McLynn Frank - Robert Louis Stevenson

Contents

Frank McLynn was educated at Wadham College, Oxford, and the University of London. He was Alistair Horne Research Fellow at St Antonys College, Oxford, in 198788, and now works as a full-time writer. He is the author of biographies of H. M. Stanley and Richard Burton, as well as several books relating to the Jacobite movement, including Charles Edward Stuart, which was shortlisted for the 1989 McVities Prize for Scottish Writer of the Year, and The Jacobite Army in England, which won the 1985 Cheltenham Prize for Literature. His most recent books are Hearts of Darkness: The European Exploration of Africa (also available in Pimlico) and Fitzroy Maclean.

A sensual Calvinist, a Tory radical, a consumptive celebrant of action, a passionate Scot who chose to live anywhere but Scotland. Not for nothing was Robert Louis Stevenson the author of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.

The greatest of Scottish novelists, Stevenson lived a life as extraordinary and as absorbing as his books. But it was a life tormented by an autocratic father, recurring illness, the prudery of the Victorian reading public and, most of all, the stresses imposed on him by his wife and stepchildren.

This powerful new study is published to mark the centenery of Stevensons death at the age of forty-four.

Thomas Stevenson, Louiss father

Margaret Stevenson, his mother

Margaret Stevenson with Louis, 1854

Louis (right), aged 8, with his cousin, Bob

Alison Cunningham (Cummy) in later life

The Stevenson family with Cummy (right) and two maids

Charles Robinsons design for Windy Nights in A Childs Garden of Verses

Edinburgh: The Lawnmarket, looking towards St Giles

Edinburgh: The shop on the corner of Leith Walk and Antigua Street where Louis bought stationery

Walter Cranes frontispiece illustration for Travels with a Donkey

RLS, aged 28. Etching by Wingman after a drawing by Fanny Stevenson

Sirons inn at Barbizon. A photograph taken in the 1870s

RLS. A portrait inscribed To CB (Charles Baxter)

17 Heriot Row

A letter to W.E.Henley

RLS. A portrait by Hawker of Bournemouth

Fanny Osbourne in 1880 before her marriage to RLS

RLS at Davos

Woodcut designed by Joe Strong for the frontispiece of The Silverado Squatters showing Louis and Fanny in their shack

Saranac Lake, New York State, 188788; (from left) Valentine, the French maid; a local help; Lloyd Osbourne; Fanny, RLS

Lloyd Osbourne, aged 20, in 1888

The schooner Casco off Vancouver

The Stevensons being entertained by King Kalakaua and his sister, Princess Liliuokalani, in Honolulu

RLS with Fanny and a missionary priest. A photograph taken by Lloyd Osbourne

At Sans Souci, Butaritari

The SS Janet Nicholl

RLS with Kalakaua (right), Fanny (left), his mother and Lloyd on board the Casco

The house at Vailima, Samoa

Family and servants, Vailima, 31 July 1892; with RLS are Joe Strong (with parrot); Mary, the Australian maid; Margaret Stevenson; Lloyd Osbourne; Fanny; Belle Strong and her son, Austin

RLS in Samoa

RLS dictating to Belle at Vailima, 1892

RLS with Fanny, Belle and members of his household on the verandah at Vailima

RLS playing his flageolet in bed at Vailima

RLS lying in state

Bas relief medallion by Augustus St Gaudens

RLSs tomb on Mt Vaea, Samoa

Photographic Acknowledgements

British Library 19; Edinburgh City Museums Lady Stairs House: 110, 1218, 2029, 31, 33, 34, 36; Mansell Collection: 11, 30, 32, 35.

This book has been written in the firm conviction that Robert Louis Stevenson is Scotlands greatest writer of English prose. It is usual to regard Sir Walter Scott as the man to whom this title is due, and it is true that, in terms of achievement, Scott takes the palm. Achievement and natural giftedness are, however, very different qualities: one may take the example of the two great Soviet composers Shostakovich and Prokofiev, of whom the formers achievement was more impressive but the latters intrinsic genius was greater. So it seems to me to be with Scott and Stevenson, and this truth has often been obscured by those who talk of Scott as Stevensons literary father. I am wholeheartedly behind Gerard Manley Hopkins, who told Robert Bridges: I think that Robert Lewis (sic) Stevenson shows more genius in a page than Scott in a volume. With Scott history and politics were always primary, storytelling secondary; with Stevenson it was the reverse, and perhaps this is why Kidnapped, Catriona and The Master of Ballantrae, despite their seemingly antiquarian Jacobite point of departure, still live today, while Waverley and Redgauntlet, for all their merits, have the musty smell of the historical museum. Scott has a ponderousness that sometimes touches depths of tragic profundity, but Stevenson is a shrewder judge of human nature, has a better sense of irony and humour and, above all, is a deeper psychologist and a more modern figure in his appreciation of the multiple ambiguities of the universe. Moreover, if ones taste runs to economy rather than prolixity, Stevenson will always win over Scott. Nothing in Scott is so tersely effective in the true Scottish idiom as Alan Brecks description of James More in Catriona: The mans as boss as a drum; hes just a wame and a wheen words.

One hundred years after his death, it seems that time has not been kind to Stevenson. Immediately after his death, his family and friends set to work to fashion the legend of RLS one of the few writers instantly familiar from his initials alone. Works of hagiography turned him into a Christ-figure in the true sense, combining the earthly sufferings of Jesus with the divine status of a son of God; in accounts like Graham Balfours authorised biography of 1901, his wife and her children played the role of ministering archangels. Arthur Quiller-Couch absurdly placed him in the same company as Shakespeare, Milton, Keats and Dickens: Surely another age will wonder over this curiosity of letters that for five years the needle of literary endeavour in Great Britain has quivered towards a little island in the South Pacific, as to its magnetic pole... Put away books and paper and pen... Stevenson is dead, and now there is nobody left to write for. The reaction to this nonsense, when it came in the 1920s, was severe. Biographers like Steuart and Hellman first revealed the feet of clay of his wife, Fanny, and for this service have never ceased to be reviled by a certain faction of RLS-lovers. More seriously, Stevensons own reputation as writer attracted the critical scalpel, and excerpts from three different adverse critics of the 1920s shows just how far the critical pendulum swung.

Frank Swinnerton, in the first great debunking book of criticism in 1924, accused Stevenson of being the literary equivalent of a singer who cannot hold a note: there were great moments in the Stevenson oeuvre, he claimed, but they were merely brilliant pieces in an indifferently executed mosaic, and it was because he had no central sustaining vision that RLS could never scale the heights of a Jane Austen, a Balzac or even an Alexandre Dumas pre: It was because they offered no new effects that The Great North Road and Heathercat and The Young Chevalier dried suddenly upon his pen, dead before ever they were begun... he could not make romance out of chopped hay, such as The Young Chevalier, with its bald, hopeless attempts to galvanise the Master into life again.