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Journal of Stevenson Studies Volume 12 ii Journal of Stevenson Studies iii Editors Professor Linda Dryden Professor Emeritus CLAW Roderick Watson School of Arts and Creative School of Arts and Industries Humanities Napier University University of Stirling Craighouse Stirling Edinburgh FK9 4LA EH10 5LG Scotland Scotland Email: Tel: 0131 455 6128 [email protected] Email: [email protected] Contributions to volume 13 are warmly invited and should be sent to either of the editors listed above. 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 Scottish Studies University of Stirling © The contributors 2015 ISSN: 1744-3857 Printed and bound in the UK by Antony Rowe Ltd. Chippenhan, Wiltshire. iv Journal of Stevenson Studies Editorial Board Professor Richard Ambrosini Professor Gordon Hirsch Universita’ di Roma Tre Department of English Rome University of Minnesota Professor Professor Stephen Arata School of English Katherine Linehan University of Virginia Department of English Oberlin College Dr Hilary Beattie Ohio Department of Psychiatry Columbia University Professor Barry Menikoff Department of English Professor Oliver Buckton University of Hawaii at Manoa School of English Florida Atlantic University Professor Glenda Norquay Department of English and Professor Linda Dryden Cultural History School of Arts and Creative Liverpool John Moores Industries University Edinburgh Napier University Professor Marshall Walker Professor Richard Dury Department of English Honorary Professorial Fellow The University of Waikato University of Edinburgh (Consultant Editor) Professor Roderick Watson School of Arts and Humanities Professor Penny Fielding University of Stirling Department of English University of Edinburgh v Contents Editorial.................................................................................. 1 Carla Manfredi Robert Louis Stevenson’s and Joseph Strong’s ‘A Samoan Scrapbook’ ................................................................................4 Jan Gorak Stevenson’s Samoa and the metamorphoses of power .........33 Lucio De Capitani The playwright, the moralist and the poet: a Brechtian reading of Stevenson’s writings on François Villon ...............53 Sylvie Largeaud-Ortéga Robert Louis Stevenson’s ‘voyage of discovery’ in The Beach of Falesá (1893): an exploration of Pacific history and culture ............................................................................. 80 Duncan Milne Realism and romance: Henry James, Robert Louis Stevenson and the Victorian literary form .............................96 Stuart A. Paterson Tuned in to Radio RLS ..........................................................118 Neil Macara Brown Yogi in the woods: reading The Master between the pines 126 Brian Wall ‘The Situation was apart from ordinary laws’: culpability and insanity in the urban landscape of Robert Louis Stevenson’s London ..................................................................................146 Uncollected Stevenson (4) Wallace’s Russia .................................................................. 169 Richard Dury Notes on Stevenson’s book review ‘Wallace’s Russia’ ......... 173 Contributors ......................................................................180 JSS Notes ............................................................................183 vi Journal of Stevenson Studies 1 Editorial The essays in this edition of JSS, seem to have divided them- selves between two Robert Louis Stevensons – not unfitting, perhaps, for an author so closely associated with the dynamics of duality. We have Stevenson as a European writer, or at least as a writer seen through European critical perspectives, and then there is the Stevenson of the South Seas, whose works contain material and references steeped in cultural expectations and associations that are far indeed from his native shores. Carla Manfredi’s essay discusses the ambiguities of authorial perspective in the balance between visual and verbal description in RLS’s commentary on photographs of Polynesian life produced by Joseph Strong. This material was to be published as ‘A Samoan Sketchbook’, perhaps in the Illustrated London News, but the project was never completed. Stevenson’s commentary survives, but Strong’s photographs were presumed to have been lost until Dr Manfredi discovered a similar stock of his Polynesian studies at the Writer’s Museum in Edinburgh. This has allowed her to reflect on the critical, cultural and contextual implications of the European gaze at work, as seen in Stevenson’s remarks and especially in Strong’s photographs. Jan Gorak’s essay on the metamorphoses of power in Samoa, takes us further into the complex politics of the place and