Читать книгу Robert Louis Stevenson: A Biography - Claire Harman, Claire Harman - Страница 7

Facts bearing on precocity or on the slow development of the mental powers, deserve mention.

Francis Galton, Record of Family Faculties

WHEN BOB WENT UP to Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, in the autumn of 1866, fifteen-year-old Lewis was eager for details, and more than a little jealous: ‘Do Cambridge students indulge in a private magazine: if so, full particulars?’¹ He himself was still at Mr Thomson’s school and bound on a different course, taking classes in practical mechanics and being given extra maths lessons in order to matriculate at Edinburgh University the next year as a student of engineering. Thomas Stevenson must have realised by this time that even if Lewis went through the hoops of getting a degree in sciences, he was temperamentally unsuited to become an engineer. Still they stuck to the known path, the father no doubt rationalising that his own reluctance to join the family firm years before had been proved wrong. His working life had been immensely useful and productive (not least of money), and his early leanings towards authorship had not been entirely abandoned. Had not his book on lighthouse illumination and his article on ‘Harbours’ for the Encyclopaedia Britannica been composed in hours of leisure, the proper place for letters?

Robert Louis Stevenson’s first publication, a privately-printed sixteen-page monograph called ‘The Pentland Rising: A Page of History’, fell entirely in the gentleman-amateur tradition that his father favoured. It would not have escaped a man like Thomas Stevenson, so keenly aware of the energy potential in a wave and the importance of building a structure of exactly the right size and shape to harness or withstand it, that the intellectual energy Lewis expended on his feverish recreation might be redirected towards some serious and worthy project. The boy’s interest in the Covenanters had been expressed in some highly inappropriate forms up to this point; he had started a romance based on the life of David Hackston of Rathillet, one of the fanatics who had murdered Archbishop Sharp, and in 1867–68 began a five-act tragedy on another Covenanting subject, ‘The Sweet Singer’. A work of a historical or overtly religious nature would have been far more suitable, and it was in such a direction that Thomas and Margaret Stevenson now steered their son,.offering to pay for the production of one hundred copies of a short history to coincide exactly with the two hundredth anniversary of the Covenanters’ defeat at Rullion Green on 28 November 1666. Getting the boy’s name into print, in a controlled and circumscribed way, was clearly a kind of reward and encouragement, but also an inoculation against becoming ‘literary’.

Lewis must have been happy with the arrangement, for he took care to make his account of the Rising as serious and scholarly as possible, with an impressive list of references (including Wodrow, Crookshank, Kirkton, Defoe, Bishop Burnet) and a stirring, sermon-like conclusion. Still it didn’t much resemble a conventional history. The facts were there, but re-imagined by the fifteen-year-old into gripping narrative:

The wind howled fiercely over the moorland; a close, thick, wetting rain descended. Chilled to the bone, worn out with long fatigue, sinking to the knees in mire, onward they marched to destruction. One by one the weary peasants fell off from their ranks to sleep, and die in the rain-soaked moor, or to seek some house by the wayside wherein to hide till daybreak. One by one at first, then in gradually increasing numbers, till at last at every shelter that was seen, whole troops left the waning squadrons, and rushed to hide themselves from the ferocity of the tempest. To right and left nought could be descried but the broad expanse of the moor, and the figures of their fellow-rebels, seen dimly through the murky night, plodding onwards through the sinking moss. Those who kept together – a miserable few – often halted to rest themselves, and to allow their lagging comrades to overtake them. Then onward they went again, still hoping for assistance, reinforcement, and supplies; onward again, through the wind, and the rain, and the darkness – onward to their defeat at Pentland, and their scaffold at Edinburgh.²

Stevenson’s later description of his apprenticeship as ‘playing the sedulous ape’ to a host of better writers seems needlessly self-mocking when one sees how expert and stylish he was already at the age of fifteen. The prose is very deliberately crafted, with cadences one could almost score, and there is something visionary about his imagination, as if he had personally witnessed the bullets dropping away from Dalzell’s thick buff coat and falling into his boots, seen the flames rising from a Covenanter’s grave on the moor and creeping round the house of his murderer. The boy’s engagement with his subject is so intense as to be almost disturbing. Just after relating the execution of the captured martyrs, he makes an emotional authorial interjection: perhaps it was as well that Hugh McKail’s dying speech to his comrades was drowned out by drums and the jeers of the crowd; these sounds, he wrote, ‘might, when the mortal fight was over, when the river of death was passed, add tenfold sweetness to the hymning of the angels, tenfold peacefulness to the shores which they had reached’. Lewis seems to have been as fervently pious in his mid-teens as in childhood.

It’s hard to imagine how such a performance could have failed to please the boy’s father, but according to a letter in the Balfour archive, the pamphlet was no sooner in type than Thomas Stevenson began to worry about potential criticism of it (from what quarter it is impossible to guess). He had criticised the first drafts himself, as Aunt Jane recalled, who had been at Heriot Row while Lewis was making alterations to the text ‘to please his Father’: ‘[Lewis] had made a story of it, and, by so doing, had spoiled it, in Tom’s opinion – It was printed soon after, just a small number of copies all of which Tom bought in, soon after.’³ So the little book’s literary qualities were its downfall; they ‘spoiled’ ‘A Page of History’ to the extent that it couldn’t even be circulated among the aunts, family friends and co-religionists who would have been its natural audience. It must have been hard for the young author to see his first work stillborn. Nor was it the only time Thomas Stevenson pulled this trick, paying for his son’s work to be printed, then censoring it. His solicitude for Lewis has the tinge of monomania, and tallies with what a family friend, Maude Parry, told Sidney Colvin about the relationship after the writer’s death: ‘Stevenson told us that his father had nagged him to an almost inconceivable extent. He thought it the most difficult of all relationships.’⁴

The following year Thomas Stevenson took out a lease on a house right in the heart of Covenanting country, the hamlet of Swanston on the edge of the Pentlands, only a few miles outside Edinburgh. The ‘cottage’ they rented there (in fact a spacious villa, almost as big as Colinton Manse) became their holiday home for the next thirteen years and a winter retreat for Lewis when he was a student. The battlefield of Rullion Green was within walking distance, as was the picturesque ruin of Glencorse Church, and Lewis, now old enough to be left to his own devices, spent days at a time walking the hills, writing and reading – especially adventure stories, caches of which the shepherd John Tod’s son later recalled having found in the whin bushes above the cottage.⁵ He was a keen, hardy walker and was able to make a long foot-study of the Pentlands in the years during which Swanston was the family’s second home. This was to become his favourite persona over the next decade or more, the romantic solitary walker, free from responsibility and respectability, watching, listening, picking acquaintance with strangers On the road, falling in with whatever adventures presented themselves.

