Robert Louis Stevenson احتفال قوقل

Robert Louis StevensonNovember 13, 1850-December 3, 1894
Robert Louis Stevenson احتفال قوقل Stevens

Nationality: Scottish
Birth Date: November 13, 1850
Death Date: December 3, 1894

Genre(s): NOVELS; POETRY

Table of Contents:

Biographical and Critical Essay
"The Philosophy of Umbrellas"
"On a New Form of Intermittent Light for Lighthouses"
"Crabbed Age and Youth"
An Inland Voyage
Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes
The Amateur Emigrant from the Clyde to Sandy Hook
Treasure Island
"The Lantern-Bearers"
"A Humble Remonstrance"
In the South Seas
Father Damien: An Open Letter to the Reverend Dr. Hyde of Honolulu
A Footnote to History
Writings by the Author
Further Readings about the Author
About This Essay

Jump to Additional DLB Essay(s) on This Author:

Victorian Novelists After 1885
British Short-Fiction Writers, 1880-1914: The Romantic Tradition
British Children's Writers, 1880-1914
British Travel Writers, 1876-1909

WRITINGS BY THE AUTHOR:

Books

The Pentland Rising (Edinburgh: Privately printed, 1866).

An Appeal to the Clergy (Edinburgh & London: Blackwood, 1875).

An Inland Voyage (London: Kegan Paul, 1878; Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1883).

Edinburgh: Picturesque Notes, with Etchings (London: Seeley, Jackson & Halliday, 1879; New York: Macmillan, 1889).

Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes (London: Kegan Paul, 1879; Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1879).

Virginibus Puerisque and Other Papers (London: Kegan Paul, 1881; New York: Collier, 1881).

Familiar Studies of Men and Books (London: Chatto & Windus, 1882; New York: Dodd, Mead, 1887).

New Arabian Nights (2 volumes, London: Chatto & Windus, 1882; 1 volume, New York: Holt, 1882).

The Silverado Squatters (London: Chatto & Windus, 1883; New York: Munro, 1884).

Treasure Island (London: Cassell, 1883; Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1884).

A Child's Garden of Verses (London: Longmans, Green, 1885; New York: Scribners, 1885).

More New Arabian Nights: The Dynamiter, by Stevenson and Fanny Van de Grift Stevenson (London: Longmans, Green, 1885; New York: Holt, 1885).

Macaire (Edinburgh: Privately printed, 1885).

Prince Otto: A Romance (London: Chatto & Windus, 1885; Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1886).

Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (London: Longmans, Green, 1886; New York: Scribners, 1886).

Kidnapped (London: Cassell, 1886; New York: Scribners, 1886).

Some College Memories (Edinburgh: University Union Committee, 1886; New York: Mansfield & Wessels, 1899).

The Merry Men and Other Tales and Fables (London: Chatto & Windus, 1887; New York: Scribners, 1887).

Underwoods (London: Chatto & Windus, 1887; New York: Scribners, 1887).

Memories and Portraits (London: Chatto & Windus, 1887; New York: Scribners, 1887).

Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin (London & New York: Longmans, Green, 1887).

The Misadventures of John Nicholson: A Christmas Story (New York: Lovell, 1887).

The Black Arrow: A Tale of the Two Roses (London: Cassell, 1888; New York: Scribners, 1888).

The Master of Ballantrae: A Winter's Tale (London: Cassell, 1889; New York: Scribners, 1889).

The Wrong Box, by Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne (London: Longmans, Green, 1889; New York: Scribners, 1889).

Ballads (London: Chatto & Windus, 1890; New York: Scribners, 1890).

Father Damien: An Open Letter to the Reverend Dr. Hyde of Honolulu (London: Chatto & Windus, 1890; Portland, Maine: Mosher, 1897).

Across the Plains, With Other Memories and Essays (London: Chatto & Windus, 1892; New York: Scribners, 1892).

A Footnote to History: Eight Years of Trouble in Samoa (London: Cassell, 1892; New York: Scribners, 1892).

Three Plays: Deacon Brodie, Beau Austin, Admiral Guinea, by Stevenson and W. E. Henley (London: Nutt, 1892; New York: Scribners, 1892).

The Wrecker, by Stevenson and Osbourne (London: Cassell, 1892; New York: Scribners, 1892).