Stevenson’s own ambivalent and difficult responses to it in A Footnote to History, as he offers a critique of colonial exploita- tion somewhere between light comedy and bitter satire. Sylvie Largeaud-Ortéga’s essay, on the other hand, draws directly on native culture to re-examine The Beach at Falesá in the light of Polynesian myth and Polynesian history to suggest how the tale can be read as a narrative of truly hybridised and syncretised cross cultural meanings. The shifting authorial perspectives discussed in Manfredi’s 2 Journal of Stevenson Studies essay reappear in Lucio De Capitani’s study of textual instability and the fluidity of authorial response to be found in Stevenson’s various writings on François Villon. Here, not least because of De Capitani’s Brechtian approach, we are back with the European Stevenson, but still engaged as before (and as always) with the nuances and ambivalences of Stevenson’s characteristically sub- tle writing. The European link is continued in Duncan Milne’s dialectical analysis of the debate between ‘realism’ and ‘romance’ in the Stevenson / James correspondence, with a proposed syn- thesis, and in Brian Wall’s historically contextualised study of split personality, the law, and the social and urban landscape of London as these themes manifest themselves in Jekyll and Hyde. ‘East’ and ‘West’, so to speak, actually come together in Neil Macara Brown’s impressive research on yogic burial and pos- sible Indian sources for Stevenson’s investigation of the matter. This essay reveals once again the Scottish novelist’s passion for authenticity and, more than that, it allows us to revisit the closing scenes of The Master of Ballantrae with a new understanding of specific narrative details that might otherwise have been dis- missed as of passing interest or as merely fantastic fabrication. And finally Scottish poet Stuart Paterson’s memoir of his time as a Stevenson Fellow at Grez-sur-Loing in France, along with two poems from that sojourn, testify once more to RLS’s continuing presence as a creative influence among contemporary writers On more general matters Professor Stephen Arata has had to report that the next International Stevenson Conference, mooted for the University of Virginia in 2016, cannot now take place. Regretfully it has not been possible to resolve continuing problems to do with funding, venue booking and accommoda- tion. Plans are afoot, however, to host the next International Conference, once again in Scotland, for 2017. In 2012 Napier University was granted a significant collection of Stevenson books and memorabilia from the estate of the late 3 Ernest Mehew. Mehew is of course widely recognised as the scholar who made such an extensive and vital contribution to Professor Bradford Booth’s edition of the Stevenson correspond- ence for the Yale Collected Letters, and for his own edition of the Selected Letters. Over fifty years during his long career as a Civil Servant, Mehew had been collecting works on and by Stevenson, including first editions, rarities, biographies, collections of let- ters, reference books, critical studies and bound copies of the magazines where Stevenson’s work first appeared. This legacy has been bequeathed to Edinburgh Napier, which, under the guidance of Linda Dryden and Richard Dury is also the home of the R. L. Stevenson website. A specially dedicated Stevenson room has now been established to house the Mehew Collection at Edinburgh Napier’s newly refurbished Merchiston Campus. The Ernest and Joyce Mehew Stevenson Collection constitutes the largest RLS collection held by any university in Europe. Finally it remains for us to remind readers that copies of the Stevenson Journal and back numbers as well, can be ordered and bought from our publisher, the University of Stirling, by credit card online. See page 191 for the details. We are already col- lecting material for Volume 13, so please do keep contributions coming in. Roderick Watson Linda Dryden 4 Journal of Stevenson Studies Robert Louis Stevenson’s and Joseph Strong’s ‘A Samoan Scrapbook’1 Carla Manfredi 1. Fragments of a Photo-Book According to Stevenson in A Footnote to History: Eight Years of Trouble in Samoa (1892), the Island’s political situation dur- ing the closing decades of the nineteenth century is a ‘singular state of affairs’: foreigners fight over Samoa’s ‘money, luxury, and business’ like ‘a bone between two dogs, each growling, each clutching his own end’.2 Stevenson’s ‘dogs’ are Germany, Britain, and the United States and their ‘bone’ is, in part, Samoa’s prime land. Unlike the Hawaiian Islands, where the plantation boom was achieved through the labour of indigenous Hawaiians and later with Chinese, Japanese,

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