To true Pentlanders, Lewis Stevenson would have appeared little more than a rich townie weekending on Allermuir, an English-speaking Unionist among terse mutterers of Lallans. No doubt some choice phrases of that dialect were shouted in his direction on the occasion, early in the Stevensons’ tenancy, when the boy barged through a field of sheep and lambs with his Skye terrier Coolin, infuriating the shepherd.⁶ Times had changed so rapidly in Scotland that in his late teens Stevenson knew no one of his own generation (certainly not of his class) whose primary language was Scots. ‘Real’ Scotsmen, like Robert Young, the gardener at Swanston, or John Tod the shepherd, or his late Grandfather Balfour, were distant, older figures who presented the paradox of being at once admirable and impossible to emulate. And with the language many temperamental traits and ‘accents of the mind’ were disappearing too, or seemed tantalisingly out of reach, as Stevenson’s loving description of shepherd Tod in his 1887 essay ‘Pastoral’ indicates:

That dread voice of his that shook the hills when he was angry, fell in ordinary talk very pleasantly upon the ear, with a kind of honied, friendly whine, not far off singing, that was eminently Scottish. He laughed not very often, and when he did, with a sudden loud haw-haw, hearty but somehow joyless, like an echo from a rock. His face was permanently set and coloured; ruddy and stiff with weathering; more like a picture than a face [ … ] He spoke in the richest dialect of Scots I ever heard; the words in themselves were a pleasure and often a surprise to me, so that I often came back from one of our patrols with new acquisitions; and this vocabulary he would handle like a master, stalking a little before me, ‘beard on shoulder’, the plaid hanging loosely about him, the yellow staff clapped under his arm, and guiding me uphill by that devious, tactical ascent which seems peculiar to men of his trade. I might count him with the best of talkers; only that talking Scotch and talking English seem incomparable acts. He touched on nothing at least, but he adorned it; when he narrated, the scene was before you; when he spoke (as he did mostly) of his own antique business, the thing took on a colour of romance and curiosity that was surprising.⁷

The ‘romance and curiosity’ of Scotsness haunted Stevenson all his life; he never tired of it. But the fact that his own culture could be romantic and curious to him he knew to be an unfortunate state of affairs. His writing about Scotland is therefore strongly melancholic and valedictory, quite unlike the language-revival movements of the following century which sought to resuscitate the culture by creating synthetic Scots. Within 150 years, the literary language waxed, waned and then reappeared again in the form of a sort of composite ghost of itself in the ‘Scottish Renaissance’ of the mid-twentieth century (pioneered by the poet Hugh MacDiarmid). But in the 1860s and ’70s, the language seemed beyond revival, and what Burns had used both naturally and daringly, Stevenson could only lament and pastiche, writing of his later attempts at Scots vernacular verse, ‘if it be not pure, what matters it?’⁸

Nevertheless, what Stevenson says of John Tod’s quintessentially Scots trait of ‘adorning’ his talk and making it startlingly vivid is egregiously true of Stevenson himself; ‘when he narrated, the scene was before you’. The irony is, of course, that Stevenson became known as a superlative English stylist because he was so alert to the power of his unknown native tongue. And as for the ‘romance and curiosity’ of Scotland, Stevenson’s version of it in novels such as Kidnapped, Catriona, The Master of Ballantrae and Weir of Hermiston did almost as much to promote and perpetuate the Scottish myth in the twentieth century as his great forerunner Walter Scott had done in the nineteenth.

In the autumn of 1867, the bullet had to be bitten and an engineering degree begun. The contrast between Lewis’s technical education at Edinburgh and Bob’s ‘semi-scenic life’ in Cambridge, with its gentlemanly atmosphere of ancient quadrangles and cultured conversation, could hardly have been stronger. As the bell rang them in to lectures from the city streets or pubs, all classes of raw Scots youth shuffled together on the ‘greasy benches’, as Stevenson recalled vividly in ‘The Foreigner at Home’:

The first muster of a college class in Scotland is a scene of curious and painful interest; so many lads, fresh from the heather, hang round the stove in cloddish embarrassment, ruffled by the presence of their smarter comrades, and afraid of the sound of their own rustic voices.⁹

No proctors, privileges or grand ceremonials here. When the classes broke up, many of the students had to hurry home to get back to work in the fields in order to earn their next winter’s college fees. It must have been an eye-opener to Lewis, whose school life (such as it was) had been spent wholly among middle-class children, and though he approved of the ‘healthy democratic atmosphere’ of the university, and admired those of the staff who strove to put the parish boys at ease, he made no close friends among his fellow engineering students, indeed felt increasingly isolated and lonely.

Around this time (1868–69) Stevenson changed his name from Lewis to the Frenchified ‘Louis’. It is said that the impetus behind the change was Thomas Stevenson’s sudden and overpowering dislike of an Edinburgh radical and dissenter called David Lewis, who embodied, in the engineer’s view, ‘everything dangerous in Church and State’.¹⁰ But as the pronunciation remained identical, Lewis – or Louis as we must now call him – may have intended it more as a joke than as a gesture of political solidarity, and it took a while to stick.^* 1868 was also the year in which Thomas Stevenson published an essay in the Church of Scotland Home and Foreign Missionary Record (later produced as a pamphlet by Blackwood’s) on ‘The Immutable Laws of Nature in Relation to God’s Providence’. This short work is notable for several reasons: for its slightly simple-minded grappling with the evolutionary controversies of the day and for its ardent struggle to develop a response to them consistent with Church doctrine. The author argues, for example, that a falling stone falls from two causes, ‘first, proximately, in virtue of the law of gravitation; but second, primarily, by the supreme will of God, who has called the law of gravitation into existence’ (one can catch the author’s pleasure in coining that ‘second, primarily’). And if man ‘has been raised from the gorilla, as is hinted at by the new school of naturalists, how comes it to pass that the dog, although resembling man so little physically, should be so much more than the gorilla akin to him in all his nobler feelings and affections?’ The style of argument gives one an idea of what Louis was up against when he and his father began to discourse ardently at the dinner table on matters of religion and science, for the youth had been reading Darwin, and Herbert Spencer, whose works his father would never countenance. But there is another passage in Thomas’s booklet of even greater relevance, one which may well have come to haunt his son:

Men of literature and science may therefore well pause ere they lift their pen to write a word which tends to shake the faith of others [ … ] How terrible will it be to such an author, when toiling all alone through the dark valley of the shadow of death, should conscience remind him, when thus entering the dark portals of the tomb, of the pernicious legacy which he has left to mankind!¹¹

Publication fascinated the young student of engineering, who had secretly become fixated on the consumption and production of literature. ‘I had already my own private determination to be an author,’ he wrote in ‘The Education of an Engineer’.¹² But the acquisition of technique, that seemed to him all-important, was difficult. Three of the four stories in his juvenile ‘School Boys Magazine’ had ended on a cliffhanger with the words ‘To Be Continued’. The pleasure in writing the beginnings of stories (natural enough in an apprentice) and a revulsion from the work involved in finishing them would remain the most marked characteristics of Stevenson’s creative life.

