There’s no real need to imagine the plan of the roundhouse in Kidnapped: you understand that it’s a single structure on the top deck of the Covenant with doors, windows and a skylight and understand their relative positions. If you can’t work out how the dangerous openings relate to fore and aft, port and starboard, it doesn’t really matter: in a way, it helps contribute to the sense of a confused and rapid action.
However, if you were to prepare an annotated edition of the novel you might want to see if the narrative actually supplies a coherent picture of spaces and their relative positions, and this would help translators, illustrators and authors of other derived works.
N. C. Wyeth (ill.), Kidnapped (1913)Howard Pyle, Kidnapped (Thistle Edition, 1895)
The roundhouse is not round. First of all, let’s clear up the name. It is not, as a naive reader might imagine, circular. It’s a cabin, certainly rectangular in plan, built across the afterdeck where the captain and officers eat and sleep. In ch. 9 Stevenson also refers to it as a deck-house.
The name ’roundhouse’ was first used for an aft cabin with curved windows, so originally ’round’ had a meaning; then the word was applied, as here, to a structure of similar function at the aft end of the ship providing accommodation for captain and officers. It’s the same as ‘the raised cabin on the quarter-deck’ in an earlier American pirate novel:
Going aft to the raised cabin on the quarter-deck, the Captain softly opened the weather door, and looking in, said, in a kindly tone … (H. A. Wise, ‘Captain Brand of the Schooner “Centipede” ‘, ch. 1, Harper’s Weekly, Apr. 1, 1860, p. 209)
It has two doors, two windows and a skylight. In ch. 8 we learn that the roundhouse has a skylight in the roof and ‘a small window with a shutter on each side’ — i.e. on each side, on two opposite sides, of the cabin. At this point we don’t know which of the two opposite sides are intended, nor do we learn about the doors.
Later in the chapter Mr Riach seizes the bottle from the table of the inebriated Mr Shuan:
crying out, with an oath, that there had been too much of this work altogether […]. And as he spoke (the weather sliding-doors standing open) he tossed the bottle into the sea.
‘Weather sliding-doors’ is a bit strange (but that’s not unusual for Stevenson): we’d normally say ‘sliding weather-doors’, i.e. solid timber doors protecting the cabin from the weather. (Some readers might think that ‘weather sliding doors’ are doors on the ‘weather side’ of the ship, i.e. the side on which the wind is blowing, but as we’ll see, the two doors are on opposite sides of the cabin.)
In ch. 9 we get the fullest description of the roundhouse:
The round-house was built very strong, to support the breaching of the seas. Of its five apertures, only the skylight and the two doors were large enough for the passage of a man. The doors, besides, could be drawn close: they were of stout oak, and ran in grooves, and were fitted with hooks to keep them either shut or open, as the need arose.
The two doors are on opposite sides of the cabin, as we seen from the following exchange:
[Alan said,] ‘It is my part to keep this door, where I look for the main battle […]’ ‘But then, sir’ said I, ‘there is the door behind you, which they may perhaps break in.’ ‘Ay,’ said he, ‘and that is a part of your work. No sooner the pistols charged, than ye must climb up into yon bed where ye’re handy at the window; and if they lift hand against the door, ye’re to shoot.’
Are the doors port and starboard or fore and aft? As the open doors in ch. 8 allow Mr Riach to toss Mr Shuan’s bottle into the sea, they must be at the sides, port and starboard.
However, in the preparations for the siege of the roundhouse in ch. 9, it looks as if the doors are fore and aft: the Captain and his followers are in the waist of the ship, i.e.amidships, when Davie hears of their plan to kill Alan and is told to get some firearms for them from the roundhouse without being observed. Davie tells Alan and they prepare for battle. Meanwhile ‘those on deck’, not knowing what is going on, are getting impatient and finally ‘the captain showed face in the open door’.
We might think that the door that Alan defends faces the mid and fore part of the deck, with a secondary door giving access to the extreme aft part of the deck. But the door could be lateral if we imagine the captain and others gathered on one side of the ship and so Alan chooses the door on that side to defend, or perhaps the lateral door chosen by Alan is the main door and the other is only secondary — it’s the obvious door to choose. The Captain shows himself in the doorway with no idea yet of what’s going on; as the door appears to be open, this again makes a lateral position more likely.
N. C.. Wyeth (1913)
.
.
The window that Davie has to guard to have warning of an attack at the opposite door must be on that same side of the cabin. Since the two windows are ‘on each side’, then the other window is on the side of the door defended by Alan, and the other two sides of the cabin have no openings.
The Cutty Sark (1869): deck-house with doors at the side
The photo of the Cutty Sark (above) shows a deck-house with doors at the side, but other images found on the internet show that there was no design obligation to place them laterally, as is show in the photo on the right.
As a reader I don’t find any difficulty in imagining an indefinite configuration to the roundhouse, with doors certainly port and starboard in ch. 8 and possibly fore and aft in ch. 9 and 10—they could still be port and starboard, but I feel the simple schematic position of Alan’s door is facing forwards, opposed to the captain and his men. The five men with a ‘spare yard’ for a battering ram attacking the other door makes me instinctively think of the aft part of the ship with more space for manoeuvre than a passage running alongside the roundhouse.
So in the end I can’t confidently draw a plan—yet I don’t think it matters. But those are my ideas, if you differ you please leave a comment.
A post by Katherine Ashley: thoughts on her study Robert Louis Stevenson and Nineteenth-Century French Literature: Literary Relations at the Fin de Siecle (EUP, 2022)
When we look at how Stevenson interpreted French literary history, how he responded to established and emerging theories of the novel in France, and how he devoured both popular and literary French novels, we can also see how all of these things informed his own writing. From the way that he argues against Naturalism in order to reassert the importance of the romance tradition, to the stylistic apprenticeship that he undertook in earnest and in jest, we see an author developing an approach to literature that went against dominant theories of the Victorian realist novel and challenged conceptions of what “the art of fiction” might entail.
To a new generation of French writers, Stevenson became a beacon of change, presenting a pathway out of the perceived dead end that the French novel had run up against.
Naturalism, with its emphasis on scientific positivism, could only take the novel so far; Decadence, with its emphasis on aestheticism, contained the seeds of its own demise. Stevenson, translated and published in popular and highbrow venues, touted as a bestselling children’s author but also as the figurehead of a cosmopolitan revival, showed that readable page-turners could also be stylistic tours-de-force. This reminded French authors and critics that form and style could themselves be part of the intrigue and the adventure of reading and writing.
This study of reciprocal influence reveals much about the literary debates that rocked late-nineteenth-century Britain and France. To retrace the readings and the relationships – both on an individual level (Stevenson) and on a macro level (Franco-British literature) – required wading through nineteenth-century newspapers, journals, correspondence and novels. This might seem dry, but it was brought to life by the ebullient and boisterous personality at the heart of my research. Stevenson’s voice was a reminder that at the end of the day, literary history is in part the history of individuals who valued the imaginative, creative qualities of language and dedicated their lives to it. For Stevenson, being a man of letters sometimes meant “sedulously aping” literary masters, but it also involved play and fun, spontaneity and pleasure. When researching my book, it was Stevenson’s exuberant multilingual outbursts, his hilarious spoofing of contemporary writers and texts, or the silly French lessons like the one he gave to his stepson Lloyd Osbourne that brought the subject and the subject matter to life.
Table of contents, Robert Louis Stevenson and Nineteenth-Century French Literature
This post is about Stevenson’s influence on the French novel in the early twentieth century, and in particular on André Gide’s Isabelle, a text in which such influence has so far not been noted.
André Gide looking Stevensonian in the 1890s
A strange experience
I recently read André Gide’s novella Isabelle (first published in 1911) and, as I did so, was continually reminded of Stevenson’s long short story ‘Olalla’.
Such were the affinities in characters, settings, events and even atmosphere that I was sure that Gide must have taken Stevenson’s tale as a conscious inspiration. This conviction was strengthened by my knowledge that Gide belonged to a group of of French writers and critics before and after 1900 who admired Stevenson and saw him as a model who could help the French novel find a new way forward.
Then I learnt that Gide recorded reading ‘Olalla’ in his Journal the year after he wrote Isabelle. I fell from the clouds (as they say in Italian). Where I wanted to find affinities, had I imagined them?
