Biography
1
Robert Louis Stevenson
November 13, 1850-December 3, 1894
When one reads the nonfiction work of Robert Louis
Stevenson along with the novels and short stories, a more complete portrait
emerges of the author than that of the romantic vagabond one usually associates
with his best-known fiction. The Stevenson of the nonfiction prose is a writer
involved in the issues of his craft, his milieu, and his soul. Moreover, one
can see the record of his maturation in critical essays, political tracts,
biographies, and letters to family and friends. What Stevenson lacks,
especially for the tastes of this age, is specificity and expertise: he has not
the depth of such writers as John Ruskin, Walter Pater, or William Morris. But he was a shrewd observer of humankind,
and his essays reveal his lively and perspicacious mind. Though he lacked
originality, he created a rapport with the reader, who senses his enthusiastic
embrace of life and art. If Stevenson at first wrote like one who only skimmed
the surface of experience, by the end of his life he was passionately committed
to his adopted land of Samoa, to his own history, and to the creation of his
fiction.
Robert Louis Stevenson was born to Thomas and Margaret Isabella Balfour
Stevenson in Edinburgh on 13 November 1850. From the beginning he was sickly.
Through much of his childhood he was attended by his faithful nurse, Alison
Cunningham, known as Cummy in the family circle. She told him morbid stories
about the Covenanters (the Scots Presbyterian martyrs), read aloud to him
Victorian penny-serial novels, Bible stories, and the Psalms, and drilled the
catechism into him, all with his parents' approval. Thomas Stevenson was quite
a storyteller himself, and his wife doted on their only child, sitting in
admiration while her precocious son expounded on religious dogma. Stevenson
inevitably reacted to the morbidity of his religious education and to the
stiffness of his family's middle-class values, but that rebellion would come
only after he entered Edinburgh University.
The juvenilia that survives from his childhood shows an observer who was
already sensitive to religious issues and Scottish history. Not surprisingly,
the boy who listened to Cummy's religious tales first tried his hand at
retelling Bible stories: "A History of Moses" was followed by
"The Book of Joseph." When Stevenson was sixteen his family published
a pamphlet he had written entitled The Pentland Rising, a recounting of the
murder of Nonconformist Scots Presbyterians who rebelled against their royalist
persecutors.
In November 1867 Stevenson entered Edinburgh University, where he
pursued his studies indifferently until 1872. Instead of concentrating on
academic work, he busied himself in learning how to write, imitating the styles
of William Hazlitt, Sir Thomas Browne, Daniel Defoe, Charles Lamp, and Michel de Montaigne. By the
time he was twenty-one, he had contributed several papers to the short-lived
Edinburgh University Magazine, the best of which was a fanciful bit of fluff
entitled "The Philosophy of
Umbrellas." Edinburgh University was a place for him to play the
truant more than the student. His only consistent course of study seemed to
have been of bohemia: Stevenson adopted a wide-brimmed hat, a cravat, and a
boy's coat that earned him the nick-name of Velvet Jacket, while he indulged a
taste for haunting the byways of Old Town and becoming acquainted with its
denizens.
The most significant work from his student days was "On a New Form of
Intermittent Light for Lighthouses," a scientific piece that explained
the economical combination of revolving mirrors and oil-burning lamps. He read
it before the Royal Scottish Society of Arts on 27 March 1871 and received the
society's Silver Medal. The paper, a result of his engineering studies,
revealed his keen eye for technical detail. Only two weeks later, however,
Stevenson took a long walk with his father and declined to follow the family
profession of engineering; he meant to become a writer. Thomas Stevenson
insisted that the young man study law, and his son stuck to the bargain long
enough to receive, in 1875, a law degree he barely used.