To be continued … by whom? One solution to the problem was to share the burden with a collaborator. In the spring of 1868, while he was also trying to write his ‘covenanting novel’, Louis wrote to Bob, ‘Don’t you think you and I might collaborate a bit this summer. Something dramatic, blank verse and Swinburne choruses.’¹³ Just the idea of collaboration then set him off in the same letter on a long sketch of two possible plays, the second of which, a tragedy about the Duke of Monmouth, got so elaborate as to put off any potential helper from the start:

Scene, a palace chamber. Without famine and revolt and an enemy investing the plains. A. found making love to B. Enter Prince who overhears. P. and A. quarrel, P. being also in love with B. Swords are drawn but D., who resembles A. very closely separates them. Exit P., cursing and muttering

– and so forth. ‘Write me your opinion of the thing and I will write the first scene which nothing can alter. I’ll then send it to you for alteration, amendment and addition, and we can parcel out the rest of the thing or alter it,’ he wrote humorously, acknowledging how tenacious he was likely to be of all his own ideas. What he really wanted was not a co-author, but a goad – or at the very least an enthusiastic audience. No wonder Bob didn’t jump at the offer, and apart from friendly encouragement contributed nothing to ‘Monmouth: A Tragedy’. But the object was achieved: the play was one of the few projects of the scores started during his teens that Louis managed to complete.

In his demanding, self-imposed and self-policed apprenticeship, Louis tried on a dizzying variety of literary styles, as he recalled satirically many years later:

Cain, an epic, was (save the mark!) an imitation of Sordello: Robin Hood, a tale in verse, took an eclectic middle course among the fields of Keats, Chaucer and Morris: in Monmouth, a tragedy, I reclined on the bosom of Mr. Swinburne; in my innumerable gouty-footed lyrics, I followed many masters; in the first draft of The King’s Pardon, a tragedy, I was on the trail of no lesser man than John Webster; in the second draft of the same piece, with staggering versatility, I had shifted my allegiance to Congreve [ … ] Even at the age of thirteen I had tried to do justice to the inhabitants of the famous city of Peebles in the style of the Book of Snobs.¹⁴

‘Nobody had ever such pains to learn a trade as I had; but I slogged at it, day in, day out; and I frankly believe (thanks to my dire industry) I have done more with smaller gifts than almost any man of letters in the world,’ Stevenson wrote modestly.¹⁵ What he needed no time to learn, however, was what to write about: his subject was always, somehow, himself.

Whenever I read a book or passage that particularly pleased me, in which a thing was said or an effect rendered with propriety, in which there was either some conspicuous force or some happy distinction in the style, I must sit down at once and set myself to ape that quality. I was unsuccessful, and I knew it; and tried again, and was again unsuccessful and always unsuccessful; but at least in these vain bouts, I got some practice in rhythm, in harmony, in construction and the co-ordination of parts. I have thus played the sedulous ape to Hazlitt, to Lamb, to Wordsworth, to Sir Thomas Browne, to Defoe, to Hawthorne, to Montaigne, to Baudelaire and to Obermann.¹⁶

Study, practice, impersonation; ‘that, like it or not, is the way to learn to write’. One can hear in these heartening words a rallying cry for millions of would-be writers, and it may be no coincidence that much of the worst prose of the coming generation was written in imitation of Stevenson. Anyone can do it, he seems to be saying; all you need is persistence and humility. What is easy to miss (because the expression is so original) is that anyone who can coin a phrase such as ‘playing the sedulous ape’ to describe his debt to other authors owes nothing to anyone. The term passed straight into common parlance, and the essay itself, as Balfour averred a mere fourteen years after its first appearance in an American periodical, quickly ‘became classical’.

To be continued … It wasn’t simply a matter of by whom, but when? For three consecutive summers, Louis was obliged to attend engineering works in his capacity as apprentice to the family firm. Instead of travelling, as Bob was doing, to Paris or Fontainebleau, he found himself stuck for weeks in a series of inaccessible locations on the Scottish coast, with no company but that of the men on the works, and no entertainments other than tobacco, drink and letters from his mother. The men must have found him an odd specimen, a skinny teenager with no real interest in or aptitude for engineering, quite unlike his father and uncle, the firm’s obsessively dedicated partners. When there was an accident at the works in Anstruther, where Louis had been sent in July 1868 to observe the construction of a breakwater, the seventeen-year-old found himself in the middle of a minor uproar. Writing to his father about the incident, he reported how a little girl had pointed him out on the street, saying, ‘There’s the man that has the charge o’t!’, an identification that must have rung strangely in everyone’s ears.

Louis spent most of his time in Anstruther loitering on the quay, vaguely recording the progress of the works, or biting his pencil over calculations. ‘All afternoon in the office trying to strike the average time of building the edge work,’ he wrote home at the end of his first week. ‘I see that it is impossible. [My computation] is utterly untrustworthy, looks far wrong and could not be compared with any other decision.’¹⁷ In the evenings, Louis retreated to his lodgings at the house of a local carpenter, and tried to make up the lost time: ‘As soon as dinner was despatched,’ he recorded twenty years later, ‘in a chamber scented with dry rose-leaves, [I] drew in my chair to the table and proceeded to pour forth literature, at such a speed, and with such intimations of early death and immortality, as I now look back upon with wonder.’¹⁸ Believing himself to be doomed to die young, and doomed, what’s more, to spend what little time he had hanging around windswept harbour works, he felt compelled to sit up long into the night, ‘toiling to leave a memory behind me’.¹⁹

The scent of dead rose-leaves, the intimations of mortality and the burden of his unwritten masterpieces weighed heavily. The works were weighty too; the sonorously-named ‘Voces Fidelium’ was to be a dramatic monologue in verse, presumably on a religious theme; ‘Monmouth: A Tragedy’ was still in progress, as was the novel about the Covenanter, Hackston. He had come a long way from ‘The Baneful Potato’. But it was difficult to keep up a secret nocturnal career of writing, that must at times have reminded him of Deacon Brodie’s double life. The nights were warm that July in Anstruther, the rose-leaves and bowls of mignonette overpowering, and the window had to be kept open. Thus moths flew in continually and scorched themselves on the candles, dropping onto ‘Voces Fidelium’ in a manner so disgusting that the author was driven to blow out the lights and go to bed, seething with rage and frustration. Immortality was deferred yet again.

After an evening watching a wretchedly bad performance by strolling players at Anstruther Town Hall, Louis got into a dispute with a fellow engineering apprentice about the troupe’s pathetic actor-manager. His companion felt that the man would be better employed as an ordinary labourer, but Stevenson disagreed ardently, saying the player must be happier ‘starving as an actor, with such artistic work as he had to do’. The parallel with his own life and frustrated ambition was all too clear, and Louis left the scruffy hall ‘as sad as I have been for ever so long’.²⁰ By the end of the month he was writing home in unusually forcible terms:

I am utterly sick of this grey, grim, sea-beaten hole. I have a little cold in my head which makes my eyes sore; and you can’t tell how utterly sick I am and how anxious to get back among trees and flowers and something less meaningless than this bleak fertility.²¹

