Robert Louis Stevenson
Life and Works Outline
Robert Lewis (later: ’Louis’) Balfour Stevenson was
born in Edinburgh on 13 November 1850. His father Thomas belonged to a
family of engineers who had built many of the deep-sea lighthouses around
the rocky coast of Scotland. His mother, Margaret Isabella Balfour, came
from a family of lawyers and church ministers. In 1857 the family moved
to 17 Heriot Row, a solid respectable house in Edinburgh’s New Town. At
the age of seventeen he enrolled at Edinburgh University to study engineering,
with the aim - his father hoped - of following him in the family firm.
However, he abandoned this course of studies and made the compromise of
studying law. He was called to the Scottish bar in 1875 but did not practice
since by now he knew he wanted to be a writer. In the university’s summer
vacations he went to France to be in the company of other young artists,
both writers and painters. His first published work was an essay called
‘Roads’, and his first published volumes were works of travel writing.
EARLY PUBLISHED WORKS: His first published volume,
An Inland Voyage (1878), is an account of the journey he made by canoe
from Antwerp to northern France, in which prominence is given to the author
and his thoughts. A companion work, Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes
(1879), gives us more of his thoughts on life and human society and continues
in consolidating the image of the debonair narrator that we also find in
his essays and letters (which can be classed among
his best works).
MEETING WITH FANNY, JOURNEY TO CALIFORNIA, MARRIAGE:
His meeting with his future wife, Fanny, was to change the rest of his
life. They met in July 1876 at Grez, a riverside village south-east of
Paris; he was twenty-five, and she was thirty-six, an independent American
‘new woman’, separated from her husband and with two children. Two years
later she decided to obtain a divorce and Stevenson set out for California.
His own experiences continue to be the subject of his next large-scale
work The Amateur Emigrant (written 1879-80, published 1894), an account
of this journey to California, which Noble (1985: 14) considers his finest
work. In this work of perceptive reportage and open-minded and humane observation
the voice is less buoyant and does not avoid observation of hardship and
suffering. The light-hearted paradoxes and confidential address to the
reader of the essays written a few years before (1876-77) and then published
as Virginibus Puerisque (1881) continue in the creation of his original
debonair authorial persona. Concluding this first period of writing based
closely on his
own direct experiences is The Silverado Squatters
(1883), an account of his three week honeymoon at an abandoned silver mine
in California.
SHORT STORIES: Stevenson’s first published fictional
narrative was ‘A Lodging for the Night’ (1877), a short story originally
published in a magazine, like other early narrative works, such as ‘The
Sire De Malétroit’s Door’ (1877), ‘Providence and the Guitar’ (1878),
and ‘The Pavilion on the Links’ (1880, considered by Conan Doyle in 1890
as ‘the high-water mark of [Stevenson’s] genius’ and ‘the first short story
in the world’, qu. Menikoff 1990: 342). These four tales were collected
in a volume entitled New Arabian Nights in 1882, preceded by the seven
linked stories originally called ‘Latter-Day Arabian
Nights’ when published in a magazine in 1878.
This collection is seen as the starting point for the history of the English
short story by Barry Menikoff (1987: 126). The Arabian stories were described
by critics of the time as ‘fantastic stories of adventure’, ‘grotesque
romances’ ‘in which the analytic mind loses itself’ (Maixner 1981: 117,
120), and are seen by Chesterton (1927: 169) as ‘unequalled’ and ‘the most
unique of his works’. They have an affinity with the Strange Case of Dr
Jekyll and Mr Hyde in their setting in the labyrinthine modern city, and
the subject matter of crimes and guilty secrets involving respectable members
of society. Stevenson continued to write short stories all his life, and
notable titles include: ‘Thrawn Janet’ (1881), ‘The Merry Men’ (1882),
‘The Treasure of Franchard’ (1883), ‘Markheim’ (1885), which, being a narrative
of the Double, has certain affinities with JH, ‘Olalla’ (1885), which like
JH originated in a dream and which also deals with the
possibility of degeneration. The above short
narratives were all collected in The Merry Men and Other Tales and Fables
in 1887. ‘Olalla’ was written in the period of just over two years (1885-7)
when Stevenson and Fanny were living in Bournmouth. Despite problems of
health and finances, this was a period of meetings with Henry James, W.E.
