APPENDICES

A.1 Ransome’s ‘Stevenson exercise-book’ transcribed

[Holograph manuscript, in the Brotherton Library, University of Leeds; blue cloth cover, ruled paper]

[spine]    STEVENSON. стивEнсонъ

[flyleaf]  Arthur Ransome,

Datcha [sic] Gellibrand,
Terijoki [sic],
Finland

A.1.i Preliminary material

[Three loose sheets of MS, same small quarto paper as the parcelled MS; on the first the following paragraph]

Stevenson. Conclusion.

It was about this time that Stevenson became ‘a great penny-whistler before the Lord’, and the fact deserves a little notice. The instrument is unjustly despised, even laughed at, but it is capable of great things. Stevenson and his stepson played duets: it led him to study the technique of music: he even composed for it. And, somehow, it is symbolical of his career. A grown man playing the instrument of youth, playing it with a skill not often dedicated to it, and, in larger matter, playing a penny whistle in the orchestra of English literature. [A wavy line through the first few lines, perhaps indicating deletion; ‘son’ crossed out, ‘stepson’ inserted.]

[Two loose folio sheets contain a summary list made by Ransome after 1945 from early diaries, of meetings with Robert Ross at the time of his book on Wilde, not relevant to Stevenson.]

The ‘Stevenson exercise book’

[many pages remain blank]

A.1.ii Annotated chronology of Stevenson’s life and works.

[fol. 1]

Stevenson.

1850

Nov. 13. Born 8 Howard Place, Edinburgh.
School. His father’s contempt for school learning. ‘Tutor was ever a byword with him; “positively tutorial”, he would say of people or manners he despised; and with rare consistency, he bravely encouraged me to neglect my lessons, and never so much as asked me my place in school.’ Life, 20.
Only child. Father, mother, nurse.

1857

17 Heriot Row. Eng. Lakes.
Colinton Manse. Early preferences in play, Life 34.
Toy theatre, 39. cudgel 43.
Henderson’s prepara[tory] Day school, for a few weeks. ‘57 again in ‘59, till ‘61, when he went to Edinburgh Academy, for 18 months, 64 then day school, till 67 when he went to the University.

1862

His father took him to London, for the 2nd Int. Exhibition, & abroad. Riviera, & his first tour of Lighthouse inspection.

[fol. unnumbered page between fols 1 and 2]

1866

The Parlour Diary.

1867

Edinburgh University & practical engineering. Swinton Cottage.

1868

Descent in diving suit, cf. Random Memories.

1869

To Shetland in the Pharos steamer with his father.

1870

3 weeks on Erraid, where Balfour was shipwrecked. Spec. 1869.
Atheist Socialist. Social enquirer. [?]full town life in Edinburgh. grandson of Art. North?
Friends. R. A. M. S., Walter Ferrier, Sir William Simpson.
Prof. Fleeming Jenkin.

1871

‘New Form of Intermittent Light for Lighthouses’. Worked for W.
Rogers.
Scottish Society of Arts.

[fol. 1v]

1874

Victor Hugo (1st ind. paper)

1876

Burns commissioned. Fontainebleau. With R. A. M. S. With Simpson
April July 25 early 15th cent. poetry.
Jan. John Knox. June ‘Forest Notes’.

1876–77

Virginibus Puerisque. 76 Inland voyaging & the Mast[er of] Ballantrae
when he had his imp. Lodging for the Night. Temple Bar Oct 77.

1877

Between Edn-Paris-London-Fontainebleau

1878

[illegible] + [?]Burford Bridge & Meredith. Autumn. Travelling with a donkey.

1878.

put, Jan, t[o] b[ed] ‘Sire de Maletroit’s Door’. ‘Will o’ the Mill’ Jan. Cornhill.

[fol. 2]

1878

’Inland Voyage’, May.
‘New Arabic [sic] Nights’, in London.
‘Donkey’ ‘Providence & Guitar’, Edinburgh

1879

Spring. ‘Deacon Brodie’.
Lay Morals

1879

Sept to Dec. ‘Thoreau’ [illegible]
Planned Prince Otto. [illegible]
Notes for Amateur Emigrant

1881 summer

‘Thrawn Janet’. Began C[hild’s] G[arden] of V[erses].
Merry Men
Treasure Island

1881 autumn

Life of Hazlitt [illegible] it.
Treasure Island finished.
Silverado Squatters.
‘Talk & Talkers’
‘Gossip on Romance’

[fol. 3]

March 83 → Oct. 84 Silverado Squatters. mission. Otto. C[hilds] G[arden] of Verses. Black Arrow.
(T[reasure] I[sland] published autumn.)
Sept. Dec. 1884 Admiral Guinea & Beau Austin.

