endlessly at their locutions. ‘Children are certainly too good to be true,’ he wrote to Fanny Sitwell; and to his mother, rather mysteriously, ‘kids are what is the matter with me’.


(#litres_trial_promo) Was that an oblique rebuke to her for not having provided a sibling-playmate, or did Stevenson mean he was restless to start a family of his own? He was twenty-three at the time, a likely age for such feelings to set in. Colvin was struck the same year by Stevenson’s ‘radiant countenance’ as he watched some little girls playing with a skipping rope under the window of Colvin’s house at Hampstead: ‘Had I ever seen anything so beautiful and wonderful?’ he reports Stevenson asking him. ‘Nothing in the whole wide world had ever made him half so happy before.’


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It seems Mrs Sitwell was wounded by Louis’s sudden enthusiasm for the two Russian women, who – as he reported daily in his letters – insisted on sitting up close to him, teasing him about his clothes, reading his palm and confiding secrets of their unhappy marriages. Madame Garschine in particular was making headway, as Stevenson’s inflammatory accounts made clear. He cannot have been altogether displeased when Mrs Sitwell wrote something (destroyed now, with all her other letters) that provoked this reply:

O my dear, don’t misunderstand me; let me hear soon to tell me that you don’t doubt me: I wanted to let you know really how the thing stood and perhaps I am wrong, perhaps doing that is impossible in such cases. At least, dear, believe me you have been as much in my heart these three days as ever you have been, and the thought of you troubles my breathing with the sweetest trouble. I am only happy in the thought of you, my dear – this other woman is interesting to me as a hill might be, or a book, or a picture – but you have all my heart [?my darling] …


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However mild a complaint Mrs Sitwell had sent, the fact that she sent one at all is striking. To do so is not the action of a woman trying to keep an inappropriate or unwanted suitor at arm’s length, but of a woman needing reassurance that she is still the focus of his attention. Perhaps Mrs Sitwell, who had just taken the decisive step of applying for a secretarial job at a college for working women in Queen Square in London and who was at last breaking free of her marriage, was really in two minds about Louis Stevenson at this date.



It is no great surprise that after a few weeks at the Hôtel Mirabeau in the company of his charming Russian friends, Stevenson was happy to report himself ‘enormously better in the head’. Colvin visited again and the two began to consider – or Stevenson began to consider, and Colvin began to agree – collaborating on a ‘spectacle-play’ on the subject of Herostratus. After months of inactivity, Stevenson was beginning to write again. There was ‘Ordered South’ ready to be sent out to Macmillan’s Magazine (who published it in May), and the idea for a book on ‘Four Great Scotchmen’, to contain pieces about Burns, Knox, Scott and Hume. Like the spectacle-play, nothing came of this (apart from the essays on Burns and Knox that appeared eventually in Familiar Studies), but Colvin’s interest was vitally encouraging to the young man who so desperately needed to find an independent income if he was ever to escape from his parents and ‘a job in an office’.

Louis had passed almost six months in the South of France, at considerable expense to his father, and as the spring arrived in Scotland, he was expected home. The prospect obviously filled him with dread. As departure neared, he began desperately to posit alternative schemes: perhaps he could remove to Göttingen, and carry on law studies there? His parents were prepared to consider this (Louis must have sold hard the idea of becoming ‘a good specialist in the law’ under the tutelage of a ‘swell professor’ – recommended by one of Madame Garschine’s relations), but it was all pie in the sky. The young dandy of the Riviera had not given a thought to law for almost a year, and had more chance of becoming ‘a good specialist’ in nursery nursing than in jurisprudence. Faced with his parents’ approval, he decided that the scheme was impossible. By this time he was in Paris, desperately stalling, and wanting to go with Bob to the artists’ colony that had formed at Barbizon, near Fontainebleau. His nervous symptoms had come back with a vengeance (Paris is much nearer Edinburgh than is Menton): he caught a cold, and on 11 April 1874 he wrote to Mrs Sitwell, ‘I see clearly enough that I must give up the game for the present: this morning I am so ill that I can see nothing for it than to crawl very cautiously home.’


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‘The game’, clearly, was against his parents. ‘You know, I was doing what they didn’t want,’ he complained to Mrs Sitwell from Paris, ‘but I put myself out of my own way to make it less unpleasant for them; and surely when one is nearly twenty-four years of age one should be allowed to do a bit of what one wants without their quarrelling with me.’


