connection with Jack the Ripper murders 305
cultural impact 304
dream genesis 295–6, 297–8, 328
echoes of Poe and Hogg 301
film versions 297, 305, 306, 307
gothic elements 301–2
latent sexual meanings in 304–5, 306
origin of idea 300
structure and plot 302–4
success of 307–8, 309, 327–8, 340
Strong, Austin 254, 289, 420, 447
Strong, Hervey 254
Strong, Isobel (née Osbourne, later Field, ‘Belle’) 126, 128, 130, 133, 140, 149, 178, 180, 355: appearance 135
birth of second son 254
expecting first child 217
living in Hawaii 371–2
marriage to Joe Strong 374–5
postscript 460
relationship with mother 135, 186–7, 254
relationship with RLS 429–30, 433
in Samoa 420, 429
in Sydney 398
Strong, Joseph Dwight 135, 178, 180, 186–7, 198–9, 355–6, 374–5, 385, 396, 424–5
Swanston (Edinburgh) 40–1
Swearingen, Roger: Prose Writings of Robert Louis Stevenson 108–9
Symonds, Catherine 215
Symonds, John Addington 209–12, 214–15, 304, 384
syphilis 169
Tahiti 367–71, 375
Tati Salmon 370
Tavernier, Jules 178
Taylor, Sir Henry 290
Taylor, Theodosia Alice, Lady 291
Tebureimoa (King of Butaritari) 379, 380
Tembinok (King of Apemama) 383
Times, The 440–1
Tod, John 41, 42
Tracy, Spencer 306, 307
Traquair, Henrietta (RLS’s cousin) 57
Treasure Island 225–9, 231, 252, 279, 390: appeal of 227
creation of Long John Silver 228–9
influences 184
offer of publication by Cassell 252, 253
plot 227
references to in Admiral Guinea 269
RLS runs out of steam on 226–7
serialisation in Young Folks 226, 227, 252
takes shape 225–6
Trudeau, Dr Edward Livingston 330, 331, 332, 333–4, 446
tuitui 409, 410
Tupua Tamasese (King of Samoa) 393–4
Tulloch, John 202–3
Twain, Mark 131, 358
Vailima (Samoa) 405–7, 409–10, 411–12, 415, 420–2, 423, 427, 459–60
Vailima Letters 409
Vandegrift, Esther 126
Vandegrift, Jacob 126, 127, 165
Vandegrift, Nellie see Sanchez, Nellie
Victoria, Queen 224
Virginia City 131–2
Warden, Jane (née Stevenson, RLS’s aunt) 27
Weil, Oscar 134
Wells, H.G. 446
Whitman, Walt 73, 212: Leaves of Grass 73
Wilde, Oscar 411n, 443
Williams, Dora Norton 135, 192, 195
Williams, Virgil 135, 192
Wright, Jonathan 182
Wright, Margaret Berthe 148, 157
Wrong Box, The 153, 351, 373, 384
Young, Robert 41
Young Folks Magazine 226, 245, 252, 313
Zangwill, Israel 454
Zassetsky, Nadia 101, 248
Zassetsky, Nelitchka 101–2
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the following for their help with my research: the librarians and staff of the Bodleian Library; the British Library; the London Library; the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University; New York Public Library; the National Library of Scotland; the Bancroft Library, University of California at Berkeley; les Archives de l’Assistance Publique-Hôpitaux de Paris; the Pacific Room of Apia Library, Upolu, Western Samoa; the Stevenson-Osbourne archive at the Robert Louis Stevenson Silverado Museum, St Helena, Napa, California; the Robert Louis Stevenson Museum at Saranac Lake, New York; the Writers’ Museum, Lady Stair’s House, Edinburgh; the Stevenson Museum at Villa Vailima, Upolu, Western Samoa; and the National University of Samoa. Anyone involved in Stevenson research has reason to be grateful for the website maintained by Richard Dury on behalf of the Association of Stevenson Scholars, an invaluable resource.
I am indebted to many people for help with specific queries, ideas, leads, suggestions and practical assistance during the writing of this book: Stuart Airlie, Scott Ashley, Mark Bostridge, Kate Clanchy, Aisling Foster, Lyndall Gordon, Siamon Gordon, Elaine Greig, Richard Holmes, Nicola Ireland, Andrew Kelly, Patrick McGuinness, Robyn Marsack, Agnès Masson, Ernest Mehew, Barry Menikoff, Andrew Nash, Nicholas Rankin, Julia Reid, Graham Robb, Karen Steele, Roger Swearingen, Belinda Thomson and Jenny Uglow. Mike Delahunt provided hot drinks and helpful guidance on a freezing January day at Baker’s Cottage, Devon Jersild drove me there; while at the other end of my travels Gatoloai Tili Afamasaga, Mata’ino Te’o and Juliana Tevaga all helped me to a better understanding of Stevenson’s years in Samoa. In Edinburgh Isabel Schmidt and Alison Harman have been kind hosts, as have Belinda and Richard Thomson and John and Felicitas Macfie, current owners of 17 Heriot Row.
