The Quest for Robert Louis Stevenson E-Book

John Cairney

• Herausgeber: Luath Press
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

This guide follows a trail of places associated with Robert Louis Stevenson. John Cairney, perhaps best known for writing and starring in The Robert Burns Story, is one of the few people to have visited all the places on the RLS trail.

Leseprobe

By the same author:

A Moment White, 1986, (Outram Press)

The Man Who Played Robert Burns, 1987, (Mainstream)

East End to West End, 1988, (Mainstream)

Worlds Apart, 1991, (Mainstream)

A Year Out in New Zealand, 1993, (Tandem Press)

The Scottish Football Hall of Fame, 1998, (Mainstream)

On the Trail of Robert Burns, 2000, (Luath Press)

The Luath Burns Companion, 2001, (Luath Press)

Solo Performers, 2001, (McFarland)

Immortal Memories, 2003, (Luath Press)

First published 2004

Reprinted 2007

eISBN: 978-1-913025-94-6

The paper used in this book is recyclable.

It is made from low-chlorine pulps produced in a low-energy, low-emission manner from renewable forests.

Printed and bound by

Creative Print & Design, Ebbw Vale

Typeset in 10.5 point Sabon

© John Cairney 2004

This volume is dedicated to Alanna Knight who, in Aberdeen, sometime in 1973, first suggested that I play Robert Louis Stevenson in the theatre. It all started from there.

Contents

Introduction

CHAPTER 1 Grit and Grace

CHAPTER 2 A Daft-like Laddie

CHAPTER 3 Love, What is Love?

CHAPTER 4 The Reluctant Advocate

CHAPTER 5 The Illogical Adventure

CHAPTER 6 A Steady Determination

CHAPTER 7 Marriage in extremis

CHAPTER 8 Child of Air

CHAPTER 9 A Shilling Shocker

CHAPTER 10 Divided Loyalties

CHAPTER 11 Such Beautiful Scenes

CHAPTER 12 A Very Meaningful Relationship

CHAPTER 13 The Breakthrough

CHAPTER 14 The Speaking Chief

CHAPTER 15 Less Afraid of a Petticoat

CHAPTER 16 Against the Tide

Postscript

A Stevenson Chronology

Bibliography

Acknowledgements

IF ALANNA KNIGHT started me off with Stevenson in the theatre, Professor Jan McDonald of Glasgow University pointed me towards Stevenson in the study. Emeritus Professor Ian A Gordon of Victoria University at Wellington, New Zealand, Professor George D Bryan of the University of Vermont and Dr David Daiches of Edinburgh awakened me to the mind of Stevenson. For the facts of his life, especially through the letters, I could look no further than Dr Ernest J Mehew of London, the supreme Stevenson authority of our time, and likewise I owe much to the unimpeachable authority of Stevenson scholars such as Roger Swearingham, Jenni Calder and Alan Sandison, and the work of JC Furnas, Nicholas Rankin, Ian Bell, Gavin Bell, Richard Woodhead, Karen Steele and particularly Frank McLynn whose 1993 book proved an invaluable source.

Further research opportunities were made available to me by following libraries: the Mitchell Library, Glasgow; the British Library, London; New York Public Library; Special Collections at Columbia University; the Beineke Collection at Yale University; the Widener Collection at Harvard University and the libraries of Glasgow and Auckland Universities; and to librarians, Margaret Furlong and Donald Kerr in Auckland for extra assistance. Thanks are also due to Ian A Nimmo and the Robert Louis Stevenson Club in Edinburgh, and to the late John Cargill Thompson.

Thanks are also due to Rosemary Smith and Maureen Bianchini in Monterey. My gratitude for unstinting hospitality goes to Michael Westcott in Edinburgh, Clare Brotherwood in Maidenhead, Berkshire, the Baldwins in New York, the Joneses in Cleveland, the Turnbows in Fort Worth, the Parmelees in San Francisco, Lilian Cunningham in Honolulu, the Neales in Sydney, and the Connell family in Wellington. Special thanks to Tifai Tagiilima and Rex Maughan in Apia and to Seutatia Mata’utia Pene Solomona of the Faculty of Education at the National University of Samoa.

I am indebted to Elaine Greig of the Edinburgh Writers’ Museum for her advice and for her permission to reproduce images from the Museum’s Stevenson archive, and to Dr Alan Marchbank for guidance on Stevenson points. As always, I must acknowledge the encouragement and inspiration given by my publisher, Gavin MacDougall, and the staff at Luath Press.