But his parents chose to interpret this repugnance as temporary and specific, a symptom of ‘the distressing malady of being seventeen years old’,²² and Louis was packed off again the next month to spend six weeks in the ‘bleak, God forsaken bay’ of Wick, a fishing port only ten miles away from the most northerly point on the Scottish mainland, John o’ Groats. Anstruther had been a mere forty miles from home, across the Firth from North Berwick, where the Stevensons had taken many family holidays; Wick was a much more serious exile, far beyond the reach of the railway system, cold, bare and implacably foreign. In the herring season, the town was full of men from the Outer Hebrides, mostly Gaelic speakers, while the mainlanders spoke mostly Scots-English and both communities were heavily influenced by their common Norse ancestry. Louis listened to a wayside preacher in total incomprehension of all but one word, ‘Powl’ (the apostle), and was incapable of conversing with one of the Highland workmen at the harbour works. ‘What is still worse,’ he wrote home to his mother, ‘I find the people here about – that is to say the Highlanders, not the northmen – don’t understand me.’²³

The firm had been commissioned to build a new breakwater in Wick harbour and work was well advanced, despite the permanently bad sea conditions, which led eventually to the abandonment of the whole project in 1874.^* In 1868, however, the scene was full of men and industry; wooden scaffolding was in place all along the unfinished stonework, and there was a platform of planks at the end on which stood the cranking equipment for the divers’ air supply. The masons’ hammers chimed continually, the air-mills turned, and every now and again a diver’s helmet would surface from the choppy water and a man dressed bizarrely in a huge helmet and diving suit hoist himself up the sea-ladder.

Here was something to capture young Louis’s imagination, and despite his father’s strong reservations (and insistence that a doctor’s opinion be sought in advance), he was eventually allowed to go diving under the strict supervision of one Bob Bain. Stevenson recalled the experience as the best part of his whole engineering career. Wearing woollen underclothes, a nightcap and many layers of insulating material, with a twenty-pound lead weight on each foot, weights hanging back and front and bolted into a helmet that felt as if it would crush him, Louis went down the ladder:

Looking up, I saw a low, green heaven mottled with vanishing bells of white; looking around, except for the weedy spokes and shafts of the ladder, nothing but a green gloaming, somewhat opaque but very restful and delicious. Thirty rounds lower, I stepped off on the pierres perdues of the foundation; a dumb helmeted figure took me by the hand, and made a gesture (as I read it) of encouragement; and looking in at the creature’s window, I beheld the face of Bain.²⁵

Encouraged to try jumping up onto a six-foot-high stone, Louis gave a small push and was amazed to find himself soaring even higher than the projected ledge: ‘Even when the strong arm of Bob had checked my shoulders, my heels continued their ascent; so that I blew out sideways like an autumn leaf, and must be hauled in hand over hand, as sailors haul in the slack of a sail, and propped upon my feet again like an intoxicated sparrow.’²⁶

The weightlessness, silence and dreamlike seclusion made diving memorable and delightful, but Wick was otherwise short on delights. The countryside was flat and treeless, exposed for miles at a time, and Louis would shelter from the biting wind in small rock crevices, listening to the seabirds and repeating over and over to himself the lines of the French poet Pierre-Jean de Béranger, ‘mon coeur est un luth suspendu/sitôt qu’on le touche, il résonne’.²⁷ Wick was a place of storms and shipwrecks, and one morning Louis was woken by the landlady of the New Harbour Hotel with news that a ship had come ashore near the new pier. The sea was too high to get near the works to assess the possible damage, but Louis reported back to his father the scene from the cope:

Some wood has come ashore, and the roadway seems carried away. There is something fishy at the far end where the cross wall is building; but till we are able to get along, all speculation is vain. [ … ]

So far, this could just pass for a technical report, but he goes on:

The thunder at the wall when it first struck – the rush along ever growing higher – the great jet of snow-white spray some forty feet above you – and the ‘noise of many waters’, the roar, the hiss, the ‘shrieking’ among the shingle as it fell head over heels at your feet. I watched if it threw the big stones at the wall: but it never moved them.²⁸

It is hardly the language of a technocrat; even Burns managed to be less poetical than this in his work as a surveyor.

Evenings in the New Harbour Hotel Louis again spent alone with his ‘private determination’. He finished ‘Monmouth’, and dedicated it, with professional seriousness, to Bob; he was also experimenting with prose sketches and metrical narratives, one based on the biblical story of Jeroboam and Ahijah, another on Chaucer’s Pardoner’s Tale. He wrote of his literary projects to Bob in a series of agitated letters, revealing the depth of his desires:

Strange how my mind runs on this idea. Becoming great, becoming great, becoming great. A heart burned out with the lust of this world’s approbation: a hideous disease to have, even though shielded, as it is in my case, with a certain imperturbable something – self-consciousness or common sense, I cannot tell which, – that would prevent me poisoning myself like Chatterton or drinking like Burns on the failure of my ambitious hopes.²⁹

Bob was irritatingly slow to respond, but when he did, expressed similar doubts about his ability to succeed as an artist, which was his own secret intention. The two of them were in a ferment of fears and ambition, but Bob’s was at once the easier and the more hopeless case: no one was forcing him to join the family firm (the example of his father’s breakdown must have allowed that), but he was self-confessedly indolent and depressive. Louis’s neuroses went the other way, towards overwork, having to live two lives in tandem if he wanted to be a writer at all. Nor did Louis need to drum up suicidal tendencies in order to be recognised as a full-blown romantic genius; death by natural causes seemed likely to get there first.

The most marked characteristic of Stevenson’s years as a student of engineering was loneliness. He seems to have made no lasting friendships at all at the university, or in the pubs and streets of the Old Town where he was most often found loitering instead of attending class. He was intimidated by the diligence of the ploughboys and earnest burghers’ sons who were his fellow students in natural philosophy or the dreaded mathematics. One of these students, it turned out, had only one shirt to his name and was forced to stay away from class on the days when it was being washed. Stevenson was ashamed to reflect that he needed no reason at all to stay away, but did so ‘as often as he dared’. He joined the University Speculative Society in March 1869, but didn’t make much of an impression there at first among the confident young future advocates and doctors who made up most of its membership. ‘The Spec’ was an exclusive debating club limited to thirty members, who met by candlelight and in full evening dress in a series of comfortable rooms in South Bridge. ‘A candid fellow-member’ (presumably Walter Simpson, brother of the lady who recorded this) said of the newly-recruited young engineer, ‘I cannot remember that Stevenson was ever anything as a speaker. He was nervous and ineffective, and had no power of debate; but his papers were successful.’³⁰ His happier days at the Spec were still to come.