(#litres_trial_promo) The peevishness of this is notable; Stevenson knew better than anyone how much his own self-interest contributed to keeping the ‘game’ going: ‘Going home not very well is an astonishing good hold for me,’ he remarked cynically. ‘I shall simply be a prince.’


(#litres_trial_promo) There was another factor too: he had hoped, during the long rest-cure at Menton, to make enough progress as an author to prove to his parents that writing could be a viable profession. But he had achieved so little there that he would have to resume law studies; indeed, studying would be seriously strenuous now, with so much ground to catch up. The prospect was appalling. What he really wanted to do, as he told Mrs Sitwell from Paris, was to live permanently in a country inn with a garden, near to friends but alone, and ‘to settle down there for good, among books and papers’.


(#litres_trial_promo) His favourite mood, he had to admit, had become ‘holy terror for all action and inaction equally – a sort of shuddering revulsion from the necessary responsibilities of life’.


(#litres_trial_promo) This was not ‘wanting to be a writer’ any more: this was accidie.

When Andrew Lang, the folklorist, was introduced to Stevenson in Menton, he thought him ‘more like a lass than a lad, with a rather long, smooth, oval face, brown hair that is worn at greater length than is common, large lucid eyes [ … ] “Here”, I thought, “is one of your aesthetic young men.”’


(#litres_trial_promo) ‘Aesthetic young men’ were beginning to seem the curse of the age, an effeminate crew full of subversive notions. But when Stevenson arrived back in Heriot Row in April 1874, looking every inch the fop in his swirling blue cloak and new Tyrolean hat, his parents swallowed down any disquiet they may have felt and welcomed the lost lamb with genuine delight. This was an enormous relief to Louis, who had been dreading a reprise of the previous autumn, and he fell in with their cheerful mood immediately.

The fear of losing their son, either to sickness or travel or marriage, had jolted Thomas and Margaret Stevenson, and it seems that while Louis was in Menton they began to repent their harshness of the previous year. They were now determined to keep him with them at any cost. His mother was suspicious of this ‘Mrs Sitwell’ who was spoken of so rapturously, and must have been quizzing her sisters and intimates about her, for she told Louis that Aunt Jane had once met Mrs Sitwell and thought she had very pretty small feet. (Needless to say, Aunt Jane’s observations of the separated wife are unlikely to have been limited to the lady’s extremities.) By the time the Stevensons were introduced to Louis’s married friend in London in the autumn, Margaret’s misgivings were so strong that she snubbed her. She suspected that Clark’s opinion was merely ‘a put-up thing’ between them, and that if illness didn’t carry her son off first, Frances Sitwell would.


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In the summer of 1874 the ecclesiastical procedure towards the Sitwells’ formal separation was well advanced (and came through in July); Frances’s job at the Queen Square college was to start in July also, and she was moving to Brunswick Row, just around the corner from her new workplace. When Stevenson went down to London for a protracted stay in June, he was in a confident mood, seemingly expecting to be able to take a much more prominent role in his Madonna’s future. What happened there is unclear, but there seems to have been an ‘emotional crisis’, as Mehew puts it,


(#litres_trial_promo) or even an ‘explosion’.


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Mrs Sitwell had certainly reached a critical juncture in her life, necessitating a sort of spring-cleaning of her priorities. Louis understood nothing of the practical difficulties she faced in splitting up a home and family, protecting her surviving son, Bertie, securing employment, and launching into a new life alone, with little money. His habit of moralising on these occasions must have been very irritating, even to the sweet-natured, long-suffering matron. Did she become exasperated with his constant demands on her attention? Or was she provoked to tell him point-blank that his passion for her was too intense and/or inappropriately aimed? The available evidence (contained in some distressed notes from Stevenson written at Colvin’s house at Hampstead) certainly suggests Louis had overstepped a limit and been reprimanded:

Looking back upon some of my past in continuation of my humour of the last two or three days, I am filled with shame. [ … ] Try to forget utterly the R.L.S. you have known in the past: he is no more, he is dead: I shall try now to be strong and helpful, to be a good friend to you and no longer another limp dead-heavy burthen on your weary arms.


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Another letter reconstructs a strange scene between them the previous evening:

You did not know I was ill last night myself; but I was; and when I hid my eyes it was that I might not see your face grow great before me, as things do when one is feverish. The terrible sculptured impassivity of a face one loves, when it is seen thus exaggerated, frightens and pains one strangely.


