Robert Louis Stevenson: A Biography

The stolen pleasures of the Colinton library linked directly with his sanctioned obsession, Skelt’s Juvenile Drama. Skelt produced dozens of different printed cutouts for use in children’s toy theatres, ‘a penny plain and twopence coloured’, which Lewis bought in quantity at the stationer’s on Antigua Street. He loved them, not so much because of the potent, transient joy of buying and colouring in a new set of characters or scenes – ‘when all was painted, it is needless to deny it, all was spoiled’ – but on account of the playbooks, with their stirring up of the sense of adventure and romance, the exoticism of the scenes and situations, the heart-stopping allure of the characters, highwaymen, smugglers and pirates:

What am I? What are life, art, letters, the world, but what my Skelt has made them? He stamped himself upon my immaturity. The world was plain before I knew him, a poor penny world; but soon it was all coloured with romance. [ … ] Indeed, out of this cut-and-dry, dull, swaggering, obtrusive and infantile art, I seem to have learned the very spirit of my life’s enjoyment; met there the shadows of the characters I was to read about and love in a late future; got the romance of Der Freischütz long ere I was to hear of Weber or the mighty Formes; acquired a gallery of scenes and characters with which, in the silent theatre of the brain, I might enact all novels and romances[.]

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The Stevensons and their queer little son, with his unexpressive face and out-of-proportion head, made a close-knit, self-protective trio. Their shared hypochondria became a great comfort to them. When Thomas developed some unspecified complaint and was ordered to take the waters at Homburg in 1862, the family went with him. The next year it was Margaret’s turn to be chief invalid and the destination was the South of France, where they stayed three months, returning through Italy on a splendidly leisurely tour and home via the Alps and the Rhine. All this time Lewis had been off school, but when Margaret was advised to return south for the winter of 1863–64, the Stevenson parents realised that if the boy was ever going to get an education they would have to leave him out of the next health tour. Thomas enrolled him at Burlington Lodge Academy in Isleworth, Surrey, chosen because three Balfour cousins were day boys there, looked after at weekends by the obliging Aunt Jane from her brother’s rented house nearby. It was a well-intentioned scheme, but not a particularly good one. Lewis could only feel the separation from his parents more keenly in a boarding school so far from home (and in a foreign country), however many little Balfours were on hand.

The twelve-year-old’s letters during his first and only term in Isleworth are full of characteristic touches: his stoicism, his distractibility (several times stopping mid-sentence), his mixed interest in and fear of other children. ‘I am getting on very well, but my cheif amusement is when I am in bed then I think of home and the holidays,’ he wrote to his ‘dear Parients’ in September.

(#litres_trial_promo) As the weeks went by, there were signs of education going on – bits of Latin and French, along with devil-may-care touches of sophistication – but the dreaded time was approaching when both parents would leave the country without him, which they did on 6 November. On the eve of his thirteenth birthday the following week, Lewis wrote his mother a letter in demi-French to thank her for the huge cake she had sent him, which, he noted, weighed twelve and a half pounds and cost seventeen shillings. There had been some trouble during the fireworks on Guy Fawkes’ Night when some bad boys (‘les polissons’) ‘entrent dans notre champ et nos feux d’artifice et handkercheifs disappeared quickly but we charged them out of the feild. Je suis presque driven mad par un bruit terrible tous les garcons kik up comme grand un bruit qu’il est possible.’ Writing to his parents this first time truly alone, with only a monstrous cake for company, seems to have been too much for the boy: he ends his letter abruptly and to the point: ‘My dear papa you told me to tell you whenever I was miserable. I do not feel well and I wish to get home. Do take me with you.’

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Lewis must have guessed the effect this simple appeal would have: Thomas Stevenson wrote back quickly to comfort the boy with the promise of fetching him out at Christmas, and Lewis’s subsequent letters are crowingly cheerful, looking forward to the prospect of joining them in Menton. When Lewis left Spring Grove at the end of term (the last boy to be picked up, his father being so late that he almost gave up hope) it was for good: he stayed in France until his mother finally left for home in May the next year. Menton was lovely: months of lounging in sunshine, reading, being fussed over by his mother and Cummy (brought out to attend him), being carried up and down the hotel stairs by two waiters when he was feeling weak. The party came back via Rome, Naples, Florence, Venice and the Rhine: a great improvement on Isleworth and the company of les polissons.