It was not the first time that Stevenson disappointed his father. In
January 1873 Thomas Stevenson discovered some papers that seemed to suggest
that the young Stevenson was an atheist. Father and son had their worst falling
out. In letters to his student chums, especially to Charles Baxter, Stevenson called himself a "damned
curse" on his family. Though it is tempting to see his filial rebellion as
a classic Victorian melodrama, father and son did reconcile. The episode is
more important in having given the author one of the enduring themes of his
fiction. It runs from "An Old Song," a short story published in an
1877 issue of the weekly London, to the masterly romance Weir of Hermiston
(1896), left unfinished. It also threads through his nonfiction, in which it is
tempered by a tone of reconciliation. For example, in "Crabbed Age and Youth," written in 1877,
Stevenson seems to be looking for the common bond that father and son share.
In the decade after his university graduation, Stevenson steeped himself
in life, finding an essential core of good humor in people and things.
Something of the lightheartedness of this period survives in the humorous
essays in Virginibus Puerisque and Other Papers (1881), published when the
author was thirty-one years old. The essays in this collection had been
originally published from 1876 to 1879 in the Cornhill, Macmillan's, and London
magazines. The collection received little attention from the critics, but the
brilliant whimsy and ironic tone in these pieces were well matched to their
loose structures, modeled after Thomas Browne's and William Hazlitt's works,
which Stevenson admired. He pretends to analyze marriage in "Virginibus
Puerisque" and the relationship between old and young in "Crabbed Age
and Youth"; he mounts a pseudophilosophical defense of sloth in "An
Apology for Idlers" and humorously advocates the old method of
illuminating cities in "A Plea for Gas Lamps." In "Child's
Play," "El Dorado," and "Pan's Pipes," the author seems
more entranced with the flight of his own rhetoric than he does with the topic
at hand. There is a more serious side to the collection as well: in "Aes
Triplex" and "Ordered South" Stevenson deals with his physical
frailty and the trips away from Scotland's rugged winters he had taken for his
health. As a boy, Stevenson had been to the Continent several times, and he
grew up to love purposeless, rambling tours across Europe.
In An Inland Voyage (1878), written from a
journal he had kept of a trip down the French river Oisé with his friend Walter
Simpson, Stevenson glories in the slow pace of his vagabond life traveling
through France. The young author expresses pleasure at having been suspected of
being a Prussian spy by the French gendarmes and pride at having endured
hunger, cold, and misery on a journey that, from Stevenson's account, sounds
like one of the oddest and most aimless ever undertaken. The publication of An
Inland Voyage was significant: it was his first full-length book and was
reviewed kindly by the critics, though it did not enjoy as many printings as
his next travelogue did.
Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes (1879) has something of the same sense of
aimlessness and introspection as An Inland Voyage, but it lacks the other's
high spirits. Its more somber, melancholy tone is due to the fact that
Stevenson had fallen in love, and the relationship was a difficult one. On a
trip to a French artists' colony in July 1876 with his cousin Bob, Stevenson
had met Fanny Van de Grift Osbourne, a married woman, an American, and ten
years Stevenson's senior. She had been living in Paris and had come to the
sleepy summer colony of Grez to recuperate after the death of her son. By the
time she returned to America in 1878, Stevenson had fallen deeply in love with
her; he undertook his walking tour through the mountains in France in part as a
restorative to his emotional life.
In August 1879 Stevenson received a cable-gram from Fanny Osbourne, who
by that time had rejoined her husband in California. Details are vague, but
there seems to have been some last attempt by Osbourne to break with Stevenson;
the contents of the cable were never revealed by either to family or friends.
With the impetuosity of one of his own fictional characters, Stevenson set off
from Greenock, Scotland, on 7 August 1879 for America. On 18 August Stevenson
landed, sick, nearly penniless, in New York. From there he took an overland
train journey in miserable conditions to California, where he nearly died.
After meeting with Fanny Osbourne in Monterey, and no doubt depressed at the
uncertainty of her divorce, he went camping in the Santa Lucia mountains, where
he lay sick for two nights until two frontiersmen found him and nursed him back
to health. Still unwell, Stevenson moved to Monterey in December 1879 and
thence to San Francisco, where he fluctuated between life and death,
continually fighting off illness.