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This is neurotic, but also very intimate; the clearest glimpse we get of Stevenson’s feverishly unbalanced love for his ‘Madonna’. But at this moment in her life Mrs Sitwell did not need a sick youth in hysterics; she needed a quiet and efficient helper. Colvin, for example. Was this the moment when Stevenson began, reluctantly, to accept that the person she really loved and intended to share her new life with was his hesitant, lisping friend?

Stevenson’s trip to London had been planned as a sort of informal induction into the city’s literary life. He joined the Savile Club (proposed by the ever-helpful Colvin – a founder member of the club – and seconded by Fleeming Jenkin and Andrew Lang) and he met Leslie Stephen, for whose Cornhill Magazine he was writing an essay on Victor Hugo. Edmund Gosse was a member of the Savile and cultivated the friendship of the new arrival, whom he remembered having met on board the Clansman eight years earlier. ‘Louis pervaded the club,’ he wrote later; ‘he was its most affable and chatty member; and he lifted it, by the ingenuity of his incessant dialectic, to the level of a sort of humorous Academe.’


(#litres_trial_promo) In a suit of blue sea-cloth, a black shirt and ‘a wisp of yellow carpet that did duty for a neck-tie’,


(#litres_trial_promo) Stevenson must have stood out emphatically against the leather club chairs. Henry James, who met him that summer, was certainly rather cool about the ‘shirt-collarless Bohemian’ he had been introduced to by Lang at lunch.

Though Stevenson himself records this summer as a time of depression and inertia, Gosse was impressed by his vitality – ‘[he was] simply bubbling with quips and jests’ and displayed ‘the silliness of an inspired schoolboy’. ‘I cannot, for the life of me, recall any of his jokes; and written down in cold blood, they might not be funny if I did. They were not wit so much as humanity, the many-sided outlook upon life.’


(#litres_trial_promo) Gosse left a vivid portrait of how Stevenson rarely sat or stood in conventional manner, but threw his legs over the arms of chairs, perched against bookshelves or sofa ends, or sat on the floor: ‘[he] would spend half an evening while passionately discussing some great question of morality or literature, leaping sideways in a seated posture to the length of [the] shelf, and then back again’. ‘In these years especially [ … ] he gave the impression of something transitory and unreal, sometimes almost inhuman.’


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Colvin was trying to set up a deal with the Portfolio for a series of essays by ‘Ah welless’, as he called him,


(#litres_trial_promo) that could be worked into a book later. Stevenson might have been expected to jump at this opportunity, but had reached such a low ebb that the amount of work Colvin was suggesting – an essay a month, or even an essay a quarter – seemed impossible. ‘Never, please, let yourself imagine that I am fertile,’


(#litres_trial_promo) he told him, adding rather preciously that he couldn’t write to a deadline but had to let his works ‘fall from me [ … ] as they ripen’.


(#litres_trial_promo) This was the man who in time became a veritable word-mill: at this moment in 1874 he was indistinguishable from a dilettante.

Not that Stevenson didn’t relish the idea of being published. Thinking over Colvin’s suggestion, he began to imagine:

Twelve or twenty such Essays, some of them purely ethical and expository, put together in a little book with narrow print in each page, antique, vine leaves about, and the following title.

XII (or XX) ESSAYS ON THE

ENJOYMENT OF THE WORLD:

BY ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

(a motto in italics)

Publisher

Place and date

Of course the page is here foreshortened but you know the class of old book I have in my head. I smack my lips; would it not be nice!


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The attention to peripherals is characteristic, so is the desire to eke out the minimum number of words into a book by expedients such as wide margins and decorations. In ‘My First Book’, published in 1894, Stevenson would write of the ‘veneration’ with which he used to regard the average three-volume novel of the time ‘as a feat – not possibly of literature – but at least of physical and moral endurance’.


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Stevenson loved to run ahead and gloat over possible future achievements. The only problem was that having done the gloating, he often found he had exhausted his enthusiasm for a project. His notebooks and letters are full of lists of chapters for books he never so much as planned out or wrote a line of. The lists, the naming, the brave idea of a title page, were often enough in themselves – or enough to convince himself that further work would be wasted. In his Prose Writings of Robert Louis Stevenson, Roger Swearingen lists 393 items, only twenty-seven of which are published, principal works. Even granted that many of the pieces listed are essays and stories which were gathered up into collections later, there are still scores of unfinished essays, unstarted stories, grand schemes, false starts: enough to have furnished two or three doppelgänger careers. With a little push this way or that, Stevenson might not have been known as the author of Treasure Island and Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde but as the playwright of The King’s Rubies, or the biographer of Viscount Dundee.

