Robert Louis Stevenson

by Claire Harman

  In the autumn of 1847 this rather troubled man, then twenty-nine years old, was on a train to Glasgow when he met a young woman travelling with her uncle and aunt and got into conversation. Margaret Isabella Balfour was eighteen, cheerful, unaffected and a daughter of the manse. Thomas must have been looking out for a wife, for their first meeting was followed promptly by a brief formal courtship and a proposal; not the behaviour of an indecisive lover. On the brink of being thirty, Thomas was old enough to have had a considerable history of dealings with women, or a long-drawn-out history of wanting to have dealings with them.

  Margaret came from genteel, Lowland stock and was the youngest surviving child of a family of thirteen, nine of whom had outlived infancy. Among her forebears were the Lairds of Pilrig and, possibly, the John Balfour who in 1656 was one of the religious zealots who murdered Archbishop Sharp. That notorious incident in the history of the ‘Covenanters’ (which became such an obsessive interest of her son Louis) formed part of Scott’s Tale of Old Mortality in which John Balfour appears as ‘Balfour of Burley’; so when Stevenson said that his father’s family played ‘the character parts in the Waverley Novels’ he might have added that his mother’s family appeared in the leading roles.

  Margaret was good-looking (though not a beauty), intelligent and lively. She was known as an indefatigable optimist, ‘a determined looker at the bright side of things’, as Sidney Colvin described her, ‘better skilled, perhaps, to shut her eyes to troubles or differences among those she loved than to understand, compose, or heal them’.22 She had none of the accomplishments, such as musical or artistic ability, that were valued as bargaining counters in the marriage market (in worldly society at least), but her plainness of manner was in itself a recommendation to the God-fearing Thomas Stevenson. His surviving letters to his young bride-to-be show the tenderness and teasing tone of a man who really wanted to get married, addressing her as ‘My dearest Mag’ and indulgently calling her ‘child’. Margaret must have drawn attention to his behaviour around children (clearly a matter of some concern), for he writes to reassure her, ‘Don’t think my love that because I am strict or inclined to be strict with children that I like them less than other people. [ … ] I have the family failing of taking strong views and expressing those views strongly.’23 He ends the letter ‘Your ever affectionate and devoted lover’, an intensity that deepened after the marriage, when he wrote home frequently from his work trips, pining to be reunited with ‘my own dear wife’.24 Thomas remained extremely protective and anxious about his young bride, strenuously encouraging the idea of her frailty and poor health. Their daughter-in-law Fanny’s judgement when she met them in 1880 was that Margaret – then well into middle age – was ‘adored by her husband, who spoils her like a baby’.25

  Thomas and Margaret were married about a year after they first met, on a date in August deliberately chosen to coincide with the anniversary of her father’s ordination (he, naturally, performed the ceremony). Margaret proved a most devoted wife to Thomas Stevenson, subservient to his wishes and interests, protective of his well-being, mainstay of his morale. Her chief talent, Louis declared, in one of his very few analytical remarks about his mother, was for organisation, and she was good at identifying and diverting possible starting points of domestic tension. This presumably came of years dealing with her husband’s sporadic dips into melancholia, and was a technique that her son would emulate closely in his dealings with an equally volatile spouse.

  Although she became, in later life, a remarkably enthusiastic and adventurous traveller, tolerant of discomforts and extreme temperatures, game for anything, Margaret Stevenson spent her youth half in and half out of a sort of vaporous decline. She was encouraged in this first by a valetudinarian father, himself a sufferer from weak lungs, then by her hypochondriac husband. All through her son’s childhood, she varied between high spirits and sickliness: her chest was weak, her heart; she must rest, she must take the waters. She was only twenty-one when the baby was born, but stayed in bed most mornings and was unable to play or go out with him when she was up. Most of the active side of mothering was left to the child’s nurses, yet there were welcome, if perplexing, surges of energy: one of Stevenson’s earliest memories was of his mother rushing him up the stairs at their house in Inverleith Terrace to see his grandfather, as excitable and skittish as a girl.

