Journal of Stevenson Studies Volume 13 ii Journal of Stevenson Studies 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 14 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 2016 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 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) Journal of Stevenson Studies v Contents Editorial.................................................................................. 1 Richard Dury Reading ‘Forest Notes’ .............................................................5 Burkhard Niederhoff The miller as artist: ‘Will o’ the Mill’ and the aestheticism of Stevenson’s early essays .........................................................35 Steve Joyce The obscure cinematic lore of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde: an updated silent era filmography .............................................. 57 William B. Jones The Black Arrow, Classics Illustrated, and the hybrid adapta- tion style ................................................................................ 111 Emma-Lee Davidson ‘The game is up’: the evolution of Treasure Island as imperial critique .................................................................................. 125 Sebastian Williams Contaminated salts and volatile ethers: Jekyll and Hyde and the Pharmacy Act ........................................................................ 149 Neil Macara Brown Speculating on The Wrecker: some sources surveyed ......... 167 Review .................................................................................203 Contributors ......................................................................207 JSS Notes ............................................................................ 212 vi Journal of Stevenson Studies Journal of Stevenson Studies 1 Editorial Films, comics and essays – four of the studies in this volume could be said to be exploring the furtherest reaches of Stevenson’s legacy, from how he has been received in the popular culture of the twentieth century, to the genre that first made his interna- tional reputation in the nineteenth century only to have, perhaps, the smallest readership in the twenty-first. Steve Joyce charts the ways in which the Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde has been adapted (strangely indeed) in the early years of silent cinema. Relatively few prints of these films have actually survived but Joyce’s research draws on a wide range of printed material from advertisements, notices, trade journals and contemporary reviews. It is a bizarre and fascinating insight into how Stevenson’s most enduring tropes of duality were interpreted, not to say mutated, in the early years of cinema and theatre adaptation. William Jones takes up the tale with his account of how The Black Arrow was adapted for Classics Illustrated comic books in the 1940s and 60s. Regular readers will remember Jones’s study of the Classics version of The Master of Ballantrae, which was published in JSS in 2007. Richard Dury and Burkhard Niederhoff take us back to Stevenson’s early writing in the form of his essays and short fic- tion. Niederhoff’s revealing analysis of ‘Will o’ the Mill’ argues for a telling connection between this fabular tale and the aestheticism of Stevenson’s early essays. Richard Dury’s study makes a strong case for the importance of those essays – rather sadly neglected by many 20th and 21st century readers and critics. Dury’s fine close reading of ‘Forest Notes’ places these ‘thematically linked lyrical fragments’ in the philosophical and conceptual context of impressionism as it was being manifested in the visual arts at the time, aided by Stevenson’s subtle and constantly changing focalisations, which aim to catch both the nature of our inner life and what he called ‘the dazzle and confusion of reality’ in 2 Journal of Stevenson Studies the world around us. One of the most exciting prospects in The New Edinburgh Edition (see page 210) will be the volumes dedicated to Stevenson’s essays (Dury is one of those editors) and the critical insights and new appreciations those works will deliver. Emma-Lee Davidson’s essay sets Treasure Island in the con- text of popular imperial fiction for boys, a genre which Stevenson subtly destabilises even as he seems to meet its parameters, and she finds further evidence for this by comparing the text of the serial publication with its subsequent appearance in book form. Sebastian Williams’s ‘Contaminated Salts and Volatile Ethers’ takes a similarly new-historical contextual approach to the matter of drugs in Jekyll and Hyde, by looking at the 1868 Pharmacy Act, the professionalisation of medicine, and the 19th century’s anxieties about the prescribing and consumption of potent substances. Neil Macara Brown continues his researches into Stevenson’s often strikingly eclectic source material by exploring some of the factors that inspired the shipwreck and opium smuggling epi- sodes in The Wrecker. Brown pursued a similar trail in volume 12 of this journal with his essay on the contemporary literature of tantric mastery and suspended animation as it featured in The Master of Ballantrae and the wild forests of North America. We are delighted to report that the next International Stevenson Conference will be taking place at Edinburgh Napier from 5–8 July 2017. Readers will have had the call for papers and full details of this by the time we go to press, see page 209. The topic is to be ‘Robert Louis Stevenson: New Perspectives’, a theme aimed at encouraging new connections and new contexts in our continuing engagement with Stevenson’s work. It seems appropriate to bring the Stevenson conferences home again, and this will make four such meetings in Scotland – two at Stirling and now two at Napier. As for the Journal of Stevenson Studies we are making plans Journal of Stevenson Studies 3 to withdraw from print format in order to have its future publica- tion freely available as an open access journal online, beginning, if possible, with volume 14. At this juncture it seems appropriate for me pass the editorial task to another scholar. With co-editor Linda Dryden I have overseen the production of twelve issues since volume one was launched at Stirling by Dr Eric Massie, with six of these produced in the years since I retired. I will continue to be available as a consultant editor, especially during the handover period, but I do think that a younger academic col- league should have the opportunity and the benefit of an editorial role that has brought me so much enlightenment and satisfac- tion as well as new friends and colleagues over the last eleven years. With this in mind, it seems equally appropriate to thank two such colleagues, as Professor Kathie Linehan and Dr Jenni Calder have decided to stand down as members of the Journal’s Editorial Board after many years of invaluable support. We look forward to a wider readership – and an expanding citation index – as we move towards future production of the Journal of Stevenson Studies in its new electronic format. Roderick Watson Linda Dryden Richard Dury 5 Reading ‘Forest Notes’ Richard Dury A defence of Stevenson’s essays Writing about Robert Louis Stevenson’s long essay ‘Forest Notes’ is no easy task in the absence of any obvious model or tradition to follow: critical studies of essays are few and far between. The first professional university literary critics had little interest in the essay form, partly because of associations with the critics and writers from whom they wished to distinguish themselves: i.e. the non-professional critic, custodian of ‘genteel values’,1 a middle-aged male in a tweed jacket ‘maundering on about the delights of idleness, country walks, tobacco, old wine and old books’.2 In addition, and in contrast to the novel or the poem, essays simply do not seem to require explication: ‘Essays are readable; often they do not require interpretation […] They are clear enough, plain enough’.3 And, as a third reason for critical neglect, they are not fully inside the literary system, or if inside, are considered a minor genre. Studies of Stevenson’s essays share in this relative