Who exactly do we write for and do we care who reads us? Andrew Melrose TAKING ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON AND TREASURE ISLAND AS AN EXAMPLE When I was in discussion with Anne Caldwell about started – and now I have just confessed that, telling you, reviewing her wonderful new collection of poems Alice strangers, something I had previously kept to myself. If I and the North, she said she had no secrets from her son write from biographical experience it is often only a true because he had read all of her poetry. Lisa Koning, in story, maybe. putting together her covid quarantine diary ‘Lockdown, quarantine and the splinter of ice in the writer’s veins’, I am intrigued by the process of writing, like all of us, on the value of taking biographical notes as a useful and like you reading this I am interested in the people writing tool, confessed she was nervous about revealing who do so. Don DeLillo (and others) said he writes to some of the ‘personal details’ her diary blog contained fnd out what he knows, others might write to show and then proceeded to reveal the link to strangers. Jen how much they know, some even write telling you Webb in ‘Ethics, writing, and splinters in the heart’ things they obviously know nothing about. That’s the confrmed she asked her son’s permission to write about writing life, either way I am interested. I know in the ‘it’s his hospitalisation as the victim of a serious assault and not the teller but the tale’ days, or the critical analysis, then when he gave it she shared what she had written to critical theory party where we deconstruct narratives an international audience. I know all three writers and for meaning and hidden subliminal, psychoanalytical love their writing. However, each time I was intrigued by resonances of childhood trauma and suchlike we are their on-the-page honesty. That’s because I, on the other discouraged from considering the person behind the hand, have spent the lockdown period writing a new story, the poem, the lyric etc., but it’s a natural human clutch of songs and a chapbook to accompany a record, response, surely? I want to know that the writer of my called Fisherrow, which says: favourite song, poem, novel shares my sensibility. I was once in an English tutorial (as a student) and someone Fisherrow is a small harbour town at the delta of called Virginia Wolf’s Mrs Ramsey (To the Lighthouse) the River Esk where it meets the Firth of Forth. ‘stupid’. My tutor, who I won’t name, cried and said she I lived there for seven years. This isn’t in any had felt a deep afnity with Mrs Ramsey and Virginia way a biographical account of my life there, or a Wolf ever she had been an undergraduate – and I had travelogue of the place but echoes I heard during wondered then what kind of impression Wolf had hoped the time of Covid (2020) when I had lockdown to make. Here we had two readers with hugely diferent and quarantine time to listen out for them. Like views of the same character. Then more recently, when all echoes they are imprecise and often only I started researching Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure loosely attached to the source, so it’s only a true Island for a diferent article, I discovered something story, maybe... really interesting about a hugely popular and famous author who was torn in all kinds of directions about his I have a tendency to move what I write away from being writing; and why he was writing Treasure Island, who he too close to the real me, so that quite often what people was writing for and who he wanted to please all at the get is an echo which has travelled a good distance from same time makes an interesting case study. I hope what the source, and is thereby not the same as it was when it I reveal about the writing of that novel and Robert Louis Writing in Education 61 Stevenson’s relationship with it, beyond the actual book with the cheaply published, cheaply printed, Penny currently available to us, might help us to reconsider a Dreadful: literary legacy with a story of its own. But also ask us to address the idea, for whom do we write? This inexpensive pleasure mastered me [my italic]. Each new Saturday I would go from one newsvendor’s Edinburgh at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of window to another’s, till I was master of the weekly the nineteenth century was known in critical circles as gallery and had thoroughly digested “The Baronet the Athens of the North. The man of letters (for he was Unmasked,” “So and so approaching the Mysterious invariable always a man in