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Counterpoint: Fanny’s and Louis’s Pacific Diaries

Audrey Murfin

in Robert Louis Stevenson and the Art of Collaboration

This chapter the progression of several textual fragments describing Pacific islands that the Stevensons visited on the ship the Janet Nichol, from their first draft as holograph manuscript ... More

This chapter the progression of several textual fragments describing Pacific islands that the Stevensons visited on the ship the Janet Nichol, from their first draft as holograph manuscript fragments, to their inclusion in Fanny Stevenson’s published diary The Cruise of the Janet Nicoll [sic], and sometimes their inclusion in Louis’s published nonfiction in In the South Seas as well as fiction such as The Beach of Falesá. Much of this material, which was originally written by Louis but later claimed by Fanny, concerns one topic--that of the sexual exploitation of young Pacific Island girls by white traders. The shared nature of the family’s diaries allowed Louis to hide in his wife’s diary material on a topic that was evidently of great interest to him, but that would have negatively affected this very famous author’s reputation as a family-friendly author.Less

Disjecta Membra: Collaboration and the Body of the Text in The Wrong Box and The Master of Ballantrae

Audrey Murfin

in Robert Louis Stevenson and the Art of Collaboration

Stevenson’s most extensive and lengthy literary collaboration was with his stepson Lloyd Osbourne. Stevenson wrote the comic novel The Wrong Box with Osbourne in 1889. The Wrong Box is the only work ... More

Stevenson’s most extensive and lengthy literary collaboration was with his stepson Lloyd Osbourne. Stevenson wrote the comic novel The Wrong Box with Osbourne in 1889. The Wrong Box is the only work for which we have extensive manuscript material showing the creative process that the partners used. While Stevenson and Osbourne were at work together on the The Wrong Box, Stevenson was simultaneously working alone on the much better received The Master of Ballantrae (1889). Thematically similar to The Wrong Box but tonally opposite, The Master of Ballantrae revisits the questions of family and morality posed by The Wrong Box and demonstrates the extent to which Stevenson’s collaborations, and his thoughts about those collaborations, inform even work purportedly not collaborative.Less

Collaboration and Marriage: The Dynamiter

Audrey Murfin

in Robert Louis Stevenson and the Art of Collaboration

This chapter considers Stevenson’s acknowledged collaborations with his wife, Fanny, most substantially, their co-written work, The Dynamiter, also titled More New Arabian Nights (1885). Husband and ... More

This chapter considers Stevenson’s acknowledged collaborations with his wife, Fanny, most substantially, their co-written work, The Dynamiter, also titled More New Arabian Nights (1885). Husband and wife collaborations create subtle problems, largely because we expect a wife to assist her husband without credit. The Dynamiter structurally draws upon The Thousand and One Nights, which themselves concern issues of narrative and marriage. The Dynamiter, a novel about Irish terrorism, was well regarded in the nineteenth century, but not so in the twentieth or twenty-first, precisely because recent critics have resented Fanny’s involvement. The chapter additionally considers Fanny and Louis’ collaborative play “The Hanging Judge” and the controversy surrounding Fanny’s short story “The Nixie.”Less

Criminal Collaborators: Deacon Brodie and Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde

Audrey Murfin

in Robert Louis Stevenson and the Art of Collaboration

This chapter discusses Deacon Brodie (1880), one of three plays collaboratively composed with his friend W.E. Henley, along with Stevenson’s short story “The Body Snatcher” and his essay “A Chapter ... More

This chapter discusses Deacon Brodie (1880), one of three plays collaboratively composed with his friend W.E. Henley, along with Stevenson’s short story “The Body Snatcher” and his essay “A Chapter on Dreams.” Deacon Brodie is an early treatment of the themes more famously developed in the Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886). Thus, Jekyll and Hyde, which owes its origins to the literal dual authorship, becomes a reflection on the fragmentation of the single author, as well as a reflection on the collaborative space of the theater.Less

‘A kind of partnership business’: The Wrecker and The Ebb-Tide

Audrey Murfin

in Robert Louis Stevenson and the Art of Collaboration

This chapter considers the last two, and best known, Stevenson-Osbourne literary collaborations. After The Wrong Box, the pair went on to write The Wrecker (1892) together, but privately Stevenson ... More