Island Nights' Entertainments: Consisting of The Beach of Falesá, The Bottle Imp, The Isle of Voices (London: Cassell, 1893; New York: Scribners, 1893).

Catriona: A Sequel to Kidnapped (London: Cassell, 1893; New York: Scribners, 1893).

The Ebb-Tide: A Trio and a Quartette, by Stevenson and Osbourne (Chicago: Stone & Kimball, 1894; London: Heinemann, 1894).

The Body-Snatcher (New York: Merriam, 1895).

The Amateur Emigrant from the Clyde to Sandy Hook (Chicago: Stone & Kimball, 1895; New York: Scribners, 1899).

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, with Other Fables (London: Longmans, Green, 1896).

Weir of Hermiston: An Unfinished Romance (London: Chatto & Windus, 1896; New York: Scribners, 1896).

A Mountain Town in France: A Fragment (New York & London: Lane, 1896).

Songs of Travel and Other Verses (London: Chatto & Windus, 1896).

In the South Seas (New York: Scribners, 1896; London: Chatto & Windus, 1900).

St. Ives: Being the Adventures of a French Prisoner in England (New York: Scribners, 1897; London: Heinemann, 1898).

The Morality of the Profession of Letters (Gouverneur, N.Y.: Brothers of the Book, 1899).

A Stevenson Medley, edited by S. Colvin (London: Chatto & Windus, 1899).

Essays and Criticisms (Boston: Turner, 1903).

Prayers Written at Vailima, With an Introduction by Mrs. Stevenson (New York: Scribners, 1904; London: Chatto & Windus, 1905).

The Story of a Lie and Other Tales (Boston: Turner, 1904).

Essays of Travel (London: Chatto & Windus, 1905).

Essays in the Art of Writing (London: Chatto & Windus, 1905).

Essays, edited by W. L. Phelps (New York: Scribners, 1906).

Lay Morals and Other Papers (London: Chatto & Windus, 1911).

Records of a Family of Engineers (London: Chatto & Windus, 1916).

The Waif Woman (London: Chatto & Windus, 1916).

On the Choice of a Profession (London: Chatto & Windus, 1916).

Poems Hitherto Unpublished, edited by G. S. Hellman, 2 volumes (Boston: Bibliophile Society, 1916).

New Poems and Variant Readings (London: Chatto & Windus, 1918).

Robert Louis Stevenson: Hitherto Unpublished Prose Writings, edited by H. H. Harper (Boston: Bibliophile Society, 1921).

When the Devil Was Well, edited by William P. Trent (Boston: Bibliophile Society, 1921).

Confessions of a Unionist: An Unpublished Talk on Things Current, Written in 1888, edited by F. V. Livingston (Cambridge, Mass.: Privately printed, 1921).

The Best Thing in Edinburgh: An Address to the Speculative Society of Edinburgh in March 1873, edited by K. D. Osbourne (San Francisco: Howell, 1923).

Selected Essays, edited by H. G. Rawlinson (London: Oxford University Press, 1923).

Castaways of Soledad: A Manuscript by Stevenson Hitherto Unpublished, edited by Hellman (Buffalo: Privately printed, 1928).

Monmouth: A Tragedy, edited by C. Vale (New York: Rudge, 1928).

The Charity Bazaar: An Allegorical Dialogue (Westport, Conn.: Georgian Press, 1929).

The Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson, edited by M. Elwin (London: Macdonald, 1950).

Salute to RLS, edited by F. Holland (Edinburgh: Cousland, 1950).

Tales and Essays, edited by G. B. Stern (London: Falcon, 1950).

Silverado Journal, edited by John E. Jordan (San Francisco: Book Club of California, 1954).

From Scotland to Silverado, edited by James D. Hart (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1966).

The Amateur Emigrant with Some First Impressions of America, edited by Roger G. Swearingen, 2 volumes (Ashland, Oreg.: Osborne, 1976-1977).

A Newly Discovered Long Story "An Old Song" and aPreviously Unpublished Short Story "Edifying Letters of the RutherfordFamily," edited by Roger G. Swearingen (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1982; Paisley, Scotland: Wilfion, 1982).

Robert Louis Stevenson and "The Beach of Falesé": A Study in Victorian Publishing with the Original Text, edited by Barry Menikoff (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1984).

Collections

The Works of R. L. Stevenson, Edinburgh Edition, 28 volumes, edited by Sidney Colvin (London: Chatto & Windus, 1894-1898).