1885

Finished Otto. Child’s Garden of Verses.
New Arabian Nights.
Attempted: Great North Road. Life of Wellington.

1885

Olalla. ?autumn
Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde

1886

Finished Kidnapped.
Preparation of Fleeming Jenkyn.

Sept. 1887–12

essays, for [illegible]. Dreams. [?] Paloris of Umbria.
Braggarts. Lanterns. Random Memories etc.

May 1888

Master of Ballantrae
Wrong Box.

[fol. 2v]

1887

Sept. Voyages in Ludgate Hill.
New York. Beginning of Sept.
End of Sept. went to Saranac Lake in the Adirondacks.
Penny Whistling.

1888

Saranac, left in April.
May, New Jersey Coast, cat-boat sailing.
June 28, sailed in the yacht Casco from San Francisco.
July 28, landfall in the South Seas. Nuka-hiva.

[fol. 4; On this last page of chronology, 1889–94, some titles are ticked; for Ransome a tick usually means ‘section written’. Here it may mean ‘book acquired’; see fols 65v and 66.]

1889, Dec. Finished ✓ Master of Ballantrae.

Wrong Box
✓ Bottle Imp

1890

The South Seas Father Damien.

1891

✓ Beach of Falesa (began)
Stories of [illegible] French.
Wrecker (Nov)
Footnote to History

1892

Correcting proofs ✓ Wrecker & ✓ ‘Beach of Falesá’ plans Sophia Scarlet
Catriona (Feb-May) ✓ Weir of Hermiston draft of typing

1893

St Ives
EbbTide

1894

Annals of his family.

Oct.

& St Ives.

Oct–Nov–Dec ✓ Weir of Hermiston.

A.1.iii Headed pages

[Quotations copied but unused, some with brief notes made]

[fol. 5]

The Sea.
Compare Stevenson’s attitude towards the sea with his attitude towards the letter of Ori-a-Ori, pp. 106 & 109, Letters, III.

[fols 7–9]

The Master of Ballantrae pub. Aug. 1889.
L[etters], III, 33. Letter to Colvin, Dec. 24, 1887, with 92pp of draft done.
With good example of S’s attitude towards imagined character. 36. ‘The master is all I know of the devil. I have known hints of him, in the world, but always cowards; he is as bold as a lion, but with the same deadly, causeless duplicity I have watched with so much surprise in my two cowards. ‘Tis true, I saw a hint of the same nature in another man who was not a coward; but he had other things to attend to; the Master has nothing else but his devilry.’
Letter to Miss Boodle, Christmas ’87.

L[etters] III, 37, ‘I am on the jump with a new story which has bewitched me – I doubt it may bewitch no one else. It is called The Master of Ballantrae – pronounce Bállan-tray. If it is not good, well, mine will be the fault; for I believe it is a good tale.’

[fol. 8]

Master of Ballantrae.
L[etters] III, 48, to Henry James.
An account of the plot, with just criticism. e.g.
‘Five parts of it are sound, human tragedy; the last one or two, I regret to say, not so soundly designed; I about hesitate to write them; they are very picturesque, but they are fantastic; they shame, perhaps degrade, the beginning. …
    For the third suppposed death and the manner of the third reappearance is steep; steep, sir. It is even very steep, and I fear it shames the honest stuff so far; but then it is highly pictorial, and it leads up to the death of the elder brother at the hands of the younger in a perfectly cold blooded murder, of which I wish (and mean) the reader to approve. You see how daring is the design.’

[fol. 9]

Master of Ballantrae
Finished May ’89 at Waikiki, Honolulu.