1874 was one of the years rich in these byways. Stevenson had already picked up and set down the ‘Four Great Scotsmen’ book, and in the autumn was thinking of a work of fantasy to be called ‘The Seaboard of Bohemia’. Since he links this to Shakespeare’s A Winter’s Tale, which was the model behind Prince Otto, ‘The Seaboard’ could have been an early intimation of that 1885 novel, which was also about Bohemia and had a character strongly based on Mesdames Garschine and Zassetsky. He was also thinking of putting together a first collection of short stories, utilising some of his 1868–69 ‘Covenanting Story Book’. The contents list he sent Colvin is almost comically upbeat; only three of the twelve titles were ‘all ready’; the rest either ‘want a few pages’ (i.e. only have a few pages?), need ‘copying’, ‘re-organization’ or are blatantly ‘in gremio’.


(#litres_trial_promo) ‘In gremio’ is where they stayed. Not one, apart from ‘The Two Falconers of Cairnstane’ – which was probably the original of ‘An Old Song’ – was ever published in the author’s lifetime.

Also not published in his lifetime, but begun in the summer of 1874, was one of Stevenson’s most original and most little-read books, Fables. He had been reviewing Edward Bulwer Lytton’s Fables in Song, which, he felt, lacked ‘the incredible element, the point of audacity with which the fabulist was wont to mock at his readers’.


(#litres_trial_promo) This was exactly what Stevenson transmitted in his own experiments with the form, three of which Colvin dates from this year: ‘The House of Eld’, ‘The Touchstone’ and ‘The Song of the Morrow’. The first of these is a satire on religious practice, clearly derived from Stevenson’s situation vis-à-vis Presbyterian Edinburgh. ‘The Song of the Morrow’ is a surreal, circular story about the longing for special knowledge (which of course the heroine does not achieve); ‘though power is less than weakness, power shall you have; and though the thought is colder than winter, yet shall you think it to an end’.


(#litres_trial_promo) Jorge Luis Borges, an ardent admirer of Stevenson, was particularly fond of these tales (of his own Parables he once said, ‘I owe that to Kafka and also to a quite forgotten book, to the fables posthumously published of Robert Louis Stevenson’


(#litres_trial_promo)), and it is easy to see how the collection as a whole fits in with Borges’s witty expositions of the self-conscious artificiality of fiction. ‘The Touchstone’, a story of two brothers seeking by very different means the hand of the same princess, manages to merge the fantastic or ‘audacious’ with a startling sort of realism about human nature, the very ‘tenderness of rough truths’ that Stevenson had found wanting in Lord Lytton.


(#litres_trial_promo) It is fascinating to think that these very early and highly original fictions lay in a drawer for more than twenty years while Stevenson laboured to perfect duds such as Deacon Brodie or Prince Otto.

And on what was Stevenson pinning his ambitions in 1874? Not any sort of fiction, but – bizarrely enough – ecclesiastical pamphleteering. ‘An Appeal to the Clergy of the Church of Scotland’


(#litres_trial_promo) was an extraordinary departure, a response to the abolition in August 1874 of the practice of Crown and other patronage in the Church of Scotland. Patronage was the issue behind the ‘Disruption’ of the 1840s which led to the forming of the Free Kirk; Stevenson’s suggestion after its abolition was that ministers of the established Church should begin to contribute money to the support of returning Free Church ministers to compensate the latter for the years during which they had been cut off from comfortable benefices. His idea was in fact rather ridiculous (and implied that he expected Free Kirk ministers to want to rejoin the established Church in significant numbers), but he was convinced that he would at least ‘have done good service in unveiling a sham and struck another death-blow at the existence of superannuated religion’.


(#litres_trial_promo) The writing was terrible – ‘Observe, I speak only of those …’


(#litres_trial_promo) ‘And the position, as I say, is one of difficulty’ – and if he hadn’t written so solemnly about this pamphlet in his letters, one would be tempted to think ‘An Appeal’ a joke thought up by Stevenson and Baxter during a wet afternoon at the Spec. But the mischievous RLS who had lived for Jink and jollity was, at this point in his life, almost eclipsed. When his twelve-page pamphlet was published (anonymously) in the spring of 1875, a copy was sent to every member of the Church’s General Assembly. ‘I think I am going to make a figure in Scotch ecclesiastical politics,’ Stevenson wrote absurdly to Frances Sitwell, though Colvin remarked later that the pamphlet received ‘no attention whatever’,


(#litres_trial_promo) and a commentator in the 1920s called ‘An Appeal’ ‘somewhat gratuitous, if not impertinent’.


