Robert Louis Stevenson

by Claire Harman

  So much for the author’s view, trampled down in the street early on in the story’s life and never revived. Film versions of the novel rely on the voluptuary as much as they do the Missing-Link makeover always allotted Hyde (notably in Rouben Mamoulian’s 1931 version and Victor Fleming’s remake ten years later, starring Spencer Tracy). In the book, Hyde’s repulsiveness is essentially indefinable. Enfield recalls ‘something wrong in his appearance, something downright detestable [ … ] He must be deformed somewhere; he gives a strong feeling of deformity, although I couldn’t specify the point,’ while Utterson can’t account for the fear and loathing he feels when looking at Hyde: ‘There is something more, if I could find a name for it. God bless me, the man seems hardly human! Something troglodytic, shall we say? [ … ] or is it the mere radiance of a foul soul that thus transpired through, and transfigures, its clay continent?’29 Hyde and Jekyll could never be mistaken for each other, even when, as in the description of ‘The Last Night’ at the laboratory, they both resort to wearing a mask as cover, because they are not just dissimilar in stature, demeanour and age (Jekyll is about fifty, Hyde a youth), but totally different personae. The young Jorge Luis Borges made this point forcibly in his review of the 1941 Victor Fleming film, which, he said, ‘avoids all surprise and mystery: in the early scenes [ … ] Spencer Tracy fearlessly drinks the versatile potion and transforms himself into Spencer Tracy, with a different wig and Negroid features. [ … ] In the book, the identity of Jekyll and Hyde is a surprise: the author saves it for the end of the ninth chapter. The allegorical tale pretends to be a detective story; no reader guesses that Hyde and Jekyll are the same person.’30 Borges returned to the subject many times, emphasising the story’s lost impact: ‘I don’t think anyone would have guessed that [Jekyll and Hyde were the same man]. Have you ever suspected that Sherlock Holmes was the Hound of the Baskervilles? Well, no, you haven’t … Have you ever suspected that Hamlet may be Claudius?’31

  Longman’s must have realised that they were on to a winner, for on receipt of the manuscript they decided to make Jekyll and Hyde into a small book rather than a serial for their magazine. It was a rapid success on both sides of the Atlantic, selling 40,000 copies in six months in Great Britain and – unknown to the author – an astonishing 250,000 legal and pirated copies in North America. Passing through Southampton in April, Fanny heard a vendor shouting it on the streets, ‘DOCtor Jekyll! DOCtor Jekyll!’,32 Margaret Stevenson got wind of a sermon being preached about the book in Glasgow, and Charles Baxter heard that Queen Victoria was reading it. The story quickly became common property, as Stevenson’s first biographer, Graham Balfour, wrote in 1901: ‘Its success was probably due rather to the moral instincts of the public than to any conscious perception of the merits of its art. It was read by those who never read fiction, it was quoted in pulpits, and made the subject of leading articles in religious papers.’33 It was, in other words, an instant classic.

  The ‘Brownies’ had done so well with Jekyll and Hyde that Stevenson may have become a little superstitious about them. Between finishing the story and its publication in January 1886, he wrote another story derived from a dream, ‘Olalla’. As Edwin M. Eigner has shown,34 ‘Olalla’ owes even more to Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s ‘Strange Story’, of which it seems to be an unwitting plagiarism. This was another sort of ‘dreaming’ that Stevenson was prone to (as with Washington Irving and Treasure Island), perhaps more truly subconscious than the ordinary, sleep-engendered sort.

  ‘Olalla’ deals explicitly – and to the modern eye rather crudely – with racial degeneration, a subject which was coming increasingly into debate through the work of contemporary gene theorists such as Francis Galton, and which had always intrigued Stevenson. In the story, an English officer is sent to convalesce from his wounds at the home of a formerly grand provincial family in Spain. His hosts are puzzling; the beautiful but impassive ‘Senora’ remains aloof, presumably from pride, while her half-witted, hairy, ‘dusky’ son Felipe shows evidence of a profound sadism and bestial lack of control. In a series of sensational incidents, culminating in a quasi-vampiric attack by the Senora (who bites his hand through to the bone), the Englishman discovers a strain of insanity in the family, but by this time he has fallen in love with the daughter of the house, the stunningly beautiful, pious, poetry-writing Olalla, whom he wishes to marry. Their early meetings are wordless and instantly, powerfully erotic. Olalla, with her perfect face and form (which Stevenson dwells on at some length, especially her breasts, which are exposed by a split-bodiced dress), ends up renouncing her feelings for the Englishman in order not to pass on and perhaps intensify the family’s bad blood, an act of what could be called sui-eugenics.

  Stevenson hardly ever mentioned this story without apologising for its ‘not very defensible’ nature, but whether he was referring to the eroticism, the vampirism or the theory is not clear. It was probably the first of these; the dishonourable treatment of women (in life) was getting to be an obsessive issue for the author, and here he was representing (in fiction) one woman as a blood-sucking degenerate and another as a sex object. And one wonders what Fanny made of this story, with its melting heroine so clearly not modelled on herself and the insane Moorish matron replicating so closely the scene in the Paris cab years before when she had bitten Louis’s hand and drawn blood.

  Sam, who was eighteen in 1886, had not done well in his first year at Edinburgh University, and Stevenson thought he should hold back from the exams rather than fail. After the event, Stevenson admitted that his cautious pessimism over his stepson’s chances was just like his father’s treatment of himself – ‘my conduct has been exactly his all through’.35 History did seem to be repeating itself; in fact, Sam’s career was becoming so like a reprise of Stevenson’s own as to suggest conscious copying. Not only was Sam living at Heriot Row (in Louis’s old room), studying engineering, attending meetings of the ‘Spec’, and wearing a velvet coat, he was about to drop out, just as Louis had done. The rapid success of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde had impressed the boy deeply (he kept a close record of his stepfather’s sales), and in the autumn following its publication he announced that he too wanted to become a writer. He was even preparing to share Louis’s fate as an invalid, convinced as he was in the summer of 1886 that he ran the risk of permanent blindness. He started to practise the piano blindfold, and pleaded to have a typewriter bought for him so that he could pursue his writing vocation in the coming darkness. The threat of Sam losing his sight aroused his mother’s acute anxiety (which must have been gratifying), and she whipped him from one specialist to another in the hope of a cure, but as the eye problem coincided with exam-time in Edinburgh, and was completely rectified by the acquisition of a pair of glasses, it is unlikely to have been too severe in the first place.

  The winter of 1886–87 was an important period of transition for the boy. While he was in Barbados on a long holiday he got news that his father, now remarried to a Miss Paul (known dismissively by Fanny as ‘Paulie’) and with a second family in California, had disappeared suddenly without trace. No’ one ever found out what happened to Sam Osbourne Senior, though there were ‘evil rumours’ that he might have run off with another woman, committed suicide or been murdered. This dark turn in the family history naturally disturbed Sam, who from this point onwards decided to drop his ill-starred patronymic and be known by his middle name, Lloyd. His allegiances turned wholly towards Stevenson as the father-figure, and he strove to cement their bond with proofs of special affinity, cutting short his very long holiday in Barbados because he had had a premonition of Louis being critically ill. This sort of psychic phenomenon always went down well at home: Fanny was a great visionary herself.

  Lloyd’s decision to ‘become a writer’ was a course of action (or inaction) to which neither Louis nor Fanny could reasonably object, nor did they. Stevenson positively encouraged the boy, though his 1888 essay addressed to Lloyd, ‘A Letter to a Young Gentleman who Proposes to Embrace the Career of Ar
t’, strikes many warning notes about writing as a profession: ‘the temptation is almost as common as the vocation is rare’, ‘perpetual effort’ was necessary, and ‘what you may decently expect, if you have some talent and much industry, is such an income as a clerk will earn with a tenth or perhaps a twentieth of your nervous output’.36 The difficulties which Lloyd’s decision posed for the whole family were obvious: he would continue to be a dependant, possibly an expensive one, and his work would be hard to criticise or praise honestly. But the lengths to which Stevenson went to accommodate his stepson’s desires and requirements show a trust in and affection for him that remained almost entirely unclouded for the rest of his life, most of which they spent sharing a home together, and during which they collaborated on three books. Lloyd had not grown up to be a particularly attractive character, and he didn’t improve with age; he was lazy, not very clever, addicted to being ‘kept’, made two bad marriages, had children out of wedlock and wrote lots of poor or indifferent books (at one point admitting that he could get anything published because of his association with Stevenson). His conduct as co-keeper of the flame with his mother in the years following Stevenson’s death was characterised by raw self-interest, his letters by speciousness and bully’s stratagems. All in all, it is hard to see what his stepfather saw in him, yet Stevenson loved him and cared for him, to the point of dotage even, as he wrote to Henley in the early summer of 1887:

  I find in the contemplation of the youth Lloyd much benefit: he is [a] dam fine youth. Happy am I, to be even this much of a father! [ … ] Perhaps as we approach this foul time of life, young folk become necessary? ‘Tis a problem. We know what form this craving wears in certain cases. But perhaps it is a genuine thing in itself: the age of paternity coming, a demand sets in. Thus perhaps my present (and crescent) infatuation for the youth Lloyd; but no, I think it is because the youth himself improves so much, and is such a dam, dam, dam fine youth.37

  The context of this is important: Henley and his wife Anna had been married nine years and had not yet had a child (though Anna had suffered many miscarriages). Stevenson recognised frustrated paternity as a cause of sadness in his friend – and indeed when Henley’s only child, Margaret, was born the following year, Henley proved the most obsessively fond father imaginable. Frustrated paternity did not play half so great a role in Stevenson’s own life, but even so he derived ‘much benefit’ from the presence and the fact of Lloyd (Belle at this point was completely out of the picture).

  The quotation has another current running in it which should not pass unremarked: the proximity of the two ‘cravings’, one parental, the other sexual. Perhaps, Stevenson suggests (in a trope that would become familiar in psychoanalysis), they are essentially the same. It’s a rather remarkable statement, deliberating using charged words such as ‘infatuation’, ‘craving’ and ‘demand’ to distinguish his feelings from those in ‘certain [paedophilic or homoerotic] cases’. And those cases themselves are, characteristically, acknowledged rather than condemned or vilified.

  Stevenson’s admiration for his stepson was never again so emphatically expressed but, as I have indicated, didn’t diminish significantly, despite trials later. Wayne Koestenbaum is the most explicit of those commentators who have read the relationship as homoerotic, representing Stevenson’s literary collaborations with Lloyd in terms of a pederastic seduction (they ‘began in a game’ but ‘marked a darker purpose’38). This seems to me a wilful sensationalisation of the available evidence in the specific case of Stevenson and Lloyd, though Koestenbaum’s alertness to homoerotic language and situations elsewhere in Stevenson’s work and life is instructive. In the spring of 1887, with Lloyd’s father vanished and Louis’s father dying, the two can be seen drawing together for comfort to form a new relationship which has almost more of a sibling flavour than that of father-and-son, a pale version of the closeness Louis had felt to Bob in the days of ‘the two Stevensons’.

  Within weeks of Jekyll and Hyde being published, Stevenson’s remarkable engine was at work again on the novel he had laid by the previous summer in order to write the Jenkin memoir. Kidnapped (an arresting and novel title) was based around a notorious incident that took place in the troubled aftermath of the 1745 Jacobite Rebellion, and which Stevenson had previously thought to include in his ‘Transformation of the Highlands’, the assassination of Colin Campbell, the King’s collector, at Appin in 1752. This romantic subject was to make another ‘story for boys’ for Young Folks Magazine; it was also perhaps a bid to please Thomas Stevenson with a reassuringly Scottish, wholesome adventure story after all the flim-flam of Prince Otto, the crudeness of the Henley plays and the sensationalism of Jekyll. The evocation of the West Highland coastline was to be an oblique homage to the Stevenson family firm and the episode set on the islet of Earraid a specific reference to Louis’s years as an apprentice engineer. All this must have mollified the ailing old man’s anxieties, especially when Stevenson agreed – in theory, at any rate – to his father’s predictable suggestion that the new book ought to include ‘a scene of religion’.39

  Though marketed as a children’s story, Kidnapped was not in quite the same key as Treasure Island and The Black Arrow, as Henry James recognised when he noted in his copy: ‘this coquetry of [Stevenson’s] pretending he writes “for boys”’.40 The narrator, David Balfour, a reserved, manly, Lowland, Low-Church sixteen-year-old, is very different from the prepubescent boy-heroes of the earlier stories, and has an unillusioned outlook on life. The story touches on weighty historical and cultural matters: the bungled management of the Jacobite cause in the aftermath of the ’45, the hardening of attitudes in the Calvinist Lowlands and the beginning of the process which led to the hated Highland clearances. The Appin murder itself was unusual matter for a Young Folks yarn. But in the dedication of Kidnapped (to Baxter), Stevenson makes a point of ‘how little I am touched by the desire of accuracy’, even to the extent of changing the year of the murder from 1752 to 1751 (it’s not at all clear why). Despite the high number of actual historical figures in the story, including Alan Breck Stewart, the probable assassin, Cluny Macpherson, the Jacobite chieftain, Robin Oig, son of Rob Roy and James Stewart, ‘James of the Glens’, Alan’s kinsman and the man who is tried and executed in his place, and his extremely clever use of all the ‘true’ material, Stevenson wanted to be judged here as a fiction writer rather than a historian.

