Robert Louis Stevenson

by Claire Harman

  When Adelaide Boodle, a young woman who lived nearby and who had admired ‘The Treasure of Franchard’ (in New Arabian Nights), took the initiative and called to meet the author, it took so long for anyone to answer the door that her mother burst into tears. The owners were perfectly welcoming, however (if rather inattentive), and a lopsided friendship developed in which Miss Boodle played the role of would-be disciple to both Louis and Fanny. More usefully, she played the piano too, and helped Stevenson pick out tunes with one finger on the instrument he had rented to entertain himself. Her gushing memoir of life at Skerryvore, dedicated to Stevenson’s biographer-cousin and endorsed by Fanny’s grandson Austin Strong, contains many ardent tributes to the author’s wife, or Sine Qua Non as her title has it. Clearly Fanny could inspire devotion as well as dislike: Boodle doesn’t just eulogise Fanny’s careful nursing of Stevenson, her domestic skills and personal charisma (getting quite breathless about the Sine Qua Non’s ‘glorious head’ and flashing eyes), but puts her literary talent almost on a par with her husband’s, at one point calling Fanny the ‘heroic bread-winner’ for writing a short story for Scribner’s Magazine.63 But even Boodle has to admit that the couple could be violent towards each other, however jokily she expresses it: ‘There were moments when the casual looker-on might have felt it his duty to shout for the police – hastening their steps perhaps with cries of “murder!”’64

  A glamour was growing up around Stevenson. Evidence of his physical frailty combined with a seemingly unstoppable output of writing worked powerfully on friends and the public alike. He was a genius, he was going to die young, like a Romantic poet. Like Shelley, to be more specific. The poet’s only son, Sir Percy, lived near Bournemouth at Boscombe Manor and he and his wife became friendly with the Stevensons in 1886. Lady Jane was a formidable keeper of the family flame (albeit not her family); there was a silk-lined alcove in the drawing room at Boscombe where she displayed the urn containing Shelley’s heart – snatched from the funeral pyre by Trelawny – with a lamp kept perpetually burning by it. Mary Wollstonecraft’s death-mask, which fascinated Stevenson, was also in their possession, and other relics, including many of Mary Shelley’s papers, were housed in Lady Jane’s ‘Sanctum’. Though of course she had never met her husband’s father, Lady Jane insisted that Stevenson was the very image of him, while to Margaret Stevenson she joked that Louis was really her son. Sir Percy, a keen amateur actor and photographer, took a series of photos of Stevenson that may have been indulging his wife’s fancy, for the subject is dramatically draped in what looks like a cape or blanket, possibly ‘in the character’ of the poet. Stevenson was satirical about the supposed likeness – ‘I seem but a Shelley with less oil, and no genius; though I have had the fortune to live longer and (partly) to grow up’65 – but went along with it, so may have been more flattered than he was quite prepared to admit. Fanny was certainly gratified by the Shelleys’ warmth of friendship towards them both, and could hardly have failed to be impressed by Lady Shelley’s example as managing director of a writer’s posthumous career.*

  The Stevensons got to know the Shelleys through the elderly poet Sir Henry Taylor and his family, who lived at a villa called ‘The Roost’. Taylor, author of the 1830s bestseller Philip Van Artevelde, had once been as famous as his friend Tennyson, now the grandest of grand old men holding court nearby at Freshwater on the Isle of Wight. Taylor died in 1886, or Stevenson might well have been introduced into the Poet Laureate’s circle (he did meet Benjamin Jowett, and was invited by him to Oxford). But the beautiful Lady Taylor and her writer daughters Ida and Una remained friends with Stevenson all his life, and their circle included F.H.W. Myers, founder of the Society for Psychical Research, with whom Stevenson struck up an important correspondence later.