Finally, I must thank my daughters, Jennifer, Alison, Lesley and Jane for the open houses they gave me in Los Angeles, Glasgow, Newcastle and Dunfermline, and my patient wife, Alannah O’Sullivan, who granted me generous leave of absence so that I might make my way along the long, long trail that finally led me to RLS. As my son, Jonathan said, ‘I don’t know how you do it, Daddy.’ Then he put me in my place by adding, ‘At your age.’

Introduction

It is a singular thing that I should live here in the South Seas, under conditions so new and striking, yet my imagination should continually inhabit that old, cold huddle of grey hills from which I came so long ago; those Pentland Hills, and the Lammermuirs, and further still, the whole of that Border country, where my Elliott ancestors had shaken a spear in the debatable land.

I have come so far, yet the sights and sounds of my youth still pursue me, and it is Edinburgh, that venerable city I still think of as home. Yet I know, even as I stand here now, I shall never see home again. Here I am until I die. The word is out, the doom is written, and I bow my head to the romance of my own destiny.

I CAME TO ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON through the theatre as a part to be played. I got to know him initially through a playscript written by Alanna Knight that was as faithful as possible to his own words and I became aware that beneath the patina of literary elegance was a character of steely resolve and determination. I found the best way to perform him was to let him speak for himself. As far as possible, I have done the same in this book.

I am writing this in New Zealand, where I now live. Through my study window I can see pohutakawa, kowhai, palm and rata trees. All around, a vibrant palette of exotic colour set against every imaginable shade of green tells me unequivocally that I am not in Scotland. I well understand the pull our dreich old native country had on Stevenson, however much he adored the lush drama of his Samoan setting. And, had it not been for an early New Zealand connection, he might never have gone there at all – might never have played that great, iconic role, the Tusitala of the South Seas, an image that is as compelling today as it was in Victorian times.

William Seed, a distant relative of the Stevensons and an Inspector for the Crown Colony of New Zealand’s Marine and Customs, was originally responsible for intriguing him with his descriptions of the South Seas islands. In 1875 Seed visited Edinburgh and stayed with the family at Heriot Row in order to discuss with Thomas Stevenson the engineering challenges involved in building a ring of lighthouses round the New Zealand coast.

Louis wrote to Fanny Sitwell:

Awfully nice man here tonight. Public servant – New Zealand – telling us all about the South Seas Islands till I was sick with a desire to go there; beautiful places, green forever; perfect climate; perfect shapes of men and women, with red flowers in their hair; and nothing to do but to study oratory and etiquette, sit in the sun and pick up fruits as they fall; absolute balm for the weary…

The ‘seed’ had fallen on fertile ground, though it took fifteen years to germinate. Writing from Sydney in 1890 (referring to Samoa as the Navigator Islands, as they were then called), he recalled,

… in ’74 or 5 there came to stay with my father and mother in Edinburgh, a certain Mr Seed, a prime minister or something in New Zealand. He spotted what my complaint was; told me I had no business to stay in Europe; that I should find… all that was good for me in the Navigator Islands; sat up till four in the morning persuading me, demolishing all my scruples. And I resisted; I refused to go so far from my father and mother. O, it was virtuous, and O, wasn’t it silly? And now in 1890, I (or what is left of me) go at last to the Navigator Islands.

Belle Strong visited Seed shortly after her stepfather’s death, bringing gifts of some desirable personal memorabilia – his flageolet, tartan plaid and favourite velvet jacket. As it happens, through all the years I played RLS on stage I wore a Victorian velvet jacket. Alanna Knight had discovered it in a trunk in her attic. With black braid round the pockets and collar and four cloth-covered buttons, it was just the sort of jacket Stevenson so often wore. It seems that one of Alanna’s mother’s friends had actually been a chambermaid at 17 Heriot Row in the decade after the Stevensons sold it. I know that it would be a pretty long shot that this jacket might have belonged to RLS, but whenever I wore it on stage, I always felt that it was his – it helped me ‘become’ him.

In working with RLS as a character on the page and on the stage, I have developed my own opinion of him. Throughout his life he adjusted himself, chameleon-like as an actor, to each new scene. He said, ‘There is no foreign land. It is the traveller only that is foreign’ and protested his Scottishness to the last – ‘I am a Scotsman, touch me and you will find a thistle.’ Yet it seems to me that nowhere was he a greater stranger than in Scotland itself.