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When the new term began at Edinburgh University in the autumn, Stevenson was condemned to study again. It was his last year as a student, and his least indolent one, spurred on by a huge bribe from his parents. On passing for the Bar, he was to receive from them a thousand pounds – the equivalent of about £50,000 today. Compared with his allowance of £84 a year (newly raised to that sum, and considered by Stevenson ‘very comfortable’


(#litres_trial_promo)), the prospect was one of real comfort and independence just around the corner. His parents of course expected him to practise the law once he qualified; they probably saw the thousand pounds (an advance on his patrimony) as a necessary amount for Louis to set himself up as an advocate. Louis on the other hand envisaged a future of personal leisure and earnest philanthropy. The only drawback was that he would have to spend much of the coming academic year locked in the ‘barren embraces’ of law books.


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Money continued to be the language most often spoken in Heriot Row. Thomas Stevenson was ill towards the end of 1874, with distressing indications that he might be subject to ‘some of the family ailments’.


(#litres_trial_promo) ‘My father is so really mad – I know no other word for it – that we have no pleasant time here,’ Stevenson wrote to Mrs Sitwell, relating how Thomas had railed about his wife in front of Louis and the servants. The older man’s mind was running on grievances, and speaking of inheritance, he cited circumstances which ‘superseded the call of blood; for instance did he think he had a son who thought as Tyndall [the materialist scientist] thought; he could not leave his money to him; he was not possessor of it, to so great an extent; he only held it in trust for the views in which he believed’.


(#litres_trial_promo) Thomas’s declaration expressed, his son felt, ‘the sense of his whole life’, and in response he promised solemnly ‘never to use a farthing of his money unless I am a Christian’. But Stevenson couldn’t stop going on from this spontaneous, nobly meant act of self-disinheritance to be pompous about it in his letter (which, by relating the incident, was already obliquely self-congratulatory), saying, ‘for me it will, of course, supersede the terms of any will written in ignorance, doubt or misapprehension [of my lack of belief]’.


(#litres_trial_promo) Skirting over the uncomfortable fact that he seems to have forgotten this resolution by the time his father died, or felt it was covered by his mitigation ‘I shall not let myself starve, of course’,


(#litres_trial_promo) the interview provides another example of how very much alike Louis and Thomas were in their principled pig-headedness and strong, rash speeches.

Stevenson was also heading for rhetorical meltdown with Mrs Sitwell. In the years he was in thrall to her, he gave her many different names, clearly a symptom of confusion about their relationship. First there was ‘Claire’, then ‘Madame’, ‘Madonna’, ‘Maud’ (from Tennyson’s poem, not Mrs Babington), and ‘Mother’; there was even a brief spell of ‘Lady Superintendent’ when Mrs Sitwell first took up that post at the College for Working Women. In Menton, Stevenson started to call her ‘Consuelo’, after the heroine of George Sand’s Mademoiselle Merquem: ‘Consuelo. Consolation of my spirit. Consolation.’


(#litres_trial_promo) In the book, Consuelo escapes an unhappy marriage and is free to marry the young man she really loves, but in real life the plot threatened to work out rather differently, and Stevenson was hard-pressed to know how to re-imagine his relationship with his newly-independent beloved. His confusion was obvious when he signed one letter, at Christmas 1874, ‘ever your faithful friend and son and priest’, having spoken of her as his ‘deity’, whose shrine he would tend forever. Wild though this is, Mrs Sitwell must have liked it, for she marked the letter ‘Keep this very safe for me.’