The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, VailimaEdition, 26 volumes, edited by Lloyd Osbourne and Fanny Van de GriftStevenson (London: Heinemann, 1922-1923; New York: Scribners,1922-1923).

The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Tusitala Edition, 35 volumes (London: Heinemann, 1924).

The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, South Seas Edition, 32 volumes (New York: Scribners, 1925).

Letters

Sidney Colvin, ed., The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson to His Family and Friends, 2 volumes (London: Methuen, 1899; New York: Scribners, 1899).

When one reads the nonfiction workof Robert Louis Stevenson along with the novels and short stories, amore complete portrait emerges of the author than that of the romanticvagabond one usually associates with his best-known fiction. TheStevenson of the nonfiction prose is a writer involved in the issues ofhis craft, his milieu, and his soul. Moreover, one can see the recordof his maturation in critical essays, political tracts, biographies,and letters to family and friends. What Stevenson lacks, especially forthe tastes of this age, is specificity and expertise: he has not thedepth of such writers as John Ruskin, Walter Pater, or William Morris.But he was a shrewd observer of humankind, and his essays reveal hislively and perspicacious mind. Though he lacked originality, he createda rapport with the reader, who senses his enthusiastic embrace of lifeand art. If Stevenson at first wrote like one who only skimmed thesurface of experience, by the end of his life he was passionatelycommitted to his adopted land of Samoa, to his own history, and to thecreation of his fiction.RobertLouis Stevenson was born to Thomas and Margaret Isabella BalfourStevenson in Edinburgh on 13 November 1850. From the beginning he wassickly. Through much of his childhood he was attended by his faithfulnurse, Alison Cunningham, known as Cummy in the family circle. She toldhim morbid stories about the Covenanters (the Scots Presbyterianmartyrs), read aloud to him Victorian penny-serial novels, Biblestories, and the Psalms, and drilled the catechism into him, all withhis parents' approval. Thomas Stevenson was quite a storytellerhimself, and his wife doted on their only child, sitting in admirationwhile her precocious son expounded on religious dogma. Stevensoninevitably reacted to the morbidity of his religious education and tothe stiffness of his family's middle-class values, but that rebellionwould come only after he entered Edinburgh University.Thejuvenilia that survives from his childhood shows an observer who wasalready sensitive to religious issues and Scottish history. Notsurprisingly, the boy who listened to Cummy's religious tales firsttried his hand at retelling Bible stories: "A History of Moses" wasfollowed by "The Book of Joseph." When Stevenson was sixteen his familypublished a pamphlet he had written entitled The Pentland Rising, a recounting of the murder of Nonconformist Scots Presbyterians who rebelled against their royalist persecutors.InNovember 1867 Stevenson entered Edinburgh University, where he pursuedhis studies indifferently until 1872. Instead of concentrating onacademic work, he busied himself in learning how to write, imitatingthe 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 thanthe student. His only consistent course of study seemed to have been ofbohemia: Stevenson adopted a wide-brimmed hat, a cravat, and a boy'scoat that earned him the nick-name of Velvet Jacket, while he indulgeda taste for haunting the byways of Old Town and becoming acquaintedwith 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 ofrevolving mirrors and oil-burning lamps. He read it before the RoyalScottish Society of Arts on 27 March 1871 and received the society'sSilver Medal. The paper, a result of his engineering studies, revealedhis keen eye for technical detail. Only two weeks later, however,Stevenson took a long walk with his father and declined to follow thefamily profession of engineering; he meant to become a writer. ThomasStevenson insisted that the young man study law, and his son stuck tothe bargain long enough to receive, in 1875, a law degree he barelyused.It wasnot the first time that Stevenson disappointed his father. In January1873 Thomas Stevenson discovered some papers that seemed to suggestthat the young Stevenson was an atheist. Father and son had their worstfalling out. In letters to his student chums, especially to Charles Baxter,Stevenson called himself a "damned curse" on his family. Though it istempting to see his filial rebellion as a classic Victorian melodrama,father and son did reconcile. The episode is more important in havinggiven the author one of the enduring themes of his fiction. It runsfrom "An Old Song," a short story published in an 1877 issue of theweekly London, to the masterly romance Weir of Hermiston(1896), left unfinished. It also threads through his nonfiction, inwhich 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 thedecade after his university graduation, Stevenson steeped himself inlife, finding an essential core of good humor in people and things.Something of the lightheartedness of this period survives in thehumorous essays in Virginibus Puerisque and Other Papers(1881), published when the author was thirty-one years old. The essaysin this collection had been originally published from 1876 to 1879 inthe Cornhill, Macmillan's, and London magazines.The collection received little attention from the critics, but thebrilliant whimsy and ironic tone in these pieces were well matched totheir loose structures, modeled after Thomas Browne's and WilliamHazlitt's works, which Stevenson admired. He pretends to