To set him before the reader as I see him, I have put in my own tuppence-worth here and there. Sometimes, in order to get to the essential truth of a situation, it is necessary to imagine it. We can feel a thing is right even when we have no direct factual evidence to support our intuition. It does not make for the highest scholarship, but it makes a better story. Every life is more than a dry accretion of verifiable facts. Stevenson himself said:

I like biography far better than fiction myself. You have your little handful of facts, little bits of a puzzle, and you sit and think, and fit ’em together this way and that, and get up and throw them down and say ‘damn’ and go for a walk, and it’s real soothing, and when it’s done it gives an idea of finish to the writer that is very peaceful. Of course, it’s not really so finished as quite a rotten novel; it always has, and must have the incurable illogicalities of life about it… still, that’s where the fun comes in.

Some years ago on a visit to Edinburgh I went to see Alan and Maria Finlayson, a theatrical couple whose fifth child, Orlando, had been born only a week previously. Maria carried the sleeping infant with her as she showed me round their house.

Eventually we reached a small back bedroom. Maria pointed to the carpet and said, ‘Orlando was born here.’

‘On the carpet?’

‘On the carpet!’ she confirmed, with a beam.

I walked over to the window. Through the rain-spattered panes everything in sight was dank and cheerless. Even so, my mood was lifted at the thought of the new life. I must confess, I wasn’t thinking of little Orlando Finlayson. I was thinking of another baby, born at 8 Howard Place over 150 years before.

To believe in immortality is one thing, but it is first needful to believe in life.

OLD MORTALITY

CHAPTER ONE

Grit and Grace

If you are going to make a book end badly, it must end badly from the beginning.

RLS IN A LETTER TO JAMES BARRIE

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON was a child of Edinburgh’s New Town. It still thought of itself as new, even though it was already into stately middle age by the time he was born. The New Town was a bastion of bourgeois rectitude – middle-class and middle of the road and taking care at all times to give the right impression. Edinburgh is the key to our subject’s life-long obsession with duality. The city has two faces, a division which is less topographical than social. The huddled Old Town on the hill below the ancient castle looks north to the set squares and prim rectangles of the New Town. The wide boulevard of Princes Street, a once beautiful Georgian lady, who for the last fifty years has been ravaged by commercial bandits, is the ‘No Man’s Land’ between the two sets of Edinburgh citizenry.

If we are to understand Stevenson, we must first understand his Janus-like city. His psyche parallels its dichotomy, the contradictions and anomalies of his personality echoing those of the streets, wynds and alleyways that surrounded him in his formative years. The effect of his native city was tenacious. In Samoa, he yearned for ‘the hills of home’ – hills that might not have been the Pentlands, but rather, Heriot Row to Stockbridge, or Leith Walk to Calton Hill. Edinburgh retains a quasi-Englishness that sits like a genteel antimacassar on the neolithic pile they call Arthur’s Seat, and so it should be no surprise that its famous son has sometimes been called Scotland’s best writer of English prose. The two-sided city and its two-faced populace are apt metaphors for the man himself. It is no accident that Stevenson’s keyword, duality, is closely related to hypocrisy, duplicity, artifice, pretence and other pejorative terms indicating the sham and the false. He was never afraid to pretend, if it suited his book, and a tendency to the histrionic was there from the start.

This bipartite, not to say multi-faceted faculty, permeated his whole life and explains why he seemed to be giving a performance at every stage. He was always ‘on’, as actors say, and the ‘tuppencecoloured’ side of him far outweighed the ‘penny plain’. It was this element in his character that caused him to be labelled so often as a poseur, especially during his Edinburgh youth and early London days. He could be one person, yet play another. His very theatricality gave him an understanding of the dual personality in himself and this was the crucial insight that enabled him to create Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, and to present each brilliantly as a facet of the other.

In Stevenson’s unique expression of duality, he was only being true to his Edinburgh genesis – Scots and English, up and down, profligate and miserly, practical and impractical. Within him, his Stevenson blood was continually at war with his Balfour blood.

