Archive for the ‘Publications’ Category
Stevenson in Homburg, 1862
Stevenson visited Germany on four occasions: 1. Homburg (now Bad Homburg vor der Höhe) with his parents, July—August 1862; 2. The following year travelling home from Italy with his parents (Munich—Augsburg—Nuremberg—Frankfurt—Cologne) in May 1863; 3. Frankfurt during his first summer vacation as a student with Walter Simpson, July—August 1872; 4. And finally, for a few days, joining his parents at Wiesbaden in September 1875.
Although steeped in French culture, Stevenson was also attracted to German thought and literature.The 1872 stay in Frankfurt was to improve his German. After the death of his friend James Walter Ferrier, Stevenson remembered that Ferrier, probably in the early 1870s, ‘had [=? had made] a pretty full translation of Schiller’s Aesthetic Letters, which we read together, as well as the second part of Goethe’s Faust, […] he helping me with the German’ (Letters 4: 206). He quotes Goethe and Heine in German several times in his letters from 1872 to 1875 (Letters 1: 289, 316, 403; Letters 2: 13, 72, 81, 122) and read Heine’s love poems together with Fanny Sitwell in the summer of 1873 (Letters 2: 31).
His German experiences are reflected in ‘Will O’ the Mill’ (1878) and Prince Otto (1885) as well as an abandoned essay on Homburg, ‘An Onlooker in Hell’, for a series, planned in 1890, to be called ‘Random Memories’. This latter is now in the NLS (MS 3112, ff. 308-311) and will be published in our Essays V, presently being prepared by Lesley Graham
But to return to his first experience of Germany, not yet twelve years old, in the summer of 1862. A reader of this blog, Thomas Obst, lives a few miles from Bad Homburg and, after some local research, kindly supplies the following facts and images.
The family were among the new arrivals between 14 and 16 July announced in the Kur- und Bade-Liste dated 17 July 1862. With them was Margaret Stevenson’s brother Mackintosh Balfour, travelling to Homburg, like Thomas Stevenson, for a health cure. They all stayed at the house of the widow Zahn, No. 3 Kisseleffstrasse, a quiet street leading from the main street, Louisenstrasse, to the Park and its Casino.
Almost opposite, on the corner of Louisen- and Kisseffstrasse, was the Russischerhof, or Hotel de Russie, where the Stevenson party took their meals. The building on the corner (right) is certainly the former hotel. Stevenson later stayed in this hotel in 1875: after meeting his parents at Wiesbaden on 2 September, he travelled with them to Homburg and Mainz before leaving them to return to Paris. The Stevenson party is announced in the Homburger Fremden-Liste recording arrivals from 4 to 8 September.
No. 3 Kisseleffstrasse (left) looks more modern. But notice a small dark rectangle on the left of the ground-floor facade. This is a plaque placed there in 2018 commemorating Stevenson’s stay (and also that of Nikolai Gogol), and the inscription starts ‘This building was built in 1844 as a hotel’, which means that the present building, at least in its basic structure and fenestration, is the one where Stevenson and his parents stayed in 1862:
The Stevenson who stayed in Homburg in 1875 was very different from the boy who stayed there in 1862: in 1875 he had graduated from University in July, had already begun publishing literary works in magazines and was in the middle of a formative experience in France living with art students. After arriving in Paris from Germany on 6 September, he proceeded to Barbizon and there met and fell in love with his future wife Fanny Osbourne.
However that early experience in Homburg remained in his memory. In late 1890, searching for subjects for a second series of Scribner’s Magazine essays he sketched out some headings for an essay on his experience of gambling establishements and then wrote a few paragraphs about Bad Homburg. Here, to end, is an extract of part of that text:
[…] I heard first in Homburg the continuous ringing of counted money on the tables of a gaming house. Sitting on the terrace, I became suddenly aware of it with a thrill of the pleasure of hearing not yet forgotten; a fine band of music played there daily, and I have forgot the music; but I think when I come to lie dying, I shall still be able to recal (as I do now) the more delicate concert from within. I thought then already, as I think still today, that there are few sounds to be compared with it in nature. It chanced I was to hear it again and yet again in the course of my vagrant life; and it is a singular thought to me now and in this far away place, that the song of the money is still going on in Europe, like the song of birds, perennial.
