Robert Louis Stevenson 1850 - 1894 Contents: Biography.................................................................................................................................................................Page 1 Contexts........................................................................................................................................................Pages 2 - 3 From a Railway Carriage ................................................................................................................................Page 4 Thrawn Janet............................................................................................................................................Pages 4 - 11 Further Reading / Contacts.......................................................................................................... Pages 12 - 15 Biography: Robert Louis Stevenson (1850 - 1894): Born in 1850, he grew up in Edinburgh, and the city had a great impact on his writing. From early childhood, he suffered from various ailments, and the fragility of his state is often seen as a reason for his fertile imagination. His father was an engineer, and it was assumed that Robert would follow in his footsteps. He even studied at Edinburgh University, but it was soon clear that his ambitions lay in literature. Stevenson started writing fi ction when still a teenager, but his fi rst publication was the 1878 travel account An Inland Voyage, followedfollowed byby Edinburgh, Picturesque Notes in 1879. Today, Stevenson is famous mainly for his adventure stories, such as Treasure Island, or Kidnapped, as well as his narrative The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, an attack on the hypocrisy of Victorian values, and a best seller both in Europe and America. Stevenson’s unconventional lifestyle, and his marriage to American divorcee Fanny Osborne, caused tensions within his family. Due to his bad health, he spent much time away from home in France, Switzerland, and the South of England, but even from a distance, he explored the dualism of the Scottish psyche in his short fi ction. On his father’s death in 1887, he went to America, and continued to go West to the South Pacifi c, where he fi nally found a climate suited to his condition, and settled down in Samoa. He never returned, and besides Scottish issues, turned to new themes in his fi ction, incorporating native traditions, and supporting the case of anti colonialism. His exile inspired some of his best work about Scotland and the Scots language, such as Catriona, or The Weir of Hermiston, which he worked on until his death, and which remained unfi nished. Stevenson’s oeuvre also includes eight volumes of letters, haunting short stories, The Child’s Garden of Verses and other poetry. He died in Samoa in 1894. 1 Copyright © 2003 Scottish Literary Tour Trust. All Rights Reserved. Robert Louis Stevenson 1850 - 1894 Contexts: Robert Louis Stevenson was one of the most widely read writers of the Victorian age. He was a gifted diarist and letter writer, poet and essayist, but he is remembered mostly for the haunting stories and novels like Kidnapped and Treasure Island which brought him a large audience and an enduring popularity. The Strange Case of Dr Jeckyll and Mr Hyde in particular has entered the popular imagination with a huge number of imitations, derivatives and references in all kinds of places from cartoons to feature fi lms as well as other stories and novels, such as Emma Tennant’s 1989 novel Two Women of London. Stevenson had a tremendous facility for language and plot. His writing is always sharp, never fl accid or slack, and his stories burn with a vivid intensity that many people believe to be a product of the illness that stalked him throughout his life and which eventually forced him to leave the country in search of a climate where he would feel more at ease. He went fi rst to France, where he met the woman – an American eleven years his senior – who would become his wife. Thereafter he travelled widely throughout Europe and across the United States, fi nally settling in Samoa in the South Pacifi c where he became an active member of the community and continued writing. He was working on his fi nal novel, The Master of Ballantrae, when he died at the age of 44. He is best known for the dark, gothic satire on Victorian values The Strange Case of Dr Jeckyll and Mr Hyde, the adventure stories Treasure Island and Kidnapped, and his collection of poems A Children’s Garden of Verse, along with his short fi ction, outstanding amongst which is the grim tale Thrawn Janet. The theme of dualism is strong in his fi ction which many people have interpreted as a commentary on the many divisions which existed in Scottish, or indeed British society. Not least of these divisions can be found in Stevenson’s home city of Edinburgh with its two very different Old and New Towns. This is a theme in Walter Scott’s novels too but with Stevenson the divisions are internal, more