The stream of his paternal ancestry is a tributary of the Clyde rather than the Forth. James Stevenson, the first ancestor he claimed, was a farmer at Neilston, near Glasgow. His son Robert was a maltster in Glasgow, as was his son, who then had two sons himself, Hugh and Alan, both merchants. As a young man Hugh went to the West Indies to look after business interests there, which included the ownership of St Kitt’s in the Leeward Islands. Alan stayed in Glasgow and in 1772 married Jean Lillie, whose father was the Deacon of Wrights. It would seem that their marriage had to be arranged rather hurriedly.

As Stevenson liked to say, ‘With these two brothers, my story begins…’ It appears that Hugh was swindled out of the family money and property by a dishonest agent in Trinidad, and in proper Glasgow fashion he sent for his brother to help him sort out the rascal. Unfortunately both of them, ‘drenched by the pernicious dews of the Tropics’, died while pursuing their quarry from island to island: Hugh at Tobago and, a month later, Alan, drowned, at St Kitt’s. (Treasure Island owes much to this family lore.) Then, to make matters worse, Mr Lillie’s business failed, and he died. His daughter was left widowed, fatherless, penniless and with a son, another Robert Stevenson, aged two. She subsequently married a James Hogg but their union did not last long. By 1787 she and her son, now aged fifteen, moved from Glasgow to Edinburgh where she met and married a successful merchant Tom Smith (whose father, a Broughty Ferry fisherman, had also drowned, in Dundee harbour). Jean had intended Robert for the manse but instead he became an apprentice to his step-father, the ‘lamp and oil man’, who, at this time, had just been appointed Engineer to the newly-formed Board of Northern Lighthouses. Robert not only followed in his footsteps, but married Tom Smith’s daughter. And so a great line of engineers was begun.

Robert Stevenson went on to build the famous Bell Rock Lighthouse and father three sons, Alan, David and Thomas, all civil engineers. (Alan, who built the equally famous lighthouse at Skerryvore, was cursed with a poor constitution; after his early retirement he became a religious recluse.)

Not one of the Stevenson lighthouse engineers registered patents on their innovations, although this was standard practice. They apparently regarded their engineering talents as God-given and intended to be shared with their fellow men. This altruistic spirit was their hallmark. As Stevenson put it:

I have often thought that to find a family to compare with ours in the promise of immortal memory we must go back to the Egyptian Pharaohs – upon so many reefs and forelands that not very elegant name of Stevenson is engraved with a pen of iron upon granite… Whenever I smell salt water I know I am not far from the works of my ancestors… and when the lights come on at sundown along the shores of Scotland, I am proud to think they burn more brightly for the genius of my father.

In 1846, aged twenty-eight, Tom Stevenson became a partner in the family business and two years later he married the nineteen-year-old Margaret Isabella Balfour, a tall, slim minister’s daughter, whom he had met on a train. In 1850 she gave birth to their only child, whom the world was to know as RLS.

He was born at his parents’ first home, 8 Howard Place, in a Georgian terrace near Canonmills, and he was christened there, after the Scottish fashion, by his own grandfather, the Reverend Lewis Balfour. He was named, as was the tradition, after his paternal and maternal grandfathers – Robert Lewis Balfour Stevenson. He was to Frenchify the ‘Lewis’ to Louis in his university years (although he was never ‘Loo-ee’: the family always pronounced it in the Scots way – ‘Loo-iss’). At the age of eighteen, he was to drop the ‘Balfour’, but young Louis loved his old grandfather, the venerable sage of Colinton,

one of the last to speak broad Scots and still be a gentleman… I often wonder what I have inherited from this old minister… try as I please, I cannot join myself on with the reverend doctor… and, no doubt, even as I write the phrase, he moves in my blood and whispers to me, and sits efficient in the very knot and centre of my being.

The distaff side of the Stevenson family, the Balfours, boasted several gentlemen of the cloth in a gentrified line which went all the way back to Flodden and before. Stevenson described this side of his family as ‘being of good provincial stock… related to many of the so-called good families of Scotland’. James Balfour, ‘of the long beard’, Minister at Guthrie and later the East Kirk of St Giles, was the first Balfour to take orders. His son Andrew, also a minister, at Kirknewton, died at thirty-seven leaving three children one of whom rose to become an advocate and principal Clerk of Session in 1649. His son and namesake, James, became a successful businessman with a soap factory and glass works in Leith, gained the monopoly for the manufacture of gunpowder, lost everything in the doomed Darien Scheme of 1698 and died, broke, at the age of fifty. (At one time he had been wealthy enough to lend King Charles II the sum of ten thousand pounds. Needless to say, the Merry Monarch neglected to repay it.)