[fol. 11]

Characteristics of Style
‘Then was a view on a bit of empty wood, a few dark houses, a donkey wandering with its shadow on a slope, and a blink of sea, with a tall ship lying anchored in the moonlight.’ [Ransome’s italics] Squatters, 5.
Sound and sense
Somerset as the new employé of Prince Florizel (Mr. Goodall of the Cigar Divan) provides a good example:–
‘“Or opulent rotunda strike the sky,” said the shopman to himself, in the tone of one considering a verse. “I suppose it would be too much to say ‘orotunda’, and yet how noble it were! ‘Or opulent orotunda strike the sky’. But that is the bitterness of art; you see a good effect, and some nonsense about sense continually intervenes.” ’
M[ore] N[ew] Arabian [Nights]. Dynamiter, 281.

[fol. 12]

Style.
War against the adjective and the optic nerve. cf. Letters, IV, 231. aet. 43
but cf. p. 11 here [i.e. of this notebook], donkey & shadow: the visual
propensities of his youth.
‘feeling’ action, ‘hearing’ speech; also IV. 231.
‘constipated mosaic manner’ of Weir, & (so he says) of The Ebb
Tide, cf. Letters, IV, 247.

[fol. 14]

Character
The fog in the valley below the mountain suggests the rising deluge – and – ‘The imagination loves to trifle with what is not. Had this been indeed the deluge, I should have felt more strongly, but the emotion would have been similar in kind. I played with this idea, as the child flees in delighted terror from the creations of his fancy. The look of the thing helped me. And when at last I began to flee up the mountain, it was indeed partly to escape from the raw air that kept me coughing, but it was also part in play.’ Silverado Squatters, 115.

Lantern bearers. Across the Plains, 138.
cf. Balzac on Paris & M[illegible]. Wrecker, 26.

[fol. 15]

Character.      Lighthouses.
Lighthouses: Poems, 44.
‘Say not of me that weakly I declined
The labours of my sires …’
Poems, 42. ‘Skerryvore’, &, ‘Skerryvore: The Parallel’.
Poems, 38. ‘To my Father’.

Action.
Letters, IV, 243.
‘I ought to have been able to build lighthouses and write ‘David Balfour’ too. Hinc illae lacrymae.…’[etc.]
cf. also earlier in same letter.

[fol. 16]

The cloak, [Letters,] I 123.
Didacticism defended at 18. [Letters], I, 17.
me and the birds. [Letters,] I, 33.
Enfants, 120.
aet. 18. Don’t say anything about the plot because he had not yet finished The Moonstone of Wilkie Collins Scotch songs [Letters,] I, 117.

[fol. 17]

The sedulous ape.
Lamb. ‘We wore them (tin bull’s-eye lanterns) buckled to the waist upon a cricket belt, and over them, such was the rigour of the game, a buttoned top-coat.’
Across the Plains, (The Lantern Bearers), 143.

[fol. 20]

Letters.
Used in actual writing.
‘what I liked still less … [etc.]’ The Wrecker. P. 173, Letters p. [sic] Letters, I. 14 – Unpleasant Places. Essays of Travel. 225. ‘Breezy, Breezy.’

[fol. 23]

Attitude towards art.
cf. ‘I would love to have my hour as a native Maker, and be read by my own countryfolk in our own dying language: an ambition surely rather of the heart than of the head, so restricted as it is in prospect of endurance, so parochial in bounds of space.’ Note to ‘Underwoods’, Poems. 7.
‘I could never be induced to take the faintest interest in Brompton qua Brompton or a drawing-room qua drawing-room. I am an Epick Writer with k to it, but without the necessary genius.’ Letters, IV, 134.

[fol. 25]

Treasure Island & Black Arrow. 1883–84 appearing in serial, Young Folks 2.
Black Arrow. Schwob asked leave to translate it, in 1890. Tushery.
‘I had had to leave ‘Fontainebleau’, when three hours would finish it & go full-tilt at tushery for a while.’ [Letters,] II, 117.
Written to Colvin who had criticised serial appearance:– Letters, 142.
‘I am so pleased you liked Crookback; he is a fellow whose hellish energy has always fixed my attention. I wish Shakespeare had written the play after he had learned more of the rudiments of lit. & art rather than before. Some day I will re-tickle the Sabre Missile, and shoot it, moyennant finances, once more into the air; I can lighten it much and devote more attention to Dick o’ Gloucester. It’s great sport to write tushery.’
T[reasure] I[sland]. ‘It was the sight of your maimed strength and watchfulness that kept John Silver in Treasure Island. Of course he is not in any other quality or feature the least like you; but the idea of the maimed man, ruling and dreaded by the sound, was entirely taken from you.’ To Henley, Letters, II, 116. 1883.
B[lack] [Arrow].
I find few greater pleasures than reading my own works, but I never, O I never read The Black Arrow.
Nov 1883, reads this time (‘the Lord begot them’) pleased … referring to T[reasure] I[sland], [Letters,] II, 155.