psychological, as well as social. In Kidnapped the two main characters are the lowland Whig, David Balfour, and the Highland Jacobite, Alan Breck Stewart. It is interesting to note the development of this theme since Scott, as Stevenson’s two characters are friends, not enemies, suggesting that Scotland’s divisions (political, social, geographical etc.) are not wholly irreconcilable. The Strange Case of Dr Jeckyll and Mr Hyde (1886) presents us with a more psychological kind of dualism: the guilty secrets and furtive goings-on among the middle classes, particularly professional men who present the world with a respectable face while getting up to all kinds of immoral mischief in private. Stevenson’s target is Victorian hypocrisy. His book satirises a society where the clothes one wears and the company one keeps is of more importance than whatever personal qualities one may possess; it is a world not very unlike our own, where surface frequently carries more value socially than 2 substance. These double standards are manifest in the character(s) of Dr Jeckyll and Mr Copyright © 2003 Scottish Literary Tour Trust. All Rights Reserved. Robert Louis Stevenson 1850 - 1894 Hyde, the latter a malformed refl ection of the former. Behind the respectable exterior of this middle class doctor and pillar of the community lurks an evil ‘inner self’. The message is clear: the faces we put on for the world may conceal a darker, uglier truth. Jeckyll and Hyde wasn’t the fi rst Scottish novel to explore psychological dualism. More than 60 years before, another novel, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justifi ed Sinner (1824) byby James Hogg, dealt with a similar theme,theme, with a similar purpurpose.pose. This nonovel,vel, considered one of the greatest in European literature, set out to expose and satirise the double standards and hypocritical values of the age, in Hogg’s case a particularly extreme form of Presbyterianism. As Hogg in Justifi ed Sinner uses a radicalradical structurestructure to unsettle the reader and force him or her to question the text, so too does Stevenson experiment with structure, giving the reader only a slippery, almost intangible sense of the title characters for much of the narrative. Critical favour towards Stevenson’s work soured somewhat in the 20th century, as the cold eye of Modernism began to survey much that was written in the previous century with detachment and a disapproval that bordered on disdain. The Times Literary Supplement wrote of Stevenson in December 1919: ‘His writing is a game… We like to see him playing with his toys; but it is a game in which we are seldom tempted to share.’ Critic HL Mencken, writing in the literary journal The American Mercury, gave a further twist of the knife in 1924 when he dismissed him as an adolescent who never grew up: “His weakness as an imaginative author lies in the fact that he never got beyond the simple revolt of boyhood – that his intellect never developed to match his imagination. The result is that an air of triviality hangs about all his work and even at times, an air of trashiness. He is never very searching, never genuinely profound.” Generations of readers who have fallen under Stevenson’s spell would disagree. But writers come into and out of taste and fashion, even the best of them. Despite the infl uence of the Modernists Stevenson remains a hugely popular writer throughout the world and his most famous works have never been out of print. As we begin to rediscover the writers of the Victorian period of literature Stevenson stands out as much for the breadth and variety of his achievements as for the high quality of his best works. Written by Colin Clark 3 Copyright © 2003 Scottish Literary Tour Trust. All Rights Reserved. Robert Louis Stevenson 1850 - 1894 From a Railway Carriage: Faster than fairies, faster than witches, Bridges and houses, hedges and ditches; And charging along like troops in a battle, All through the meadows the horses and cattle: All of the sights of the hill of the plain Fly as thick as driving rain; And ever again in the wink of an eye, Painted stations whistle by. Here is a child who clambers and scrambles All by himself and gathering brambles; Here is a tramp who stands and gazes; And there is the green for stringing the daisies! Here is a cart run away in the road Lumping along with man and load; And here is a mill and there is a river: Each a glimpse and gone forever! Thrawn Janet The Reverend Murdoch Soulis was long minister of the moorland parish of Balweary, in the vale of Dule. A severe, bleak-faced old man, dreadful to his hearers, he dwelt in the last years of his life, without relative or servant or any human company, in the small and lonely manse under the Hanging Shaw. In spite of the iron composure of his features, his eye was wild, scared, and uncertain; and when he dwelt, in private admonitions, on the future of the impenitent, it seemed as if his eye pierced through the storms of time to the terrors of eternity.