analyzemarriage in "Virginibus Puerisque" and the relationship between old andyoung in "Crabbed Age and Youth"; he mounts a pseudophilosophicaldefense of sloth in "An Apology for Idlers" and humorously advocatesthe old method of illuminating cities in "A Plea for Gas Lamps." In"Child's Play," "El Dorado," and "Pan's Pipes," the author seems moreentranced with the flight of his own rhetoric than he does with thetopic at hand. There is a more serious side to the collection as well:in "Aes Triplex" and "Ordered South" Stevenson deals with his physicalfrailty and the trips away from Scotland's rugged winters he had takenfor his health. As a boy, Stevenson had been to the Continent severaltimes, and he grew up to love purposeless, rambling tours acrossEurope.In An Inland Voyage (1878), written from a journal he had kept of a trip down the Frenchriver Oisé with his friend Walter Simpson, Stevenson glories in theslow pace of his vagabond life traveling through France. The youngauthor expresses pleasure at having been suspected of being a Prussianspy by the French gendarmes and pride at having endured hunger, cold,and misery on a journey that, from Stevenson's account, sounds like oneof the oddest and most aimless ever undertaken. The publication of An Inland Voyagewas significant: it was his first full-length book and was reviewedkindly by the critics, though it did not enjoy as many printings as hisnext 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 toneis due to the fact that Stevenson had fallen in love, and therelationship was a difficult one. On a trip to a French artists' colonyin July 1876 with his cousin Bob, Stevenson had met Fanny Van de GriftOsbourne, a married woman, an American, and ten years Stevenson'ssenior. She had been living in Paris and had come to the sleepy summercolony of Grez to recuperate after the death of her son. By the timeshe returned to America in 1878, Stevenson had fallen deeply in lovewith her; he undertook his walking tour through the mountains in Francein part as a restorative to his emotional life.InAugust 1879 Stevenson received a cable-gram from Fanny Osbourne, who bythat time had rejoined her husband in California. Details are vague,but there seems to have been some last attempt by Osbourne to breakwith Stevenson; the contents of the cable were never revealed by eitherto family or friends. With the impetuosity of one of his own fictionalcharacters, Stevenson set off from Greenock, Scotland, on 7 August 1879for America. On 18 August Stevenson landed, sick, nearly penniless, inNew York. From there he took an overland train journey in miserableconditions to California, where he nearly died. After meeting withFanny Osbourne in Monterey, and no doubt depressed at the uncertaintyof her divorce, he went camping in the Santa Lucia mountains, where helay sick for two nights until two frontiersmen found him and nursed himback to health. Still unwell, Stevenson moved to Monterey in December1879 and thence to San Francisco, where he fluctuated between life anddeath, continually fighting off illness.Stevensoncharacteristically turned the ocean-crossing and transcontinentaljourney into grist for the literary mill. "The Story of a Lie" and "TheAmateur Emigrant" were two products of Stevenson's trip. The former, ashort story, was published in the New Quarterly Magazine in1879. In the latter, a travelogue, Stevenson noted the harsher side oflife, especially for the immigrant passenger aboard ship sailing forAmerica. Its grim tone distressed his friends and family. Certainpassages were considered too graphic by the publisher and byStevenson's father: Thomas Stevenson bought all the copies of thealready printed travelogue because he found it beneath his son'stalent. Stevenson also produced a travelogue about the train journey,"Across the Plains," which was published as the title piece of his 1892essay collection. The suppressed piece and "Across the Plains" wereeventually published together in The Amateur Emigrant from the Clyde to Sandy Hook in 1895, the year after Stevenson's death.WhenStevenson left Scotland so abruptly he temporarily estranged hisparents. They were also upset about his relationship with a marriedwoman. However, hearing of their son's dire circumstances, they cabledhim enough money to save him from poverty. Fanny Osbourne obtained herdivorce from her husband, and she and Stevenson were married on 19 May1880 in San Francisco. For their honeymoon they headed to Mount SaintHelena in Napa Valley, California--partly on the recommendation offriends concerned about Stevenson's frail health and partly becausetheir meager finances afforded them no more than the rundown shack theywere able to rent at Silverado, on the side of the mountain.Stevenson also turned this experience into literature: he wrote The Silverado Squattersin 1880 from a journal he kept during the approximately two months theyspent at the abandoned mine site. It is a pleasant description of theiradventures and their domestic life and includes portraits of the peopleliving around Saint Helena and Calistoga in the Napa Valley. The workwas first serialized in the Century Magazine in 1883 and later that year was published as a book.Whenboth husband and wife were well enough for extended travel, theyreturned across the continent and set sail from New York, landing inBritain on 17 August 1880. Fanny Stevenson was soon accepted at theStevenson family home on 17 Heriot Row. She became a favorite ofStevenson's father and a staunch ally of his mother, with whom sheshared the duty of attending to Stevenson's health.In thenext seven years, 1880 to 1887, Stevenson did not flourish as far ashis health was concerned, but his literary output was prodigious.Writing was