His heir, the next James Balfour, intended to seek his fortune abroad. But before going away he attended a wedding in Hamilton and came back to Edinburgh with a bride of his own, his cousin, Louisa Hamilton, the ‘Fair Flower of Clydesdale’, and a new determination to face out his future in Scotland. Lucky in love, he was also lucky in life. On the Union of the Parliaments in 1707 some of the Darien money was repaid and with his share he bought Pilrig House, an estate in the countryside between Edinburgh and Leith, where he and his wife lived happily ever after as the Laird of Pilrig and his Lady.

The young Stevenson loved hearing these family tales – ‘tradition whispered to me in my childhood…’ He had Balfour ‘eyes with the gypsy light behind’ and the distinctive Balfour profile.

Seventeen children were born to Louisa. Thirteen survived. James, the oldest son and second Laird of Pilrig, became a distinguished lawyer who was not afraid to cross swords with the great David Hume. Indeed, he defeated Hume to gain the Chair of Moral Philosophy at Edinburgh University, and later held the Chair of Nature and Nations until his death in 1795, in his ninetieth year.

The Borders strain was brought into the family by Professor Balfour’s marriage to Cecilia Elphinstone, daughter of Sir John Elphinstone of Logie whose wife Mary Elliot was the daughter of Sir Gilbert Elliot of Minto, later Lord Minto. Through this connection RLS could claim kinship to Sir Walter Scott, and going even further back, to Rob Roy MacGregor. At the time when the clan was proscribed, Rob Roy was a MacGregor by night and a Stevenson by day – an early instance of that thematic duality.

The third Laird of Pilrig, John Balfour, was one of the first residents of the brand-new Princes Street. His second son, Thomas, was the father of Stevenson’s future biographer, Graham Balfour. His third son, Lewis, ‘an amiable and clever young man’ became the minister at Sorn in Ayrshire and the husband of Henrietta Scott Smith, a great beauty and daughter of the Reverend Dr Smith of Galston. In 1823 Lewis Balfour was called to the parish of Colinton south of Edinburgh. Chronic chest trouble did not prevent his fathering thirteen children and heading his family with patriarchal authority. His youngest child, Margaret, inherited the family tendency to pulmonary weakness and she passed it on to her only son, who wrote:

I know not what is more strange, that I should carry about with me some fibres of a minister-grandfather, or, that in him, as he sat in his cool study, there was an aboriginal frisking in the blood that was not his, or that tree-top instincts lying dormant in his mind awoke to gambol in the brain of an old divine.

There you have the essence of heredity, that atavistic chain that stretches back from everyone to Adam. We are the aggregate of everything that has gone into us, or, as Stevenson put it, ‘Our conscious years are but a moment in the elements that built us’. In a letter to Henry James in 1888, he commented: ‘I am one of the few people in the world who do not forget their own lives.’ This preoccupation remained with him throughout his life and he touched on it in a letter to Sir Herbert Maxwell written only two days before he died: ‘I see like a vision the youth of my father and his father before him and the whole stream of lives flowing down with the sound of laughter and tears.’

‘RLS’ was the merging of Stevenson grit and Balfour grace. Both elements were strikingly apparent as he grew to manhood. He was always pulled between the opposites his parents represented. To his father the teapot was always half empty and to his mother, it was always half full. Though he always joked that he had his father’s legs and would always fall on his feet, he also had his mother’s Balfour chest, and for that reason alone, there was always a question of whether he would survive the ‘inspissated gloom’ of his Edinburgh childhood home – not to mention the weather:

In Edinburgh, the delicate die early. As a survivor, among bleak winds and plumping rain, I had sometimes been tempted to envy them their fate. For Edinburgh weather is raw and boisterous in winter, shifty and ungenial in summer and a downright meteorological purgatory in the spring.

In January 1853 the Stevensons moved to 1 (now 9) Inverleith Terrace an imposing, north-facing property which was riddled with damp and mildew. The worst affected room was the three-year-old Smout’s (so called because his father thought him ‘such a wee smout of a thing’). Nothing could have been worse for the little fellow. His miseries began with an attack of croup, followed by whooping cough. From this time on, there was never to be a year – except, ironically, his last – when he did not have a catarrhal illness of some kind. In a sense, the valetudinarian had been born at Inverleith Terrace. The father of the wasting man was the sickly boy.