[fol. 26]

cf. earn my seamanship in journey …
T[reasure] I[sland] ‘I make these paper people to please myself and Skelt, and God Almighty, and with no other purpose. Yet am I mortal myself; for, as I remind you, I begged for a supervising mariner.’
excellent letter on realism etc. [Letters,] II, 152.

[fol. 28]

Catriona
‘I shall never write a better book than Catriona, that is my high water mark …’ [etc] Letters, IV, 258.

[fol. 30]

Opinions on Contemporaries. etc.
Aestheticism. He congratulates James Payn on not having been an aesthete. L[etters,] IV, 95.

[fol. 31]

Opinions
‘Chateaubriand is more antipathetic than anyone else in the world.’ [Letters,] I, 81.

[fol. 32]

Technique of Narration.
Talkative squire in T[reasure] I[sland] Continuation. Knowledge of weakness in heart of Ballantrae.

[fol. 34]

The South Seas
Sailed from San Francisco in Casco. June 88. Visited eastern islands early in 89. Honolulu. Thence in trading schooner.
Equator 70 tons, 4 months among the Gilberts. Samoa end of 1889. 3rd cruise – in Janet Nicoll.
The sketch of native history in the Gilberts.
The execution by assassination of the unfit [illegible] chief. character sketches of kings.
Tembinok of Apemana & his Ladies School of a palace. chronicles, port, etc.
The cannibal high place.
The building of a town for Stevenson’s party. p. 289 etc.
Forth Cove. p. 189, to decayed, fast changing, flying corpse.

[fol. 36]

Poetry.
Marjorie Fleming.
‘Children are certainly too good to be true.’
Letters, I, 105.
Nelitschka. etc. at Menton.

A.1.iv Lists and plans

[fol. 61v]

Virginibus Puerisque.
Donkey. Inland Voyage
Silverado Squatters. Amateur Emigrant etc. Essays of Travel? Merry Men

[fol. 62]

Plan.

I

Introductory.

II

Biographical Summary.

III

The Early Essayist.

IV

Short Stories.

V

New Arabian Nights, and The Dynamiter.

VI

Treasure Island and Black Arrow.

IX

Jekyll and Hyde. Markheim. etc. to [?highness] of Hawthorne.

X

The Scotch stories. Kidnapped & Catriona. The Master of Ballantrae.

XI

The collaborations. ? Fleeming Jenkin. experiments in style.

XII

Weir of Hermiston

VII

Child’s Garden of Verses & poetry generally.

VII

The South Seas. Island Nights Entertainments.

XIII

Conclusion.

[Arrows lead VII and VIII to their places; a sum divides 60,000 by 13, giving 5000; another column lists 4.5, 13, 135, 45, 585 – these relate to numbers of pages written, and word-counts.]

[fol. 62v]

Stevenson’s Books
Inland Voyage
Edinburgh

Travels with a Donkey

[fol. 66]

Books wanted for Stevenson.
Gosse. Critical Kit Kats.
Voyages
of Capt. Woodes Rogers.
Shakespearian dramas for toy theatres. (Skelt).
W. H. Low Chronicle of Friendships.
A Cloud of Witnesses.

Selections from the Covenanting writers.
Robertson’s Sermons.
G. P. R. James.
Shorter Catechism.
Herman Melville.
Henry James. Partial Portraits.
Rocambole (Squatters
133)
✓ Barbey d’Aurevilly
H. J. Moors. Stevenson in Samoa.
✓ Labiche.

[fol. 68]

[listing number of MS pages completed under each heading.]
Sea. 5
Ballantrae 7
Style 11
Character 14
Sedulous ape 7
Letters 20
Contemporaries 30
Treasure Island}
Black Arrow} 25
Attitude towards Art. 23