At HarperCollins, I would like to thank Richard Johnson and Robert Lacey for their friendly support and deft editorial skills and Holley Miles for her work on the illustrations. I am especially grateful to the trustees and administrators of the Leverhulme Trust for their award of an emeritus grant for travel expenses related to my research and to the Arts Council for a Writers’ Award in 2003.
Claire Harman
AUGUST 2004
I am grateful to the following for permission to quote from manuscript material in their possession:
Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University
National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh
R.L.S. Silverado Museum, St Helena, California
The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley
While I have made every effort to contact copyright holders, in some cases this has not proved possible. The publishers would be grateful to hear from anyone who has inadvertently been overlooked.
Claire Harman
APRIL 2005
About the Author
CLAIRE HARMAN’S first book, a biography of the writer Sylvia Townsend Warner, won the Mail on Sunday/John Llewellyn Rhys Prize in 1990, and her second, Fanny Burney: A Biography, was shortlisted for the Whitbread Award. She has edited Warner’s poems and diaries, as well as works by Robert Louis Stevenson, and writes regularly for the literary press. Since 2003 she has been teaching a course in biography at Columbia University. She lives in New York City and Oxford.
Notes
ABBREVIATIONS
CB – Charles Baxter
FJS – Frances Jane Sitwell
FS – Fanny Stevenson (née Vandegrift, formerly Osbourne)
GB – Graham Balfour
HJ – Henry James
IF – Isobel Field (née Osbourne, formerly Strong; ‘Belle’)
LO – Samuel Lloyd Osbourne
MIS – Margaret Isabella Stevenson (née Balfour)
RAMS – Robert Alan Mowbray Stevenson
RLS – Robert Louis Stevenson
SC – Sidney Colvin
TS – Thomas Stevenson
WEH – William Ernest Henley
BL – Manuscript Collections, British Library
MS Bancroft – Stevenson-Osbourne family papers 1839–1970, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, California
MS Silverado – Manuscripts relating to Robert Louis Stevenson, Fanny Osbourne and her family in the collection of the Silverado Museum, St Helena, California
MS Yale – Robert Louis Stevenson Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut
NLS – National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh
NLS Balfour – National Library of Scotland, Papers of Sir Graham Balfour
Balfour – G
raham Balfour, The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson, 2 vols (London and New York, 1901)
Bathurst – Bella Bathurst, The Lighthouse Stevensons (London, 1999)
Baxter Letters – Delancey Ferguson and Marshall Waingrow (eds), R.L.S.: Stevenson’s Letters to Charles Baxter (London and New Haven, 1956)
Collected Poems – The Collected Poems of Robert Louis Stevenson, ed. Roger C. Lewis (Edinburgh, 2003)
Colvin – Sidney Colvin, Memories and Notes (London, 1921)
Field – Isobel Strong Field, This Life I’ve Loved (London, 1937)
From Saranac – Margaret Isabella Stevenson, From Saranac to the Marquesas and Beyond (London, 1903)
Furnas – J.C. Furnas, Voyage to Windward: The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson (London, 1952)
Gosse – Edmund Gosse, Critical Kit-Kats (London, 1913)
Hammerton – J.A. Hammerton (ed.), Stevensoniana: An Anecdotal Life and Appreciation of Robert Louis Stevenson (Edinburgh, 1907)
ICR – Rosaline Masson (ed.), I Can Remember Robert Louis Stevenson (Edinburgh, 1925)
Letters – Bradford A. Booth and Ernest Mehew (eds), The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson, 8 vols (Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1994–95)
Lucas – E.V. Lucas, The Colvins and their Friends (London, 1928)
Maixner – Paul Maixner (ed.), Robert Louis Stevenson: The Critical Heritage (London, 1981)
‘Memoirs’ – ‘Memoirs of Himself’, Vailima Edition of the Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, vol. 26
Portrait – Lloyd Osbourne, An Intimate Portrait of R.L.S. (New York, 1924)
Swearingen – Roger G. Swearingen, The Prose Writings of Robert Louis Stevenson: A Guide (London, 1980)
Tusitala – The Tusitala Edition of the Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, 35 vols (London, 1923–24)
Vailima – The Vailima Edition of the Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, 26 vols (New York and London, 1923)
1 : BARON BROADNOSE
1 MS Yale
2 ‘Records of a Family of Engineers’, Vailima, vol. 12, p.411
3 ‘The Lamplighter’, Collected Poems, p.39
4 ‘Records of a Family of Engineers’, Vailima, vol. 12, pp.426–7
5 Ibid., pp.432–3
6 Quoted in Bathurst, p.72
7 Ibid., pp.99–100
8 ‘Thomas Stevenson, Civil Engineer’, Vailima, vol. 12, p.106
9 Ibid., p.107
10 Quoted in Bathurst, p.103
11 Letters, vol. 8, p.235
12 Collected Poems, p.98
13 Balfour, vol. 1, p.22
14 Ibid., p.9
15 MS Huntington, the Huntington Library, San Marino, California, quoted and partly published in ibid., p.18
16 Balfour, vol. 1, p.20
17 Ibid., p.24
18 Hammerton, p.5
19 ‘Thomas Stevenson, Civil Engineer’, Vailima, vol. 12, p.108
20 MS Bancroft
21 Vailima, vol. 7. p.428
22 Quoted in Letters, vol. 1, p.31
23 TS to MIS, 21 June 1848, MS Bancroft
24 Ibid., 1 March 1850
25 FS to Dora Williams, September 1880, MS Yale
26 Balfour, vol. 1, p.8
27 J.C. Furnas suggests that this may have been due to thyroid problems, and that the ‘croup’ might have been diphtheria; see Furnas, p.421 n8 and 9
28 ‘Notes of Childhood’, MS Yale, vault 805, box 2
29 ‘Memoirs’, p.220
30 FS, in Preface to Collected Poems, Biographical Collection of the Works of Robert Louis Stevenson (New York, 1908), p.vi
31 ‘Notes of Childhood’, MS Yale, vault 805, box 2
32 ‘A Chapter on Dreams’, Vailima, vol. 12, p.234
33 ‘Notes of Childhood’, MS Yale, vault 805, box 2
34 ‘Memoirs’, pp.215–16
35 Ibid., p.217
36 ‘Stevenson’s Infancy’, Vailima, vol. 26, p.276
37 Ibid., p.280
38 ‘Memoirs’, pp.209–10
39 NLS, Acc 10356
40 MS Bancroft, Robert Louis Stevenson collection of letters and papers c.1873–1949, C-H 107
41 Furnas, p.31
42 ‘Memoirs’, p.220
43 Hammerton, p.12
44 Vailima, vol. 26, p.295
45 ICR, p.152
46 ‘Memoirs’, p.218
47 Ibid.
48 Ibid., p.211
49 FS, in Preface to Collected Poems, Biographical Collection of the Works of Robert Louis Stevenson (New York, 1908), p.vii
50 ‘Memoirs’, p.214
51 ‘Reminiscences of Colinton Manse’, MS Yale, vault 805, box 2
52 ‘Memoirs’, p.213
53 ‘Reminiscences of Colinton Manse’, MS Yale, vault 805, box 2
54 RLS to WEH, June 1881, Letters, vol. 3, p.199
55 ‘A Penny Plain and Twopence Coloured’, Vailima, vol. 12, pp. 169–70
56 Letters, vol. 1, p.95
57 Ibid., p.98
58 Cummy’s Diary: A diary kept by Robert Louis Stevenson’s nurse, Alison Cunningham, while travelling with him on the continent during 1863, with a preface and notes by Robert T. Skinner (London, 1926), p.2
59 Ibid., p.54
60 Ibid., p.37
61 Ibid., p.60
62 Ibid., p.7
63 RLS to Emily Robertson, Letters, vol. 5, p.83
64 NLS Balfour, 9897, ff128–9
65 Balfour, vol. 1, p.87
66 NLS Balfour, 9895, f118
2 : VELVET COAT
1 Letters, vol. 1, p.111
2 Vailima, vol. 26, pp.47–8
3 Jane Whyte Balfour to Graham Balfour, 25 January 1900, NLS Balfour, 9895, f15
4 Maude Parry to SC, n.d., NLS Balfour, 9896
5 ICR, pp.34–5
6 As related by the shepherd’s son; ibid., p.35
7 ‘Pastoral’, Memories and Portraits, Vailima, vol. 12, pp.76–7
8 Note to ‘Underwoods’, Collected Poems, p.71
9 Vailima, vol. 12, p.19
10 Charles Guthrie, Robert Louis Stevenson: Some Personal Recollections (Edinburgh, 1924), p.24
11 ‘A Layman’ (Thomas Stevenson), The Immutable Laws of Nature in Relation to God’s Providence (Edinburgh and London, 1868), pp.12–13
