An echo of Dickens

The following observation comes in a message from Alberto Meschiari (author of Le lanterne di stagno. Dieci racconti di commento a Stevenson [Tin lanterns. Ten short stories as a commentary to Stevenson] (2004), which, in indirect ways, develop ideas from ‘The Lantern Bearers’).

Has anyone previously commented, Alberto writes, on the affinities between the following two listings of miscellaneous but eloquent objects in a mysterious chest?

After some search, it [Barkis’s will] was found in the box, at the bottom of a horse’s nose-bag ; wherein (besides hay) there was discovered an old gold watch, with chain and seals, which Mr. Barkis had worn on his wedding-day, and which had never been seen before or since ; a silver tobacco-stopper, in the form of a leg ; an imitation lemon, full of minute cups and saucers, which I have some idea Mr. Barkis must have purchased to present to me when I was a child, and afterwards found himself unable to part with ; eighty-seven guineas and a half, in guineas and half-guineas ; two hundred and ten pounds, in perfectly clean bank-notes ; certain receipts for Bank of England stock ; an old horse-shoe, a bad shilling, a piece of camphor, and an oyster-shell. From the circumstance of the latter article having been much polished, and displaying prismatic colours on the inside, I conclude that Mr. Barkis had some general ideas about pearls, which never resolved themselves into anything definite.

For years and years, Mr. Barkis had carried this box, on all his journeys, every day.

Charles Dickens, David Copperfield (1850), ch. 31

.

Ill. by Hablot Browne (Phiz) (1849)

A strong smell of tobacco and tar rose from the interior, but nothing was to be seen on the top except a suit of very good clothes, carefully brushed and folded. They had never been worn, my mother said. Under that, the miscellany began–a quadrant, a tin canikin, several sticks of tobacco, two brace of very handsome pistols, a piece of bar silver, an old Spanish watch and some other trinkets of little value and mostly of foreign make, a pair of compasses mounted with brass, and five or six curious West Indian shells. I have often wondered since why he should have carried about these shells with him in his wandering, guilty, and hunted life.

[…] Underneath there was an old boat-cloak, whitened with sea-salt on many a harbour-bar. My mother pulled it up with impatience, and there lay before us, the last things in the chest, a bundle tied up in oilcloth, and looking like papers, and a canvas bag that gave forth, at a touch, the jingle of gold.

Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasure Island (1881), ch. 4

Ill. by Henriette Munière (1982)

Alberto adds: ‘Despite the their interests in very different areas and their practical lives untouched by art, both pirate and carrier feel a need for beauty, that both approach through a shell that they carry with them wherever they go. This seems a wonderful metaphor. And perhaps here Stevenson was inspired by Dickens.’

---

To my knowledge no-one has commented on the parallels between these two passages: the examination of the contents of a travelling chest belonging to a person who has just died, and the resulting heterogeneous list of objects (both ending with a shell or shells) that reveal aspects of the owner’s life and inner life. It is not remarked on in the notes to John Sutherland’s edition of Treasure Island for Broadview Press and searches in Google Advanced Book Search with combined key phrases from the two lists has not produced any results.

The two lists, though similar, bring out differences between the two authors: the humorous prose of Dickens, his sentimentality and interest the grotesque detail and human folly; Stevenson’s more concise listing, the brief suggestion of dialogue in ‘They had never been worn, my mother said’ (bringing out the woman’s interest and understanding, and sketching in her pause in the search), and the greater mystery surrounding imaginative life of the owner of the box (unsurprising in the author who was to write ‘The Lantern Bearers’ on this very topic). The narrative voice is very different: Dickens ends with a barrister-like ‘I conclude that’, while Stevenson ends with a more intimate ‘I have often wondered since’.

Stevenson had read David Copperfield: his copy (with marginal notes) was sold in 1914, its present whereabouts unknown. But the person unconsciously influenced by Dickens’s inventory of the dead man’s chest may well have been Thomas Stevenson

My father […] set himself acting to collaborate. When the time came for Billy Bones’s chest to be ransacked, he must have passed the better part of a day preparing, on the back of a legal envelope, an inventory of its contents, which I exactly followed

(‘My First Book: Treasure Island‘)

We may imagine that Thomas Stevenson wrote out the list, while Stevenson fitted it into sentences.

Any such influence (unprovable of course), would in any case not be surprising in a text which Stevenson himself admits (in ‘My First Book’) was created in a spirit of intertextuality both conscious and unconscious.