Stevenson’s dedications to others

Cope Cornford on Stevenson’s Dedications

Leslie Cope Cornford, a novelist and journalist specializing in maritime matters, published one of the earliest studies of Stevenson in 1899: Robert Louis Stevenson, a short volume just under two hundred pages, part biographical, part critical. The last section of the penultimate chapter, devoted to ‘His Style’, begins as follows:

But Stevenson’s most notable achievements as an executant were, perhaps, his Dedications. It is upon record that Thomas Stevenson, when all books failed him, as books will fail us all at times, would take down the volumes of his son and read the Dedications therein. These, at least, never, to the last day of his life, failed to give him the same pleasure. Since Ben Jonson wrote, there have been no better examples of this form of composition, made up, as the perfect Dedication must be, of tact, delicacy, eloquence, and cunning craftsmanship.

(p. 191)

Leslie Cope Cornford (1867–1927)

The present-day reader is surprised; why would Cope Cornford pick out Stevenson’s Dedications for such praise?

Cope Cornford was a friend and later biographer of W. E. Henley, and had worked for him on the National Observer, and in the Preface he thanks him for his help. We know that Henley felt he had been mistreated by Stevenson, so we can perhaps see Henley’s influence in the choice of the word ‘executant’ (also the last word in the book), which implies that Stevenson was essentially a wonderful craftsman, attentive to form, and the choice of his Dedications for high praise may fit into the same relativization of achievement.

Yet at the same time Cope Cornford also admired Stevenson, and, no doubt inspired by Treasure Island, was to publish his own pirate romance The Last Buccaneer in 1902. In the quotation just given he seems to be in two minds: his acclaim seems genuine, he really does find the Dedications worthy of praise, and he goes on to quote with approval from those for Virginibus Puerisque (to Henley). The Merry Men (to Lady Taylor), Travels with a Donkey (to Colvin), The Master of Ballantrae (to Sir Percy and Lady Shelley) and Catriona (to Baxter).

The anecdote of Thomas Stevenson at the end of his life reading Stevenson’s Dedications is touching, and gives an idea of the pleasure, gracefulness and charm of Stevenson’s style in these short texts: ‘tact, delicacy, eloquence, and cunning craftsmanship’.

What follows is an attempt to understand more fully why anyone should select Stevenson’s Dedications as one of his notable achievements.

Dedications before Stevenson

The dedication in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries typically took the form of the dedicatory letter displaying rhetorical skill to a high-status dedicatee who is treated with ceremonious praise, while at the same time the ‘little book’ is modestly down-played. The heyday such long epistolary Dedications was ca. 1560 to 1720 (Manfred Görlach, Text Types and the History of English (Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 2004), 114) and ‘the long type of dedicatory letter was definitely dead by 1800’ (ibid., 120).

After this, dedications were either absent from a volume or confined to the brief, centrally aligned inscription headed by the word ‘To’. However, the importance placed on friendship by the Romantic poets led to a brief season in which the link of friendship is stressed in an affectionate dedicatory letter.

Byron dedicated The Corsair (1814) to his friend Thomas Moore in a long letter (also functioning as a preface) beginning ‘My dear Moore’; and dedicated the fourth canto of Child Harold (1818) to another friend John Cam Hobhouse in a similar long letter, beginning ‘My dear Hobhouse’, praising him as ‘a friend often tried and never found wanting’. Shelley, similarly, dedicated his verse drama The Cenci (1919) in a letter to Leigh Hunt, which starts as follows:

and ends thus:

Dedications in Stevenson’s day

The first study of Dedications was Henry Wheatley’s Dedication of Books to Patron and Friend: A Chapter in Literary History (1887). In his last chapter ‘Modern Dedications’ he says ‘As formerly no book was issued without a dedication, so now few are published with them’. Although Wheatley unfortunately overlooks Stevenson, his testimony shows how at this time Stevenson’s books—almost every one with a dedication—must have stood out as unusual.

Novels were not normally associated with dedications: Dickens has brief inscriptions in only two of his (Hard Times and Our Mutual Friend), Thackeray dedicated Pendennis (1850) to his doctor in a brief letter of gratitude for his attentions the previous year; George Eliot and Thomas Hardy did without dedications; Meredith and later Conrad confined themselves to brief inscriptions.

As for essays, Lamb’s Essays of Elia are playfully dedicated ‘To the Friendly and Judicious Reader’, but there are no dedications to Leigh Hunts Essays, Hazlitt’s Table Talk, Alexander Smith’s Dreamthorp or Thackeray’s Roundabout Papers.

The only example I have found from the immediately preceding period that seems close to Stevenson’s dedicatory letters—perhaps the gentle reader may find some others—is Edward Bulwer Lytton’s dedication to Caxtoniana of 1863, one of the essays of which is referred to by Stevenson in 1868 (L1, 147). This has the same allusion to shared memories and emphasis on friendship:

Stevenson’s dedications

As we have seen, apart from Caxtonianiana (and any other—I suspect, rare—examples), the lack of dedications in contemporary collections of essays must have meant that to the first readers it would have been a surprise to open Virginibus Puerisque in 1881 and see the collection of previously published essays presented as a self-standing work and with a dedicatory letter (not even preceded by the title ‘Dedication’) written in a foregrounded style, with a bold beginning reminiscent of the brusqueness of Bacon or Thomas Browne:

and ending elegantly, emphasizing the bonds of friendship with the dedicatee:

Leaving aside the volumes co-authored with Lloyd Osbourne, for which there are no dedications, Stevenson wrote ten dedicatory letters, six inscriptions and four dedicatory poems (and also inscriptions, to Lang and Meredith, to two of the plays written with Henley). They are notable for their elegant style and affectionate tone, emphasizing in most cases the ties of friendship and shared memories. In some cases there are allusions that only the dedicatee can understand, as in the dedication to Baxter of Kidnapped, in which he refers to ‘the old Speculative’, ‘the inglorious MacBean’ and ‘that great society, the L.J.R.’ Such details emphasize that this is indeed a private communication, and in the dedication to Sidney Colvin of Travels with a Donkey he even playfully suggests that the ordinary reader is just helping to pay for the delivery of the dedicatory letter to the dedicatee:

Stevenson’s influence

To estimate Stevenson’s influence in the writing of dedications would require a separate study, but here are two examples. First of all, the dedication to Critical Kit-Kats (1896) by Stevenson’s friend Edmund Gosse. It is a long, personal, friendly, stylishly witty dedication letter to Thomas Hardy, with reference to conversations and long friendship:

It ends, like Stevenson’s dedication to Henley with a hope for continued friendship in the future:

And for a second example, let us take John Buchan’s The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915), an adventure romance that owes something to Kidnapped, dedicated to the Scottish rugby player and publisher Thomas Arthur Nelson (killed in France two years later):

Other examples of such dedications are welcomed from the gentle reader. For the moment, though, perhaps we have understood a little more why Stevenson’s dedications stood out for his first readers as artistically innovative, as something unexpected and new.