Stevenson characteristically turned the ocean-crossing and
transcontinental journey into grist for the literary mill. "The Story of a
Lie" and "The Amateur Emigrant" were two products of Stevenson's
trip. The former, a short story, was published in the New Quarterly Magazine in
1879. In the latter, a travelogue, Stevenson noted the harsher side of life,
especially for the immigrant passenger aboard ship sailing for America. Its
grim tone distressed his friends and family. Certain passages were considered
too graphic by the publisher and by Stevenson's father: Thomas Stevenson bought
all the copies of the already printed travelogue because he found it beneath
his son's talent. Stevenson also produced a travelogue about the train journey,
"Across the Plains," which was published as the title piece of his
1892 essay collection. The suppressed piece and "Across the Plains"
were eventually published together in The Amateur Emigrant from the
Clyde to Sandy Hook in 1895, the year after Stevenson's death.
When Stevenson left Scotland so abruptly he temporarily estranged his
parents. They were also upset about his relationship with a married woman.
However, hearing of their son's dire circumstances, they cabled him enough
money to save him from poverty. Fanny Osbourne obtained her divorce from her
husband, and she and Stevenson were married on 19 May 1880 in San Francisco.
For their honeymoon they headed to Mount Saint Helena in Napa Valley,
California--partly on the recommendation of friends concerned about Stevenson's
frail health and partly because their meager finances afforded them no more
than the rundown shack they were able to rent at Silverado, on the side of the
mountain.
Stevenson also turned this experience into literature: he wrote The
Silverado Squatters in 1880 from a journal he kept during the approximately two
months they spent at the abandoned mine site. It is a pleasant description of
their adventures and their domestic life and includes portraits of the people
living around Saint Helena and Calistoga in the Napa Valley. The work was first
serialized in the Century Magazine in 1883 and later that year was published as
a book.
When both husband and wife were well enough for extended travel, they
returned across the continent and set sail from New York, landing in Britain on
17 August 1880. Fanny Stevenson was soon accepted at the Stevenson family home
on 17 Heriot Row. She became a favorite of Stevenson's father and a staunch
ally of his mother, with whom she shared the duty of attending to Stevenson's
health.
In the next seven years, 1880 to 1887, Stevenson did not flourish as far
as his health was concerned, but his literary output was prodigious. Writing
was one of the few activities he could do when he was confined to bed because
of hemorrhaging lungs--"Bluidy Jack" he nicknamed the recurrent
bleeding. But, despite illness, he wrote some of his most enduring fiction,
notably Treasure Island (1883), Kidnapped (1886), Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll
and Mr. Hyde (1886), and The Black Arrow (1888). He was also busy writing
essays and collaborating on plays with W. E. Henley, the poet, essayist, and
editor who championed Stevenson in London literary circles and who became the model
for Long John Silver in Treasure Island. Although
he settled well into domestic life with Fanny, Stevenson's letters revealed
that he rejoiced in returning to his friends--to fellow artists such as Edmund Gosse and Henley, to Sidney Colvin, his longtime
literary adviser, and to Charles Baxter, the confidant from his university days who
remained his closest friend as well as financial adviser.
It was also a period of much traveling. His and Fanny's various
temporary residences in England, Switzerland, and southern France had more to
do with his probable tuberculosis (it was never diagnosed as such during his
lifetime) than with his love for travel. It was at Braemar in Scotland that
Treasure Island was begun, sparked by a map that Stevenson had drawn for the
entertainment of his twelve-year-old stepson Lloyd Osbourne. Stevenson had
quickly imagined a pirate adventure story to accompany the drawing, and a
friend arranged for it to be serialized in the boys' magazine Young Folks,
where it appeared from October 1881 to January 1882. By the end of the 1880s,
it had become one of the most popular and widely read books of the period. William Ewart Gladstone was supposed to have stayed awake all night to
read it, and Stevenson, no supporter of Gladstone, snapped upon learning the
news that the man would have done better "to attend to the imperial
affairs of England." In the seven-year period from 1880 to 1887
Stevenson's output also included essays on the craft of fiction. In these, in
which the reader might expect Stevenson to exhibit a more objective attitude
than he had in the travelogues, the author's cultivated discursiveness and
rambling rhetoric are not always successful.
