Journal of Stevenson Studies Volume 14 ii Journal of Stevenson Studies Journal of Stevenson Studies iii Editors Professor Emeritus Professor Linda Dryden Roderick Watson CLAW School of Arts and School of Arts and Creative Humanities Industries University of Stirling Napier University Stirling Craighouse FK9 4LA Edinburgh Scotland EH10 5LG Scotland Tel: 0131 455 6128 Email: [email protected] Email: [email protected] Contributions to volume 15 are warmly invited and should be submitted directly to the journal. Any queries should be directed to the Editors at [email protected]. The text should be submitted in MS WORD files in MHRA format. All contribu- tions are subject to review by members of the Editorial Board. Published by The Centre for Literature and Writing Edinburgh Napier University © The contributors 2018 ISSN: 1744-3857 iv Journal of Stevenson Studies Journal of Stevenson Studies v Editorial Board Professor Richard Ambrosini Professor Penny Fielding Universita’ di Roma Tre Department of English Rome University of Edinburgh Professor Stephen Arata Professor Gordon Hirsch School of English Department of English University of Virginia University of Minnesota Dr Hilary Beattie Professor Barry Menikoff Department of Psychiatry Department of English Columbia University University of Hawaii at Manoa Professor Oliver Buckton Professor Glenda Norquay School of English Department of English and Florida Atlantic University Cultural History Liverpool John Moores Professor Linda Dryden University School of Arts and Creative Industries Professor Roderick Watson Edinburgh Napier University School of Arts and Humanities University of Stirling Professor Richard Dury Honorary Professorial Fellow University of Edinburgh (Consultant Editor) vi Journal of Stevenson Studies Contents Editorial.................................................................................. 1 Lesley Graham Toing and froing in Stevenson’s construction of personal history in some of the later essays (1880-94) ......................................5 Ivan D. Sanderson and Mark J. Sanderson ‘The strangely fanciful device of repeating the same idea’: chiasmus in Robert Louis Stevenson’s essays........................ 18 Hilary J. Beattie The enigma of Katharine de Mattos: reflections on her life and writings ...................................................................................47 Ilona Dobosiewicz The early reception of Robert Louis Stevenson in Poland ....72 Nathalie Jaëck ‘The valley was as clear as in a picture’: landscape as an ideological tool to come to terms with Scottish identity in Stevenson’s Kidnapped ..........................................................90 Harriet Gordon We all belong to many countries’: alternative geographical imaginations in Stevenson’s Californian writing. ................ 110 Flora Benkhodja Reading the ‘sea runes’: hermeneutics in ‘The Merry Men’ 139 Douglas Kerr The strange case of the creeping man .................................. 156 Jean-Pierre Naugrette Revisiting the ‘chambers of the brain’: Stevenson’s ‘A Chapter on Dreams’ between Poe and Wilde, with Sherlock Holmes 171 Morgan Holmes Ancient, wild, indigenous: Stevenson’s bagpipe nation ..... 186 Trenton B. Olsen Robert Louis Stevenson’s annotated Wordsworth: a complete transcript ............................................................................ 208 Journal of Stevenson Studies vii Contributors ......................................................................218 JSS Notes ............................................................................222 Journal of Stevenson Studies 1 Editorial This is the first production of the Journal of Stevenson Studies in its new electronic format and we fully expect to expand the Journal’s footprint for all future editions. From now on the Journal will be available on-line only and accessible at the RLS Website at Napier University (http://robert-louis-stevenson. org.) Please do mark this site for future access and spread the word to any and all interested parties. Direct contact with the editors will continue as before, including my own email address at the University of Stirling, during an interim handover period in which I have agreed to continue as acting editor. This edition contains two essays that deal with wider aspects of Stevenson’s engagement with his own cultural background. Morgan Holmes’s account of the Highland bagpipe explores the historical roots of that instrument and the cultural and thematic significances of its appear-ance in Stevenson’s work, most especially, of course, in Kidnapped. And an intriguing piece of research by Trenton Olsen takes us to Stevenson’s own copy of Wordsworth’s complete poems, and traces, by way of his annotations and marginal markings