Henley and other literary figures, and when he wrote the long short-story
(published as a single volume), his ‘breakthrough book’, the Strange Case
of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886). Another collection Island Nights’ Entertainments,
tales with a South Sea setting, was published in 1893, including ‘The Bottle
Imp’ (1891), ‘The Beach of Falesà’ (1892, a long short story of
the same length as JH), and ‘The Isle of Voices’ (1893).
TREASURE ISLAND AND ‘CHILDREN’S LITERATURE’:
Another fortuitous turning-point in Stevenson’s life had occurred when
on holiday in Scotland in the summer of 1881. The cold rainy weather forced
the family to amuse themselves indoors, and one day Stevenson and his twelve-year-old
stepson, Lloyd (Fanny’s son by her first marriage), drew, coloured and
annotated the map of an imaginary ‘Treasure Island’. The map stimulated
Stevenson’s imagination and, ‘On a chill September morning, by the cheek
of a brisk fire’ he began to write a story based on it as an entertainment
for the rest of the family. Treasure Island (published in book form in
1883) marks the beginning of his popularity and his career as a profitable
writer, it was his first volume-length fictional narrative, and the first
of his writings ‘for children’ (or rather, the first of writings
manipulating the genres associated with children).
Later works that fit into this category are The Black Arrow (1883), A Child’s
Garden of Verses (1885), Kidnapped (1886) and its continuation Catriona
(1893).
NOVELS AND ROMANCES: Prince Otto (1885), his
second full-length narrative, is defined by Andrew Lang as ‘a philosophical-humouristical-psychological
fantasy’ (qu. Maixner 1981: 181). The action is provocatively set in the
imaginary state of Grünewald, an unusual choice for Stevenson, and
it was to historical Scotland (which had already provided the setting for
Kidnapped) that he turned for his next full-length ‘adult’ story, The Master
of Ballantrae (1889). This is a Doubles narrative in which the brothers
James and Henry have similarities with Jekyll and Hyde, not only in their
initials, but also because of the mixed personality of the ‘good’ character,
the constant return of the persecuting Double, and the simultaneous death
of the two antagonists. Both Calvino and Brecht consider it to be the best
of his works, and it is highly praised by writers as diverse as Henry James,
Walter Benjamin and André Gide. The novel that he was working on
when he died, Weir of Hermiston (published incomplete and posthumously
in 1896), is also set in Scotland in the not-too-distant past and has also
been often praised and seen as Stevenson’s masterpiece. The centre of the
story is the difficult relationship of an authoritarian father and a son
who has to assert his own identity (a theme present in many of Stevenson’s
works - and we may remember that Hyde is presented in some ways as Jekyll’s
son - and clearly a way he used of exploring and coming to terms with his
difficult relationship with his own father).
IN THE SOUTH SEAS: This very Scottish romance
was written when Stevenson was far away on the other side of the world.
His decision to sail around the Pacific in 1888, living on various islands
for short periods, then setting off again (all the time collecting material
for an anthropological and historical work on the South Seas which was
never fully completed), was another turning point in his life. In 1889
he and his extended family arrived at the port of Apia in the Samoan islands
and they decided to build a house and settle. This choice brought him health,
distance from the distractions of literary circles, and went towards
the creation of his mature literary persona:
the traveller, the exile, very aware of the harsh sides of life but also
celebrating the joy in his own skill as a weaver of words and teller of
tales. It also acted as a new stimulus to his imagination. He wrote about
the Pacific islands in several of his later works: Island Nights’ Entertainments
already referred to; In the South Seas (published
1896), essays that would have gone towards the
large work on the area that he planned; and two other narratives with a
South Sea setting: The Wrecker (1892), and The Ebb-Tide (1894). The former
is a mystery adventure set in various places
over the globe but centred in the South Seas
(indeed at Midway Island, Latitude 0°) with some dark tones, especially
in the fruitless search for treasure and the massacre of a ship’s crew
(for quite understandable reasons!). The Ebb-Tide (like ‘The Beach of Falesà’)
gives a realistic picture of the degenerate European traders and riffraff
who inhabited the ports of the Pacific islands. These South Sea narratives
mark a definite move towards a more harsh and grim realism (Stevenson himself
(qu. Maixner 1981: 452) acknowledges affinities of The Ebb-Tide with the
work of Zola).