Thomas and Margaret Stevenson had bought their son a set of barbells to develop his chest, but no amount of callisthenics could perform that miracle; the boy didn’t have an ounce of either muscle or fat. As his body grew taller and thinner, it made his head look unusually large by comparison, and his eyes, that had always been wide-set and interestingly misaligned, began to look more than ever like those of an intelligent hare. In view of how quickly his health improved in warm, dry places, it was unfortunate, to say the least, that Stevenson lived so many years in one of the ‘vilest climates known to man’, in the damp and cold and dark of Auld Reekie. He used to hang over the bridge by Waverley station, watching the trains taking luckier people away from his native city, and remembered with piquant dislike ‘the solo of the gas burner in the little front room; a knickering, flighty, fleering and yet spectral cackle. I mind it above all on winter afternoons, late, when the window was blue and spotted with rare raindrops, and looking out, the cold evening was seen blue all over, with the lamps of Queen’s and Frederick’s Street dotting it with yellow and flaring eastward in the squalls. Heavens, how unhappy I have been in such circumstances.’³¹

Louis’s isolation made it difficult for him to fight back fits of morbid melancholy. ‘My daily life is one repression from beginning to end, and my letters to you are the safety valve,’ he told Bob bluntly, just after his eighteenth birthday. He managed to be tormented with scruples, mostly about his waste or abuse of the opportunities his parents had provided him with, and attempted once to leave home on the principle that he might ‘free himself from the responsibility of this wealth that was not his’.³² To minimise his parents’ total expenditure he came to the eccentric conclusion that so long as he doubted a full return to health, he would live very sparsely in ‘an upper room’, but when he perceived an improvement he would go back to being pampered and paid for, in order to make the quickest exit from dependence.

His plans for self-improvement all turned on renunciation of his true desires, and in these moods his single-minded pursuit of authorship struck him as not merely a feeble self-indulgence but actively wrong. Perhaps, as he wrote to Bob on a particularly gloomy day, ‘to do good by writing [ … ] one must write little’:³³

I am entering on a profession which must engross the strength of my powers and to which I shall try to devote my energies. What I should prefer would be to search dying people in lowly places of the town and help them; but I cannot trust myself in such places. I told you my weak point before and you will understand me.³⁴

The pious young man was imagining himself as some sort of Jesus of the streets – and yet, he was too unworthy for that. Sunday school teaching was perhaps the only option open to him, he mused – but no, that also required a purer spirit.

The dark talk of not being trustworthy in ‘lowly places of the town’ refers (not without a tinge of pride) to Louis’s rapid escalation of worldly knowledge during his student years. He later said that his childhood piety had gone hand in hand with its correlate, ‘precocious depravity’,³⁵ which ranged from trying to summon up the Devil to solemn, secret experiments in blasphemy. Writing about his childhood at the age of twenty-two, Stevenson was in no mood to dismiss these traits, but saw them as consistent with his adult behaviour: ‘I find that same morbid bias, [ … ] the same small cowardice and small vanity, ever ready to lead me into petty falsehood.’³⁶ He saw ‘a parallel case’ between his own early years and those of the Covenanter Walter Pringle of Greenknow, whose memoirs had been one of Cummy’s permitted texts. This is an extraordinary thing to say. Pringle’s Memoirs are stuffed with the harshest language: he describes his youth as ‘years of darkness, deadness, and sinfulness’ when he committed ‘abominations’ and ‘slept about the brink of the bottomless pit’,³⁷ all in the context of later conversion, in other words, all in a priggish context. Stevenson could certainly be priggish too: the Covenanting childhood left deep divisions in his mind between good and evil, heaven and the pit, and ‘something of the Shorter Catechist’ hung about him, as W.E. Henley was to observe, even in his most apparently easy-going, atheistic days.

Just as in childhood Stevenson had found himself drawn fascinatedly towards the wickedness that his puritan upbringing taught him to revile, so in the freedom of adulthood and the long hours of college truancy he quickly became a habitué of some of Edinburgh’s most disreputable dives. ‘The underworld of the Edinburgh of 1870 had its sharp and clear geographical limits,’ one historian of the town has written. ‘It began in certain streets within a space of scarcely more than a few yards, and ended as abruptly.’³⁸ What could have been more grimly satisfying to the young moralist than the ease with which he could traverse these boundaries?

Many years later, Stevenson told his cousin Graham Balfour that he felt his rather shabby forms of youthful dissipation were linked to the short allowance he was kept on:

You know I very easily might have gone to the devil: I don’t understand why I didn’t. Even when I was almost grown up I was kept so short of money that I had to make the most of every penny. The result was that I had my dissipation all the same but I had it in the worst possible surroundings.³⁹

His ‘headquarters’ at this time, he told Balfour, was an old pub frequented by sailors, criminals and ‘the lowest order of prostitutes – threepenny whores’, where he used to go and write. Eve Simpson, rather missing the point, protested later that Stevenson had no need to behave like a poor man; he had ‘all his bills paid’, an allowance, ‘and his own study in a very hospitable home’.⁴⁰ But the dingy old pub clearly pleased him, with its interesting human traffic: ‘[the girls] were really singularly decent creatures, not a bit worse than anybody else’.⁴¹

And he made an interesting figure himself, affecting a ‘scruffy, mountebankish appearance’ and cultivating notoriety among the neighbours in the New Town by his ‘shabby dress and dank locks’.⁴² ‘Hauf a laddie, hauf a lassie, hauf a yellow yite!’ boys called after him on the street, not visibly ruffling the young man at all.⁴³ A poem of 1870 celebrates the effect his clothes and demeanour had on the average Edinburgh bourgeois:

I walk the streets smoking my pipe

And I love the dallying shop-girl

That leans with rounded stern to look at the fashions;

And I hate the bustling citizen,

The eager and hurrying man of affairs I hate,

Because he bears his intolerance writ on his face

And every movement and word of him tells me how much he hates me. ⁴⁴

Perhaps Stevenson was trying to become a Scottish symboliste; he habitually, at this date, made marginal comments on his own poetry in French: ‘pas mal’ or ‘atroce’. The choice of free verse for this and the whole series of poems that he wrote in 1870 seems very bold and challenging, especially as Stevenson became known later as a rather conventional poet (when he was thought of in that role at all). None of these early verses – written when he was most serious about verse – was published in his lifetime, however.

The ‘bustling citizen’ most offended by Louis’s eccentricities of behaviour and dress was, of course, his father. Thomas Stevenson was always begging his son to go to the tailor, but when Louis finally succumbed and had a garment made, he chose a dandyish black velvet smoking jacket. He wore this constantly, so it soon lost whatever smartness it had: it was totemic, marking perfectly his difference from the waistcoated and tailed bourgeois of Edinburgh. It declared that although young Stevenson was sometimes confusable with a privileged brat from the New Town, his real milieu was the Left Bank, his true home among artists, connoisseurs, flâneurs.^* And in the sanded back-kitchen of the Green Elephant, the Gay Japanee or the Twinkling Eye, ‘Velvet Coat’ became his nickname; the boy of genius, perhaps even the poète maudit.