My ill-health principally chronicled itself by the terrible, long nights that I lay awake, troubled continually by a hacking, exhausting cough, and praying for sleep or morning from the bottom of my shaken little body.

The doctor became their most frequent visitor and it was on urgent medical advice that, in May 1857, the Stevensons moved house again. Louis’s second nanny, Mrs Hailey, had been discovered drunk in a public house with her charge wrapped in a parcel behind the bar. Alison Cunningham, his third nanny, (known as Cummy) had just been appointed when the family moved into a splendid New Town home facing south to Queen Street Gardens. Standing outside 17 Heriot Row under the light of that famous street-lamp and glancing up to the top floor where his nursery was, it is easy to imagine the little figure of Stevenson as a boy being held up to look out from the candle-lit window.

My recollections of the long nights when I was kept awake by the pain of coughing are only relieved by the tenderness of my nurse and second mother, (my first will not be jealous) Alison Cunningham. She was more patient than I can suppose of an angel… How well I remember her lifting me out of bed, carrying me to the window, and showing me one or two lit windows up in Queen Street across the dark belt of gardens; where also, we told each other, there might be sick little boys and their nurses waiting, like us, for the morning.

There is no denying that Cummy was devoted and caring, but her influence on the sensitive child could also have been dangerous. A doughty Calvinist with a fanatical hatred of Catholics, she succeeded in turning the imaginative six-year-old into a prayerful, hell-obsessed, Bible-biased, hymn-singing zealot.

I had an extreme terror of Hell, implanted in me, I suppose, by my good nurse, which used to haunt me terribly on stormy nights, when the wind had broken loose and was going about the town like a bedlamite…

She was forever reading to him from the Bible, preferring the parts that dealt with death, famines and disasters. She schooled him in the Shorter Catechism: ‘What is the chief end of Man?’ she would ask and the child would answer by rote, ‘To glorify God and to enjoy him forever.’

He was constantly at prayer, praying for everybody and everything – even for his father’s horse. He wondered if the family pets would go to Heaven, as they couldn’t read the Bible. When his mother asked why he prayed so much, he didn’t mention the constant terror of Hell inculcated in him by Cummy, but only said solemnly, ‘You can never be good unless you pray.’

‘How do you know that?’

‘Because I’ve tried it.’

Cummy warned him about ghosts on the dark stairs and demons in every cupboard but she reserved her best for his Satanic Majesty, the Prince of Darkness. Didn’t Lou know that the Devil was wandering through Auld Reekie in search of bad boys who didn’t say their prayers? With thoughts like this to go to bed with, no wonder he couldn’t sleep. On their walks together in Greyfriars Kirkyard he was encouraged to read the inscriptions on the tomb stones. The ‘mort-safes’ – graves ringed with an iron fence against the body-snatchers – impressed his imagination. Sometimes they went down into the Grassmarket where Cummy would point to the spot where the martyred Covenanters, those ‘Sweet Singers’, bade eloquent farewell to the sun, moon and stars, or died silent to the roll of Catholic drums.

Even nursery games were kirk-based. In the ‘Church’ game, his favourite, Louis would dress up as a minister in Cummy’s cloak, stand on a chair, and with paper stuck in his collar as clerical bands, preach a sermon on hell-fire and damnation to anyone who would listen. This, the first of his ‘characterisations’ or ‘performances’, delighted Cummy and impressed his father. His mother was less amused and one of her friends was scandalised when, visiting with her own son, she heard Lou playing the ‘minister’. In a fury, she pulled the paper bands from his neck and hauled her son away at once from that sacrilegious playroom.

The importance of Alison Cunningham in the formation of Stevenson’s attitudes cannot be overestimated, even if he did recant most of them in later life. As Jenni Calder has pointed out, Stevenson, like certain other Victorian writers such as Dickens, Butler and Kingsley, carried a sense of guilt about his childhood.

But it is my view that the massive and overwhelming presence of Edinburgh itself provided his primary formative trauma. His only escape was into the ongoing theatre of his mind where he could play the part his dreams directed. His cousin Bob was also a dreamer:

Bob was three years older than I lived in a dream with his sisters and the Arabian Nights and less unfitted for the world than an angel. We lived together in a purely visionary state. We had our own countries. His was Nosingtonia, mine was Encyclopaedia. We ruled and made wars and inventions and we perpetually drew maps. We were never weary of dressing up. We drew and cut out and painted the figures for our pasteboard theatre. My toy theatre. This last was one of the dearest pleasures of my childhood and one I was loathe to relinquish. Indeed, it was one I followed in secret until I was fifteen or sixteen…

Sir James Barrie, who once described RLS as ‘the most famous initials in the world’, recognised the man-boy or ‘Peter Pan’ in him. Stevenson fitted Barrie’s definition of genius – he always had ‘that power to be a boy again at will’. As Andrew Lang said, Stevenson was ‘not the only genius who has retained from childhood something more than its inspiration’.