  Owning a house seemed to attract a flood of visitors; ‘Aunt Alan’ Stevenson (Bob and Katharine’s mother), Katharine de Mattos, Coggie Ferrier, Colvin and the Jenkins from Edinburgh all visited that year, as did Bob, who was facing a difficult juncture in his life. Now he was married and had a child, his pursuit of the artist’s life was no longer feasible, and Louis, Henley and Colvin were encouraging him to take up art history seriously. Bob eventually excelled in this field – his book on Velasquez is a classic – but in 1885 he was only just scraping by. He was still Stevenson’s favourite company, and the only guest who could match his host’s fervour for war-gaming now that sixteen-year-old Sam had outgrown it, but the difference in their fortunes made Louis feel guilty, and the burgher of Skerryvore tried to channel some of his money towards Bob by commissioning him to decorate the panels in the hall.

  Skerryvore was expensive to keep up. The Stevensons had three servants: a housekeeper called Mrs Watts, her daughter Agnes, who was maidservant, and Valentine Roch, who functioned more as a lady’s maid.* ‘I do not live cheaply, and I question if I ever shall,’ Louis wrote to his parents in December, in fine understatement. The prospect of ever earning a living seemed remote, even though Stevenson’s output had increased dramatically: A Child’s Garden of Verses and The Dynamiter were published in the spring of 1885, and Prince Otto was about to appear too. The life of the Duke of Wellington still beckoned, and then there were the plays, and ideas for plays, endlessly rolling down the production line: ‘Hester Noble’ and ‘The King’s Rubies’ were just two more in 1885 alone. Colvin and Henley in particular were understandably eager to have Stevenson live up to their long championship of his work. But no one quite appeared to know where to assign the fame they all seemed to agree he should have. Was he a story-writer, an essayist, a dramatist, a children’s author, a dying poet? What could be made of such a protean writer?

  * * *

  *Fanny had been shocked on that occasion by ‘the brutal coarseness of Rodin’s work [ … ] he and Louis had, continually, to stand between me and the works lest I should see them’.28 Rodin was a friend of Henley, and made a striking head of the poet in bronze, copies of which are in the National Portrait Galleries of Scotland and England.

  *The similarities between ‘Markheim’ and Dostoievsky’s novel are so strong that it seems impossible Stevenson could have written his story without knowledge of the other, but evidence is sparse. The first draft of ‘Markheim’, written in November 1884, differs very little from the final version and predates by five months the beginning of Stevenson’s friendship with Henry James. Perhaps the French copy of he Crime et le châtiment that James is said to have handed on to Stevenson was not the first version Stevenson had read. He had read an English translation of Dostoievsky’s Insulted and Injured before this, possibly as early as 1881 (when a review of it appeared alongside one of ‘Virginibus Puerisque’ in the same periodical). Roger Swearingen has drawn my attention to this, and to the possibility that Stevenson and Dostoievsky might have been responding to some common other source; he suggests E.T.A. Hoffmann, whom both writers admired.

  *Lady Shelley’s possessiveness and forceful nature were remarkable. On the death of her mother-in-law in 1851, she arranged for the exhumation of William Godwin’s and Mary Wollstonecraft’s remains from the graveyard of St Pancras and their removal to Bournemouth, where she wanted all three bodies to be interred together. When the vicar of St Peter’s objected, Lady Jane sat outside with the coffins on a carriage until he saw sense. The grave, on a rise in the churchyard overlooking a busy shopping centre, now contains the bodies of Godwin, Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, her son Sir Percy and Lady Jane.

  *When Fanny was away, Valentine slept on the floor in Stevenson’s room to guard against health crises, and when word got round the neighbourhood about this it was assumed that she was his mistress.

  10

  THE DREAMER

  Keenness of sensation in each of its forms is a valuable natural gift, unfortunately no means are as yet easily accessible for testing it in different persons; there are no anthropometric laboratories as yet in existence to which any one may go, and on payment of a small fee have all his faculties measured and registered.r />
  Francis Galton, Record of Family Faculties

  WHEN HIS FORMER MENTOR Fleeming Jenkin died suddenly of blood poisoning in June 1885, aged only fifty-three, Stevenson’s reaction was almost as intense as that to Walter Ferrier’s death two years earlier. He was unprepared to survive his friends; it made him feel like a cheat. As with his impulse to comfort and care for Ferrier’s sister Coggie, Stevenson now showed anxious solicitude for Jenkin’s widow Anne, and immediately agreed to undertake a biographical memoir of Fleeming. This was a generous promise from a man so pressed to earn money, but Stevenson’s sense of gratitude to Jenkin kept him at the memoir with a fervour he could seldom maintain for other works, even though it took many months and meant laying by the novel he had just started, a gripping adventure about a Lowland boy stranded in the Highlands in the years just after the Jacobite Rebellion.