For a person brought up in such fear for his soul, Stevenson displayed a remarkable fund of basic common sense about sex. Despite their piety, neither of his parents was a prude, and his father’s generous opinions about fallen women predisposed the son to think well of this class of female. Stevenson lost his virginity to one of them while still in his teens, and probably had relations with many more, as this fragment from his 1880 autobiographical notes makes clear:

And now, since I am upon this chapter, I must tell the story of Mary H –. She was a robust, great-haunched, blue-eyed young woman, of admirable temper and, if you will let me say so of a prostitute, extraordinary modesty. Every now and again she would go to work; once, I remember, for some months in a factory down Leith Walk, from which I often met her returning; but when she was not upon the streets, she did not choose to be recognised. She was perfectly self-respecting. I had certainly small fatuity at the period; for it never occurred to me that she thought of me except in the way of business, though I now remember her attempts to waken my jealousy which, being very simple, I took at the time for gospel. Years and years after all this was over and gone, when I was walking sick and sorry and alone, I met Mary somewhat carefully dressed; and we recognised each other with a joy that was, I daresay, a surprise to both. I spent three or four hours with her in a public-house parlour; she was going to emigrate in a few days to America; we had much to talk about; and she cried bitterly, and so did I. We found in that interview that we had been dear friends without knowing it; I can still hear her recalling the past in her sober, Scotch voice, and I can still feel her good honest loving hand as we said goodbye.⁴⁶

His respectful, even loving, manner must have endeared him to the tarts of the Old Town and encouraged him to develop what was already strong – a romantic sensuousness. He was clearly rather sentimental about women, although he had no neuroses about his dealings with them. But bringing his sexual experience to bear in his writing was another matter altogether.

Prostitutes weren’t the only kind of women that Stevenson associated with; he had plenty of pretty and spirited girl-cousins (there is more than a touch of gallantry in his letters to his cousin Henrietta Traquair), and liked to practise his charm on friends’ sisters. A ‘lady with whom my heart was [ … ] somewhat engaged’ dominated his thoughts in the winter of 1870,⁴⁷ and if his poems of the time reflect actual experiences, she may have been the girl with whom he played footsie at church (‘You looked so tempting in the pew’⁴⁸), or the one with whom he skated on Duddingston Loch:

You leaned to me, I leaned to you, Our course was smooth as flight –

We steered – a heel-touch to the left,A heel-touch to the right.

We swung our way through flying men,Your hand lay fast in mine,

We saw the shifting crowd dispart,The level ice-reach shine.

I swear by yon swan-travelled lake,By yon calm hill above,

I swear had we been drowned that dayWe had been drowned in love. ⁴⁹

Stevenson later admitted to having considered marrying one of the Mackenzie girls (who were neighbours of his engineering professor, Fleeming Jenkin), or Eve, the sister of his friend Walter Simpson, among whose possessions was a lock of the author’s hair. But on the whole he was little attracted to ladylike girls, for reasons suggested by this passage in his 1882 essay, ‘Talk and Talkers’:

The drawing-room is, indeed, an artificial place; it is so by our choice and for our sins. The subjection of women; the ideal imposed upon them from the cradle, and worn, like a hair-shirt, with so much constancy; their motherly, superior tenderness to man’s vanity and self-importance; their managing arts – the arts of a civilised slave among good-natured barbarians – are all painful ingredients and all help to falsify relations.⁵⁰

In the wake of his later fame, many colourful stories of ran-stam laddishness grew up around Stevenson, mostly revealing an undercurrent of regret that he failed to marry a Scotswoman and died childless.^* In 1925, Sidney Colvin was disgusted at the claim in a book (called, baldly, Robert Louis Stevenson, My Father) that Louis had an illegitimate son by the daughter of the blacksmith at Swanston. But while doubting there was any truth in the Swanston claim, even Colvin had to admit ‘we all knew [ … ] that Louis as a youngster was a loose fish in regard to women’.⁵¹

Loose fish is better than cold fish (the accusation often aimed at Colvin himself), and however uninhibited Louis was about sex, he retained high notions about chivalry and ‘what is honorable in sentiment, what is essential in gratitude, or what is tolerable by other men’⁵² in regard to women. This did not include political rights, however. When there were student disturbances in Edinburgh late in 1870 over the admission of women to medical classes, Stevenson wrote to his cousin Maud that he had little sympathy with the ‘studentesses’ who had been hissed at and jostled: ‘Miss Jex-Blake [the lead campaigner] is playing for the esteem of posterity. Soit. I give her posterity; but I won’t marry either her or her fellows. Let posterity marry them, if posterity likes – I won’t.’⁵³ He was to revise his views about New Women somewhat in the coming years.

Stevenson was often subject to fits of morbid melancholy during these years, and wrote to Bob of aimless days looking for distractions, trying to buy hashish, thinking about getting drunk, or hanging round Greyfriars churchyard for hours at a time ‘in the depths of wretchedness’,⁵⁴ reading Baudelaire, who, he told Bob, ‘would have corrupted St Paul’. The exquisitely self-tormenting notion struck him that he might have already used himself up, that his imagination was, in the potent word of the time, ‘spent’. Alone in an inn at Dunoon in the spring of 1870, he wrote a notebook entry which explicitly links this idea of ‘over-worked imagination’ with the addictive effects of drug-taking:

He who indulges habitually in the intoxicating pleasures of imagination, for the very reason that he reaps a greater pleasure than others, must resign himself to a keener pain, a more intolerable and utter prostration. It is quite possible, and even comparatively easy, so to enfold oneself in pleasant fancies, that the realities of life may seem but as the white snow-shower in the street that only gives a relish to the swept hearth and lively fire within. By such means I have forgotten hunger, I have sometimes eased pain, and I have invariably changed into the most pleasant hours of the day those very vacant and idle seasons which would otherwise have hung most heavily upon my hand. But all this is attained by the undue prominence of purely imaginative joys, and consequently the weakening and almost the destruction of reality. This is buying at too great a price. There are seasons when the imagination becomes somehow tranced and surfeited, as it is with me this morning; and then upon what can one fall back? The very faculty that we have fostered and trusted has failed us in the hour of trial; and we have so blunted and enfeebled our appetite for the others that they are subjectively dead to us. [ … ] Do not suppose I am exaggerating when I talk about all pleasures seeming stale. To me, at least, the edge of almost everything is put on by imagination; and even nature, in these days when the fancy is drugged and useless, wants half the charm it has in better moments. [ … ] I am vacant, unprofitable: a leaf on a river with no volition and no aim: a mental drunkard the morning after an intellectual debauch. Yes, I have a more subtle opium in my own mind than any apothecary’s drug; but it has a sting of its own, and leaves one as flat and helpless as the other.⁵⁵

Stale, flat, unprofitable: these seem familiar words from a young man intrigued by his own existential dilemmas, and there is more than a touch of speech-making about them, from the expository first sentence to the anticipation of a listener’s responses – ‘Do not suppose I am exaggerating when I talk …’, ‘Yes, I have a more subtle opium …’ For a diary entry it is wonderfully oratorical. Perhaps Stevenson was right to fear losing touch with his imaginative powers, but not through lack of ideas so much as from a surfeit of style.