Stevenson had a very uncomplicated view of art; he would have rewritten
Horace to assert that it was better to entertain than to instruct. Consequently
his critical essays on literature contain few sustained analyses of style or
content. They are more entertaining to read for the narrator's tone than they
are instructive about the fine points of writing. In "'A Penny Plain and
Two-pence Coloured'" (1884), Stevenson recounts how the seeds of his craft
were sown in childhood when he purchased Skelt's Juvenile Drama--a toy set of
uncolored or crudely colored cardboard characters (hence the title of
Stevenson's essay) who were the principal actors in a usually melodramatic
adventure. Stevenson maintained that his art, his life, and his mode of
creation were all in some part derivative of the highly exaggerated and
romantic world that he had inherited from Skelt's toy.
The same love for the exaggerated world of romance and adventure informs
the essays "A Gossip on Romance" (1882) and "A Gossip on a Novel
of Dumas's" (1887). Again Stevenson maintains that the better end of
reading and writing is entertainment, a claim that led some critics to accuse
him of escapism. French realists, such as Émile Zola, had begun to explore the
harsher sides of reality in their fiction. To some extent English realists, George Gissing, for example, and Americans, including William Dean Howells and Henry James, agreed in practice with the tenets of
realism. But the bulk of Stevenson's literary criticism is explicitly in favor
of the romance. He saw himself as the literary descendant of Sir Walter Scott. The best storytelling, he felt, had the
ability to whisk readers away from themselves and their circumstances.
It was particularly the tendency in French realism to dwell on
sordidness and ugliness that Stevenson rejected. In an 1877 essay,
"François Villon: Student, Poet, and Housebreaker," he castigates the
French medieval poet François Villon for lying about the poor: Villon had made
them out to be as greedy, covetous, and deceitful as he, but he had not the
courage to depict their nobility. Stevenson reiterated this theme, but with an
eye on the nineteenth-century French realist Zola, in his essay "The Lantern-Bearers" (1888). In this
piece he describes a childhood game wherein vacationing schoolboys belted tin
bull's-eye lanterns to their waists, buttoned their top-coats over the
lanterns, and met in some remote cove to reveal, at a password, the lit
lanterns beneath their coats. Stevenson likens the average person to the boy
who joyfully walks in the dark knowing he has a lantern "within" him.
All people are noble, although Zola (and realists like him) would dismiss them
as dreary lumps of humanity, seeing only the topcoats of mundane dullness,
completely missing the nobility that it is the artist's job to uncover.
Stevenson attempted to justify his attack upon realism on technical
grounds. In both "A Note on Realism" (1883) and "A Humble Remonstrance" (1884),
Stevenson analyzes different types of fiction. The 1883 essay maintains that
realism differs from romance only according to the writer's choice of style. In
"A Humble Remonstrance," Stevenson answers Henry James's claim in "The Art of Fiction"
(1884) that the novel competes with life. Stevenson protests that no novel can ever
hope to match life's complexity; it merely abstracts from life to produce a
harmonious pattern of its own. Henry James essentially agreed: he had made the point
earlier that reality was too immense to capture in art. At Bournemouth, where
the Stevensons lived from 1884 to 1887, James came calling in the spring of
1885 and was mistaken for a tradesman. Gradually, however, the two men became
close friends. James, in fact, was one of the few of her husband's associates
whom Fanny Stevenson trusted. Watchful of her husband's health, she resented
the friends who kept Stevenson up into the night.
Fanny Stevenson had never been content to remain on the outside of her
husband's craft; she coupled her nursing with editorial duties and alienated
some of her husband's friends in the process. Doubtless she had kept him alive
from Silverado to Bournemouth, but barring some of his lively friends from
seeing Stevenson caused some resentment. W. E. Henley had the worst falling out
with Fanny Stevenson, partly because of his drinking and partly because he
exhausted Stevenson by keeping him at work collaborating on plays that had
little promise. The major crisis occurred after the Stevensons had settled at
Saranac Lake, New York (the move was supposed to have been only a temporary
leave-taking of Scotland), on 3 October 1887. Henley accused Fanny, in a letter
marked confidential, of having stolen a story from Stevenson's cousin, ignoring
or forgetting that Fanny had permission to rework the story.
Stevenson was crushed, although he eventually forgave Henley, who never
admitted he had done anything wrong. What made the accusation harder to bear
was that it came on the heels of Thomas Stevenson's death. The elder Stevenson
had died after a long illness in May 1887, plunging his son into a deep
depression. In the spring of that year Stevenson contemplated arranging his
martyrdom in Ireland, intending to die at the hands of night riders, in the
theory that his death--he was by now the well-known author of the Strange Case of
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde--would draw attention to the injustices suffered there.
Partly out of that bizarre wish came Confessions of a Unionist (1921), an
explanation to Americans why Ireland should continue to be ruled by England.
Written in January 1888, it was rejected by Stevenson's American publisher and
never published during his lifetime.
In 1888 the main threads of Stevenson's art and life seemed to snap; he
wrote the last of his literary essays for Scribner's magazine by May, and his serious
quarrel with Henley had opened his eyes to betrayal. In a letter he wrote to
Baxter in May 1888, he sounded as though he was gambling for new stakes. He
informed his friend that he would take a South Seas cruise, one that he
expected to heal him emotionally as well as physically: "I have found a
yacht, and we are going the full pitch for seven months. If I cannot get my
health back ... 'tis madness; but of course, there is the hope, and I will play
big."
The Stevenson party--including Stevenson, his wife, his stepson, and his
mother--chartered the yacht Casco and sailed southwest from San Francisco to
the Marquesas Islands, the Paumotus, and the Society Islands, and thence
northward from Tahiti to the Hawaiian Islands by December of 1888. They camped
awhile in Honolulu, giving Stevenson time to visit Molokai's leper settlement
and to finish his novel The Master of Ballantrae (1889). In June 1889 they set
out southwest from Honolulu for the Gilbert Islands aboard the schooner
Equator. From there in December 1889 the Stevensons traveled to the island of
Upolu in Samoa. By that time Stevenson realized that his health could never
stand a return to Scotland, despite his friends' urgings and his own
homesickness. Gosse and Colvin, in particular, urged him to return. Only James
and Baxter seemed to react sympathetically to Stevenson's predicament: each
time that he ventured far from the equator he fell sick. In October 1890 the
Stevenson party returned to Samoa to settle, after a third cruise that took
them to Australia, the Gilberts, the Marshalls, and some of the remoter islands
in the South Seas.
Stevenson detailed his three cruises and adventures in the letters he
wrote to his friends, exulting in his newfound health, relating incidents of
life on the open sea, and capturing the flavor of life lived away from Western
civilization. From 1889 to 1894 his attitude toward the islanders in his
letters gradually changed from paternalism to sympathy for their troubles with
Western imperialism. He studied South Seas politics to espouse plans that he
believed would ensure harmony between the whites and the indigenous races of
the South Pacific. The naiveté of his early letters is absent from his
remarkable book of essays on the various island groups and their peoples--In the South Seas . Written from material he had
collected on the three cruises, the book reveals a much shrewder observer of
human nature and politics than the man who had written Confessions of a
Unionist. He viewed the islanders as humans who were not without a valid
culture of their own. They were not all cannibals, nor were they all noble
savages. As for politics, he advocated self-rule for the islands, a view that
did not always make him popular with contemporary travelers and settlers in the
Pacific. But he was never predictable. While he was in Hawaii, for example,
Stevenson felt himself drawn to the royalists--those who wanted the United
States out of Hawaii. But he resisted becoming involved in their intrigues
because he did not fully trust the royalists themselves.