  In the summer of 1850, when Margaret was pregnant for the first and only time, old Robert Stevenson died. He had been ill for some months, but had been looking forward to his annual inspection tour of the lighthouses. When his sons tried to convince him that no more travelling was possible, the old man seemed to acquiesce, but on the day of departure ‘was found in his room, furtively packing a portmanteau’.26 Thomas Stevenson was deeply affected by the pathos of his father’s decline and death and when his first child was born four months later, on 13 November, had no hesitation in naming the baby for him.

  The little boy’s name was in fact an amalgamation of both grandfathers’, one inside the other: Robert Lewis Balfour Stevenson. The names were in strong demand in the family: Alan Stevenson had also called his first son Robert (the little boy was known as Bob), and there was a veritable epidemic of Lewis Balfours on the other side of the family; two born in 1850 (the same year as RLS), another called Lewis Henry two years earlier, Lewis (‘Noona’) in 1842, Lewis Charles in 1851. Despite that, Thomas and Margaret stuck with ‘Lewis’ for the baby’s everyday name. Or ‘Smout’, or ‘Lou’, or ‘Signor Sprucki’, or ‘Baron Broadnose’: Thomas Stevenson was a great coiner of comical aliases.

  Margaret, who was weakened and possibly traumatised by the experience of childbirth, was not put through that hazard again: there were no more children. This in a family that showed typical Victorian fecundity – little Lewis had fifty-four first cousins – must have marked out the Stevenson household as a trifle eccentric. It wasn’t easy to limit a family to one child; to avoid conception successfully during a marriage that lasted another thirty-seven years must have required strict regulation of both partners’ sexual appetites. But Thomas Stevenson was not the man to put anything before his young wife’s well-being, and a challenge of this sort suited his self-mortifying temperament. However they solved the contraception issue, the couple remained conspicuously devoted and dependent, and fussed contentedly about each other’s health.

  The baby made a delicate third member of this hypochondriac household. He seemed healthy enough to begin with, but an attack of croup in his third year was so alarming that ever after his parents lived in fear of another chest infection carrying him off. Both Thomas Stevenson and his wife came from large families with a high incidence of infant mortality: between them they had twelve live siblings and twelve dead ones. Consumption was a threat – Margaret had developed a patch of ‘fibroid pneumonia’ after the baby’s birth – and incipient tuberculosis seemed an increasingly plausible explanation for the child’s uneven, rickety growth and extreme thinness.27 So whether from genuine danger, or from excessive solicitude, the child spent long stretches of time confined to bed. The catalogue of his ailments that appears in his mother’s diary is truly astonishing: in his first nine years, apart from numerous chills and colds, the boy had scarlatina, bronchitis, gastric fever, whooping cough, chickenpox and scarlet fever. But the persistent cough was what worried everyone most. It seems likely that the croup had damaged his lungs or that he suffered (among other possible things) from asthma, since his health often worsened in the damp, cold winters of smoggy Auld Reekie. The sound of his cough starting up was heard in the household with dread.

  The Stevensons’ first home in Edinburgh was the one Thomas had prepared for his bride and where the baby was born, 8 Howard Place, on the northern fringes of the New Town, by the Botanic Garden. They moved in 1853 to 1 Inverleith Terrace, a larger property just around the corner. In the baby’s first years, Thomas and Margaret had a run of bad luck with nurses (or weren’t very good at choosing them): two left unbidden and the third
took the infant Smoutie to a bar and left him wrapped in a shawl on the counter while she soaked up a few gins. But the fourth hire produced a family servant of the most reassuring type: sober, single and religious to a fault. Alison Cunningham was a weaver’s daughter from Fife, thirty years old when she came to the household (Margaret Stevenson was twenty-three that year) and an experienced nurse. ‘Cummy’ was given free rein with the toddler, and became a pivotal figure in the household.