just which poems made the most impression on him. All the other essays in this volume have been developed from papers given at the successful inter- national Stevenson conference held by the Centre for Literature and Writing at Napier University, Edinburgh, in July 2107. This was the eighth such Stevenson event and we look forward to the ninth in the series, which will be held at the Université Bordeaux Montaigne in June 2020, where the theme will be ‘Pleasure in Stevenson’. The chosen theme for the Napier meeting was ‘New Perspectives’ (an approach already re-alised in the additional essays by Holmes and Olsen), and these perspectives include the close critical attention paid to Stevenson’s essays by Lesley Graham and Ivan and Mark Sanderson. Graham’s essay on the 2 Journal of Stevenson Studies later essays explores how Stevenson’s more autobiographical ‘random memories’ are reconstructed in a ‘somewhat unsettling’ way by moving ‘to and fro between real past time, imaginary past time, putative future time and a present that brings them all together, not always explicitly, in the personage of Mr. Robert Louis Stevenson the writer, a constantly moving nexus of recollec- tion and projection and a work in progress.’ Graham argues that this process is characteristic of how contemporary theory sees modern identity. These insights, and Graham’s work as an editor of Stevenson essays for the new Edinburgh Edition certainly do show ‘new perspectives’ on this genre, too often neglected as a branch of Stevenson’s output. By the same token, Ivan and Mark Sanderson offer an illuminating and closely technical analysis of Stevenson’s use of chiasmus as it appears in his essays from the start to the end of his career. Stepping aside from Stevenson’s writing per se, Hilary Beattie’s essay reflects on the curious case of Katherine de Mattos and her complicated relationship with the author, his wife, his friends and the Stevenson family. (Beattie touched on aspects of this in her account of the writing of Fanny Osbourne’s story the ‘The Nixie’ in volume 11 of the Stevenson Journal.) Looking still further afield, Ilona Dobosiewicz’s essay outlines the translation and critical reception of Stevenson’s fiction in Poland from the nineteenth into the mid twentieth century. Returning to Stevenson’s oeuvre once more, Nathalie Jaëck, Flora Benkhodja and Harriet Gordon bring more immediately contemporary critical theory to bear on the semiotics of land- scape as envisioned by Stevenson. Jaëck looks at Kidnapped to argue that ‘landscape imagery is a semiotic structure that needs to be historicised, a culturally constructed process and certainly not a neutral and objective reproduction of the land’, while Benkhodja explores the hermeneutic complexities and uncertainties of ‘reading the runes’ in ‘The Merry Men’. Harriet Gordon, on the other hand, studies how Stevenson read the Journal of Stevenson Studies 3 runes of the Californian landscape as a place of global movement, rapid change and modernity, a locus utterly different from the history-steeped hills of his native land. Equally in line with ‘new perspectives’ Douglas Kerr uses a link to Conan Doyle and Sherlock Holmes’s case of ‘The Creeping Man’ to illuminate aspects of Jekyll and Hyde, while Jean-Pierre Naugrette invokes Edgar Allan Poe, Oscar Wilde, and Conan Doyle once again in his exploration of the tropes used by these writers, and by Stevenson, to convey the labyrinths of the brain and the mysteries of the imagination. In their different ways, each of these essays (and Benkhodja’s passing reference to ‘A Scandal in Bohemia’) suggests a telling comparison between the Holmesian drive for logic and order and Stevenson’s more fluid engagement with flux, narrative uncertainty and modernity. Roderick Watson Linda Dryden 4 Journal of Stevenson Studies 5 Toing and froing in Stevenson’s construc- tion of personal history in some of the later essays (1880-94) Lesley Graham Stevenson’s later essays (1880-94) are marked by a growing nostalgia for his younger self and he regularly weaves into them recollections of childhood and early adulthood experience. He had already written of his boyhood with a more overtly autobio- graphical style and structure in the unpublished accounts entitled ‘Notes of Childhood’ (1873) and ‘Memoirs of Himself’ (1880). In these later essays, however, as his star rises and public interest in his life reaches a crescendo, he fragments the account of his earlier self, scattering clues to the origins and development of his present personal identity across his writing. The discontinuous nature of the account is reflected in the subtitles of certain of the essays – ‘Random Memories’, ‘More Random Memories’. In this article, I propose to examine the somewhat unsettling