From what follows the reader will be able to judge between three possible explanations: 1. I had made a pattern out of unrelated elements and mere coincidences, 2. the two works share a common influence, or 3. Gide may have read ‘Olalla’ earlier than recorded in his Journal and had indeed been inspired by it.
‘Olalla’ and Isabelle: similarities
First of all, what was it about the narrative that made me think that Gide may have been thinking of ‘Olalla’ when writing Isabelle? In both texts
The narrator travels to and stays in a remote and decayed aristocratic residence inhabited by a family of declining fortune
The youngest members of the family are — a mentally handicapped boy (Felipe, Casimir), who is attracted to the narrator, — and a young woman (Olalla, Felipe’s sister; Isabelle, Casimir’s mother), with whom the narrator falls in love and who gives the title to the story. — There is also a priest in both (a visitor in ‘Olalla’, a resident tutor in Isabelle), who knows the family secret.
The narrator in both cases is ill-at-ease in the house, — not being an intimate friend of the family (foreigner and paying guest in ‘Olalla’; scholar consulting a manuscript and received as a guest in Isabelle); — he finds the house and its inhabitants strange (‘being in a strange place and surrounded by strange people’; ‘étranges êtres à peine humains’); — the house has elements from ‘Gothic’ tales and there are frightening noises at night.
In both cases, the narrator investigates and discovers the hidden truth about the family.
A turning point in both stories is when the narrator sees a portrait of the previously unseen young woman and becomes obsessed with it to the point of falling in love, an attraction which in both cases is ultimately frustrated.
‘Olalla’ and Isabelle: differences
There are important differences too:
An important theme in ‘Olalla’, absent in Isabelle, is the inherited degeneracy shared by all members of the family (except by Olalla herself, though she fears it will develop or be passed on to a child).
‘Olalla’ is more ‘Gothic’: the narrator hears terrible screams in the night and finds himself locked in his room. In despair, the he puts his hand through a window and his wrist bleeds copiously; when he seeks help from the Senora, she leaps at the bleeding wrist and bites it to the bone.(1)
in Isabelle the main theme is that of the narrator’s self-deception: his idealistic and romantic view of Isabelle at the end is destroyed by crude reality: she is manipulative and mendacious (it’s a kind of Northanger Abbey in which events are expected by the protagonist on the basis of his reading but then turn out very differently).
It is also more realistic and Gide works in several autobiographical elements
It includes a number of metaliterary references and an outer frame to the main story,
On that last point, any influence of Stevenson in Isabelle is not going to be the only one, in view of Gide’s unusually large range of literary influences here and in all his writing, and of the way that — like Stevenson — he was constantly experimenting with different kinds of texts.
The following intertextual models have been identified for Isabelle: Chateaubriand’s René, Maupassant, Turgenev’s Virgin Soil, Laclos’ Les liaisons dangereuses, Hoffman’s The Sandman, the writings of Francis Jammes (friend and character in the frame narrative), Paul Bourget’s Le disciple, and Mozart’s The Magic Flute.(2)
So any influence of ‘Olalla’ will be only one of a whole range of others.
‘Olalla’ and Isabelle: shared influences
Some of the similarities between the two works are undoubtedly due to shared influences:
The gothic novel in which the ingénu visitor gradually discovering the secrets of an isolated house
Novels of the governess or tutor in an aristocratic mansion, their intermediate status, relations with the family members and romantic attractions
Poe’s ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ in the gothic novel tradition; the decadent family and family home.
However, the composition of the family, the function of the portrait and the frustrated love story do seem strangely similar.
Other Stevensonian echoes in Isabelle
But right from the first chapter I noted what seemed to me a striking and pictorial incidents where the reader can picture the disposition of characters at an important moment — of the kind that Stevenson discusses in ‘A Gossip on Romance’ and that we typically remember from his narratives. In the introductory frame-narrative chapter, the unnamed narrator and and Francis Jammes are taken by Gérard Lacase to visit a nearby abandoned château, but then get separated from him during the exploration. Here it is in my translation:
We caught up with Gérard on the second floor near an unglazed corridor window through which a cord hung down from outside; it was a bell rope, and I was about to give it a gentle pull, when I felt my arm seized by Gérard; his movement, rather than check mine actually amplified it: a wild knell rang out, so close, so violent, that it made us painfully start; then, when it seemed that silence had closed round us again, two pure notes sounded again, at an interval, more distant. I had turned round towards Gérard and I saw his lips were trembling.
Isabelle, unnumbered introductory chapter
As I read, I came across other moments that seemed similarly Stevensonian. In the middle of a scene between Isabelle and her indulgent aunt (observed unseen by the narrator), Isabelle’s disapproving mother makes a theatrical entrance:
The baroness appeared in the doorway, rigid, in a low-cut gown, with rouged cheeks, in full formal array, and her head surmounted by a sort of plume of marabout stork feathers. She held aloft as best she could a large six-branched candelabra, all candles lit, which bathed her in a flickering light, and dropped wax tears on the floor.
Isabelle, ch. 6
This seemed to me a clear hommage to the scene between Flora and St Ives interrupted by the stately entrance of Flora’s aunt:
The words were still upon my lips when the door opened and my friend of the gold eyeglass appeared, a memorable figure, on the threshold. In one hand she bore a bedroom candlestick; in the other, with the steadiness of a dragoon, a horse-pistol. She was wound about in shawls which did not wholly conceal the candid fabric of her nightdress, and surmounted by a nightcap of portentous architecture.
St Ives, ch. 9
Other echoes I perceived may have been due to my pattern-making. For example, the scene between Isabelle and the coachman’s wife in the dark vestibule, observed but not heard by the narrator, in which the latter, holding a lantern, advances and the former retreats while ‘the lantern moved back and forth projecting leaping shadows’ (La lanterne s’agita projetant des ombres bondissants; ch. 6), reminded me of Stevenson’s penchant for describing such ‘dancing shadows’ (as he puts it in The Wrecker), for instance in ‘A Lodging for the Night’, where he writes: ‘there was no light in all the neighbourhood but a little peep from a lamp that hung swinging in the church choir, and tossed the shadows to and fro in time to its oscillations’.
But there was a more general influence of Stevenson in the narrative presented as an adventure, about which I will say more in the following section.
Roman d’aventure — not exactly ‘adventure novel’
After about 1890 it was generally felt that the French Realist or Naturalist novel (which had dominated the literary scene for several decades) had run its course. The need to explore aspects of fictional narrative apart from the naturalist world view (of the individual at the mercy of oppressive and mechanical social forces) was debated in the French periodical press by young writers and critics, especially a group around André Gide and the Nouveau revue française (which he was closely associated with from 1909). For them, a precious indication of how to move forward could be found in the example of Stevenson, Conrad and the ‘roman d’aventure’.(3)
The precise interpretation of this term was influenced by Marcel Schwob’s preface-manifesto to his collection of short stories Cœur double (1891), in which he wrote:
If the literary form of the novel persists, it […] will undoubtedly be an adventure novel in the broadest sense of the word, the novel of the crises of the inner world and the outer world
By roman d’aventure the writers of the period did not mean a sensational adventure tale, but a narrative, distinct from the naturalist novel, with an ethical core of choice and conduct (as in Stevenson and Conrad), and a novel that also highlights the importance of the imagination in human perception and understanding for both writer, characters and reader.(4)
To get an idea of how far all this was from any simplistic yarn of derring-do, it’s enough to look at two remarkable declarations by Jacques Rivière, author of the study-manifesto ‘Le roman d’aventure’, which first appeared in Gide’s Nouveau revue française in three parts in 1913. The first is at the very end of his study when Rivière finally gives an example of what he means by a roman d’aventure — and it is the scene from Stevenson’s Ebb-Tide when the schooner enters the lagoon of the pearl island. This episode involves not only anticipation and suspense but also a quickening of sense perceptions and a density of mental activity on the part of the observer Herrick, reflected in the prose, and responded to by the reader. When reading this ‘I feel my life expanding to infinity’, Rivière comments.(5)
The second is in a letter of 1923, when Rivière was in the middle of editing Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, in which letter he says that his 1913 study now ‘appears to me today as an announcement and almost a prophecy of a work that was to appear at the end of the same year: the work of Proust, to be precise’.(5) Here he refers to Du côté du chez Swann, the first volume of the Recherche, published in 1913, and — although this might be difficult to believe — seen as a realization of the roman d’aventure !