DEATH: The authorial persona had changed from
the debonair flâneur of the early works, but retained a joy in his
craft and a consciousness in the shaping of his own life. He died in December
1894 and even shaped the manner of his burial: as he had wished, he was
buried at the top of Mount Vaea above his home on Samoa. Appropriately
it was his own short poem, Requiem’ (from an 1887 collection), that was
written on his tomb: ‘Under the wide and starry sky, / Dig the grave and
let me lie...’
RECEPTION: Stevenson’s establishes a personal
relationship with the reader, and creates a sense of wonder through his
brilliant style and his adoption and manipulation of a variety of genres.
Writing when the period of the three-volume novel (dominant from about
1840 to 1880) was coming to an end, he seems to have written everything
except a traditional Victorian novel: plays, poems, essays, literary criticism,
literary theory, biography, travelogue, reportage, romances, boys’ adventure
stories, fantasies, fables, and short stories. Like the other writers who
were asserting the serious artistic nature of the novel at this time he
writes in a careful, almost poetic style - yet he provocatively combines
this with an interest in popular genres. His popularity with critics continued
to the First World War. He then had the misfortune to be followed by the
Modernists who
needed to cut themselves off from any constraining
tradition; Stevenson was felt to be one of the most constraining of immediately-preceding
authors for his sheer ability, and one of the most insidious for his play
with popular genres and for his preference for ‘romance’ over the serious
novel. Condemned by Virginia and especially Leonard Woolf (not unconnected,
perhaps, with the fact that one of Stevenson’s great supporters had been
Virginia’s father), ignored by F.R.Leavis, he was gradually excluded from
the ‘canon’ of regularly taught and written-about works of literature.
The nadir comes in 1973 when Frank Kermode and John Hollander published
their Oxford Anthology of English Literature. With over two thousand pages
at their disposal in which to exemplify and comment on the notable poetry
and prose produced in the British Isles from ‘1800 to the Present’, not
one page is devoted to Stevenson - in the whole closely-printed two thousand
pages, Stevenson is not even mentioned once! Critical interest has been
increasing slowly since then, in some countries more than others (cf. Ambrosini
1991), though there have been few single-volume studies when compared with
the large numbers of books published every year on his contemporaries James
and Conrad. Stevenson, some might say, has been fortunate to escape such
attention. Reading this Mozartian and mercurial writer remains for many
as for Borges (1979), despite critical neglect, quite simply ‘a form of
happiness’.
© Richard Dury 1997
References
Ambrosini, Sonia (1991). ‘La fortuna critica
di Robert Louis Stevenson in Italia, con riferimento ad Italo Calvino’.
Laurea (M.A.) dissertation, Università di Bergamo.
Borges, Jorge Luis (1979). ‘Prefazione’. Robert
Louis Stevenson. L’isola delle voci. Parma: Ricci [‘fin dall’infanzia Robert
Louis Stevenson è stato per me una delle forme della felicità’]
Chesterton, G,K, (1927). Robert Louis Stevenson.
London: Hodder & Stoughton.
Maixner, Paul (ed.) (1981). Robert Louis Stevenson:
the Critical Heritage.
London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Menikoff, Barry (1987). ‘Class and Culture in
the English Short Story’ [review].
Journal of the Short Story in English 8: 125-139.
Menikoff, Barry (1990). ‘New Arabian Nights:
Stevenson’s experiment in Fiction’.
Nineteenth-Century Literature 43iii: 339-362.
Noble, Andrew (1985). From the Clyde to California.
Robert Louis Stevenson’s Emigrant Journey. Aberdeen: Aberdeen UP.