one of the few activities he could do when he was confinedto bed because of hemorrhaging lungs--"Bluidy Jack" he nicknamed therecurrent bleeding. But, despite illness, he wrote some of his mostenduring 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 withW. E. Henley, the poet, essayist, and editor who championed Stevensonin London literary circles and who became the model for Long JohnSilver in Treasure Island.Although he settled well into domestic life with Fanny, Stevenson'sletters revealed that he rejoiced in returning to his friends--tofellow 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 wasalso a period of much traveling. His and Fanny's various temporaryresidences in England, Switzerland, and southern France had more to dowith his probable tuberculosis (it was never diagnosed as such duringhis lifetime) than with his love for travel. It was at Braemar inScotland that Treasure Island was begun, sparked by a map thatStevenson had drawn for the entertainment of his twelve-year-oldstepson Lloyd Osbourne. Stevenson had quickly imagined a pirateadventure story to accompany the drawing, and a friend arranged for itto be serialized in the boys' magazine Young Folks, where itappeared from October 1881 to January 1882. By the end of the 1880s, ithad become one of the most popular and widely read books of the period. William Ewart Gladstonewas supposed to have stayed awake all night to read it, and Stevenson,no supporter of Gladstone, snapped upon learning the news that the manwould have done better "to attend to the imperial affairs of England."In the seven-year period from 1880 to 1887 Stevenson's output alsoincluded essays on the craft of fiction. In these, in which the readermight expect Stevenson to exhibit a more objective attitude than he hadin the travelogues, the author's cultivated discursiveness and ramblingrhetoric are not always successful.Stevensonhad a very uncomplicated view of art; he would have rewritten Horace toassert that it was better to entertain than to instruct. Consequentlyhis critical essays on literature contain few sustained analyses ofstyle or content. They are more entertaining to read for the narrator'stone than they are instructive about the fine points of writing. In "'APenny Plain and Two-pence Coloured'" (1884), Stevenson recounts how theseeds of his craft were sown in childhood when he purchased Skelt'sJuvenile Drama--a toy set of uncolored or crudely colored cardboardcharacters (hence the title of Stevenson's essay) who were theprincipal actors in a usually melodramatic adventure. Stevensonmaintained that his art, his life, and his mode of creation were all insome part derivative of the highly exaggerated and romantic world thathe had inherited from Skelt's toy.The samelove for the exaggerated world of romance and adventure informs theessays "A Gossip on Romance" (1882) and "A Gossip on a Novel ofDumas's" (1887). Again Stevenson maintains that the better end ofreading and writing is entertainment, a claim that led some critics toaccuse him of escapism. French realists, such as Émile Zola, had begunto explore the harsher sides of reality in their fiction. To someextent 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 ofStevenson'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 wasparticularly the tendency in French realism to dwell on sordidness andugliness that Stevenson rejected. In an 1877 essay, "François Villon:Student, Poet, and Housebreaker," he castigates the French medievalpoet François Villon for lying about the poor: Villon had made them outto be as greedy, covetous, and deceitful as he, but he had not thecourage to depict their nobility. Stevenson reiterated this theme, butwith an eye on the nineteenth-century French realist Zola, in his essay"The Lantern-Bearers" (1888). In thispiece he describes a childhood game wherein vacationing schoolboysbelted tin bull's-eye lanterns to their waists, buttoned theirtop-coats over the lanterns, and met in some remote cove to reveal, ata password, the lit lanterns beneath their coats. Stevenson likens theaverage person to the boy who joyfully walks in the dark knowing he hasa lantern "within" him. All people are noble, although Zola (andrealists like him) would dismiss them as dreary lumps of humanity,seeing only the topcoats of mundane dullness, completely missing thenobility 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 essaymaintains that realism differs from romance only according to thewriter's choice of style. In "A Humble Remonstrance," Stevenson answers Henry James'sclaim in "The Art of Fiction" (1884) that the novel competes with life.Stevenson protests that no novel can ever hope to match life'scomplexity; it merely abstracts from life to produce a harmoniouspattern of its own. Henry Jamesessentially agreed: he had made the point earlier that reality was tooimmense to capture in art. At Bournemouth, where the Stevensons livedfrom 1884 to 1887, James came calling in the spring of 1885 and wasmistaken for a tradesman. Gradually, however, the two men became closefriends. James, in fact, was one of the few of her husband's associateswhom Fanny Stevenson trusted. Watchful of her husband's health, sheresented the friends who kept Stevenson up into the night.FannyStevenson had never been content to remain on the outside of herhusband's craft; she coupled her nursing with editorial duties andalienated some of her husband's friends in the process. Doubtless shehad kept him alive from Silverado to Bournemouth, but barring some ofhis lively friends from seeing Stevenson caused some resentment. W. E.Henley had the worst falling out with Fanny Stevenson, partly becauseof his drinking and partly because he exhausted Stevenson by keepinghim