If we think back to Rivière’s example from The Ebb-Tide, however, the affinity becomes clear. At the same time clearly the word ‘aventure’ had become a catchword to identify the new kind of French fiction: in the text of Isabelle it stands out as the last word of the very first sentence. And in Alain-Fournier’s Le Grand Meaulnes (also from 1913 and another example of the new modern novel), ‘nos aventures’ is isolated at the end of a periodic sentence closing the fourth paragraph, chapter 8 is titled ‘L’Aventure’, and the word ‘nouvelles aventures’ are the last words of the whole text.
Stevenson, Gide, ‘Olalla’ and Isabelle
Gide wrote Isabelle in 1910 and it was published in the Nouveau revue française in 1911. According to his Journal he read ‘Ollala’ in the summer/autumn of 1911 and re-read it again in The Merry Men in 1913.(6)
It is possible, however, that he had read it earlier, in the translation by Alfred Jarry published in La Vogue in 1901. This magazine, together with the Mercure de France (where Gide published most of his books between 1897 and 1911) published many first translations of Stevenson in this period. As a reader of literary magazines, a member of a network of Parisian literary friends, and a writer interested in Stevenson, it is probable that Gide read this translation of ‘Olalla’ in 1901. And he had certainly read ‘Will o’ the Mill’ in the same magazine in Schwob’s translation in 1899.(7)
This possible (or probable) early reading could lie behind the interesting parallels between ‘Olalla’ and Isabelle. In any case Gide had read many works by Stevenson before writing his novellaand its elements of roman d’aventure and the echoes of Stevenson’s style mentioned above seem clear influences of a writer who Gide admired and saw as a valuable model for renewing the French novel. And although Isabelle has a good number of other literary references and influences, I think that Stevenson and ‘Olalla’ should be numbered among them.
NOTES
(1) For Gothic and other influence on ‘Olalla’, see Hilary J. Beattie, ‘Dreaming, doubling and gender in the work of Robert Louis Stevenson: The strange case of “Olalla” ‘, Journal of Stevenson Studies 2, pp. 16–17.
(2) Doris Y. Cadish, ‘Ironic Intertexts: Echoes of René in Gide’s Isabelle’, International Fiction Review, 121 (Jan 1985), 37–9; Émile Lavielle, ‘L’intertexte d’Isabelle’, Bulletin des Amis d’André Gide, 86–87 (avril-juillet 1990), pp. 307–320.
(3) Fitzpatrick, ʻR. L. Stevenson, Joseph Conrad and The Adventure Novel: Reception, Criticism and Translation In France, 1880-1930ʼ, Thèse de doctorat, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle – Paris 3, 2015, pp. 247, 382, 425. For Gide’s reading of Stevenson, see Fitzpatrick, pp. 425–8. The ‘Manifeste des cinq’ against Zolian Naturalism was published in the Figaro 18 Aug 1887.
(4) For articles in the Nouveau revue française on the roman d’aventure, see Fitzpatrick, pp. 425–56, 546–49. For the way Schwob’s thoughts isnpired the Nrf critics, see Aleksander Milecki, ‘ “Isabelle” ou le refus du roman’, Bulletin Des Amis D’André Gide,18. 86/87 ( 1990), pp. 226–7.
(5) For more on this, see Richard Ambrosini, ‘The Miracle: Robert Louis Stevenson in the History of European Literature’, In Ambrosini and Dury (eds.) (2009), European Stevenson (Cambridge Scholars Publishing), pp. 138–9.
(6) André Gide, Journal I : 1887-1925, ed. Eric Marty (Gallimard, 1996), pp. 682, 745 (as cited by Fitzpatrick, p. 428).
(7) He mentions it in ‘Lettre à Angèle’, published in L’Ermitage, 10 May 1899 (cited by Fitzpatrick, p. 206 n).
In his essay ‘A Gossip on Romance’ (1882, then in Memories and Portraits, 1887), Stevenson writes
There is a vast deal in life and letters both which is not immoral, but simply a-moral.
The word ‘a-moral’ would have struck contemporary readers as something new.
It is the earliest citation in the OED
It is apparently not a borrowing from French: in Trésor de la Langue Francaisethe earliest use of amoral is attributed to the critic and dramatist Jules Lemaître in 1885, again in contrast with ‘immoral’: ‘[If we consider the world devoid of the idea of merit], S’il n’est pas immoral, il faut qu’il soit amoral‘ (italics in the original) (Les Contemporains, Première série, undated (the Preface says the articles were written in 1884 and 1885), 67).
The word unmoral had previously been used with the same meaning. The OED entry confuses matters by giving one definition for it: ‘Not moral; having no moral sense or standards, immoral; unconcerned with morality’, where they would have done better to distinguish two: ‘1. Not moral; having no moral sense or standards, immoral’ and ‘2. unconcerned with morality’. From the citations, the first use of the word in this second sense is c. 1840–50. So the concept was in the air but expressed by the ambiguous term unmoral.
It was clearly new in the 1880s, as both Stevenson and Lemaître use it in a context that brings out its meaning, and they additionally draw attention to it by the hyphen after the prefix and the use of italics.
However, Stevenson seems to have been preceded in the use of the word by a few years. Advanced Google Book Search reveals an earlier use of amoral in an article in the Quarterly Review for 1874 ‘Primitive Man: Tyler and Lubbock’, which I have found referred to in the Pall-Mall Budget for 31 July 1874, p. 13: ‘[There exists no evidence] for the evolution of a moral state from a pre-existing brutal and amoral (sic) condition of mankind’ (says the PMB reviewer quoting the article in the QR and pointing out the unusual word by the use of sic). The PMB reviewer says that the story of the Fall refers to ‘such an evolution from an “amoral” state of innocence to a moral knowledge of good and evil’ but adds that the important point is that the ‘scruples of savages’ are not ‘real morality’ ‘but rather morality in the act of being evolved out of something “amoral” (we thank the reviewer for that word)’. This shows the coining of the word in the QR in 1874, where it is used of a society ‘without moral standards’ and given a negative connotation in the phrase ‘brutal and amoral’. The PMB reviewer goes on to use it to refer to a society in a state either of Edenic innocence or of savagery, where in the second case amoral again designates a more primitive, less evolved state.
Stevenson therefore did not invent the concept (as it was around in the use of unmoral since c. 1850), nor did he invent the form (which seems to date from 1874), but his innovation is the use of amoral ina neutral and ethical sense: not of primitive and inferior individuals and societies but of morally-neutral choices and actions, since then the dominant use.
I don’t know about you, but when I pick up a new annotated edition I go straight to the explanatory notes—the salted peanuts of the volume as far as deliciousness and difficulty of stopping are concerned. Unlike salted peanuts, however, they are all different: more like a series of entries in that fascinating publication Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable. It would seem that we are hard wired as a species to like random information—which might explain, to a puzzled observer like myself, the addictive nature of mobile phones.
When it comes to writing such notes, however, you are immediately aware of a series of problems, and it was to share ideas about this that Prof. Burkhard Niederhoff kindly invited fellow essay-editor Lesley Graham and myself to speak for a morning in June this year at the University of Bochum. This gave us an opportunity to think about our experience in writing notes; what follows are a few notes about what was said, followed by a summary of a recent article and information about a conference on this very subject.
General considerations (Lesley Graham)
1. What we annotate. 1. literary, biblical and historical allusions; 2. words that are not immediately understandable; 3. words in a foreign language; 4. proper names; 5. cross-references to themes covered by Stevenson elsewhere; 6. biographical details; 7. facts that can be checked.
2. The imagined reader. Someone a little like ourselves. Not a school child, but not a literary expert either. Not an expert in either essays, history, philosophy, the life of Stevenson or 19th Century philosophy, but someone with a curious mind. Not necessarily a Westerner, but someone with at least a basic knowledge of the Western literary canon. Not a fluent speaker of French or Italian or Scots, or German, nor a reader of Latin, but someone that knows what voilà and al fresco mean. And probably someone who will occasionally like to take some of these notes a little further.