Stevenson later served up accounts of his youth (in his autobiographical essays) in a manner so inherently witty and objectified that the real pain of it is diluted, but there is a passage in his ‘Chapter on Dreams’ which is revealing about how divided a life he was living at this time. The dream examples in the essay are written in the third person (with the revelation at the end that all the examples are in fact from the writer’s own experience), but the trick seems, if anything, to make the piece more confessional. While ‘the dreamer’ was a student, Stevenson explains, he began to dream in sequence, ‘and thus to live a double life – one of the day, one of the night – one that he had every reason to believe was the true one, another that he had no means of proving to be false’:

[ … ] In his dream-life, he passed a long day in the surgical theatre, his heart in his mouth, his teeth on edge, seeing monstrous malformations and the abhorred dexterity of surgeons. In a heavy, rainy, foggy evening he came forth into the South Bridge, turned up the High Street, and entered the door of a tall land, at the top of which he supposed himself to lodge. All night long, in his wet clothes, he climbed the stairs, stair after stair in endless series, and at every second flight a flaring lamp with a reflector. All night long, he brushed by single persons passing downward – beggarly women of the street, great, weary, muddy labourers, poor scarecrows of men, pale parodies of women – but all drowsy and weary like himself, and all single, and all brushing against him as they passed. In the end, out of a northern window, he would see day beginning to whiten over the Firth, give up the ascent, turn to descend, and in a breath be back again upon the streets, in his wet clothes, in the wet, haggard dawn, trudging to another day of monstrosities and operations.⁵⁶

Two things are immediately striking about this vivid account: one, that it anticipates so much of Stevenson’s most famous story, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde – from the medical context, with its ‘monstrous malformations’ to the dismal cityscapes and degrading double-life; the other is the reappearance on every second flight of that endless upward staircase of a flaring ‘lamp with a reflector’, presumably stamped with the maker’s mark, ‘Stevenson and Sons’.

Stevenson implies that these nightmares ‘came true’ in as much as they hung so heavily on him during the day that he never seemed able to recover before it was time to resubmit to them. The account ends bathetically with the information that everything cleared up once he consulted ‘a certain doctor’ and was given ‘a simple draught’ (shades of Jekyll again), but what hangs in the reader’s mind, like the nightmare itself, is what Stevenson admits just before this, that the experience left ‘a great black blot upon his memory’ and eventually made him begin to doubt his own sanity.

In June 1869, Thomas Stevenson took his son with him on the annual tour of inspection aboard the lighthouse steamer Pharos, calling at Orkney, Lewis and Skye. There was plenty to fascinate Louis, but of a romantic, not a technical, nature. At Lerwick he heard all about tobacco and brandy smuggling, and at Fair Isle saw the inlet in which the flagship of the Armada had been wrecked: ‘strange to think of the great old ship, with its gilded castle of a stern, its scroll-work and emblazoning and with a Duke of Spain on board, beating her brains out on the iron bound coast’.⁵⁷ Not much survives apart from lists of his projected writings from this date, but they show another novel, sketches, stories and rough plans for at least eleven plays (listed in the notebook he took to P.G. Tait’s natural philosophy lectures, the only course he attended with any regularity). But the impression that his engineering experiences (or rather, the long observation of the sea and the Scottish coast they afforded) made on him fuelled his lifetime’s writing. It lies behind many of the autobiographical essays (‘The Coast of Fife’, ‘Rosa Quo Locorum’, ‘Memoirs of an Islet’, ‘On the Enjoyment of Unpleasant Places’, ‘The Education of an Engineer’), short stories such as ‘The Merry Men’, ‘Thrawn Janet’, ‘The Pavilion on the Links’, and the novels Treasure Island, Kidnapped and The Master of Ballantrae.

By the summer of 1870, when Louis was sent on his third consecutive engineering placement, he had begun to enjoy the trips much more. For one thing, there was plenty of sea travel, which he loved, and public steamers allowed him to charm and flirt with new acquaintances in a holiday manner. On the way to the tiny islet of Earraid, which the firm was using as a base for the construction of Dhu Heartach lighthouse, he met the Cumbrian artist Sam Bough, a lawyer from Sheffield, and a pretty and spirited baronet’s daughter called Amy Sinclair: ‘My social successes of the last few days [ … ] are enough to turn anyone’s head,’ he wrote home to his mother.⁵⁸ The party stopped at Skye and boarded the Clansman returning from Lewis, where their high spirits and monopolisation of the captain’s table were observed by a shy young tourist called Edmund Gosse, son of the naturalist P.H. Gosse, whose struggles to square fundamentalist religious views with the emerging ‘new science’ mirrored very closely those of Thomas Stevenson. Years afterwards, Gosse recorded his initial impressions of the young man who ‘for some mysterious reason’ arrested his attention: ‘tall, preternaturally lean, with longish hair, and as restless and questing as a spaniel’.⁵⁹ Gosse watched the youth on deck as the sun set, ‘the advance with hand on hip, the sidewise bending of the head to listen’. When the boat stopped unexpectedly a little while later, Gosse saw that they had come up an inlet and that there were lanterns glinting on the shore:

As I leaned over the bulwarks, Stevenson was at my side, and he explained to me that we had come up this loch to take away to Glasgow a large party of emigrants driven from their homes in the interests of a deer-forest. As he spoke, a black mass became visible entering the vessel. Then, as we slipped off shore, the fact of their hopeless exile came home to these poor fugitives, and suddenly, through the absolute silence, there rose from them a wild keening and wailing, reverberated by the cliffs of the loch, and at that strange place and hour infinitely poignant. When I came on deck next morning, my unnamed friend was gone. He had put off with the engineers to visit some remote lighthouse of the Hebrides.⁶⁰

What they were witnessing in the half-darkness was a latter-day form of Highland ‘clearance’, strongly similar to the notorious forced evictions of the eighteenth century. Stevenson does not mention Gosse at all or this incident in his letters home (which were too taken up with Miss Amy Sinclair), but it must surely be the inspiration for the scene in Chapter 16 of Kidnapped – written sixteen years later – when David Balfour sees an emigrant ship setting off from Loch Aline:

the exiles leaned over the bulwarks, weeping and reaching out their hands to my fellow-passengers, among whom they counted some near friends. [ … ] the chief singer in our boat struck into a melancholy air, which was presently taken up both by the emigrants and their friends upon the beach, so that it sounded on all sides like a lament for the dying. I saw the tears run down the cheeks of the men and women in the boat, even as they bent at the oars.⁶¹

Earraid itself, where Stevenson was headed on the Clansman, figured prominently in Kidnapped as the isle of Aros, on which David Balfour believes himself to be stranded. It was his first view of Earraid, isolated and empty except for one cotter’s hut, that Stevenson reproduced in the novel; when the firm was there in 1870, the islet had been transformed into a bustling work-station, with sheds, a pier, a railway, a quarry, bothies for the workmen, an iron hut for the chief engineer and a platform on which parts of the lighthouse were preconstructed. The reef where the lighthouse was to be built, fifteen miles away, was watched through a spyglass, and when the water was low, the engineers would put out for it in a convoy of tenders and stone-lighters. The scene on Dhu Heartach was another one of industrial despoliation: ‘the tall iron barrack on its spider legs, and the truncated tower, and the cranes waving their arms, and the smoke of the engine-fire rising in the mid-sea’.⁶²

Stevenson’s letters home to his parents from Earraid were typically charming, affectionate and frank. He sought to be a good son, and bore his parents’ feelings in mind to an extraordinary degree, perhaps too much for his own good. He did not share all their values by any means, found many of their strictures infuriating or risible, deceived them to the usual degree in such cases, yet felt what amounts to a profound sympathy for their predicament qua parents and never ceased to respect and love them. ‘It is the particular cross of parents that when the child grows up and becomes himself instead of that pale ideal they had preconceived, they must accuse their own harshness or indulgence for this natural result,’ he wrote in an uncollected essay.⁶³ ‘They have all been like the duck and hatched swan’s eggs, or the other way about; yet they tell themselves with miserable penitence that the blame lies with them; and had they sat more closely, the swan would have been a duck, and home-keeping, in spite of all.’⁶⁴ Thus he continued – for the time being – to be a staunch religionist (writing to the approved Church of Scotland paper on subjects such as foreign missions), a good Tory (he was treasurer of the University Conservative Club in 1870) and a passable student of engineering. But it couldn’t last long, and didn’t.