12 Vailima, vol. 12, p.375
14 Memories and Portraits, Vailima, vol. 12, pp.50–1
15 Letters, vol. 6, p.47
16 Vailima, vol. 12, pp.49–50
17 Letters, vol. 1, p.130
18 ‘The Education of an Engineer’, Vailima, vol. 12, p.376
19 Ibid.
20 Letters, vol. 1, p.132
21 Ibid., p.136
22 Colvin, p.108
23 Letters, vol. 1, p.142
24 ‘Thomas Stevenson, Civil Engineer’, Vailima, vol. 12, p.105
25 ‘The Education of an Engineer’, Vailima, vol. 12, pp.379, 380
26 Ibid.
27 ‘On the Enjoyment of Unpleasant Places’, Vailima, vol. 24, p.340. I have Graham Robb to thank for identifying the quote from Béranger’s ‘Le Refus’
28 Letters, vol. 1, p.157
29 Ibid., p.143
30 Eve Blantyre Simpson, Robert Louis Stevenson (Boston and London, 1906), pp.34–5
31 Letters, vol. 4, pp.305–6
32 MS Yale, vault 805, box 2
33 Letters, vol. 1, p.166
34 Ibid.
35 ‘Notes of Childhood’, MS Yale, vault 805, box 2
36 Ibid., p.4
37 The Memoirs of Walter Pringle of Greenknow, ed. W. Wood (Edinburgh, 1847), p.6
38 Moray Maclaren, Stevenson and Edinburgh: A Centenary Study (London, 1950), p.80
39 Quoted in Letters, vol. 1, p.210
40 Eve Blantyre Simpson, Robert Louis Stevenson (Boston and London, 1906), pp.29–31
41 Letters, vol. 1, p.211
42 Eve Blantyre Simpson, Robert Louis Stevenson (Boston and London, 1906), pp.29, 40
43 ICR
, p.159. The second meaning of ‘yellow yite’ in the Scottish National Dictionary, vol.10 (Edinburgh, 1976), is ‘a person of small stature’, ‘also [ … ] a general term of contempt’
44 ‘My brain swims empty and light’, Collected Poems, p.260
45 NLS Balfour, 9895, f155
46 This section of RLS’s fragmentary autobiography, written in 1880, is in NLS Balfour, 9897
47 ‘A College Magazine’, Vailima, vol. 12, p.59
48 ‘You looked so tempting in the pew’, Collected Poems, pp.243–4
49 ‘Duddingston’, ibid., p.245
50 ‘Talk and Talkers’, 2nd paper, Vailima, vol. 12, p.144
51 NLS Balfour, 9896
52 ‘Memoirs’, p.223
53 Letters, vol. 1, p.208
54 Ibid., p.193
55 MS Yale; published in Tusitala, vol. 30, and in the Edinburgh Edition of the Works of Robert Louis Stevenson
56 Vailima, vol. 12, pp.235–6
57 Letters, vol. 1, p.188
58 Ibid., p.198
59 Gosse, p.276
60 Ibid., p.277
61 Kidnapped, Vailima, vol. 9, pp.170–1
62 Memories and Portraits, Vailima, vol. 12, p.98
63 It was printed posthumously as an ‘unfinished treatise’ in the Edinburgh Edition
64 ‘Reflections and Remarks on Human Life’, Vailima, vol. 26, p.117
65 ‘A College Magazine’, Vailima, vol. 12, p.58
66 Quoted in Letters, vol. 1, p.41 n3
67 Collected Poems, p.312
68 ‘Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin’, Vailima, vol. n, p.529
69 NLS, Acc 4534
70 D.A. Stevenson to GB, n.d., NLS Balfour, 9895, f37
71 Letters, vol. 6, p.47
72 MS Yale, box 2, vol. 4, folder D
3 : THE CARELESS INFIDEL
1 Charles Guthrie, Robert Louis Stevenson: Some Personal Recollections (Edinburgh, 1924), p.31
2 NLS, MS 9822, Law Notes, Caricatures, Drawings and Verses
3 ICR, p.100
4 Ibid., p.101
5 Charles Guthrie, Robert Louis Stevenson: Some Personal Recollections (Edinburgh, 1924), P.34
6 Sir Alfred Ewing, An Engineer’s Outlook (London, n.d.), p.250
7 ICR, p.123
8 An amusing account of how this yacht, the Purgle, got into trouble on its maiden voyage is included in RLS’s ‘Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin’, Vailima, vol. 11