[RD: 1. For the essays in particular, we imagine a range of readers: the notes here, apart from as a way of understanding the text, are going to be read for a wide range of documentary reasons, so, for example, it’s a good idea to provide relevant background biographical information.]
3. Wouldn’t digital annotation be better? Hyperlinks can be detrimental to a profound reading experience; the affect is engaged in different ways when we see an essay as a whole self-standing thing with its own current and internal logic rather than an organic, pulsing jump off point. Our job in the volume is to accompany the reader, without allowing him/her to go off on long detours, in a reflective reading experience, to facilitate the reading of the work, to accompany the reader’s understanding and appreciation of it but doing some of the hard work of establishing context, definition, and allusion but none (or very little) of the joyful, heuristic work.
4. Restraint. There are so many fascinating facts to be found and that may seem highly relevant but when you step back and look at the whole thing again, you realize you have to cull the extraneous material if you want to preserve the joy of discovering the essay for the reader.
5. Some problems found while annotating the essays. 1. Stevenson writes either two or three parish churches: should we supply information where the author is deliberately vague? (in this case, no). 2. Obscure terminology, e.g. travellers, and headers, and rubble, and polished ashlar: should we define terms that Stevenson did not expect his readers to know? (we decided, yes in this case). 3. Avoid self-indulgent additional information, e.g. Turnberry Point: should we mention the Trump golf-course there now? (no; restraint required). Dunfermline, in whose royal towers the king may be still observed (in the ballad) drinking the blood-red wine: in supplying the allusion to the ballad should we add historical information about royal connections of the town (we thought not). 4. And a lord he was (reading a Greek New Testament on the beach of Fair Isle): do we need to identify him? (yes; Stevenson does so in his letter from Fair Isle). [RD: Item (5.4) is a case of Stevenson’s use of allusions that are known to only a small number of readers or often only by himself. The essay editors in their discussions have called these ‘bald allusions’ and Barry Menikoff, with reference to Kidnapped, has called the phenomenon ‘subtextual meaning’: ‘Stevenson actually defies rather than helps his real readers. He forces them to uncover the allusions for themselves, but nothing is lost if they do not. For the surface prose is sufficient unto itself; the literal meaning of the text can be followed with no difficulty whatever’ (Narrating Scotland, 60; see also 59-60, 91-2, 109). I think it’s clear that the reader of an annotated edition will want to have these allusions explained.] 5. My business lay in the two Anstruthers: do we provide date and Stevenson’s reason for being there? (yes: the essays will be used by those interested in Stevenson’s biography.) 6. Shell House: should we supply more information about this place? (yes: the essay will be used by those interested in local history, so we need to explain the ‘snatches of verse’ and to point out that its location as an ‘outpost’ to Anstruther Wester is the result of a confusion with another shell-decorated house).
6. Excluded from Explanatory Notes in the essays. 1. any analysis of the structure of the essay, of its internal logic.
2.the editor’s personal reading, irrelevant in a scholarly edition. This is at once frustrating (I would love to tell you about how I believe ‘An Education of an Engineer’ is really about the difficulty of communication and the risk of miscommunication, but also humbling and affords freedom for follow up studies and analyses.)
7. Lightness (RD). 1. put first the most important and the relevant things; 2. put things in chronological (and other ‘natural’) order; 3. don’t use complicated series of subordinate clauses etc.; 4. give the most probable explanation without too much hedging.
Writing definitions (Richard Dury)
1. Place the gloss or definition first. Scots law the legal system of Scotland: under the 1707 Act etc. [more information] A medlar the fewer on the three-legged medlar-tree! one rotten fruit the fewer on the gallows tree; medlar: etc. [glosses and commentary on ‘medlar’ and ‘three-legged’].
2. Make the gloss syntactically equivalent to the lemma. Examples: check-string cord etc (not ‘a cord’); doubled … with played by the same actor as. The definition should ideally be able to replace the lemma in the text.
3. Don’t copy-and-paste the OED definition. This is difficult in our edition anyway, where the note starts with a lower case letter if preceded by an elided ‘is’ or ‘means’ (e.g. ‘Scots law [is] the legal system of Scotland’) and OED definitions always start with a capital letter; difficult anyway because you will often be glossing a noun or verb not in the dictionary citation form, so the ‘lemma’ followed by the OED definition would not make a coherent sentence (see previous item). Other reasons for adapting the OED definition or writing your own definition are given in the following points. [LG It may be useful to compare the OED definition with other dictionary definitions]
4. Make OED definition clearer and more concise if necessary. OED definitions will cover many cases, for the Explanatory Notes only the relevant parts should be included. You may also be able to make the formulation less wordy than in the OED: e.g. : check-string a string by which the occupant of a carriage may signal to the driver to stop (OED) / cord inside a carriage, pulled to tell the driver to stop.
5. Look critically at OED definitions and the citations. The OED, like all sublunary things, is not perfect; you may need to write a definition not found there, e.g. the entry for hold the candle does not mention its use (from French) of ‘assist in a love affair’, though Stevenson uses the phrase alluding to this meaning on at least a couple of occasions. In other cases, reading the citations carefully will reveal a meaning not listed. [LG: When the citation is the very sentence you seek to elucidate, give yourself a clap on the back]
6. Look elsewhere for help in defining a word or phrase. 1. Look elsewhere in Stevenson’s works, e.g. a puzzling use of motive may be resolved by finding that he sometimes uses the word to mean ‘motif’ (for this you will need a corpus of Stevenson’s writings; I’ll try and provide this asap). 2. Look in related entries in the OED, e.g. a reference to Henry James and his humorists of ordinary life may be solved by looking at ‘humour’ meaning ‘a particular disposition, inclination, or liking’. 3. Search internet (including using Google Advanced Book Search) so that, instead of the general OED definition, sinnet, for example, can be defined with relevance to its use in the text: ‘braided, rather than twisted, cordage, (here) the typical flat, plaited coconut-fibre cords of the Pacific islands’. 4. Take into account what the reader needs to understand, phenomena possibly assumed as known by the OED, e.g. aspects and connotations of vanished Victorian domestic life such as pass-key and area. 5. Inspect the cognate word in French (see next point).
7. Be aware that Stevenson often invents new uses of words. The context is of more importance than the OED in determining Stevenson’s ‘nonce’ meanings, e.g. a generic in the following: ‘Boswell’s is, indeed, a very special case, and almost a generic’. After studying the whole context very carefully it seems clear that Stevenson is using ‘a generic’ to mean ‘a case apart, i.e. a genus on its own’, not found in the OED. Stevenson’s nonce-words or -uses are often calques from French: checking in the onlineTrésor de la lange française is a good strategy in doubtful cases. Check with Google Advanced Book Search to confirm a suspected original use by Stevenson.
8. The OED may only provide negative information (show what is not possible). For example blowing in the key cannot mean ‘thrusting in the key’ as there are no examples of ‘to blow’ as a verb derived from (the etymologically unrelated) noun ‘a blow’ (it means ‘blowing to remove any dust from the key before inserting it’).
3. An article on annotation
Matthias Bauer and Angelika Zirke (2017), ‘Explanatory Annotation of Literary Texts and the Reader: Seven Types of Problems’, International Journal of Humanities and Arts Computing, 11.ii (2017): 212-232.
The second part of the article describes a model of layered annotations for digital editions, but the following notes are only on the first part, which examines seven ways that existing annotations do not take into account readerly needs. The comments there are of interest to both print and digital annotation.
The authors propose not to attempt guidance by an imagined readership but to provide annotations that are of use to a variety of readers and do not think that interpretation should be discarded from annotations altogether. They then analyze a series of actual annotations by asking two questions: (A) What knowledge does the annotation presuppose? (B) What knowledge does it provide? Here are the seven types of annotation problems.
1. Stating the obvious: explaining something that any potential reader will know already or can gather from the text itself.
2. Inconsistent assumptions and unclear functions: where the explanation assumes lack of knowledge in an area but uses unexplained terms from the same area; or provides information which does not have a clear function in understanding the text.
3. Presupposing (expert) knowledge: the assumption of knowledge that is never made explicit, as for example in a quotation from the same author that supplies a wider context (an enriching rather than explanatory annotation), when this is not clearly related to the text being annotated (just introduced by something like ‘Compare’).