at work collaborating on plays that had little promise. The majorcrisis occurred after the Stevensons had settled at Saranac Lake, NewYork (the move was supposed to have been only a temporary leave-takingof Scotland), on 3 October 1887. Henley accused Fanny, in a lettermarked confidential, of having stolen a story from Stevenson's cousin,ignoring or forgetting that Fanny had permission to rework the story.Stevensonwas crushed, although he eventually forgave Henley, who never admittedhe had done anything wrong. What made the accusation harder to bear wasthat it came on the heels of Thomas Stevenson's death. The elderStevenson had died after a long illness in May 1887, plunging his soninto a deep depression. In the spring of that year Stevensoncontemplated arranging his martyrdom in Ireland, intending to die atthe hands of night riders, in the theory that his death--he was by nowthe 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 beruled by England. Written in January 1888, it was rejected byStevenson'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'smagazine by May, and his serious quarrel with Henley had opened hiseyes to betrayal. In a letter he wrote to Baxter in May 1888, hesounded as though he was gambling for new stakes. He informed hisfriend that he would take a South Seas cruise, one that he expected toheal him emotionally as well as physically: "I have found a yacht, andwe are going the full pitch for seven months. If I cannot get my healthback ... 'tis madness; but of course, there is the hope, and I willplay 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, thePaumotus, and the Society Islands, and thence northward from Tahiti tothe Hawaiian Islands by December of 1888. They camped awhile inHonolulu, giving Stevenson time to visit Molokai's leper settlement andto 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 ofUpolu in Samoa. By that time Stevenson realized that his health couldnever stand a return to Scotland, despite his friends' urgings and hisown homesickness. Gosse and Colvin, in particular, urged him to return.Only James and Baxter seemed to react sympathetically to Stevenson'spredicament: each time that he ventured far from the equator he fellsick. In October 1890 the Stevenson party returned to Samoa to settle,after a third cruise that took them to Australia, the Gilberts, theMarshalls, and some of the remoter islands in the South Seas.Stevensondetailed his three cruises and adventures in the letters he wrote tohis friends, exulting in his newfound health, relating incidents oflife on the open sea, and capturing the flavor of life lived away fromWestern civilization. From 1889 to 1894 his attitude toward theislanders in his letters gradually changed from paternalism to sympathyfor their troubles with Western imperialism. He studied South Seaspolitics to espouse plans that he believed would ensure harmony betweenthe whites and the indigenous races of the South Pacific. The naivetéof his early letters is absent from his remarkable book of essays onthe various island groups and their peoples--In the South Seas .Written from material he had collected on the three cruises, the bookreveals a much shrewder observer of human nature and politics than theman who had written Confessions of a Unionist. He viewed theislanders as humans who were not without a valid culture of their own.They were not all cannibals, nor were they all noble savages. As forpolitics, he advocated self-rule for the islands, a view that did notalways make him popular with contemporary travelers and settlers in thePacific. But he was never predictable. While he was in Hawaii, forexample, Stevenson felt himself drawn to the royalists--those whowanted the United States out of Hawaii. But he resisted becominginvolved in their intrigues because he did not fully trust theroyalists themselves.In the South Seashad a checkered publishing history, not so much because of the radicalnature of its political views, but because it was not so colorful ashis former travelogues. Twenty-two copies for copyright purposes wereprinted in 1890 by the London firm Cassell; an enlarged text, bearingthe Scribners imprint, was published in New York in 1896, and the firstBritish edition, from Chatto and Windus,appeared in 1900. Although Stevenson was happy with his work, hisfriends back home thought he was wasting his talent on politics when heshould have been writing fiction. The complicated publishing history ofIn the South Seas suggests that it may have been too serious forthose who wanted Stevenson to remain the introspective traveler he hadbeen 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.WhileStevenson was in Hawaii, in June 1889 he visited the government's lepercolony on Molokai. According to Fanny Stevenson, her husband had firstgone to the island on a fact-finding mission, expecting to uncover the"truth" about Father Damien De Veuster, the missionary to the leperswho had died only a month earlier. His admiration was awakened byfirsthand reports of the man's courage and resourcefulness whichcontradicted then-current rumors that the priest had contracted leprosythrough intimacies with female patients. In Sydney, Australia, eightmonths later Stevenson read an attack in the religious press uponDamien by a Dr. Charles M. Hyde, a former missionary to Molokai, whomaintained that these rumors were true. The letter by Hyde wascirculated throughout the South Seas and the world. Stevenson was soprovoked 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.Hisdefense of Father Damien was curious. It did not deny Hyde's charges somuch as it suggested that their publication was an indication of themeanness, cowardice, and jealousy of Hyde. Though defending DamienDeVeuster's character was a way for Stevenson to identify with the goodwork of the missionary priest, the defense involved some risk.Stevenson fully expected to be sued and financially ruined by Hyde--bya libel suit he knew, as a lawyer, he had little chance of winning.Luckily for the Stevensons, Hyde contented himself with dismissing theauthor as a crank. The episode had a profound effect on Stevenson andhis work on the South Seas. He continued to champion the oppressed evenwhen 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 afragment. In his last years he also worked industriously at hisnonfiction. 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 Seasbut later realized that he had enough for more than one book. TheSamoan political situation in the late 1880s and early 1890s wascomplex. Historically the Samoans had chosen a king from among severaltribal high chiefs. Because of friction over trade in the islands,Germany, England, and the United States had attempted but aborted aplan to divide the islands into protectorates. In 1888 the Germansbanished Laupepa, one of three tribal chiefs in contention forkingship, the other two being Tamasese and Mataafa. After a short warbetween the other two chiefs (in which some Germans died) the threeWestern nations formed a tripartite consulate and established Laupepaas king of Samoa and Mataafa as vice-king. Arguing that Mataafa had, byrights and power, more claim to kingship than his rival, Stevensonadvocated Mataafa's cause in A Footnote to History andcontinued writing letters to several British newspapers well into 1894,stirring up a hornet's nest of controversy for himself in Samoa. Hisbook earned him the resentment of the Germans and threats ofdeportation from harassed British officials. When the Germans banishedMataafa to the Marshall Islands in 1893, Stevenson's agitation could dono more than secure the release of some of Mataafa's supporters whowere jailed in Apia.In A Footnote to HistoryStevenson advocated justice and compromise among the Samoan factions.He wanted to bring the affair before the public, to acquaint Westernerswith the effects of imperialistic policies they tacitly supported.Though he apologized for the tempest-in-a-teapot nature of therebellion, he believed A Footnote to History performed a service for the beleaguered country.In thelast two years of his life Stevenson's letters to his friends in GreatBritain increasingly revealed his longing for Scotland and thefrustration he felt at the thought of never seeing his homeland again.To S. R. Crockett he wrote, "I shall never see Auld Reekie. I shallnever set my foot again upon the heather. Here I am until I die, andhere will I be buried. The word is out and the doom written." It mayhave been this preoccupation with Scotland and its history that made Weir of Hermiston so powerful a tale. With its theme of filial rebellion, its evocationof Scotland's topography, language, and legends, it is a masterlyfragment 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 ownfamily and finally coming to terms with his earlier rejection of theengineering profession. In Records of a Family of Engineers hedepicts his grandfather as a scientist-artist, linking his own growingobjectivity in his style of writing to the technical yet imaginativework of his forebears. Increasingly Stevenson's art embraced more ofthe everyday world and drew on his experiences in the South Seas forits 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 inhis house at Vailima, Samoa, he was at the height of his creativepowers.TheSamoan faction that he had helped to free from jail assembled at hishouse to cut a path to the top of Mt. Vaea, where he was buried. He hadbeen rich, famous, an adventurer, and a legend in his homeland; thereport of his death created a small shock wave throughout the literaryworld. Almost immediately the Stevenson family began attempts toglorify the memory of Stevenson, and this action was to work againstthe writer's literary reputation. They dickered over who would bestedit Stevenson's letters. Baxter and James steered clear of theunenviable task, which fell to Sidney Colvin. There also appearedmemoirs by Stevenson's friends who did him the disservice of writinghagiography instead of biography. The inevitable reaction of thesucceeding literary generation to this presentation of Stevenson as ademisaint was severe. The worst of it amounted to speculation aboutEdinburgh prostitutes whom the youthful Stevenson might have known andthe exact amount of impropriety in Stevenson's relationship with Fannybefore their marriage. From personal attacks on Stevenson, criticsturned to style: he was accused of blind imitation, having nothing tosay and saying it oddly, and of promoting a spineless escapism.WhatStevenson was left with was a literary reputation based solely on hisromances--a reputation that solidly ignored his South Seas fiction, hisessays, his travelogues about America and the Pacific, and the lettersthat revealed his enthusiasm for his craft and for the islanders of theSouth Pacific. Because of this failure to acknowledge his breadth as awriter, he is often remembered primarily as an author for children; hisreputation 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 Stevensonrestored a sense of balance to the examination of the author's life andletters. Recent studies have turned more attention to Stevenson'sless-well-known works, attempting to integrate the various strata ofhis literary output. Consequently, Stevenson has risen in stature sincethe early 1900s. The centennial of his death may bring a scholarlyreappraisal of Stevenson that will move him from the second rank ofVictorian authors to the first.
FURTHER READINGS ABOUT THE AUTHOR

De Lancey Ferguson and Marshall Waingrow, eds., R. L. S.: Stevenson's Letters to Charles Baxter (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1956; London: Oxford University Press, 1956).
W. F. Prideaux, A Bibliography of the Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, revised edition, edited and supplemented by Mrs. Luther S. Livingston (London: Hollings, 1918).
Graham Balfour, The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson (New York: Scribners, 1901).
Janet Adam Smith, Robert Louis Stevenson (London: Duckworth, 1947).
David Daiches, Robert Louis Stevenson (Norfolk, Conn.: New Directions, 1947).
J. C. Furnas, Voyage to Windward: The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson (New York: Sloane, 1951).
Jenni Calder, RLS: A Life Study (London: Hamilton, 1980).
G. K. Chesterton, Robert Louis Stevenson (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1927).
Edwin M. Eigner, Robert Louis Stevenson and Romantic Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966).
J. A. Hammerton, ed., Stevensoniana (Edinburgh: Grant, 1910).
Robert Kiely, Robert Louis Stevenson and the Fiction of Adventure (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1965).
Janet Adam Smith, ed., Henry James and Robert Louis Stevenson: A Record of Friendship and Criticism (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1948).

Roger G. Swearingen, The Prose Writings of Robert Louis Stevenson: A Guide (Hamden, Conn.: Archon, 1980).

Papers:
Collections of Stevenson's papers are at the BeineckeRare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University; the Pierpont MorganLibrary, New York; the Henry E. HuntingtonLibrary, San Marino, California; the Widener Library, HarvardUniversity; the Edinburgh Public Library; the Silverado Museum, SaintHelena, California; and the Monterey State Historical MonumentStevenson House, Monterey, California.

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

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