Cummy’s diary of this trip, written at the request of (and addressed to) her friend Cashie, nurse to David Stevenson’s children, gives a vivid glimpse of the woman with whom Lewis had spent so much of his time. Cummy had not travelled abroad before, and was appalled at how lost the world was to ‘the Great Adversary’. In London, the sight of barges on the Thames on a Sunday made her lament, ‘God’s Holy Day is dishonoured!’,

(#litres_trial_promo) whereas France, with its sinister-looking priests and perpetual feeling of carnival, was even worse, a land ‘where the man of sin reigns’.

(#litres_trial_promo) She was shy of eating with or associating with Catholics and felt that contact with heathens was in some way eroding her capacity to reach out ‘in deep, heart-felt love to Jesus’.

(#litres_trial_promo) She therefore relished her minor ailments and frustrations as signs of interest from the deity, as this entry, on recovering from a slight sore throat, illustrates:

O how good is my Gracious Heavenly Father to His backsliding, erring child! He knows I need the rod, but O how gently does He apply it! May I be enabled to see that it is all in love when He sends affliction!

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Cummy was not wholly consistent, of course, and proved susceptible to certain temptations. In Paris, she wrote to Cashie, she had been intrigued by the sight of some specially white and creamy-looking mashed potatoes, of which she sneaked tiny portions whenever the waiter’s back was turned. Although they were French and possibly the work of the Devil, she had to admit, ‘I never tasted anything so good.’

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One good thing had come of Lewis’s time at Spring Grove; he had been able to indulge a growing mania for writing. ‘The School Boys Magazine’ ran to just one issue and all four stories were by the editor, but at least he had the possibility of an audience among his schoolfellows and cousins. An opera libretto followed the next year, with the promising title ‘The Baneful Potato’, and a very early version of his melodrama Deacon Brodie was also written at this period, telling the gripping tale of the real-life Deacon of the Wrights who in the 1780s had carried on a notorious double life: respectable alderman by day, thief by night. The Stevensons owned a piece of furniture made by Brodie that stood in Lewis’s bedroom, a tangible reminder of the criminal’s duality. The idea of being an author intrigued the boy, though when one of his heroes, the famous adventure writer R.M. Ballantyne, visited the house of David Stevenson while researching his novel The Lighthouse (about the Bell Rock) and was introduced to the family, Lewis was so awestruck that he couldn’t say a thing.

Stevenson’s relations with his father were never anything other than intense, complex and troubling. Thomas Stevenson had on the one hand unusual sympathy with the child, colluding instantly with his attempts to avoid school, while at the same time being in thrall to the strictest ideas of what it was to be a responsible parent. Lewis was on the whole frightened of being accountable to him, for the response was predictable. Years later he wrote to the mother of a new godson of his this heartfelt advice: ‘let me beg a special grace for this little person: let me ask you not to expect from him a very rigid adherence to the truth, as we peddling elders understand it. This is a point on which I feel keenly that we often go wrong. I was myself repeatedly thrashed for lying when Heaven knows, I had no more design to lie than I had, or was capable of having, a design to tell the truth. I did but talk like a parrot.’

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Lewis became artful enough to know when to keep his mouth shut, as an incident which he related to Edmund Gosse in 1886 illustrates. When he was about twelve years old, he was so gripped by the romance and mystery of an empty house with a ‘To Let’ sign on it that he broke in by climbing through a rear window. Elated by his burgling skills, the boy then took his shoes off and prowled round, but once in the bedroom, thought he could hear someone approaching. Panic overcame him and he scuttled under the bed with his heart pounding. ‘All the exaltation of spirit faded away. He saw himself captured, led away handcuffed,’ and worst of all in his vision of retribution, he saw himself exposed to his parents (on their way into church) and cast off by them forever. This was such an alarming image that he lay under the bed sobbing uncontrollably for some time before realising that no one was in fact coming to get him, so he crept out and went home ‘in an abject state of depression’. He was incapable of explaining to his parents what had happened, and their concern redoubled his guilty feelings, sending him into hysterics. During the evening, as he lay recuperating, he heard someone say ‘He has been working at his books a great deal too much,’ and the next day he was sent for a holiday in the countryside.