4. Sending the reader on the wrong track: for example, using a general definition from the OED that omits important contextual meaning in the text being annotated or meanings supplied by the author’s personal use elsewhere.
5. Delimiting interpretation: giving one definition/explanation where more than one is plausibly present.
6. Offering intuitions without evidence: giving personal reactions (in an essay-like fashion)—the text annotated ‘becomes an occasion to think about one’s experiences and feelings’
7. Missing annotations: a missing annotation tells us either that nothing is to be explained or that explanation is impossible—in the latter case the difficulty should be dealt with in a note anyway.
The second half of the article gives information about digital annotation using the ‘Tübingen Explanatory Annotation System’ (TEASys), using three levels of information and eight categories that classify the content. As NEd is not using digital annotation, this part is less directly relevant to us. But here are the eight categories of annotation content which could well be of interest:
A linguistic (lexicon, syntax etc.)
B formal (verse, narrative structure, iconicity etc.)
C intratextual (motifs, recurring structures etc.)
D intertextual (relations to other texts)
E contextual (biography, history, philosophy, theology, etc.)
F interpretative (synthesis of A–E)
G textual (variants relevant to the understanding of the text)
H questions (items that require annotation; comments on research already done relating to an item).
A conference on annotation
‘Understanding (through) Annotations’ (15th International Connotations Symposium): July 28 – August 1 2019, Eberhard Karls University Tübingen (Germany).
We invite papers that are concerned with annotations to specific literary texts written in English and address their functions. Papers may also reflect on the speakers’ own annotation projects, analyse existing annotations, offer suggestions as to a more systematic approach to the practise of annotating texts, and/or discuss historical and theoretical dimensions involved, such as the relation of lemma and context, part and whole, the envisaged reader of annotations, etc.
Please send an abstract (300 words max.) to the editors of Connotations by October 15, 2018 at symposium2019@connotations.de
Robert Louis Stevenson’s David Balfour, the original text, edited with an introduction and notes by Barry Menikoff (San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens, 2016).
1. Sample pages
2. Editorial principles and practices
The present posting aims to be informative, not a review. The following will be of interest to other EdRLS editors. We may not always follow exactly the same practices, but it is always interesting to see how someone else does it.
1. Stevenson’s changes are assimilated without comment. Deleted earlier wordings are not generally recorded in the Notes, though a facsimile page on p. 236 enables us to see that the fair copy manuscript had a final deleted sentence:
For the life of man upon this world of ours is a funny business. They talk of the angels weeping; but I think they must more often be holding their sides as they look on; and there was one thing I determined to do when I began this long story, and that was to tell out everything as it befell. <If your father was something of a simpleton and your grandfather not better than a rogue, no harm that you should know it.>
2. Corrections are silently made of spelling and apostrophe use, and superscript letters have been dropped. However not all spellings are given standard form, e.g. ‘falsness’ (p. 41) (marked by the OED as found only up to the 16C).
There are also forms such as ‘dis-cretion’ (p. 115), which shows that the handwritten line between ‘s’ and a letter with left-facing bowl (c, d, g, o or q) has been interpreted as a hyphen. [For EdRLS, these marks have been interpreted as a non-significant link line; see this post in the blog and this one for a discussion. Barry defends his view in one of the comments to another post].
3. Unchanged are idiosyncratic capitalization of words not usually capitalized (e.g. ‘a Soft Tommy’), and the reverse case (latin, dutch, christian), in many case varying between the two usages (duke and Duke) as ‘this usage is so pervasive in the autograph, and poses no impediment to reading’ (p. lxvi). We therefore have ‘Tam Dale’ and ‘Tam dale’ in the first paragraph of ‘The Tale of Tod Lapraik’ (p. 107). To be honest, I must admit this did not cause me any problems in reading—and neither did examples like ‘I ken nae French and nae dutch’ (p. 106).
[This, like other editorial choices, is an area where each editor has to decide one way or another according to the aims of the edition. Menikoff gives us what the author wrote, while EdRLS (conservatively) emends MS texts—acting as publisher in a way accepted repeatedly by the author in other cases.]
3. Apart from supplying missing periods and question marks Stevenson’s punctuation has not been changed, e.g. a comma, semicolon or question marks followed by a dash, question marks followed by a lower-case letter. When punctuating ‘[t]he objective [for Stevenson] was to reproduce thought processes and heightened conversation informally, without slowing it down with arbitrary stops and formal new sentences’ (p. lxxv).
[In EdRLS transcribed texts we have sometimes supplied a missing comma that is so common (e.g. before ‘isn’t it?’) as to be considered codified and that would almost certainly be provided by a printer. Presumably this happened here too.]
4. Stevenson’s substantive mistakes are not corrected; I am thinking here of the first paragraph of ‘The Tale of Tod Lapraik’: ‘there were whiles when they but to fish and shoot solans for their diet’—’they but’ doesn’t seem right, a verb seems to be missing. (The sentence is identical in all editions, however. Can anyone solve this problem?)
5. Explanatory Notes: these are brief; they log all the citations of David Balfour in the OED, SLD and EDD (English Dialect Dictionary); most usefully, they indicate omissions in the first printed editions and also quote in full new passages supplied by Stevenson for the book edition at Colvin’s request.
6. References: Beinecke references to letters not by RLS are by date and McKay numbers, e.g. ‘July 13, 1892, Beinecke Library (B 4219), Yale University’.
3. Differences between the MS and the first printed editions
In the editorial part of the volume, the preparation of the first printed edition is discussed only briefly (though there is a reference to Menikoff’s article ‘Towards the Production of a Text: Time, Space, and David Balfour‘ in Studies in the Novel 27.3 (1995)). It is mentioned in the Introduction (‘The Lonely Trials of David Balfour’) on pp. xliii-xliv, and p. xlvi (‘Colvin had his hand on the manuscript and in his fashion excised a number of choice expressions and incidents. These have been restored and appear for the first time in this edition’). The subject returns again in the ‘Note on the Text’, pp. lxiv-lxv, which discusses ‘absurd cutting’, ‘deliberate censorship’ and ‘mangled phrases’. The latter is illustrated by how ‘the warsling of the sea [and the breaching of the sprays]’ in the MS (ch. 22) becomes a mis-reading, ‘the sailing of the sea’, in Atalanta and ‘the whistling of the wind’ (ch. 22) in the Cassell’s book edition. As the latter cannot be a misreading of the MS, it was a change presumably made in proofs, though we don’t know by whom. However, as ‘whistling of the wind’ is so much weaker than ‘warsling of the sea’, it just might have been made by Colvin, going to press, unable to decipher the MS, and unable to get a reply from Stevenson in less than two months, perhaps included in the proofs, but not picked up by Stevenson. Thanks to Menikoff’s work, it could be a good case for emendation in any edition of the text. Similar differences between MS and printed edition (‘innocency’ and ‘indifferency’ in the MS becoming ‘innocence’ and ‘indifference’) are also noted, though we cannot tell if the change was made by Stevenson or not (though probably not).
The notes contain significant differences between the manuscript and the periodical and Cassell publications and also ‘four summary paragraphs that are not in the manuscript or Atlanta but that Stevenson wrote for the book at Colvin’s urging’ (p. lxiv).
Changes to single words in Cassell 1893
To give an idea of the number of changes between MS and first book edition, here are the significant differences given in the notes to the first two chapters (pp. 1-15), set out as for a textual apparatus with the MS reading on the left and printed variants on the right (a swung dash standing for words identical in MS and printed edition):
p. 2 Thence to an armourer’s, where I got a stout, plain sword, to suit with my degree in life (MS and Atl) ] ~ a plain sword ~ (Cassell)
p. 2 cla’es (MS) ] claes (Atl, Cassell)
p. 10 Get a ship for him, quoth he! (MS and Atl) ] ~ quo’ he (Cassell)
Going by this sample, the printed texts are very close to the manuscript and all three changes could well be the author’s second thoughts expressed on the proofs of the book edition:
the omission of ‘stout’ could be authorial: David wants a ‘walking sword’ to show his status, it’s not intended for fighting so does not need it to be ‘stout’;
claes could be seen as a acknowledging the word as an independent Scots form, not an English word with ‘th’ missing. As the note says ‘There is no other form in the DSL‘, i.e. the Scottish national dictionary uses only the form without an apostrophe;
the change to quo’ could be seen as a change to a more Scots form (the DSL headword is quo). Both DSL and OED actually give the form in this quotation from David Balfour as quot’, not found in any other of their citations, although there is also a common Scots form quod. It is possible that Stevenson’s quot’ (if this is the form used in Cassell) is a variant on quod — Stevenson’s attempt to discourage a pronunciation of ‘quod he’ as ‘quo dee‘ and a suggestion that in Scots use the ‘d’ was a voiceless flap of the tongue (like US English pronunciation of the ‘t’ in utter). In any case, it does seem a change to a more Scots form.
Many other changes to single words in Cassell 1893 must come from Stevenson and are clearly motivated, e.g. ‘Rhone wine’ drunk in Rotterdam (thus in the MS, p. 173, and Atalanta) is changed to the more appropriate ‘Rhenish wine’ in the first book edition.
An important point is where Catriona in the MS says to David ‘I am thanking the good God he has let me see you naked’ (p. 209), which is changed to ‘[…] see you as you are’ in Atalanta, a story magazine for girls, and to ‘[…] see you so’ in Cassell 1893. Though the meaning of ‘naked’ here is intended as ‘plain, undisguised’ (but surely with an intended frisson of associated meaning for the reader), I could imagine the author having second thoughts about it in proofs.
There seems to have been no attempt to change Scots to standard English in the proofs, if anything (and this is interesting) the reverse (as we’ve seen with ‘quoth’); MS ‘I knew the answer‘ (p. 156), and ‘Well’ (p. 217) were changed to ‘I ken the answer‘ and ‘Weel’ in both Atalanta and Cassell. ‘Ye cannae tell which way it is’ in the MS (p. 217), is identical in Atalanta but becomes ‘Ye cannae tell the tane frae the tither’ in Cassell—clearly in intervention of the author on the proofs.
Passages omitted from Cassell 1893
It is good to have the long interpolated story about shipwrecking in the chapter ‘The Bass’ (pp. 99-100) that was omitted from the book edition, yet one could understand Stevenson deleting it in proofs as too much like the explanatory back-story inserted by a historical novelist.
The other, short passages omitted in Cassell 1893 can for the most part be seen as possibly authorial. For example, in the first paragraph of ch. 9 David describes his state of mind:
And when I remembered James More, and the red head of Neil the son of Duncan, I thought there was perhaps a fourth in the confederacy, and what remained of Rob Roy’s old desperate sept of caterans would be banded against me with the others.<Yet there was that force in my innocency, that this league was driven to attempt my destruction underhand! I thought I would beat them all, and my blood heated with the thought.> (p. 60)
This could well have been omitted (and surely could only have been omitted by Stevenson) because considered inappropriately fiery for David.
At the beginning of ch. 10 another omission in Cassell 1893 can be seen as motivated by a desire for concision:
It was about half-past three when I came forth on the Lang Dykes <; and being now abroad again upon the world, began considering to what part of it I should first address myself. Not that the consideration held me long;>^.^ Dean was where I wanted to go.
Passages added to Cassell 1893
It’s also good to have transcribed in the notes the four summary paragraphs written by Stevenson at the suggestion of Colvin and included in the first book edition. To tell the truth, the story at this point is on the complicated side, and I think the readers of the book found it useful—as I did—to have these additional guides.
4. Barry Menikoff’s vigorous prose
I have tried to keep my comments as neutral as possible, wanting to avoid writing a full evaluative review of the volume. The reason for this is that this a posting about an edition of Stevenson for a Stevenson edition blog. Any edition involves many subjective decisions, and naturally everyone thinks their own subjective decisions are the best and defends them doggedly (with justifications that we delude ourselves are rational). It’s a bit like furniture arrangement in the home: we all know that it doesn’t really matter if the umbrella stand is placed inside, or outside, the front door, and yet we all want it where we want it. Such things can even lead to divorce. So this is me aiming at a calm tolerance above and beyond all that. Let me simply welcome this edition as a most valuable resource to have, the work of many years wrestling with manuscript transcription (I know how difficult this is in a small way, so can only respect this vast undertaking), and of course a welcome invitation to read David Balfour/Catriona once more.
As someone who has been involved in MS transcription for Essays IV in the new Stevenson edition, I can appreciate the vast amount of work involved and heroically undertaken by one editor. One can imagine that the following comment in ‘The Note on the Text’ incorporates an acquired personal understanding from Menikoff himself:
I have opted to print these words as he wrote them—as he wrote them, one hundred thousand words by hand, not once but twice. The sheer labor of the thing is almost unimaginable in a word-processed culture. […] He never complained about the physical labor, even if he did get writer’s cramp while composing Balfour; he regularly shifted the pen to his left hand, manifest in the painful scrawl on the pages, and reflected in Davie’s comment on his scribal work for Prestongrange—”The copying was a weary business.” (p. lxvi)
I can only envy Menikoff’s vigorous prose style:
he considered Le Vicomte de Bragelonne unequaled in its fusion of story and action, which is another way of saying adventure. (p. xxv)
we live through experience, which is our adventure, but our adventure lives only through art. A life of action, however grand, leads but to the grave; a life drawn in ink, with a steel stylus, becomes indelible. (p. xxx)
David […] is like an actor in a play unfolding before him in real time and desperately in need of the script. (p. xxx)
courage is not the absence of fear but the presence of action (p. xlix)
Sometimes it sounds a bit like Raymond Chandler:
No man signs up to cross a choppy ocean in winter and traverse a continent in an iron horse to a raucous port city shrouded in fog in order to sit in a parlor and sing “Love’s Sweet Song”. (p. xliv)
Sometimes, in the energetic wrestling of words and ideas, there are echoes of Stevenson himself, as in the elegant end to the introduction:
For all life is a story, as in the pages if David Balfour, a tale told, and the only predictable thing about it is the ending. As for its meaning, even in the plainest if cases, it eludes us, as it does the more cunning wisdom of Stevenson, which is why the final sentence, of whatever pen, cannot decide whether the angels above are looking down with peals of laughter, or are turning aside, fraught with tears. (p. lxi)
Menikoff seems to write himself into certain elegiac passages:
But in the end, as is his way, idealism comes down to earth, for in this world as God made it, as Black Andie would say, we all grow old, and innocence loses out in the trampling of time, and the romance that made it lovely when young can never be recaptured but in memory. This is why a great book like David Balfour is told in retrospect, turning back and grasping for love and beauty in their freshest hours, before marriage and children make their clamoring claims, and the story jump-cuts to the end, when age installs itself in its inescapable place in our mortal lives. (p. l)
Just as he enshrined memory in the dedication to Charles Baxter at the front of the book, he embedded it in an interior landscape that he transcribed in prose and compressed into place-names. They can be likened to the “floating world” of the Japanese ukiyo-e, only instead of pictures they are words of evanescent beauty, captured and held for their own sake, but ultimately transitory and perishable like life itself. (lvi)
All the introductory matter is a pleasure to read—and now that Barry Menikoff has successfully completed his trilogy of three Stevenson editions from the manuscripts (Falesá, Kidnapped and David Balfour), I look forward to enjoying his first volume of familiar essays: I’m sure they too will be a great pleasure to read.
Stevenson was in Dunoon, on the outer Firth of Clyde, from 26 April to 3 May 1870 to follow harbour works. In a letter dated 29 April 1870 from the Argyll Hotel, he wrote to his mother,
I have had my fortune told: I am to be very happy and get to be much on the sea: two predictions which my queasy stomach will hardly consider as agreeable with each other.
(Bonham’s Sale 17520, Los Angeles, 19 October 2009, now in the Robert Louis Stevenson Museum, St. Helena)
In the same period, probably while still in Dunoon, he began but then abandoned an essay in which he described the fortune-telling in more detail:
All that I could gather may be thus summed up shortly: that I was to visit America, that I was to be very happy, and that I was to be much upon the sea, predictions, which in consideration of an uneasy stomach, I can scarcely think agreeable with one another. […] She suddenly looked at me with an eager glance, and dropped my hand saying, in what were either tones of misery or a very good affectation of them, ‘Black eyes!’ A moment after she was noisily at work again. It is as well to mention that I have not black eyes. (‘A Retrospect’, Yale, GEN MSS 664 28, 668 (B 6173), pp. 5-6)
‘It is as well to mention that I have not black eyes’, Beinecke B 6173, p. 6.