those days) was a position House,” “The Discovery of the Dead Body in the of esteem. The young Robert Louis Stevenson was keen Blue Marl Pit,” “Dr. Vargas Removing the Senseless to join this tradition and his early work was designed to Body of Fair Lilias,” and whatever other snatch of provide him entry into the club. unknown story and glimpse of unknown characters that gallery aforded. I do not know that I ever Having sculpted a reasonable literary reputation, enjoyed fction more... with titles such as An Inland Voyage (1878), Edinburgh. Picturesque Notes (1879) and Travels With A Donkey (1879) along with other essays, poetry and fction, there is an element of him putting a toe into the notoriously outrageous ‘penny dreadful’ territory with Deacon Brodie, or The Double Life (1880). As he moved into 1881 there were two signifcant developments in his literary life. The frst of these was the publication of Virginibus Puerisque. This was the frst collection of Stevenson’s essays and contained what were regarded as personal essays in the tradition of Lamb and Hazlitt. Bringing together essays previously published in the prestigious magazines such as Cornhill Magazine and Macmillan’s, they promoted a spirit of the gentleman writer. The man of letters he aspired to be. Despite a good critical reception however, the collection didn’t sell well and Stevenson, while cementing a The growth in cheap publishing, cheap printing and reputation, was not making money. So in the same year sensational stories throughout the Victorian period is he wrote to Sydney Colvin about another project, quite well documented – and with it the moral arguments unlike Virginibus Puerisque altogether. which surrounded the industry and their suitability for 807 To Sidney Colvin the Victorian young. The young man of letter, dependent on his father and desperate to keep writing was looking Text: Letters, II, 150-51, supplemented from Colvin’s at the cash, not litarary potential. Then something happened. The Black Man and Other Tales gave way to Galleys, Silverado something much more important: [Mid-June 1881] Kinnaird Cottage, Pitlochry [24 August 1881] My dear Henley, Of course I am a rogue… now see My Dear Colvin, The Black Man and Other Tales here. The Black Man i. Thrawn Janet The Sea Cook ii. The Devil on Cramond Sands The Shadow The Body Snatchers Or Treasure Island The Case Bottle The King’s Horn A Story for Boys. The Actor’s Wife The Wreck of the Susanna If this don’t fetch the kids, why, they are gone rotten since my day. Will you be surprised to learn This is the new work on which I am engaged with it is about Buccanneers, that begins in the Admiral Fanny; they are all supernatural… the tales are all Benbow public house, that’s all about a map and a ghostly. ‘Thrawn Janet’ frightened me to death… treasure and a mutimy and aderelicts ship and a Yours exuberantly, R.L.S. (Booth and Mehew, Vol current and a fne old Squire Trelawney (the real Tre, Three: 188-9) purged of literature and sin)… a Sea Cook with one leg, and a sea song with the chorus, ‘Yo-ho-ho and a While there is no direct evidence or correspondence, at bottle of Rum’… that time, relating to the subject of ‘penny dreadfuls’ or the marketplace dealing with them. But just by the tone In short Stevenson had changed course and was about to of the correspondence it is clear that in the The Black Man sail in diferent waters in the style of the hugely popular and Other Tales proposal, Stevenson is beginning to see Jack Harkaway stories. The why is easy to establish the possibilities of writing for a more commercial (and from his biographies, money and fnancial reliance on highly lucrative) market. And indeed he accounts for this his father was a constant concern. As he wrote to Mrs switch and his love of the genre later. In his 1888 essay, Sitwell, ‘If Colvin does not think that I shall be able to ‘Popular Authors’ RLS wrote of his childhood fascination 62 Writing in Education support myself soon by literature, I shall give it up and the Dry Tortugas, and wild deeds and places on the go (horrible as the thought is to me) into an ofce of some Spanish Main,’ which we never actually get to hear, ‘were sort.’ (Booth and Mehew, Vol One: 91). what frightened people worst of all…’ (5) alongside his ‘eternal song… “Fifteen men on the dead man’s chest/ Yo-ho- Here he is, then, pitching the Sea Cook or what was ho, and a bottle of rum!”’ (6). It sets the story up well, we to become Treasure Island as a potential best seller to have treasure in the title, a mystery seaman, scary stories, a publisher.