Homburg was then near an end; Blanc [François Blanc, director of the Homburg casino] had received a formal warning [gambling was to be outlawed in German in 1872]; he was already (as I was to see next year [1863]) timidly breaking ground elsewhere for another palace of fate [from 1860 in Monaco]; but the original establishment was still humming with gulls and ringing with their money. There were many circumstances to delight a boy abroad for the first time; the taste of mulberries; the sweet water in our house well; the English chapel opening down a long stair into an archway in the old Schloss, the pond with the carp, the vast green rambling ground of forest; the terrace before the Kursaal where the band played and the crowd of visitors walked to and fro in summer raiment […] But the centrepiece of all was that glorified garden-house that sang all day with gold and silver. The barbaric splendour of its decoration, the gold room, the patterns on the tables, the hopping of the roulette ball, the high dry voice of the croupier, the song of the money—and perhaps above all the sense that the place was a temple of wickedness, and that attraction of inverted horror which it is so easy and so dangerous to arouse in children — held me in bondage to the image of the Kursaal itself. Sometimes my father took me in, and I would wander, a twelve-year-old observer, about the crowded tables. The large liveried footmen were an awful joy to me; I had picked up that they served as spies upon the visitors; and I would place myself near one, try to follow the direction of his glances, and thrill all over with the sense of secrecy and peril. […]
Stevenson and Dante
A post contributed by Robert-Louis Abrahamson
In his 1878 essay ‘Pan’s Pipes’, Stevenson describes those who ‘hold back the hand from the rose because of the thorn, and from life because of death’ as ‘tooth-chattering ones’. The phrase ‘tooth-chattering’ posed a problem when compiling the notes for my edition of Virginibus Puerisque. Like so many other phrases in the essays, it seemed to be lifted or adapted perhaps from the Bible, or Shakespeare, or some French idiom, but I could find no sources. Richard Dury and I pondered this problem, and the best we could come up with was: ‘an invention of Stevenson’s based on the ancient “kindly ones” (that is, the Eumenides, or Furies)’.
Nearly five years after the edition of Virginibus Puerisque came out, I can supply what I think is a better note. In Canto 3 of Dante’s Inferno, the souls waiting to be transported across the Acheron quake when they hear Charon’s words of doom (‘I come to conduct you nelle tenebre eterne, in caldo e in gelo, into eternal darkness, into fire and ice’). These are the souls who have lost all the goodness life had offered them. Forlorn and naked, changing colour, Dante shows them as they dibattero i denti, they chattered with their teeth. These, of course, are the ‘tooth-chattering ones’. In his essay about one mythic story, Pan, Stevenson draws on another myth, Dante’s journey, and if we catch the infernal allusion, we see these ‘recreant[s] to Pan’ in a much darker light.
RLS and French literature
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.
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Stevenson’s David Balfour: a new edition edited from the MS by Barry Menikoff
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.
New Edinburgh Prince Otto published
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Robert Louis Stevenson, Prince Otto, ed. by Robert P. Irvine, The New Edinburgh Edition of the Works of Robert Louis Stevenson (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014).
Published 28 April 2014. £70 (and for around £50 from booksellers associated with Amazon)
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Journal of Stevenson Studies 9 (2012): Special essays number
The Journal of Stevenson Studies 9 has just been published and is on its way to subscribers. The contributions all address aspects of Stevenson’s essays. Richard Dury and Robert-Louis Abrahamson, the guest editors, along with Lesley Graham and Alex Thomson, are editing Stevenson’s essays in five volumes for the New Edinburgh Edition. The four of us have been working together on the project for the last few years, discussing the essays with others in the ‘ReadingRLS’ internet forum and speaking with each other often several times a week via Skype.
This present collection constitutes the lengthiest study of Stevenson’s essays yet published, and we hope will open up a way for critics to talk about them, not merely in an instrumental way, when explaining the narrative works or the historical context of when they were written (revealing though these approaches are), but also in their own right as interesting literary works and memorable reading experiences.
Contents
1. overviews
Robert-Louis Abrahamson, ‘“The essays must fall from me”: an outline of Stevenson’s career as an essayist’
Traces RLS’s career as an essayist, the literary networks and magazines associated with the beginning of his career, RLS’s attitude towards the genre and his reasons for abandoning it.
Richard Dury, ‘Stevenson’s essays: language and style’
A study of S’s style in his essays, emphasizing reader-involvement and the many factors of variety and shifting focus that lead to their experience as performances in time by a mercurial, ever-changing artist.
2. 1880s essays /essays on memory, art and imagination
Richard Hill, ‘Stevenson in the Magazine of Art’
The six essays RLS wrote for Henley’s Magazine of Art 1882-4, though apparently diverse are linked by interest in relationship between the visual arts and literature, in the possibilities of an illustrated text, and on the importance of childhood memories and the imagination in the creative process.
Alex Thomson, ‘Familiar style in Memories and Portraits’
An examination of how Memories and Portraits is a collection of ‘familiar essays’ that explores autobiography, memorial and the consequences of pervasive inherited memory, and how the self-reflexive essay form distinguishes them from the Scottish tradition of nostalgic ‘reminiscences’.
Dewi Evans, ‘Stevenson in Scribner’s: ethics and romance in the literary marketplace’
A study of connected and contrasting ethical and aesthetic ideas in earlier essays and how they are consolidated in the Scribner’s series, with particular attention to the writer in the literary marketplace.
Neil Macara Brown, ‘Had their day: Robert Louis Stevenson’s Popular Authors’
Documents Stevenson’s reading of popular authors and planned and finished works connected with popular genres, supplies bio- bibliographical information about the writers, speculates on their attraction for him, and suggests scenes from popular books that he read that may have inspired his own fiction.
Marie Léger-St-Jean, ‘“Long for the penny number and weekly woodcut’: Stevenson on reading and writing popular romance’
A comparative reading of papers on popular literature by Rymer (1842) and Stevenson (1888), followed by an exploration of the imaginative importance of illustrations for RLS and their link with ‘romance’, dreams and daydreams and a ‘true’ inner life.
3. Californian and South Seas essays / essays on sympathetic understanding / evolution as an essayist
Jennifer Hayward, ‘“The Foreigner at Home”: The Travel Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson’
How RLS’s writings about California helped him develop views of national identity and race and empathy towards the marginalized.
Andrew Robson, ‘Stevenson as sympathetic essayist’
RLS shows sympathy and understanding for the dispossessed and oppressed; this is present in early essays and develops in his American and Pacific writings.
Timothy Hayes, ‘“Not so childish as it seems”: Stevenson’s interrogation of childishness in the South Seas’
RLS showed an interest in childhood and its relation to adult existence in a series of essays and his ‘South Seas’ pieces continue with an interest in ‘childlike’ behaviour in adults. In the South Seas can be considered a collection of essays because of their variety of approach, their shifts in point-of-view, and seen as exploratory ‘attempts’.
4. afterlife
Lesley Graham, ‘The reception of Stevenson’s essays’
Traces Stevenson’s literary reputation and his appreciation as an essayist and relates this to the decline in interest in the essay.
JSS is available by annual subscription only; to obtain a copy of this issue, send a cheque for £15 (UK) or £17/€18/$23 US/$24 CA (overseas) to JSS, English Studies, Univ. Stirling, with subscription form.
Bottle Imp – Stevenson number
The Bottle Imp, the well-designed “Scottish Studies ezine” published by the Association for Scottish Literary Studies, is planning a Stevenson number for November 2012.