Bournemouth, August 1887
Stevenson came across this abandoned essay while he was packing up in Bournemouth before going to the USA in August 1887, and he added a note at the bottom of the page:
written at Dunoon 1870 (?). And very strange | it is : the old pythoness was right : I have been happy, I did | go to America (am even going again—unless—) and I have | been twice and once upon the deep. Moreover I have (and had) black | eyes. R.L.S 1887.
twice and once: several times, often (‘I have been merry twice and once ere now’, 2 Henry IV, V. 3. 39)
Black eyes?
In April 1870, Stevenson wrote ‘I have not black eyes’, but in August 1887 he wrote ‘I have (and had) black eyes’. How can we explain this?
Maybe his eye-colour darkened between 1870 and 1887 (and he forgot it had once been lighter). But is this likely? Can eye colour change in this way? The blue eyes of babies darken in most cases in the the first year of life and eyes grow paler in old age. But apart from this,
fluctuations in eye color do occur, but they are relatively minor. As a general rule, eye color may be thought of as a highly stable physical characteristic.
(Morgan Worthy, Eye Color: A Key to Human and Animal Behavior (San Jose : ToExcel, 1999), 81)
For me, a better explanation is that Stevenson had very dark brown eyes, and in 1870, inclined to take the prophecy as false, he classified them as ‘not black’; but in 1887, inclined to see the prophecy as true, he classified them as ‘black’.
And is this not a good example of how we place things in categories because we want to see the world in a particular way? In a way deceiving ourselves.
Those who follow this blog will know of our search for possible unnoticed articles by Stevenson in London magazine—ending up with a closer analysis of 1878 payments for work on London, after which I concluded that I would need to look more closely at the four numbers of 13 July to 3 August 1878. R.-L. Abrahamson and myself had already looked through these numbers, but found nothing that we thought was even possibly by Stevenson, apart from ‘A Story-teller’ and a note on George Eliot (for 13 July), and notes from ‘a correspondent in Paris’ (for 20 July). We suspected that a poem on 13 July (from comments in a letter by Henley) might be by Stevenson, but we were interested in prose. To tell the truth, I was prepared to let it rest there: if whatever was in the 27 July and 3 August numbers had not been distinctive enough to be visible to us before, and there was no guarantee that another trip to London would be accompanied by sudden enlightenment.
A (deceptive) letter from Lang changes the picture
Then I was looking through Marysa Demoor’s useful edition of letters from Andrew Lang to Stevenson and my eye was caught by an undated letter from 1877 in which he says, ‘I’ve sent for the new book on Villon’, which probably refers to Longnon’s innovative biographical study, which must have been published in February 1877, as the Academy gives a report of the publication in its ‘Paris Letter’ in the issue of 3 March (95–6). Andrew Lang seems to be indirectly praising Stevenson in this letter when he writes,
‘I wish your C. B. would get a political fellow as good in his way as the author of Balzac’s correspondence and George Eliot’ (Demoor, 42–3).
By ‘C. B.’ he meant the editor of London, Robert Glasgow Brown, who Lang thought was ‘Caldwell Brown’ (Demoor, 6n); by ‘Balzac’s Correspondence’ he is referring to the review article with that title in the second issue of London on 10 February 1877, p. 44. This is an article that R.-L. Abrahamson and myself identified as probably by Stevenson on our first look into London at the old Colindale Newspaper Library back in January 2013. It hasn’t previously been reported here—well, we’ve got to keep something for the album. When I saw Lang’s letter I thought: could he be indirectly praising Stevenson for the article on ‘Balzac’s Correspondence’—and for another on George Eliot too? That decided it: I had to go back to London to investigate this possibility for February 1877, and combine it with a closer look at the issues of the magazine for July and early August 1878.
Return to the Newsroom
So it was that on a pleasant morning in June I crossed the British Library forecourt with RLA (who this time had to look at microfilms of Chatto records of Virginibus Puerisque—this will be the first of our essay volumes to appear, in the first half of next year). I went straight to the Newsroom, picked up the five hefty volumes of London and immediately turned to February 1877 and located the article on George Eliot in the issue of February 10, p. 43. Immediate disappointment: Stevenson could not begin an essay in this way:
The cultus of George Eliot is one of the great social facts of the age. Its adherents include nearly the whole of the reading public. For purposes of generalisation they may be classed under three headings—Conformist, Disciples, and Sceptics.
The article then continues with a humorous paragraph on the reception of Eliot by each of these three classes of reader and a final paragraph collecting some epigrams about her and her novels. Such a preliminary announcement of categories followed by a paragraph apiece is, as far as I remember, not to be found in any of Stevenson’s writings. In addition, the article contains no Stevensonsonian language-play (new meaning created by use, unexpected epithets, calques from French), no intelligently concise formulations, no typical use of semicolons etc. It is true that in the fourth paragraph contains the following:
With very, very few exceptions, he [the Sceptic] knows that all of them [‘the gay young fellows it has pleased her to put forward as men’] have a comb concealed among their back-hair.
This reminds us immediately of Stevenson’s ‘Virginibus Puerisque’, published in August 1876:
Even women, who understand men so well for practical purposes, do not know them well enough for the purposes of art. Take even the very best of their male creations, take Tito Melema [in George Eliot’s Romola], for instance, and you will find he has an equivocal air, and every now and again remembers he has a comb at the back of his head.
But the later passage in London must be Henley (who probably wrote the article) cheekily ‘borrowing’ from his friend’s recent essay. With no more internal evidence than this, we cannot take the article as by Stevenson. Lang letter: red herring.
July—August 1878 again
OK—now for the 1878 volume. Henley, talking about the 13 July number says in a letter to Stevenson:
Don’t tax me with ‘Ce Que Se Dit’. I only brushed it up. In doing so, I’ve made it presentable, but I’ve broken the author’s heart. (Atkinson, 52)
This sounds like Henley not apologising for having changed a poem by Stevenson (the person who might ‘tax’ him about it). Here it is: on the strict Q.T., ‘confidential (quiet)’ (first Advanced Google Books Search hits: 1877; 1877 song by Lydia Thompson; called ‘a crude expression’ in George Moore’s A Mummer’s Wife (1884)); rather! ‘yes! I should think so!’ (OED (1904) calls this ‘vulgar’, the online OED identifies this as ‘Brit. colloq.‘; first OED citation 1836); ripping! ‘great, excellent, stunning’ (first OED citation 1776).
My guess is that this may have been about Fanny Osbourne with the last line a piece of American slang, that Henley changed to British slang (to make it presentable)—absolutely no proof, except that ‘You feel you’re tripping’ doesn’t fit well into the previous two lines and seems inserted to rhyme with ‘ripping’. Well, it’s perhaps not worth losing any sleep about, whatever the story is behind it.
6 July number
This was a week with ‘an article also’ opposite the payment for the ‘Arabian’ episode but a payment that corresponded only to that episode. I looked again, but could find nothing
27 July number
Subtracting the estimated payment for the ‘Arabian’ episode from the total payment, left me looking for a contribution of about half a column. The ‘Whispering Gallery’ section has three items of news from Paris, one in particular about the Jurors of the Exposition (and Stevenson was nominal secretary to one of them, Fleeming Jenkins). It starts ‘The Exposition has developed inventions undreamt of by the carnal mind of the casual observer. For instance, amongst the Jurors hospitality reigns’ (where ‘carnal mind’ could have a Stevensonian epithet). It goes on to mention that dishes with new names have been invented and gives a menu with items like ‘Potage. Emaillé de Printanier’ and ‘Truits. Patinée à Génèvoise’. This could be the Stevenson contribution—nothing earth-shaking, as you can see.
3 August number
Here, again, I was looking for something of half a column or less. And, again in the ‘Whispering Gallery’ section there is a contribution ‘from a letter’ that sounds as if it might be from Stevenson, containing a nonsense rhyme: Here, the French word béquille ‘crutch’ and béquiller ‘walk with crutches’ has clearly touched the poet’s funny nerve (maybe because a homophone béquiller (from bec ‘beak’) is a slang word for ‘eat’) and he creates a calque in English ‘to beckle’ which he repeats and varies in a crazy progression that threatens to extend to infinity.
