Footsteps

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Richard Holmes. Footsteps

Copyright

Contents

ONE. 1964 : Travels

1

2

3

4

5

TWO. 1968 : Revolutions

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

THREE. 1972 : Exiles

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

FOUR. 1976 : Dreams

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

Author’s Note

Index

About the Author

ALSO BY RICHARD HOLMES

About the Publisher

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FOOTSTEPS

ADVENTURES OF A

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To begin with I had conceived of Stevenson’s journey—and experienced it for myself—as a physical trial, a piece of deliberate “adventuring”, a bet undertaken against himself, that he could survive on his own. His ill-health, his struggle against consumption, together with the real wildness of the Cévennes a hundred years ago made this trial a genuine enough affair.

The question he seemed to be formulating at La Trappe came down to this. As a writer, as an artist, should he be living and working on his own, celibate (or at least unmarried) and dedicated purely to the ideals of a literary community? Or should he commit himself emotionally to something, and someone else: to domesticated love, to marriage, to a professional life undertaken in partnership? For a young and ambitious Victorian writer this was no light or hypothetical question. He could survive comfortably as a single man on an allowance from relatively wealthy and well-meaning parents; and artistically he could flourish in the London literary world of clubs, pubs, reviews and masculine “bohemia”. It required the most fundamental decisions about his future. Most of all, from a man of Stevenson’s unusual temperament, to whom the enclosed Scottish world of his boyhood was so imaginatively important, it meant a choice about how far he could afford to grow up, to come fully into man’s estate.

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