As he was to prove over and over again, every experience counts, not least as raw material for stories. Out of Cummy’s ghoulish fantasies, he would fashion stories such as ‘The Body Snatcher’ and ‘The Story of Thrawn Janet’, a short-story in Scots of extraordinary tautness and power and one of Stevenson’s own favourites. The Balfour part of him recognised early that he was his own best copy. In a way, he created his own ‘memory’ of himself, and therefore it is perhaps between the lines that one should look for the real Robert Louis Stevenson.

As an only child, he was the centre of an adult world, a position he often childishly tried to maintain in adult life. He had little or no idea of what to expect when Cummy took him to the ‘Beginners’ School in Canonmills. The experience so unnerved him that he never went back. Goodness knows what the children there must have thought of him – a miniature skeleton with dark eyes and a tuft of fair hair, with the manner of an imperial prince and the speech of a cut-down adult. He later wrote in ‘Child’s Play’:

Although the ways of children cross with those of their elders in a hundred places daily, they never go in the same direction nor so much as lie in the same element. So may telegraph wires intersect the line of the high road, or so might a landscape-painter and a bagman visit the same country and yet move in different worlds… Children think very much the same thoughts and dream the same dreams as bearded men and marriageable women… no one is more romantic… ‘Art for Art’s Sake’ is their motto, and the doings of grown folk are only interesting as the raw material for play…

However perceptive, this was, of course, hindsight. As was this:

On the whole I have not much joy in remembering these early years. I was as much an egotist as I have ever been; I had feverish desire of consideration; I was ready to lie although more often wrongly accused of it, or rather, wrongfully punished for it, having lied unconsciously; I was sentimental, snivelling, goody, morbidly religious. I hope and I do believe I am a better man than I was as a child…

Nevertheless, it all had to be gone through again. In 1858 he was enrolled for an uneasy term of mornings only at Mr Henderson’s Special School in India Street; it was eventually interrupted by a bout of gastric fever, probably brought on by sheer funk on the wee fellow’s part. Even the short walk up the hill was too much for him, despite the after-breakfast training runs with his mother up and down Heriot Row. He had to stop at every stone step to take a rest:

I have three powerful impressions of my childhood: my sufferings when I was sick, my delight in convalescence at my grandfather’s manse of Colinton, near Edinburgh, and the unnatural activity of my mind after I was in bed at night. As to the first, I suppose it is generally granted that none suffer like children from physical distress. We learn, as we grow older, a sort of courage under pain which marvellously lightens the endurance; we have made up our mind as to its existence as a part of life; but the spirit of the child is filled with dismay and indignation, and these pangs of the mind are often little less intolerable than the physical distress that cause them.

After these abortive educational experiments, he retreated into the familiar world of the nursery. He had taught himself to write in bold, large capitals even before he could read. When he was six his uncle, David Stevenson, had offered the family children gathered at the Colinton manse a prize of a pound for the best history of Moses. Young Louis dictated his version to his mother between November and December 1856. Complete with illustrations showing the Israelites in top hats and smoking pipes just like his father, he won. He followed this up with ‘The Story of Joseph’ and ‘The American Travellers’, again with his mother as adoring amanuensis. He had begun as an author.

‘Travels in Perthshire’ was started on the first of many family holidays in Bridge of Allan. Margaret Stevenson knew early on that it was, as she put it, ‘the desire of his heart to be an author’. In her diary for 6 February, 1855, some four years earlier, she had noted: ‘Lou dreamed that he heard the noise of pens writing’.

The world is full of a number of things, I am sure we should all be as happy as kings.

A CHILD’S GARDEN OF VERSES

CHAPTER TWO

A Daft-like Laddie

The love of parents for their children is, of all natural affections, the most ill-starred… Because the parent looks for too much, or at least something inappropriate, at their offspring’s hands, it is too often insufficiently repaid.

ETHICAL STUDIES