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More education was ventured sporadically, the last being at a private day-school in Edinburgh for backward and delicate children. Mr Thomson’s establishment in Frederick Street, which admitted girls as well as boys and whose regime did not include homework, was the softest possible cushion upon which to place young Lewis. As far as his father was concerned, the boy’s eventual career was never in doubt; he would join the family firm. Therefore formal schooling was of minor importance: the greater part of his training would be got by observation and example in an apprenticeship. To this end, Thomas took his son on the annual lighthouse tour one year, and attempted to share his own knowledge of engineering and surveying whenever opportunity allowed. There is a touching memory of this in Records of a Family of Engineers:

My father would pass hours on the beach, brooding over the waves, counting them, noting their least deflection, noting where they broke. On Tweedside, or by Lyne and Manor, we have spent together whole afternoons; to me, at the time, extremely wearisome; to him, as I now am sorry to think, extremely mortifying. The river was to me a pretty and various spectacle; I could not see – I could not be made to see – it otherwise. To my father it was a chequer-board of lively forces, which he traced from pool to shallow with minute appreciation and enduring interest. [ … ] ‘[S]uppose you were to blast that boulder, what would happen? Follow it – use the eyes that God has given you: can you not see that a great deal of land would be reclaimed upon this side?’ It was to me like school in holidays; but to him, until I had worn him out with my invincible triviality, a delight.

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Thomas Stevenson had seen a painting at the Royal Scottish Academy exhibition titled Portrait of Jamie by James Faed, depicting an adolescent boy posed with a microscope. He wrote to Faed asking if a similar portrait could be made of his son and was told that the artist didn’t do much in that line, but would take a look at the boy and see if he thought he could paint him. Faed was surprised to get a reply saying that Mr Stevenson had been back to look at the ‘Jamie’ portrait again and had changed his mind, feeling his son was ‘too stupid looking to make a picture like that’.

(#litres_trial_promo) The incident stuck in Faed’s mind and thirty years later he offered it to Stevenson’s cousin Graham Balfour as a biographical curiosity (Balfour didn’t use it): the father’s turn of phrase was so odd and unsentimental. Odder still is the thought of Thomas Stevenson veering so completely between two different images of his son, one minute picturing him as a budding scientist, the next as too stupid-looking to be scrutinised.

(#ulink_06163eac-b305-5705-a13b-998f98ff460f)I am grateful to John Macfie for telling me an interesting fact about the real lamplighter on Heriot Row in the 1850s: he was a piece-worker, and therefore habitually rushed his work. So the ‘hurrying by’ of the poem is more realism than romance.

(#ulink_1cd2a3dc-308f-54ea-8b32-779fc215bc5d)It is not known who Smith learned from, but it could have been John Smeaton, who built the third Eddystone light in the 1750s, and whose work was very influential on the whole Smith/Stevenson family.

(#ulink_1e05ff37-b30a-57f3-b445-288395bf7b05)The fourth son, Robert (1808–51), took a degree in medicine at Edinburgh University and became an army surgeon. He left his whole estate to his youngest brother, Thomas.

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Facts bearing on precocity or on the slow development of the mental powers, deserve mention.

Francis Galton, Record of Family Faculties

WHEN BOB WENT UP to Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, in the autumn of 1866, fifteen-year-old Lewis was eager for details, and more than a little jealous: ‘Do Cambridge students indulge in a private magazine: if so, full particulars?’

(#litres_trial_promo) He himself was still at Mr Thomson’s school and bound on a different course, taking classes in practical mechanics and being given extra maths lessons in order to matriculate at Edinburgh University the next year as a student of engineering. Thomas Stevenson must have realised by this time that even if Lewis went through the hoops of getting a degree in sciences, he was temperamentally unsuited to become an engineer. Still they stuck to the known path, the father no doubt rationalising that his own reluctance to join the family firm years before had been proved wrong. His working life had been immensely useful and productive (not least of money), and his early leanings towards authorship had not been entirely abandoned. Had not his book on lighthouse illumination and his article on ‘Harbours’ for the Encyclopaedia Britannica been composed in hours of leisure, the proper place for letters?

Robert Louis Stevenson’s first publication, a privately-printed sixteen-page monograph called ‘The Pentland Rising: A Page of History’, fell entirely in the gentleman-amateur tradition that his father favoured. It would not have escaped a man like Thomas Stevenson, so keenly aware of the energy potential in a wave and the importance of building a structure of exactly the right size and shape to harness or withstand it, that the intellectual energy Lewis expended on his feverish recreation might be redirected towards some serious and worthy project. The boy’s interest in the Covenanters had been expressed in some highly inappropriate forms up to this point; he had started a romance based on the life of David Hackston of Rathillet, one of the fanatics who had murdered Archbishop Sharp, and in 1867–68 began a five-act tragedy on another Covenanting subject, ‘The Sweet Singer’. A work of a historical or overtly religious nature would have been far more suitable, and it was in such a direction that Thomas and Margaret Stevenson now steered their son,.offering to pay for the production of one hundred copies of a short history to coincide exactly with the two hundredth anniversary of the Covenanters’ defeat at Rullion Green on 28 November 1666. Getting the boy’s name into print, in a controlled and circumscribed way, was clearly a kind of reward and encouragement, but also an inoculation against becoming ‘literary’.

Lewis must have been happy with the arrangement, for he took care to make his account of the Rising as serious and scholarly as possible, with an impressive list of references (including Wodrow, Crookshank, Kirkton, Defoe, Bishop Burnet) and a stirring, sermon-like conclusion. Still it didn’t much resemble a conventional history. The facts were there, but re-imagined by the fifteen-year-old into gripping narrative:

The wind howled fiercely over the moorland; a close, thick, wetting rain descended. Chilled to the bone, worn out with long fatigue, sinking to the knees in mire, onward they marched to destruction. One by one the weary peasants fell off from their ranks to sleep, and die in the rain-soaked moor, or to seek some house by the wayside wherein to hide till daybreak. One by one at first, then in gradually increasing numbers, till at last at every shelter that was seen, whole troops left the waning squadrons, and rushed to hide themselves from the ferocity of the tempest. To right and left nought could be descried but the broad expanse of the moor, and the figures of their fellow-rebels, seen dimly through the murky night, plodding onwards through the sinking moss. Those who kept together – a miserable few – often halted to rest themselves, and to allow their lagging comrades to overtake them. Then onward they went again, still hoping for assistance, reinforcement, and supplies; onward again, through the wind, and the rain, and the darkness – onward to their defeat at Pentland, and their scaffold at Edinburgh.

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Stevenson’s later description of his apprenticeship as ‘playing the sedulous ape’ to a host of better writers seems needlessly self-mocking when one sees how expert and stylish he was already at the age of fifteen. The prose is very deliberately crafted, with cadences one could almost score, and there is something visionary about his imagination, as if he had personally witnessed the bullets dropping away from Dalzell’s thick buff coat and falling into his boots, seen the flames rising from a Covenanter’s grave on the moor and creeping round the house of his murderer. The boy’s engagement with his subject is so intense as to be almost disturbing. Just after relating the execution of the captured martyrs, he makes an emotional authorial interjection: perhaps it was as well that Hugh McKail’s dying speech to his comrades was drowned out by drums and the jeers of the crowd; these sounds, he wrote, ‘might, when the mortal fight was over, when the river of death was passed, add tenfold sweetness to the hymning of the angels, tenfold peacefulness to the shores which they had reached’. Lewis seems to have been as fervently pious in his mid-teens as in childhood.

It’s hard to imagine how such a performance could have failed to please the boy’s father, but according to a letter in the Balfour archive, the pamphlet was no sooner in type than Thomas Stevenson began to worry about potential criticism of it (from what quarter it is impossible to guess). He had criticised the first drafts himself, as Aunt Jane recalled, who had been at Heriot Row while Lewis was making alterations to the text ‘to please his Father’: ‘[Lewis] had made a story of it, and, by so doing, had spoiled it, in Tom’s opinion – It was printed soon after, just a small number of copies all of which Tom bought in, soon after.’

(#litres_trial_promo) So the little book’s literary qualities were its downfall; they ‘spoiled’ ‘A Page of History’ to the extent that it couldn’t even be circulated among the aunts, family friends and co-religionists who would have been its natural audience. It must have been hard for the young author to see his first work stillborn. Nor was it the only time Thomas Stevenson pulled this trick, paying for his son’s work to be printed, then censoring it. His solicitude for Lewis has the tinge of monomania, and tallies with what a family friend, Maude Parry, told Sidney Colvin about the relationship after the writer’s death: ‘Stevenson told us that his father had nagged him to an almost inconceivable extent. He thought it the most difficult of all relationships.’

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The following year Thomas Stevenson took out a lease on a house right in the heart of Covenanting country, the hamlet of Swanston on the edge of the Pentlands, only a few miles outside Edinburgh. The ‘cottage’ they rented there (in fact a spacious villa, almost as big as Colinton Manse) became their holiday home for the next thirteen years and a winter retreat for Lewis when he was a student. The battlefield of Rullion Green was within walking distance, as was the picturesque ruin of Glencorse Church, and Lewis, now old enough to be left to his own devices, spent days at a time walking the hills, writing and reading – especially adventure stories, caches of which the shepherd John Tod’s son later recalled having found in the whin bushes above the cottage.

(#litres_trial_promo) He was a keen, hardy walker and was able to make a long foot-study of the Pentlands in the years during which Swanston was the family’s second home. This was to become his favourite persona over the next decade or more, the romantic solitary walker, free from responsibility and respectability, watching, listening, picking acquaintance with strangers On the road, falling in with whatever adventures presented themselves.

To true Pentlanders, Lewis Stevenson would have appeared little more than a rich townie weekending on Allermuir, an English-speaking Unionist among terse mutterers of Lallans. No doubt some choice phrases of that dialect were shouted in his direction on the occasion, early in the Stevensons’ tenancy, when the boy barged through a field of sheep and lambs with his Skye terrier Coolin, infuriating the shepherd.

(#litres_trial_promo) Times had changed so rapidly in Scotland that in his late teens Stevenson knew no one of his own generation (certainly not of his class) whose primary language was Scots. ‘Real’ Scotsmen, like Robert Young, the gardener at Swanston, or John Tod the shepherd, or his late Grandfather Balfour, were distant, older figures who presented the paradox of being at once admirable and impossible to emulate. And with the language many temperamental traits and ‘accents of the mind’ were disappearing too, or seemed tantalisingly out of reach, as Stevenson’s loving description of shepherd Tod in his 1887 essay ‘Pastoral’ indicates:

That dread voice of his that shook the hills when he was angry, fell in ordinary talk very pleasantly upon the ear, with a kind of honied, friendly whine, not far off singing, that was eminently Scottish. He laughed not very often, and when he did, with a sudden loud haw-haw, hearty but somehow joyless, like an echo from a rock. His face was permanently set and coloured; ruddy and stiff with weathering; more like a picture than a face [ … ] He spoke in the richest dialect of Scots I ever heard; the words in themselves were a pleasure and often a surprise to me, so that I often came back from one of our patrols with new acquisitions; and this vocabulary he would handle like a master, stalking a little before me, ‘beard on shoulder’, the plaid hanging loosely about him, the yellow staff clapped under his arm, and guiding me uphill by that devious, tactical ascent which seems peculiar to men of his trade. I might count him with the best of talkers; only that talking Scotch and talking English seem incomparable acts. He touched on nothing at least, but he adorned it; when he narrated, the scene was before you; when he spoke (as he did mostly) of his own antique business, the thing took on a colour of romance and curiosity that was surprising.

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The ‘romance and curiosity’ of Scotsness haunted Stevenson all his life; he never tired of it. But the fact that his own culture could be romantic and curious to him he knew to be an unfortunate state of affairs. His writing about Scotland is therefore strongly melancholic and valedictory, quite unlike the language-revival movements of the following century which sought to resuscitate the culture by creating synthetic Scots. Within 150 years, the literary language waxed, waned and then reappeared again in the form of a sort of composite ghost of itself in the ‘Scottish Renaissance’ of the mid-twentieth century (pioneered by the poet Hugh MacDiarmid). But in the 1860s and ’70s, the language seemed beyond revival, and what Burns had used both naturally and daringly, Stevenson could only lament and pastiche, writing of his later attempts at Scots vernacular verse, ‘if it be not pure, what matters it?’

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