The Oedipal struggle between Archie Hermiston and his awesome, hanging-judge father reaches a crisis in Chapter 3 – ‘In the Matter of the Hanging of Duncan Jopp.’ The chapter opens:

It chanced in the year 1813 that Archie strayed one day into the Judiciary Court. The macer made room for the son of the presiding judge. In the dock, the centre of men’s eyes, there stood a whey-coloured, misbegotten caitiff, Duncan Jopp, on trial for his life. His story, as it was raked out before him in that public scene, was one of disgrace and vice and cowardice, the very nakedness of crime; and the creature heard and it seemed at times as though he understood – as if at times he forgot the horror of the place he stood in, and remembered the shame of what had brought him there. He kept his head bowed and his hands clutched upon the rail; his hair dropped in his eyes and at times he flung it back; and now he glanced about the audience in a sudden fellness of terror, and now looked in the face of his judge and gulped. There was pinned about his throat a piece of dingy flannel; and that it was perhaps that turned the scale in Archie’s mind between disgust and pity. The creature stood in a vanishing point; yet a little while, and he was still a man, and had eyes and apprehension; yet a little longer, and with a last sordid piece of pageantry, he would cease to be. And here, in the meantime, with a trait of human nature that caught at the beholder’s breath, he was tending a sore throat.

There is a striking anticipation here of a passage in George Orwell’s ‘A Hanging’:

As an increasingly appalled Archie watches, Jopp and his slatternly mistress, Janet, are ruthlessly mocked by the judge in his braid-Scots dialect – ‘Godsake! ye make a bonny couple.’ Janet is spared, but Duncan is summarily sentenced to execution. In the course of passing sentence, Weir delivers himself of a particularly brutal obiter dictum: ‘I have been the means, under God, of hanging a great number, but never just such a disjaskit [untidy] rascal as yourself’. As the narrative observes: ‘The words were strong in themselves; the light and heat and detonation of their delivery, and the savage pleasure of the speaker in his task, made them tingle in the ears’ (Ch. 3).

Duncan Jopp leaves the dock, a pathetic spectacle in the eyes of court: ‘Had there been the least redeeming greatness in the crime, any obscurity, any dubiety, perhaps he might have understood’. For Archie the trial – more particularly the cosmic insignificance of Jopp as a defendant – has soiled his father irredeemably: ‘It is one thing to spear a tiger, another to crush a toad; there are aesthetics even of the slaughter-house; and the loathsomeness of Duncan Jopp enveloped and infected the image of his judge’ (Ch. 3). But neither here nor elsewhere does Stevenson indicate what Jopp’s ‘crime’ is, other than in the contemptuous vagueness of ‘His story … was one of disgrace and vice and cowardice, the very nakedness of crime’.

The short interval between sentencing and execution passes as a ‘violent dream’ for Archie. He is present at the public hanging of Jopp (in Edinburgh’s Grass Market, presumably):

It is Archie’s first overt act of rebellion against his father, and as such a threshold event in his life. He compounds his rebellion at the place of execution by proposing that evening at the ‘Spec’ debating society the ‘Jacobinical’ motion: ‘Whether capital punishment be consistent with God’s will or man’s policy?’ All this inevitably gets back to Hermiston who, with his habitual, unmanning insolence banishes Archie to the family estate at Hermiston. The scene is thus set for the events which will lead (had Stevenson lived long enough to write it) to Archie’s being brought up before his own father on a charge of murder and – presumably – being sentenced to the same fate as the luckless Jopp.

Stevenson devotes a great deal of space in Chapter 3 to the description of Duncan Jopp. But he nowhere tells us what his offence is. As is well known (and as RLS pointed out in letters to friends), Weir of Hermiston is based closely on the ‘Scottish Jeffreys’, Robert MacQueen, Lord Braxfield (1722–99). As Emma Letley explains, in her notes to the Oxford World’s Classics edition:

A ‘coarse and illiterate man’ (as Henry Cockburn called him) and spectacularly drunken to boot, who loved to use broad dialect on the bench, Braxfield made himself hated (and earned his ‘Jeffreys’ sobriquet) in the brutal repression of the Duns rioters over which he presided in 1793–4. His conduct was, Cockburn declared, ‘a disgrace to the age’. But Weir of Hermiston is set in a later age – 1813. Whatever else, Jopp is not guilty of any offence against civil order; his, we may be sure, is no ‘political’ crime. But what kind of crime is it? It is some two decades before the Peel reforms and Jopp could, in 1813, be hanged for the theft of a loaf of bread to feed his starving offspring. But his crime seems more sordid than this. ‘Grant he was vile’, Archie tells his father, ‘why should you hunt him with a vileness equal to his own?’ Some squalid sexual crime seems to be indicated. The point is necessary to assist the readers in arranging their sympathies towards father and son. If Jopp, for instance, had killed a man, or a woman, or a child, in cold blood we might well feel – even with the enlightened sympathies of the twentieth century – that the hanging was no ‘God-defying murder’, but justice. If, on the other hand, Jopp was a petty thief, or some wretched sexual delinquent, hanging would indeed strike the modern reader as judicial murder. By not instructing on this matter Stevenson, for his own artistic purposes, leaves us, like Jopp, twisting in the wind.

Notes

1. ‘A Hanging’, in The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, ed. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus, 4 vols. (London, 1968), i. 45.