This chapter considers the last two, and best known, Stevenson-Osbourne literary collaborations. After The Wrong Box, the pair went on to write The Wrecker (1892) together, but privately Stevenson emphasized Lloyd Osbourne’s subordinate role and expressed his growing frustration with the creative process. Finally, they undertook The Ebb-Tide (1894), but by then the process had failed. Stevenson’s growing dissatisfaction with the collaboration forms the argument of both The Wrecker and The Ebb-Tide. In particular, The Wrecker is a novel about partnerships and the compromises they require—of ethics, art, and self-interest, written at a moment when Stevenson himself was the most challenged by his own difficult partnership with Osbourne.Less

Collaboration in Theory and Practice

Audrey Murfin

in Robert Louis Stevenson and the Art of Collaboration

This chapter considers Robert Louis Stevenson’s collaborations in the context of criticism on literary collaboration. In order to define collaboration, we must consider four essential questions: is ... More

This chapter considers Robert Louis Stevenson’s collaborations in the context of criticism on literary collaboration. In order to define collaboration, we must consider four essential questions: is it acknowledged? is it mutual? is it equal? and is it separable? All authors receive advice from others, making all creative practice in a sense collaborative, but this chapter proposes that texts in which the collaboration is mutually undertaken and overtly acknowledged differ fundamentally from traditionally authored texts. On the other hand, criticism of collaboration has been hampered by the assumption that true collaboration must be evenly divided (all of Stevenson’s collaborations were, in one way or another, unequal ones), and that the business of the critic is to solve the “problem” of who has written what, a project which shows an a priori scepticism about the possibility of collaboration at all.Less

The Plot Against England: The Dynamiter

Julia Sun-Joo Lee

in The American Slave Narrative and the Victorian Novel

The epilogue focuses on Robert Louis Stevenson and Fanny Stevenson's collection of stories, The Dynamiter (1885). Set against the Fenian dynamite bombings in London, The Dynamiter revises the slave ... More

The epilogue focuses on Robert Louis Stevenson and Fanny Stevenson's collection of stories, The Dynamiter (1885). Set against the Fenian dynamite bombings in London, The Dynamiter revises the slave narrative to expose England's dwindling moral authority in the late-Victorian period. This epilogue addresses the cultural durability of the American slave narrative in the years following the Emancipation Proclamation, while considering how issues of authorship and authenticity continued to haunt the genre into the late nineteenth century.Less

A Joy on the Precipice of Death: Muir and Stevenson in California

in The World in Play: Portraits of a Victorian Concept

This chapter examines the California travel narratives of Scottish free spirits Robert Louis Stevenson and John Muir, who set out to purge the Victorian cult of leisure, specifically, outdoorsy ... More

This chapter examines the California travel narratives of Scottish free spirits Robert Louis Stevenson and John Muir, who set out to purge the Victorian cult of leisure, specifically, outdoorsy sportiness, of its proprietary egoism. They reimagine the Golden State, their adopted home, as a sublime Romantic playground where the middle-class male ego disintegrates in the face of destructive nature, and where competitive men are reborn as little cosmic boys. Stevenson and Muir's literary efforts to rebrand California as a postapocalyptic, neo-Caledonian playground, as a land of death and play, helped shape the fledgling state's image of itself as an otherworldly and exceptional place. Modern California is a product, in part, of the Victorian world in play.Less

The Price of Paradise: Robert Louis Stevenson, Joseph Conrad and British Expansion in the Pacific

Jennifer Fuller

in Dark Paradise: Pacific Islands in the Nineteenth-Century British Imagination

The fourth chapter turns to British settlers in the Pacific whose attempts to create ideal colonies reveal the weaknesses inherent in the British concept of themselves as a “superior” civilizing ... More

The fourth chapter turns to British settlers in the Pacific whose attempts to create ideal colonies reveal the weaknesses inherent in the British concept of themselves as a “superior” civilizing force. In Robert Louis Stevenson’s Vailima Letters and The Beach of Falesá, he questions the right of the British to colonize or settle in the South Seas as part of a “civilizing mission.” By examining the effects of the invasive settler, explorer, and trader on the island landscape, Stevenson linked the health of the islanders and the state of the islands, presenting European invasion as a violent and potentially dangerous “disease.” While Stevenson focused primarily on the interactions between British and Pacific islanders, Joseph Conrad instead focused on the ways in which life in the Pacific impacted British individuals in his later and largely overlooked Pacific works, Freya of the Seven Isles and “Because of the Dollars. Conrad’s work reflects an increasingly dark vision of British settlement in the Pacific, one that depicts British men and women as weak and degenerate.Less

Robert Louis Stevenson, Henry James and the City of Encounters

Deaglán Ó Donghaile

in Blasted Literature: Victorian Political Fiction and the Shock of Modernism

This chapter discusses the ‘dynamite novels’ of Henry James and Robert Louis Stevenson. It notes that these novels are both concerned with the relationship between political violence and late ... More

This chapter discusses the ‘dynamite novels’ of Henry James and Robert Louis Stevenson. It notes that these novels are both concerned with the relationship between political violence and late Victorian urban modernity, as well as the relationship between political violence and culture. These novels also explore the metropolitan conditions that produce and maintain terrorism. In some ways, they also address the cultural impact of terrorism upon the late Victorian imagination.Less

Collaborating with the Enemy: Treasure Island as Anti–Adventure Story

Marah Gubar

in Artful Dodgers: Reconceiving the Golden Age of Children's Literature

The boys' adventure story is perhaps the genre that seems least likely to invite child readers to dodge rather than succumb to adult authority, since such stories often strive to brainwash boys into ... More

The boys' adventure story is perhaps the genre that seems least likely to invite child readers to dodge rather than succumb to adult authority, since such stories often strive to brainwash boys into committing themselves to the imperialist cause. Chapter 2 argues that Treasure Island, long accepted as an exemplary text in this regard, actually functions as an anti-adventure story, inciting child readers to see through the seductive propaganda of typical desert island romances. Like Ewing, Robert Louis Stevenson portrays the project of draining foreign lands of riches as traumatizing and morally problematic. At the same time, he exposes flattery as the key narrative technique adult storytellers employ to seduce children into embracing the project of empire-building. Thus, the duplicitous Long John Silver butters up Jim Hawkins using the very same techniques employed by writers like W. H. G. Kingston and R. M. Ballantyne: addressing the boy as an equal, promising to tell him the truth, and portraying him as an invaluable collaborator in the project of subduing foreign lands. Treasure Island warns children to beware of the treachery of such silver-tongued adult storytellers.Less

Counting

Maurice S. Lee

in Overwhelmed: Literature, Aesthetics, and the Nineteenth-Century Information Revolution

This chapter talks about penetration of quantification into literary discourse. Lovers of literature could resist information and wax nostalgic for the deserted island reading of their youths, but ... More

This chapter talks about penetration of quantification into literary discourse. Lovers of literature could resist information and wax nostalgic for the deserted island reading of their youths, but adventure novels of the long nineteenth century show how “the accounting of literature” could also be aesthetically enchanting. British and American adventure novels from the period register a productive tension: guided by atavistic, preindustrial texts, characters flee from civilized realms marked by information overload only to impose informational modernity on the deserted islands and lost worlds they find. The chapter also explores the limits and wonders of quantification by using a sustained multiscalar approach—a close reading of Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island, a literary-historical argument that draws on a dozen transatlantic adventure fictions, and a distant reading project based on keyword frequencies in a corpus of 105 adventure novels. The chapter does not only explain how nineteenth-century literature accommodated the rise of information but also the prospect that the digital humanities might begin to tell a deeper history of itself.Less

Home and Abroad in the South Pacific: Spaces and Places in Robert Louis Stevenson and Katherine Mansfield’s Short Fiction

Stefanie Rudig

in Katherine Mansfield and the (Post)colonial

This essay focuses on the parallels between two (proto-)modernist stories: ‘The Beach of Falesá’ by Robert Louis Stevenson and Katherine Mansfield’s ‘Prelude’. Even though the authors’ movements ... More

This essay focuses on the parallels between two (proto-)modernist stories: ‘The Beach of Falesá’ by Robert Louis Stevenson and Katherine Mansfield’s ‘Prelude’. Even though the authors’ movements across the Pacific were diametrically opposed, their novella-length stories lend themselves to a comparison; both writers explore notions of home and of simultaneous belonging and alienation. Stevenson, whose fame relies largely on his adventure stories, writes against a Eurocentric textualisation of the South Pacific in his realist rendering of a cross-cultural romance, thus challenging the traditional dichotomy between ‘them’ and ‘us’. By contrast, Mansfield writes back to her homeland, placing the Burnell/Fairfield family in the New Zealand setting to investigate questions of identity and home as fluid and dynamic concepts. As both authors re-evaluate the relationship between self and other, between the strange and the familiar, they show that the difference between traversed and transgressive space is a thin line.Less

Dissecting the Doctor: Mr. Jekyll, Dr. Hyde, and Robert Knox

Caroline McCracken-Flesher

in The Doctor Dissected: A Cultural Autopsy of the Burke and Hare Murders

This chapter looks at Robert Louis Stevenson's “The Body Snatcher.” Thoroughly subjected by Scotland and by period medicine, Stevenson writes here as if he has at last escaped the clutch of both, and ... More

This chapter looks at Robert Louis Stevenson's “The Body Snatcher.” Thoroughly subjected by Scotland and by period medicine, Stevenson writes here as if he has at last escaped the clutch of both, and thus the traumatizing reach of Doctor Knox. In the Christmas Extra for the Pall Mall Gazette of 1884, he purveys this Scottish horror for the British market. England celebrated his winter's tale in screaming advertisements, and gobbled it up through numerous reprintings. But “The Body Snatcher” is only Stevenson's first visit to the doctor. Trauma demands repetition, and in Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), Stevenson translates the anxieties of 1828 into the era of chemical medicine—and exports them to London. In The Wrong Box (1889) he displaces them into yet another genre: comedy is the symptom of a broader critique.Less

Feelings for Nature in Victorian Scotland

Louisa Gairn

in Ecology and Modern Scottish Literature

This chapter considers the writings of Robert Louis Stevenson alongside those of nineteenth-century mountaineering intellectuals John Veitch and John Stuart Blackie, land rights campaigners, and the ... More

This chapter considers the writings of Robert Louis Stevenson alongside those of nineteenth-century mountaineering intellectuals John Veitch and John Stuart Blackie, land rights campaigners, and the poetry of Gaelic crofters, which, taken together, demonstrate a crucial shift towards a more bodily experience of the natural world, a new ‘feeling for nature’ spurred by developments in biological science which offered fresh perspectives on the relationship between self and world. It reports that the period from the 1850s until the end of the century saw the activity of mountaineering become increasingly popular in the British Isles, and become not only a sport but a ‘science of a highly complex character, cultivated by trained experts, with a vocabulary, an artillery, and rigorous methods of its own’.Less

Mapping Literary Value: Imperial/Modernist Forms in the Illustrated London News

Patrick Collier

in Modern Print Artefacts: Textual Materiality and Literary Value in British Print Culture, 1890-1930s

This chapter argues that the Illustrated London News and its imitators in the 1890s evolved a new and particularly apt system for representing the empire, the city of London, and the literary ... More

This chapter argues that the Illustrated London News and its imitators in the 1890s evolved a new and particularly apt system for representing the empire, the city of London, and the literary marketplace—all arenas that were expanding in rapid and disorienting fashion. By manipulating a nexus of space and value—indeed, by valuing its own page space according to an imperial spatial logic—the Illustrated London News traded on the comforting fiction that a vast and changing world could be ordered and comprehended on a weekly basis. The chapter traces these dynamics in text-and-image packages surrounding news from the empire, advertisements, and fiction by Henry James and Robert Louis Stevenson.Less

Notes from the borderlands: repressing the returned

in Representing Epilepsy: Myth and Matter

This chapter discusses the borderlands of epilepsy. It reviews the monks, Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and the untimely death of Arthur Thomas Myers. These ideas and ... More

This chapter discusses the borderlands of epilepsy. It reviews the monks, Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and the untimely death of Arthur Thomas Myers. These ideas and disparate events are all part of the circuit of culture that shapes epilepsy narratives well into the twentieth century. This chapter shows the success of Fyodor Mikhailovitch Dostoevsky in negotiating from the borderlands an enunciative position that compelled medical engagement and dialogue that goes some way in addressing the unliveable oppositions confronting Myers. It also suggests the conflict faced by Myers as a physician and an epileptic at the end of the nineteenth century.Less