The winter of 1870–71 saw Stevenson’s first real opportunity to associate with other would-be writers, and the effect was galvanising. Three law students in the Speculative Society, James Walter Ferrier, Robert Glasgow Brown and George Omond, approached Stevenson to join them in editing a new periodical, the Edinburgh University Magazine. They had already found a publisher (the local booksellers), and were going to share the expenses and the profits. Of course, the likelihood of there being profits was nil and the magazine only ran for four issues, but in those four Stevenson published six articles and edited one whole number on his own. Being recognised as a fellow writer was ‘the most unspeakable advance’, he said later: ‘it was my first draught of consideration; it reconciled me to myself and to my fellow-men’.⁶⁵

Ferrier, the golden youth of this group, was to become one of Stevenson’s best friends. Witty, wealthy and devastatingly handsome, he seemed destined for great things and was the first of these ambitious young writers to publish a book, a novel called Mottiscliffe: An Autumn Story. Robert Glasgow Brown also had early literary success, founding a weekly magazine called London in 1877, to which Stevenson and most of their group contributed. Louis’s best friend, however, was a young lawyer whom he had known socially through attending the same Edinburgh church, St Stephen’s. Charles Baxter was two years older than Louis and had graduated from the university in 1871, entering his father’s chambers as an apprentice. Temperamentally the two young men had much in common: Baxter was idle, sentimental, and ready for any sort of practical joking. He was the ideal drinking companion and had a droll turn of phrase that was a perfect foil for Louis’s high spirits and semi-hysterical flights of fancy. An anecdote that Baxter told of his first visit to Swanston makes it easy to see what Louis valued in this amiable youth:

That night, late, in his bedroom, after reading to me (I think) ‘The Devil on Crammond Sands’, he flung himself back on his bed in a kind of agony exclaiming, ‘Good God, will anyone ever publish me!’ To soothe him, I (quite insincerely) assured him that of course someone would, for I had seen worse stuff in print myself.⁶⁶

Baxter was put up for the Spec by Stevenson and became Secretary (he was always good with procedure, as befitted his profession). But their happiest times were spent on the streets of Edinburgh, engaged in jokes against fogeys such as the ill-tempered wine merchant Brash, whom Stevenson made the hero of a set of ribald verses, or talking to each other in ludicrously broad Scots, in the character of two old Edinburgh lawyers, Johnson and Thomson. Spontaneous jokes were their speciality, like the time they followed six men carrying a wrapped sheet of glass down George Street, as if they were chief mourners, hats off and heads bowed. As Louis wrote in one of his ‘Brasheana’ poems, ‘Let us be fools, my friend, let us be drunken,/Let us be angry and extremely silly.’⁶⁷

In the spring of 1871 Louis was called on to give a paper to the Royal Scottish Society of Arts, and made a fair effort at pleasing both the examining committee and his father. One of the examiners was his professor of engineering, Fleeming” Jenkin, whose early dealings with the student had not been promising. Stevenson had applied to him for one of the necessary certificates of attendance at the end of the first year, only to be told that as far as the professor was aware, his attendance had been nil. ‘It is quite useless for you to come to me, Mr Stevenson,’ Jenkin had said. ‘There may be doubtful cases; there is no doubt about yours. You have simply not attended my class.’⁶⁸ The frankness of this impressed the truant, and Jenkin turned out to be one of the few older men towards whom Louis showed admiration and respect.

‘On a New Form of Intermittent Light’ is very short for a paper – ten pages of large writing, the last sentences of which have been written in a different ink and possibly a different hand: ‘It must however, be noted, that none of these last methods are applicable to cases where more than one radiant is employed: for these cases either my grandfather’s or Mr Wilson’s contrivance must be resorted to’⁶⁹ – an anxious note, which suggests Thomas Stevenson looking over his boy’s first contribution to science. The substance of Louis’s proposal is that a revolving hemispherical mirror could be used in conjunction with a fixed mirror to make lighthouse lights flash. The ‘revolving’ part of this idea was ingenious, though from his very rudimentary diagrams it is clear that the student had given little thought to the technical and logistical difficulties. Nevertheless, Jenkin and his colleagues judged the paper ‘specially noteworthy’ and later in the year awarded this latest scion of the Stevenson family a silver medal for his trouble.^*

Thomas Stevenson was, presumably, not so impressed by his son’s performance, for it was only about ten days later that he chose an evening walk as the occasion to grill Louis on his intentions. The conversation was painful and upsetting for both, for the youth, ‘tightly cross-questioned’,⁷¹ confessed that he cared for nothing but literature. Thomas had at last to swallow the fact that the experiment had gone on long enough, and had been a failure. Louis had spent four years studying at the university, three summers on the works, he had worked in a carpenter’s shop, a foundry and a timberyard, and still couldn’t tell one kind of wood from another or make the most basic calculations. They were flogging a dead horse.

An alternative career on ‘the devious and barren paths of literature’, as Thomas described it,⁷² was out of the question, however. If the boy was going to abandon the family business, he had at least to train for a similarly dignified and worthy profession. He would have to study for the Bar. ‘Tom wonderfully resigned’, his wife noted in her diary on hearing the news, but though he had to accept the defeat as well as he could, Thomas Stevenson never got over the bitter disappointment of this day, and was still complaining about it in the last years of his life.

So Stevenson, after almost four years, was released from the yoke of engineering. He was going back to the university in the autumn to begin all over again as a student of law. Which was not to say he had any intention of becoming a lawyer.

^*W.E. Henley, who didn’t meet RLS until six years after this change, always attempted to use the earlier spelling, though this might have been as much affectation as anything.

^*Storms in the winters of 1868, 1871 and 1872. destroyed large parts of the breakwater. The failure of the project was later described by RLS as ‘the chief disaster of my father’s life’.²⁴

^*RLS reminisced so warmly about his original velvet jacket once he was married that his wife got him a replacement made of velveteen, renewed serially thereafter.⁴⁵

^*There was a long-running myth that a mysterious lassie called ‘Kate Drummond’ was the love of the young RLS’s life, and the mistaking of one of RLS’s names for Mrs Sitwell – ‘Claire’ – also led to confusion until J.C. Furnas showed that she and Mrs Sitwell were one and the same.

^*David Stevenson junior had a much curter judgement of the paper when approached by Graham Balfour for his professional opinion many years later, saying there were ‘several objections’ to his dilettante cousin’s notion.⁷⁰