  Cummy was the type of servant who derived the keenest gratification from being indispensable, and turned down more than one suitor, it is said, to stay in the Stevensons’ service for twenty years. Her devotion to Lewis, intensified by his vulnerability and the emerging realisation that he was to be the Stevensons’ only child, went hand in hand with an equally powerful intention to mould the boy to her pattern. She could delight the child with her songs and dances and was selfless in the devotion of her time to his care (no trips to the bar for her, or even the usual nurse’s expedient of meeting with friends in the park). Her genuine interest in his company fed the child’s already pronounced egotism and her relation to him was – oddly enough – more that of companion than nanny, as Stevenson’s later description of her as ‘my first Wife’ would seem to corroborate.

  In 1857 this compact household moved from Inverleith Terrace, which had proved damp and uncongenial, to a splendid house on Heriot Row in the heart of the elegant New Town, overlooking Queen Street Gardens from the south. Beyond the gardens, whose trees were only half-mature at this date, were the tall fronts of the houses on Queen Street and in the distance, beyond the great metal river of the railway line, the smoky wynds and tenements of the Old Town climbed towards the Castle. This was the view from Lou’s day and night nurseries on the top floor; Cummy’s room was at the back of the house on the same floor, with views, in clear weather, of the Firth and, distantly, the coast of Fife, her home. There was a wide landing, with other bedrooms and storerooms off, and then the grand spiral staircase running down the core of the house and lit from above by a large glazed cupola. As a student, Stevenson was to be grateful for the fact that the stairs were made of stone and made little or no sound when he crept past his parents’ bedroom on the first floor late at night.

  Thomas and Margaret’s bedroom looked out to the back of the property and had a bathroom leading off it; at the front on the same level was the elegant drawing room, with its fireplace and recesses and twelve-foot-high windows looking out on the genteel greenery of the Gardens. Down the stairs again was the ground floor, with its high-ceilinged, panelled dining room and wide entrance hall. The kitchens and sculleries were in the basement, accessible to tradesmen by the area steps. Heriot Row was a truly substantial home, exuding an aura of wealth well-spent. Nobody seeing it could have the least doubt that the only son of the house was a privileged child.

  Robert Louis Stevenson’s many autobiographical essays and memoirs leave vividly contrasting impressions of his childhood. On the one hand, it contained the idyllic pleasures described in essays such as ‘The Manse’ and ‘Child’s Play’ and poems such as ‘My Kingdom’ and ‘Foreign Lands’, on the other it was a time of chronic ill-health and piquant terrors. There is a temptation, given the subject’s own obsessive recourse to images and tropes of duality, and his ‘clinching’ creation of the Jekyll-Hyde poles, to see his life in terms of strong contrasts. But Stevenson was unusual – in those last days before Freud – in recognising not just the co-existence of states of mind (in childhood particularly), but their inextricability. The author of A Child’s Garden of Verses was to say of his own earliest memories, ‘I cannot allow that those halcyon-days or that time of “angel infancy” have ever existed for me. Rather, I was born, more or less, what I am now – Robert Louis Stevenson, and not any other, or better person.’28 The ‘good’ and ‘bad’ parts of his childhood could no more be pulled apart than could the child and adult self. In its puzzling variability and dizzying plunges into dark and light, life was all of a piece.

  Looking back on his childhood when he was twenty-nine, Stevenson concluded that he had been ‘lovingly, but not always wisely treated’ by his parents.29 In fact, there were aspects of his upbringing that seem not only ill-advised, but even dangerous. It is a minor mystery, for instance, how the frail little boy survived the custom of the time to seal up a nursery ‘almost hermetically’30 so that it was always draught-free (i.e. airless), or how he ever slept, given Cummy’s treatment for insomnia, which was to give the fretful child a soothing drink of strong coffee in the middle of the night. Fanny Stevenson retrospectively blamed her husband’s ‘feverish excitement’ as a child on the powerful drugs he was given during bouts of gastric fever, and the regular use of antimonial wine, which Margaret Stevenson’s doctor brother George later believed had ruined the boy’s constitution. These remedies were held to be sovereign by the parents, and if the child seemed overwrought they would sooner remove his toys or send his playmates away to calm him, than lower the doses of strong or inappropriate medicine.

