Robert Louis Stevenson: A Biography

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The mariners heard the warning bell;

And then they knew the perilous rock,

And blessed the Abbot of Aberbrothok.

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

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

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

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

Say not of me that weakly I declined

The labours of my sires, and fled the sea,

The towers we founded and the lamps we lit,

To play at home with paper like a child.

But rather say: In the afternoon of time

A strenuous family dusted from its hands

The sand of granite, and beholding far

Along the sounding coast its pyramids

And tall memorials catch the dying sun,

Smiled well content, and to this childish task

“Around the fire addressed its evening hours,

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