  The method is very like that of Sir Walter Scott, and Kidnapped stands comparison with the works of the master on any ground other than sheer length. The necessity of writing in instalments kept the narrative bowling along at a bracing pace in a series of superbly imagined episodes: the sinister House of Shaws where David’s wicked uncle Ebenezer tries to murder the boy by sending him up a staircase leading to a steep drop, the kidnap itself, the fight in the roundhouse, David’s ordeal after the shipwreck, Cluny Macpherson’s terrorist-cell hide-out ‘like a wasp’s nest’ in the mountains, the flight across the moorlands with Alan Breck, all done with sharp attention to detail, especially physical discomfort:

  I would be aroused in the gloaming, to sit up in the same puddle where I had slept, and sup cold drammach; the rain driving sharp in my face or running down my back in icy trickles; the mist enfolding us like as in a gloomy chamber – or perhaps if the wind blew, falling suddenly apart and showing us the gulf of some dark valley where the streams were crying aloud.41

  It’s a very unsentimental book; the gross Captain Hoseason and his crew (of the Covenant – surely a satirical choice of name) present a remarkable catalogue of vices and the character of Ransome the cabin boy a brief but arresting study in abuse:

  He swore horribly whenever he remembered, but more like a silly schoolboy than a man; and boasted of many wild and bad things that he had done, stealthy thefts, false accusations, ay, and even murder; but all with such a dearth of likelihood in the details, and such a weak and crazy swagger in the delivery, as disposed me rather to pity than to believe him.


  [ … ] It was the pitifullest thing in life to see this unhappy, unfriended creature staggering and dancing and talking he knew not what. Some of the men laughed, but not all; others would grow as black as thunder (thinking perhaps of their own childhood or their own children) and bid him stop that nonsense and think what he was doing. As for me, I felt ashamed to look at him, and the poor child still comes about me in my dreams.42

  Kidnapped is both a romance and a novel of realism, and the odd coupling of the two things is symbolised and acted out in the relationship between the volatile, charismatic Alan Breck Stewart and his cautious companion David, whose politics and temperaments are so wildly different. This is reminiscent of the Hawkins/Silver relationship and anticipates the much darker and more destructive connection between the Durie brothers in The Master of Ballantrae, but it is also a fairly obvious way of separating and analysing the two different kinds of Scottishness in Stevenson himself. The ‘Shorter Catechist’ was always on duty in the author, but willing to be ‘kidnapped’ any moment by the romance of a vigorous, glamorous warrior culture. The disunity of Scotland is lamented throughout, for David is, like his creator, a ‘foreigner at home’, who knows no Gaelic, cannot recognise tartans and is loyal to an English King. Yet Alan, despite his pride in being a ‘Hieland shentleman’ of long pedigree, is so ‘native’ that he has had to spend years in exile, and with his lace cuffs and court mannerisms has all but turned into a Frenchman.

  The vision of Scotland that the book projects is essentially tragic, for in the wide variety of Scots life it illustrates – Lowland churchmen, Highland chiefs, clansmen, fisherfolk, mariners, itinerant preachers, evicted crofters, Latin-spouting city lawyers – everyone is to a greater or lesser extent embattled or threatened. The effects of this traumatic, schismatic period in Scots history were all too plainly felt by the author, who longed to be a ‘native Maker’ in a language and culture which were almost too fragmentary and diverse to be usable. In the same year as he finished Kidnapped, Stevenson was writing the poems, in Scots and in English, which made up the collection Underwoods. It was a ‘two-minded’ book as well as a bilingual one: the first half, in English, contains highly personal poems mostly addressed to friends; the second half, in Scots, is quite different in style and tone, full of bracing lyrics and ballads. But the dialect in which he composed these ‘native’ verses was, he admitted in a prefatory note, far from pure. His remarks are in response to a contemporary research project on dialect which illustrated how multifarious and localised Scots language had become.