Provisional contents:
Scott Hames: views of Stevenson’s style, past and present
Julia Reid: “borders” in the essays
Barry Menikoff: on the South Sea tales
Penny Fielding: the new EUP Edition
Alisdair Braidwood: later writers influenced by Stevenson
David Wingrove: on “Olalla”
Richard Dury: shifting viewpoint in the essays
The Music of Robert Louis Stevenson
John Russell’s impressive ‘Music of Robert Louis Stevenson’ site has moved to music-of-robert-louis-stevenson.org. Latest additions are music for ‘Tempest Tossed’ and ‘My Ship and I’.
The site contains an essay on Stevenson and music, indexes of his compositions, charts and databases of the various forms and a bibliography. It is of importance to editors and readers of his poems, but it also illuminates the many references to music in letters and prose works.
John Russell is now finishing a print version of all his work, The Complete Musical Compositions and Arrangements of Stevenson. News of publication will be given in this blog.
Review: Arthur Ransome’s Long-lost Study of Robert Louis Stevenson
Kirsty Nichol Findlay (ed.), Arthur Ransome’s Long-lost Study of Robert Louis Stevenson. Woodbridge: Boydell, 2011.
The sequestered manuscript
It was to have been “Robert Louis Stevenson: A Critical Study”, following Ransome’s earlier Edgar Allan Poe: A Critical Study (1910) and Oscar Wilde: A Critical Study (1912) and with the same pattern: a quarter of the book devoted to a single chapter called “Biographical” and the rest devoted to the works. (Gissing’s Charles Dickens: A Critical Study had apparently started the style of title, but he does not so clearly mark the division between life and works).
The contract for the Stevenson book was signed in 1910 but Martin Secker pushed for the Wilde book first. Relations with author and publisher became strained and in 1912 they parted company. Ransome continued to work on the book in 1913 and 1914 for Methuen.
How we got Swinnerton 1914, not Ransome 1914
In May 1914, when Ransome went to Russia to write a book on St. Petersburg, his wife Ivy, with whom relations were strained, apparently, and for her own reasons, took possession of the first draft manuscript, and deposited it in a bank.
Meanwhile, Secker had given the Stevenson project and its title to a Frank Swinnerton, a rival of Ransome’s. The rancour in of the resultant study published in 1914 can be judged right from its curious dedication to a friend who was an admirer of RLS: ‘to Douglas Gray, in malice’. It may have taken some added intensity from its being an indirect blow at Ransome, who did not, like Swinnerton, belong to the Wells-Bennett group and who had a poor view of Swinnerton’s novels.
The sequestered manuscript rediscovered
Ransome did not complete the project: his first draft was not available to him, his life was in turmoil, what with his unhappy marriage, the First World War and the Russian Revolution and his meeting with his future second wife (Trotsky’s secretary) and their escape across the Baltic in a sailing boat. And then Swinnerton’s iconoclastic work (following the pattern that Ransome felt that he had invented) was the focus of everyone’s attention. The manuscript was never recovered and was discovered, unopened, in the strong room of a London solicitor’s in 1990.
This edition
Kirsty Findlay has done us a service in editing the manuscripts (there is also an exercise book and some loose sheets) and in writing an excellent introduction. The first section, which tells the story of the manuscript has the appropriate Ransome-like title of ‘Parcel Post’, which puts us in the mood for a good story.
Ransome as literary theorist
From Findlay’s Introduction I learnt that Ransome actually wrote articles of literary theory, in a period before this became the exclusive property of universities. In the essay “Art for Life’s Sake” (1912) he says that “[the] act of conscious living is the work of art” and, in a sentiment that surely Proust would have agreed with,
“Art is itself life. Its function is to increase our consciousness of life, to make us more than wise or sensitive, to transform us from beings overwhelmed by the powerful stream of unconscious living to beings dominating that stream, to change us from objects acted upon by life to joyful collaborators in that reaction.”
He comes back to this idea in the Stevenson manuscript:
“a novel, like any other work of art, is an act of becoming conscious, performed by its author. But an illusion is produced that the author has left his own life aside, and is merely chronicling the lives of others. We are faced with the difficulty of reconciling this apparent contradiction.” (140)
In his essay “Kinetic and Potential Speech” collected in 1913 he calls for literary theory as the basis of criticism: “a statement of the nature of literature applicable not to the books of one nation of one time only, but to those of all nations and of all times”, so that criticism (he refers to “the history of literature”) can get beyond trivialities.