  Even his parents’ happy marriage was problematic, for, as Stevenson was to say memorably in his essay ‘Virginibus Puerisque’, ‘the children of lovers are orphans’. Margaret gave over much of the childcare to Cummy, not thinking any harm could come of it, the nanny being such a religious body. But the strength of Cummy’s religious views (possibly a source of mild amusement to her employers) made hers a very troubling influence. Cummy was a devout member of the Free Church, and far more stringent in her interpretation of doctrine than Lou’s Church of Scotland parents. The theatre was the mouth of hell, cards were ‘the Devil’s Books’ and novels (meaning romances) paved the road to perdition. She filled the little boy’s head with stories of the Martyrs of Religion, of the Covenanters and the Presbyters and the blood-drenched religious fundamentalists of the previous two centuries, stories that were rendered, confusingly enough, in highly dramatic style. (Stevenson later told Cummy mischievously that her declamations had sparked his own obsessive interest in the drama.) The Bible and the Shorter Catechism were to Lou what Mother Goose might have been to a luckier child, visits to the Covenanters’ graves in Greyfriars churchyard were the substitute for playing in the park, and though there was opportunity to read adventure stories, Cassell’s Family Paper and (clandestinely) bound copies of Punch downstairs, Cummy’s regime of spiritual education was based around Low Church tract-writers and theologians, ‘Brainerd, M’Cheyne, and Mrs Winslow, and a whole crowd of dismal and morbid devotees’, as Stevenson recalled about twenty years later.

  Cummy had mutually respectful relations with her employers and was trusted implicitly, but her religious brainwashing of her charge clearly subverted their authority over him. She was a simple woman who undoubtedly meant no harm, but her anxieties about the religious liberalism of the household were always clear. The Stevensons gave dinner parties and were known to drink wine; Mrs Stevenson had been flagrantly evasive of the ban on Sunday recreation by sewing a little pack onto the back of Lou’s doll so that his game could pass as ‘Pilgrim’s Progress’. One of Stevenson’s early memories was of his nurse ‘comforting’ him at night by pressing him to her in a ferment of prayer for the souls of his parents, who had broken the Sabbath by playing a game of whist after dinner. The scene sounds ludicrous now, but to the child spelled eternal damnation for his mother and father. He was wound up to such a pitch that he sometimes thought none of them would be saved, for even Cummy had lapses: he remembers them both straining to make out the contents in the printer’s window of serial stories she herself had cut short on the grounds of them threatening to turn out to be ‘regular novels’.

  Dread of judgement, midnight coffee and a predisposition to overheated dreaming and daydreaming made much of the sick little boy’s life a misery. He speaks of fevers that seemed to make the room swell and shrink, and ‘terrible long nights, that I lay awake, troubled continually with a hacking, exhausting cough, and praying for sleep or morning from the bottom of my shaken lit
tle body’.31 He had a recurring nightmare of standing before the Great White Throne and being asked to recite some form of words, on which salvation or damnation depended; ‘his tongue stuck, his memory was blank, hell gaped for him’,32 for the idea of eternal punishment had been ‘seared’, as he said, into his infant consciousness. When his night-horrors were particularly bad, Cummy would call for Thomas Stevenson, who would try to calm his son by sitting by the bed, or outside the bedroom door, feigning conversations with imaginary coachmen or inn-keepers. But, as the adult Louis recalled, ‘it was long, after one of these paroxysms, before I could bear to be left alone’.33

  Though in time the severity of his nightmares lessened, Stevenson continued to dream vividly and with disturbing conviction of reality, so that he was unable to distinguish whether his conscious or subconscious was in control. By the time he was a student his dreams produced the impression in him, nightmarish in itself, of leading a double life, at which point he began to fear for his reason. He learned in time to control his night-terrors, more or less (partly by the use of drugs), but if he hadn’t been terrified by hellfire rantings as a child, this habit of feverish dreaming and neurotic invention, that was to prove important to his writing, might possibly never have set in.