In the South Seas had a checkered publishing history, not so much
because of the radical nature of its political views, but because it was not so
colorful as his former travelogues. Twenty-two copies for copyright purposes
were printed in 1890 by the London firm Cassell; an enlarged text, bearing the
Scribners imprint, was published in New York in 1896, and the first British
edition, from Chatto and Windus, appeared in 1900. Although Stevenson was
happy with his work, his friends back home thought he was wasting his talent on
politics when he should have been writing fiction. The complicated publishing
history of In the South Seas suggests that it may have been too serious for
those who wanted Stevenson to remain the introspective traveler he had been
when he was younger. The work, however, did find an admirer in Joseph Conrad, who highly approved of its form and its
portrayal of life on the edge of civilization.
While Stevenson was in Hawaii, in June 1889 he visited the government's
leper colony on Molokai. According to Fanny Stevenson, her husband had first
gone to the island on a fact-finding mission, expecting to uncover the
"truth" about Father Damien De Veuster, the missionary to the lepers
who had died only a month earlier. His admiration was awakened by firsthand
reports of the man's courage and resourcefulness which contradicted
then-current rumors that the priest had contracted leprosy through intimacies
with female patients. In Sydney, Australia, eight months later Stevenson read
an attack in the religious press upon Damien by a Dr. Charles M. Hyde, a former
missionary to Molokai, who maintained that these rumors were true. The letter
by Hyde was circulated throughout the South Seas and the world. Stevenson was
so provoked that he wrote his famous Father Damien: An Open Letter
to the Reverend Dr. Hyde of Honolulu (1890) in a hotel lobby, in
uncharacteristic haste.
His defense of Father Damien was curious. It did not deny Hyde's charges
so much as it suggested that their publication was an indication of the
meanness, cowardice, and jealousy of Hyde. Though defending Damien DeVeuster's
character was a way for Stevenson to identify with the good work of the
missionary priest, the defense involved some risk. Stevenson fully expected to
be sued and financially ruined by Hyde--by a libel suit he knew, as a lawyer,
he had little chance of winning. Luckily for the Stevensons, Hyde contented
himself with dismissing the author as a crank. The episode had a profound
effect on Stevenson and his work on the South Seas. He continued to champion
the oppressed even when it seemed to threaten his safety and security.
While he lived in the Pacific, Stevenson kept up his usual impressive
literary output. From 1888 to 1894 the author finished The Wrecker (1892), a
collaboration with Lloyd Osbourne; Island Nights' Entertainments (1893),
containing "The Beach of Falesá," "The Bottle Imp," and
"The Isle of Voices"; and The Ebb-Tide (1894), again a collaboration
with his stepson. He also completed the sequel to Kidnapped, Catriona,
published in 1893. At his death in December 1894 two novels lay unfinished--St.
Ives (1897), a pot-boiler about a French prisoner who escapes from a Scottish
jail to England, and Weir of Hermiston (1896), generally acknowledged to be a
master-piece although it is a fragment. In his last years he also worked
industriously at his nonfiction. With In the South Seas finished, he completed A Footnote to History, published in 1892. At his
death Records of a Family of Engineers (1916) lay unfinished.
Stevenson had gathered material on Samoa for In the South Seas but later
realized that he had enough for more than one book. The Samoan political
situation in the late 1880s and early 1890s was complex. Historically the
Samoans had chosen a king from among several tribal high chiefs. Because of
friction over trade in the islands, Germany, England, and the United States had
attempted but aborted a plan to divide the islands into protectorates. In 1888
the Germans banished Laupepa, one of three tribal chiefs in contention for
kingship, the other two being Tamasese and Mataafa. After a short war between
the other two chiefs (in which some Germans died) the three Western nations
formed a tripartite consulate and established Laupepa as king of Samoa and
Mataafa as vice-king. Arguing that Mataafa had, by rights and power, more claim
to kingship than his rival, Stevenson advocated Mataafa's cause in A Footnote
to History and continued writing letters to several British newspapers well
into 1894, stirring up a hornet's nest of controversy for himself in Samoa. His
book earned him the resentment of the Germans and threats of deportation from
harassed British officials. When the Germans banished Mataafa to the Marshall
Islands in 1893, Stevenson's agitation could do no more than secure the release
of some of Mataafa's supporters who were jailed in Apia.
In A Footnote to History Stevenson advocated justice and compromise
among the Samoan factions. He wanted to bring the affair before the public, to
acquaint Westerners with the effects of imperialistic policies they tacitly
supported. Though he apologized for the tempest-in-a-teapot nature of the
rebellion, he believed A Footnote to History performed a service for the
beleaguered country.
In the last two years of his life Stevenson's letters to his friends in
Great Britain increasingly revealed his longing for Scotland and the
frustration he felt at the thought of never seeing his homeland again. To S. R.
Crockett he wrote, "I shall never see Auld Reekie. I shall never set my
foot again upon the heather. Here I am until I die, and here will I be buried.
The word is out and the doom written." It may have been this preoccupation
with Scotland and its history that made Weir of Hermiston so powerful a tale. With
its theme of filial rebellion, its evocation of Scotland's topography,
language, and legends, it is a masterly fragment and the most Scottish of all
his works. Records of a Family of Engineers, a biographical work that recounts
his grandfather's engineering feats, reveals that Stevenson was trying to find
a bridge back to his own family and finally coming to terms with his earlier
rejection of the engineering profession. In Records of a Family of Engineers he
depicts his grandfather as a scientist-artist, linking his own growing
objectivity in his style of writing to the technical yet imaginative work of
his forebears. Increasingly Stevenson's art embraced more of the everyday world
and drew on his experiences in the South Seas for its strength. His South Seas
work, both nonfiction and fiction, gradually grew more powerful than the
earlier works for which he is, ironically, more famous. When he died of a
stroke on 3 December 1894 in his house at Vailima, Samoa, he was at the height
of his creative powers.
The Samoan faction that he had helped to free from jail assembled at his
house to cut a path to the top of Mt. Vaea, where he was buried. He had been
rich, famous, an adventurer, and a legend in his homeland; the report of his
death created a small shock wave throughout the literary world. Almost
immediately the Stevenson family began attempts to glorify the memory of
Stevenson, and this action was to work against the writer's literary
reputation. They dickered over who would best edit Stevenson's letters. Baxter
and James steered clear of the unenviable task, which fell to Sidney Colvin.
There also appeared memoirs by Stevenson's friends who did him the disservice
of writing hagiography instead of biography. The inevitable reaction of the
succeeding literary generation to this presentation of Stevenson as a demisaint
was severe. The worst of it amounted to speculation about Edinburgh prostitutes
whom the youthful Stevenson might have known and the exact amount of
impropriety in Stevenson's relationship with Fanny before their marriage. From
personal attacks on Stevenson, critics turned to style: he was accused of blind
imitation, having nothing to say and saying it oddly, and of promoting a
spineless escapism.
What Stevenson was left with was a literary reputation based solely on
his romances--a reputation that solidly ignored his South Seas fiction, his
essays, his travelogues about America and the Pacific, and the letters that
revealed his enthusiasm for his craft and for the islanders of the South Pacific.
Because of this failure to acknowledge his breadth as a writer, he is often
remembered primarily as an author for children; his reputation as the author of
Treasure Island has prevented many adults from reading any of his other works.
But he may yet survive the injustice. G. K. Chesterton's 1927 book Robert Louis Stevenson restored a
sense of balance to the examination of the author's life and letters. Recent
studies have turned more attention to Stevenson's less-well-known works,
attempting to integrate the various strata of his literary output.
Consequently, Stevenson has risen in stature since the early 1900s. The
centennial of his death may bring a scholarly reappraisal of Stevenson that
will move him from the second rank of Victorian authors to the first.
Written by: Richard A. Boyle, Whiting, Indiana
Source: Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 57: Victorian Prose Writers
After 1867. A Bruccoli Clark Layman Book. Edited by William B. Thesing,
University of South Carolina. Gale Research, 1987. pp. 294-305.
Source Database: Dictionary of Literary Biography
This page was created and is mantained by Andreas
Teuber. For further information, please click on Andreas Teuber's Home Page
© http://people.brandeis.edu/~teuber/stevensonbio.html
Other interesting biographies: Next [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7]
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