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Once Stevenson began to develop the mother – son metaphor in his letters to Mrs Sitwell, the results were astonishing:

And so, my beautiful and good and O surely not quite unhappy, mother of election, so you must be brave for my sake, and let me think of you with happiness and not with pain. Day by day, you become more to me; and day by day, I must acknowledge to myself how dependent I am on you for all that is good and beautiful in my poor life. This is the consolation I have given you always; and I now know no other: think of how I cling to you, Madonna, my mother; think of how you must be to me throughout life the mother’s breasts to suckle me, and be brave, dear, and be for me a brave mother; if I am to be a son, you must be a mother; and surely I am a son in more than ordinary sense, begotten of the sweet soul and beautiful body of you, and taught all that ever I knew pure or holy or of good report, by the contact of your sweet soul and lovely body [ … ] I long to be with you most ardently, and I long to put my arms about your neck and kiss you, and then sit down with my head on your knees, and have a long talk, and feel you smoothing my hair.


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He seems desperate in these months to reach an unchangeable state with his tormentingly lovely and devoted friend, writing to her of the ‘perpetual treasure’ of her heart and his belief that ‘you will never change to me any more; I believe it is safe’.


(#litres_trial_promo) ‘Surely between you and me, all that there is, is restful – is it not?’ he asked nervously in January 1875, half-hoping for the answer No. Electing her as ‘Mother’ might have been expected to help free the relationship from the vicissitudes of sexual longing, except that Stevenson was the first to admit that ‘it is not a bit like what I feel for my mother here’.


(#litres_trial_promo) He got much nearer to articulating his ideal when he rhapsodised to her about a photograph of the Parthenon pediment sculpture known as the Three Fates, in front of which he had shed tears with her on his last visit to London. The statue evoked for him ‘a great mythical woman, living alone among inaccessible mountain tops or in some lost Island in the pagan seas; [ … ] think dear, if one could love a woman like that once, see her once grow pale with passion, and once wring your lips out upon hers, would it not be a small thing to die?’


(#litres_trial_promo) It is an oddly aggressive fantasy, and, directed at a woman he once hoped to possess, tinged with vindictiveness.

Sadly, there was no great mythical woman around to turn Stevenson’s attention away from Frances Sitwell, love for whom was turning into festering misery. ‘You are all the women in the world to me,’ he told her in February, while admitting to Bob, ‘I have dropped out of my service to the second rates.’


(#litres_trial_promo) He still haunted howffs such as the Gay Japanee, but only to drink or take opium. All that winter he was seedy and in a ‘curiously impressionable state’, rather like the morbid melancholia of his early student days. A crippled girl ‘with that curious voice [ … ] of sexless and ageless deformity’, two lost children being walked to the police station by an officer, the trains curving out of Waverley station seen from high on the North Bridge; all these everyday things affected him queerly, ‘took hold of’ him, as he described it to Mrs Sitwell. ‘I don’t like being so sensitive in town, though,’ he said, ‘the impressions are more often painful than agreeable.’


(#litres_trial_promo) He was turning into the Caillebotte of Edinburgh – or perhaps its de Nerval. A prose poem that he wrote that year contains this vividly neurasthenic paragraph:

The dresses of harlots swayed and swished upon the pavement. Pale faces leaped out of the crowd as they went by the lights, and passed away like a dream in the general dream of the pallid and populous streets. The coarse brass band filled the air with a rough and ready melody; and the fall of alternate feet, and the turn of shoulders and swish of dresses, fell into time with it strangely. Face after face went by; swinging dress after dress brushed on the even stones; out of face after face the eyes stood forth with a sordid animal invitation.


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This was the preoccupied, unhappy young man whom Leslie Stephen took with him to Edinburgh Royal Infirmary one day in February 1875. Stephen was in the city to give two lectures on the Alps and had decided to pay a visit not only to ‘Colvin’s friend’, but to another young contributor to the Cornhill who was at that time a long-term patient at the Infirmary. William Ernest Henley, a twenty-six-year-old would-be writer suffering from necrosis of the bone, had arrived in Edinburgh eighteen months earlier. He had already had his left leg amputated below the knee (as a result of tuberculosis), and had been told the second foot was beyond cure, but Henley had heard of the pioneering work of the Edinburgh surgeon Joseph Lister, and came north in 1873 to be treated by him. Lister’s controversial belief was that antiseptics could be used to prevent as well as treat putrefaction, and under his care, with several operations and whole years of bed rest, Henley’s condition was gradually stabilising.