“Robert Louis Stevenson: A Critical Study”
As this is only an almost-complete first draft, parts are missing, parts are notes, and no doubt there would have been much revision had Ransome been able to complete the project. Nevertheless, it has the attraction of the opening of a time cylinder and is clearly a serious study, mainly admiring but not adulatory with some fresh judgements. Ransome deals with essays and early travel books together, then short stories, tales of adventure, Jekyll and Hyde and the Fables, the Scotch novels, and works produced in the South Seas.
Essays.
Ransome Divides Stevenson’s career into 1873-85, 1886-94 and sees the ten or eleven “earlier books” as “exercises in style” and “most of his essays are a kind of practice in this [stylistic] art” (98-99). This reminds us of the similar opinion of Daiches in 1947 and is for myself – an editor of the essays – the most disappointing judgment in the book. I would see it as related to the decline in critical opinion of the essay and its relegation to a peripheral status in the literary canon. Also by a desire by critics to note progress, to see an early and a late style.
Ransome does, however, dedicate a generous amount of space to the often neglected Familiar Studies of Men and Books (pp. 100-106), including an interesting discussion of the meaning of ‘familiar’ in the title.
The variety of style and stylistic experiments in Stevenson’s works is emphasized: “in art he was preoccupied with technique so largely that all he did seems now to have been by way of experiments during a prolonged adventure in the discovery of technical perfection […] he will be counted as one of the greatest exponents of the objects and the methods of literature’ (87). He also notes the common praise for Stevenson’s “charm” but goes further than other contemporaries by attempting to analyze what this might mean: “literary charm […] depends […] on tenderness exhibited by a writer for his subject, on the infectious mood in which a man looks affectionately upon the past” (95).
Short stories – among his best works
The short stories he places among Stevenson’s best works: “It requires little courage to say that Stevenson is a very much greater storyteller than novelist, and even to say that his short stories are better than his longer tales” (109). He praises in particular “Providence and the Guitar” (111-12). Also the two stories in Scots: “Thrawn Janet” and “The Story of Tod Lapraik” “are among the best of Stevenson’s achievements. The dialect seems to knit the words together so that there are no interstices to allow reality to slip out” (114). One influence of RLS in the 1890s and early 1900s is shown by the observation that to The New Arabian Nights “we owe […] the many miraculous Londons that have been discovered in these latter years” (113).
High praise for A Memoir of Fleeming Jenkins
“Nearer to life than any of his novels, his memoir of Fleeming Jenkin is among the three or four best books he wrote. Considered only as a work of imagination, how admirable is its careful discontinuity of texture, the general setting of the family, with its set character sketches of Jenkins and Jacksons, then in a larger pattern the account of Jenkins himself, and finally, the small web again, in the account of the last days not only of Jenkins himself but the picturesque members of the previous generation, survived from the first chapter… I know of no biography which, without flatulent adulation, leaves so heroic an impression of its subject.” (147)
In the South Seas – underestimated
“I think few books have been so curiously underestimated in comparison with the other works of their writer than Stevenson’s In the South Seas […] there are few books of travel so vivid, so sympathetic with the people visited, so rich in the sense of the strange, so precise in its expression of that strangeness. […] I believe the reason of its neglect and the disparagement of silence it has suffered is that it bears Stevenson’s name on the title-page, and that persons reading that name, conversant with Stevenson’s other works, expect a different book.” (148)
More volumes contracted
Six more volumes of the Stevenson Edition have been enthusiastically approved by the Edinburgh University Press Committee. These include the 5 volumes of the Essays (ed. Abrahamson, Dury, Graham and Thomson), the publication of which in the first ever collected edition will be an exceptionally important scholarly landmark. Also contracted is Glenda Norquay’s St Ives which will mark a thorough revaluation of this rarely-published novel.
EdRLS 