There is a good chance this is by Stevenson: it is from a letter (the origin of other contributions from Stevenson in this period), it involves play with French, which we often find him doing, the creation through use of a new meaning of ‘fulfilled’ at the end of the third stanza reminds one of Stevenson’s typical word-play, and Stevenson writes similar verse in other letters to Henley in this period (e.g. L2, 259). (This supposition is confirmed in a later post.)
That’s it
With that, I had more-or-less accounted for the four annotations of ‘an article also’ on the 1878 list of payments. That list, of course, only goes up to 10 August and it is possible that Stevenson continued contributing short pieces and poems after that. But this I generously leave to another researcher.
In 2008, Robert-Louis Abrahamson, Richard Dury and others agreed to read through Prince Otto and share our thoughts about it on the online discussion group ReadingRLS (topics 282, 293, 294, 296, 314). What follows are a few strands of that conversation, a conversation with no pretence to academic rigour, copied out and re-arranged.
Playfulness
RLA: The distanced tone and reference to Florizel of Bohemia make us think we’re back with the New Arabian Nights. The Shakespearean references to Perdita and the Bohemian seacoast suggest a world of parody and playfulness.
The playfulness continues when we’re told the precise year doesn’t matter and is “left to the conjecture of the reader”. This feels like it’s going to be a comic tale, a game of some sort, where, in fact, we’re encouraged to take part in the creation.
YOU shall seek in vain upon the map of Europe for the bygone state of Grünewald. […] On the south it marched with the comparatively powerful kingdom of Seaboard Bohemia, celebrated for its flowers and mountain bears, […]; and the last Prince of Grünewald, whose history I purpose to relate, drew his descent through Perdita, the only daughter of King Florizel the First of Bohemia. […]
The precise year of grace in which this tale begins shall be left to the conjecture of the reader.
Then at the beginning of Book II ch. 11, we get the precise time reference, but only after a playful ‘feint’:
AT a sufficiently late hour, or to be more exact, at three in the afternoon
Toy Theatre
RD: The story opens with two minor characters fililng us in about the situation: naturally we think of the stage convention. Their dialogue is of the type found in a play-script, requiring us to fill in the details; part of the first dialogue could be re-written as follows with stage-directions:
There goes the government over the borders on a grey mare. What’s that? No, nothing—no, I tell you, on my word, I set more store by a good gelding or an English dog. That for your Otto!’
This could be rewritten as
First Huntsman: There goes the government over the borders on a grey mare. [Sudden noise] What’s that? No, nothing – no, I tell you, on my word, I set more store by a good gelding or an English dog. [snaps his fingers] That for your Otto!’
The reader is clearly being asked to recognise these conventional bits of stage ‘business’; the reading experience here depends if you want to enter the game or not. I’m reminded of Roxy Music’s LP Avalon with a cover of an Arthurian knight seen from behind and a misty lake: there’s no sign that this is ironic—you are supposed to think ‘This can’t possibly be serious. Or is it?’ and enjoy the artful way you are left in doubt.
The stage-play effect continues with the farcical dramatic irony of Otto in disguise in conversation with the people in the farmhouse about Prince Otto – for example, the following would be a splendid opportunity for a good actor to ‘milk the pause’ before ‘Indeed?’:
‘Not what you might call disliked,’ replied the old gentleman, ‘but despised, sir.’
‘Indeed,’ said the Prince, somewhat faintly.
RLA: Of course, Prince Otto started out as a play [as Bob irvine’s Introduction reminds us (added comment)]. In Book II, the chapter titles (‘Act the First’ etc.) explicitly take us into the theatre. And then there are continual allusions to theatre, acting etc.: ‘with a man like me to impersonate’ — ‘come buskined forth’ — ‘puppet’ — ‘Hoyden playing Cleopatra’ — ‘this gentleman, it seems, would have preferred me playing like an actor’ — ‘a scene of Marriage à la Mode’ etc. etc.
RD: Much of the exaggerated staginess reminds us of grand opera [and Bob Irvine’s Introduction to the New Edinburgh Edition comments on several direct influences from operas (added comment)], and the story in a way becomes an opera at one point, when (Book III, ch. 3) the Countess von Rosen sings the Handel aria ‘Lascia ch’io pianga’ outside Otto’s door in the Felsenberg. (This reminded me of Becky Sharp singing ‘Remember me’ in Andrew Davies’s BBC adaptation of Vanity Fair from 1988.)
Elsewhere we are reminded of the conventions of (campy) melodramatic acting:
‘It is very strange, Herr Cancellarius, that you should so persistently avoid my questions,” said the Prince. “You tempt me to suppose a purpose in your dulness. I have asked you whether all was quiet; do me the pleasure to reply.’ […]
The Prince waited, drawing his handkerchief quietly through his fingers.’
Drawing a handkerchief slowly (but I like ‘quietly’) through the fingers must have been a well-known piece of stage ‘business’.
‘Philosophical novel’
RD: Apart from being reminiscent of a play, the work also has the structure of chance meetings and conversations with a variety of people of the 18th-century philosophical novel (and is reminiscent of S’s own short stories with debates –‘Markheim’ and ‘Villon’).
RLA: One of the central moral issues concerns the possibility of forgiving. Otto says of Seraphina ‘I can, of course, [forgive her], and do; but in what sense?’ And Colonel Gordon replies ‘I will talk of not forgiving others, sir, when I have made out to forgive myself, and not before; and the date is like to be a long one”—in other words, the question of ‘not forgiving’ is not even to be put.
Gordon then links this to wider considerations to Otto and Gotthold:
And as for this matter of forgiveness, it comes, sir, of loose views and (what is if anything more dangerous) a regular life. A sound creed and a bad morality, that’s the root of wisdom. You two gentlemen are too good to be forgiving.
It is not by morally judging ourselves that we achieve greatness.
RD: Gordon also associates ‘this matter of forgiveness’ with ‘a regular life’ (=ruled by conventions?) and (we infer) a so-called ‘good’ morality (=conduct governed by fixed rules).
RLA: The meaninglessness of ‘forgiveness’ is also touched on in ‘Truth of Intercourse’: ‘so far as I have gone in life I have never yet been able to discover what forgiveness means’.
RD: Other ‘philosophical’ discussions in the text centre on Otto’s ‘manly’ or ‘gentlemanly’ behaviour: his honesty, understanding of others, awareness of his own faults, sense of justice, lack of assertiveness.
Bibliographical postscript
RLA: At the end, just as he did in the New Arabian Nights, Stevenson undermines his whole narrative, this time during a summary of the later life of Otto and Seraphina based on close citation of printed sources.
RD: The Postscript starts with lots of real and probable names , then in the last few lines we get ‘Buttonhole’, ‘Lord Protocol’ and ‘Admiral Yardarm’ – S doesn’t pretend any more and says ‘it’s all a fiction’. I don’t know about anyone else, but I found that reading the first part I am lulled into the literary joke and enjoying the clever imitation documentary evidence – so when these last absurd names are produced, one feels the author is showing that he can still surprise us and that he’s in control.
RLA: This reminds me of formulaic ways of ending fairy tales in some cultures, where the storyteller adds a long jesting closing formula to bring us back to normality. Even the fairy-tale ‘Pretty Woman’ film ends with the crazy guy on the Hollywood sidewalk saying ‘This is Hollywood – the land of dreams’. A final twist – the last trick of the storyteller.
RLA: The distanced tone and reference to Florizel of Bohemia make us think we’re back with the New Arabian Nights. The Shakespearean references to Perdita and the Bohemian seacoast suggest a world of parody and playfulness.
RD: The story opens with two minor characters fililng us in about the situation: naturally we think of the stage convention. Their dialogue is of the type found in a play-script, requiring us to fill in the details; part of the first dialogue could be re-written as follows with stage-directions:
RD: Apart from being reminiscent of a play, the work also has the structure of chance meetings and conversations with a variety of people of the 18th-century philosophical novel (and is reminiscent of S’s own short stories with debates –‘Markheim’ and ‘Villon’).
EdRLS 