Stephen had been touched by the pathos of Henley’s situation and decided to take Stevenson along with him on his second visit to the gloomy old hospital in the hope that ‘Colvin’s friend’ might be able to lend Henley books and visit him. It was a judicious move: Stevenson was deeply impressed by Henley and wrote enthusiastically to Mrs Sitwell about the ‘bit of a poet’ he had just met:

It was very sad to see him there, in a little room with two beds, and a couple of sick children in the other bed; a girl came in to visit the children and played dominoes on the counterpane with them; the gas flared and crackled, the fire burned in a dull economical way; Stephen and I sat on a couple of chairs and the poor fellow sat up in his bed, with his hair and his beard all tangled, and talked as cheerfully as if he had been in a King’s Palace, or the great King’s Palace of the blue air. He has taught himself two languages since he has been lying there. I shall try to be of use to him.


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Henley’s intellectual energy, his enormous pleasure in talk and company, were evident from the first, as was his spirited response to his dire predicament and his tormentingly long stay in the hospital. Here was someone whom Louis could help, someone much worse off than himself, seriously ill, and without family or money. But the taint of patronage, which coloured the whole relationship, is also there from the start, with that rather priggish ‘I shall try to be of use to him.’ Stevenson’s second mention of Henley in his letters is to ‘my poet’, to Bob he called him ‘a poor ass in the infirmary’,


(#litres_trial_promo) and only a year later he was describing Henley to a woman he wanted to impress as his ‘pensioner in the hospital’.

The ‘poor ass’ had been writing some remarkable poems while laid up. Henley became famous later for poems that addressed the nation’s hunger for moral uplift, providing it with a classic text, ‘Invictus’, whose strongly accented rhythms and bracing sentiments have burned themselves into the popular imagination in the same way that Kipling’s ‘If –’ began to do two decades later:

It matters not how strait the gate

How charged with punishments the scroll,

I am the master of my fate

I am the captain of my soul.

‘Invictus’ was written in 1875 (and Stevenson must have been one of its first readers, for he was already quoting from it that year


(#litres_trial_promo)), but the ‘In Hospital’ sequence, written at approximately the same time, was very different. ‘In Hospital’ included free-verse portraits of Dr Lister, the nurses, the house-surgeon, the ‘scrubber’ and others, and impressionistic poems such as ‘Waiting’ and ‘Interior’. The dismal experience of being a long-term patient in a dark backroom, where the dripping cistern is the only indication of time passing, is perfectly conveyed in ‘Pastoral’, ‘Nocturne’ and ‘Vigil’:

Lived on one’s back,

In the long hours of repose

Life is a practical nightmare

Hideous asleep or awake.


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For the 1870s, when they were written, these poems were truly innovative, though by the time they were published in book form in 1888 Henley had given up writing in this vein.

One of the sequence, a sonnet called ‘Apparition’, is Henley’s often-quoted portrait of Stevenson that begins ‘Thin-legged! thinchested! slight unspeakably’, and ends:

A deal of Ariel, just a streak of Puck,

Much Antony, of Hamlet most of all,

And something of the Shorter Catechist.


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But another of Henley’s poems about Stevenson, ‘Ballade, R.L.S.’, not published until 1974, gives a rather more intimate portrait of

An Ariel quick through all his veins

With sex and temperament and style;

All eloquence and balls and brains;

Heroic and also infantile.

The affectionately bantering tone carries right through the poem to ‘Wise, passionate, swaggering, puerile’ in the last stanza. The forthright, critical spirit that Henley displays here was the very thing that attracted Stevenson to him. Opinionated, quarrelsome, with his huge laugh and super-sized vitality, Henley was like a sharper and more inventive Baxter, a boon companion whose restless intelligence was a match for Stevenson’s own.

The friendship was cemented by Stevenson’s inspired plan to take Henley out of hospital on a couple of occasions in a carriage (probably the swanky Stevenson barouche, of which Thomas was very proud). To a passer-by it must have been peculiar to see the stick-thin, boyish Stevenson carrying a burly, bearded one-legged man down the long staircase of the Infirmary and staggering out to where the vehicle waited. They drove out of the city to see the new spring greenery and the cherry blossom, stopping on bridges ‘to let him enjoy the great cry of green that goes up to Heaven out of the river beds’:

he asked (more than once) ‘What noise is that?’ – ‘The water.’ – ‘O’ almost incredulously; and then quite a long while after: ‘Do you know the noise of the water astonished me very much.’


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Henley remembered these drives all his life with intense happiness, and celebrated them in the last poem of his ‘In Hospital’ sequence, ‘Discharged’:

Carry me out

Into the wind and the sunshine,

Into the beautiful world.

O, the wonder, the spell of the streets!

The stature and strength of the horses,




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