  There were many visitors that summer, and excursions to London and Cambridge; too much activity for the frail author, who collapsed under the strain of an attempted holiday to Dartmoor. The holiday group, which included Sam and Katharine de Mattos, got as far as Exeter, where they had to stay put in a hotel for several weeks until Louis could be moved home. It was an alarming interval; the patient was brimful of ergotine and behaving very oddly: ‘he has just given up insisting that he should be lifted into bed in a kneeling position, his face to the pillow’, Fanny reported to Henley, ‘and then still kneeling he was lifted bodily around, and then a third time held up in the air while he drew out his feet. I never performed a feat as difficult.’1 The spectacle frightened Katharine, but not Fanny, who was in her element in these crises: ‘Strangely enough, I am not so cast down as I was before this. Here is something tangible that I understand, at least, and when I can do something.’

  The aborted holiday had started well: on their way to Devon Stevenson and Fanny had called on Thomas Hardy at his new house, ‘Max Gate’, just outside Dorchester. Fanny sent her mother-in-law an amusing description of the ‘pale, gentle, frightened little man, that one felt an instant tenderness for, with a wife – ugly is no word for it, who said, “whatever shall we do?” I had never heard a living being say it before.’ The meeting between the two writers was an odd convergence of nineteenth-century literary misfits; Hardy the backward-looking modernist (ten years Stevenson’s senior, but living on till 1928); Stevenson the forward-looking traditionalist (whose early death sealed him into the Victorian age). In the summer of 1885, they were both probably eyeing each other up as to who would prove the worthiest successor to Meredith, with whom both men were friends. Stevenson was shocked, as we shall see, by the publication in 1892 of Tess of the d’Urbervilles, but in 1885 was a keen admirer of Far from the Madding Crowd, and was so taken with The Mayor of Casterbridge when it appeared in 1886 that he asked permission to dramatise it. It would have been an odd form of collaboration – somewhere between a homage to Hardy and hitching a ride. Hardy greeted the suggestion with touching eagerness, saying, ‘I feel several inches taller at the idea,’2 but nothing came of it.

  The long wait for Prince Otto to go on sale hadn’t diminished Stevenson’s expectations for that novel, nor Fanny’s (who anticipated it would create much more of a sensation than Treasure Island even3). But all the things that Otto represented to Stevenson in terms of craft, authority, effort and polish were about to be brushed aside by the instant success of the novella-length ‘shilling shocker’ he composed at a gallop in the weeks immediately preceding Otto’s publication. If he had been asked at the end of 1885 which he considered the best of his works, there is little doubt he would have named the Bohemian romance on which he was staking his hopes as a serious novelist. The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde might not even have got a mention. Stevenson did not seek to be known as a sensationalist, and had felt compromised by the way the Pall Mall Gazette advertised ‘The Body Snatcher’ at Christmas 1884, sending six sandwich-men around the streets of London (at double rates) wearing coffin-shaped boards and plaster skulls specially made by a theatre property company – until the police ‘suppressed the nuisance’.4

  The story of the composition of Jekyll and Hyde is that of Stevenson’s most thoroughgoing collaboration of all: the collaboration of his conscious and unconscious selves. The fact that the story ‘came to him in dream’ was always reckoned to be of significance: by the public, for whom it augmented or validated the supernatural content of the tale; by the promoters of the Stevenson myth, for whom it proved the author’s super-receptivity to inspiration; and of course by Fanny Stevenson, whose ‘management’ of the dream-material illustrated her own pivotal importance in the composition of her husband’s works. She told the story several times, the first official version in a letter to Stevenson’s biographer Graham Balfour in 1899:

  Louis wrote Jekyll and Hyde with great rapidity on the lines of his dream. In the small hours of one morning I was wakened by cries of horror from him. I, thinking he had a nightmare, waked him. He said, angrily, ‘Why did you wake me? I was dreaming a fine boguey tale’. I had waked him at the first transformation scene. He had had in his mind an idea of a double life story, but it was not the same as the dream. He asked me, as usual, to make no criticisms until the first draft was done. As he didn’t like to get tired by discussing my proposed changes in his work it was the custom that I should put my criticisms in writing. In this tale I felt and still feel that he was hampered by his dream. The powder – which I thought might be changed – he couldn’t eliminate because he saw it so” plainly in the dream. In the original story he had Jekyll bad all through, and working for the Hyde change only for a disguise. I wrote pages of criticism, pointing out that he had here a great moral allegory that the dream was obscuring. I didn’t like the opening, which was confused – again the dream – and proposed that Hyde should run over the child showing that he was an evil force without humanity. I left my paper with Louis, who was in his bedroom writing in bed. After quite a long interval his bell rang for me, and Lloyd and I went upstairs. As I entered the door Louis pointed with a long dramatic finger (you know) to a pile of ashes on the hearth of the fireplace saying that I was right and there was the tale. I nearly fainted away with misery and horror when I saw all was gone. He was already hard at work at the new version which was finished in a few days more. I wanted to make further objections concerning the powder but after that pile of ashes had not the courage.5

  Sam Osbourne (called here by his later name of Lloyd), who was hanging around at Skerryvore waiting for a decision about his return to college, wrote up his own version of the story years later in An Intimate Portrait of R.L.S., stressing the author’s possession by quasi-mystical forces. According to Sam, Stevenson appeared one day ‘very preoccupied’ and announced that he must not be disturbed, as he was ‘working with extraordinary success on a new story’. For three days the household maintained a reverential ‘tiptoeing silence’ as the work progressed, and Sam watched his stepfather through an open door (odd, under the circumstances, that this wasn’t closed) ‘sitting up in bed, filling page after page, and apparently never pausing for a moment’.6 Here is the iconic description of the writer, bed-ridden, battling with chronic illness, yet pouring out the pages.

  Sam’s story goes on in a manner that stretches credulity, but by 1924, when he published this, all the other witnesses to the incident were dead and Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde was one of the most famous stories in the world, available in dozens of languages and already filmed twenty times (including the classic 1920 John Stuart Robertson version starring John Barrymore). Sam claimed that Stevenson’s initial three-day frenzy of writing ended with him reading the piece aloud to Fanny and Sam, being bitterly disappointed by Fanny’s cool response and ready criticisms (as opposed to Sam’s ‘spellbound’ attention) and then having an almighty row with his wife, ‘so impassioned, so outraged, and [ … ] so painful’ that the boy had to creep away, ‘unable to bear it any longer’.7 Sam later discovered his mother sitting ‘pale and desolate before the fire, staring in
to it’; Stevenson then came down the stairs, ‘burst in’, shouted at Fanny again and threw his manuscript on the fire: ‘Imagine my feelings – my mother’s feelings – as we saw it blazing up; as we saw those precious pages wrinkling and blackening and turning into flame!’8 But all was not lost. Though it looked like a fit of temper, Stevenson’s destruction of the script – according to Sam – was actually an act of submission to his wife’s judgement. The first version was mainly a ‘shocker’; on reflection Stevenson thought Fanny was right to insist he bring out the story’s allegorical potential. Another three days of wild scribbling followed, during which Stevenson produced the printed version; ‘sixty-four thousand words in six days’, Sam marvelled, ‘more than ten thousand words a day [ … ] and on top of that copied out the whole in another two days, and had it in the post on the third!’9 A true nine-days’ wonder, except that it actually took Stevenson more like six weeks to have the manuscript ready, if his own remark to Frederick Myers in March 1886 is to be believed: ‘Jekyll was conceived, written, rewritten, re-rewritten, and printed inside ten weeks.’10

  Stevenson himself emphasised the significance of the story’s dream genesis in an interview he gave to a reporter from the New York Herald on his arrival in America in September 1887: