Through what little channels, by what hints and premonitions, the consciousness of the man’s art dawns first upon the child, it should be not only interesting but instructive to inquire. A matter of curiosity to-day, it will become the ground of science tomorrow. From the mind of childhood there is more history and philosophy to be fished up than from all the printed volumes in a library.
—ROSA QUO LOCORUM
If the crucible of identity mixes personal, social, and societal influences, then this chapter, tracing the formative ingredients of Stevenson’s identity, draws on all three elements. To do so properly, we begin centuries before Stevenson’s birth. Stevenson loved history—particularly Scottish history—and this love reflected how much of his self-understanding was steeped in his sense of his family’s hard-won legacy of professional prominence and religious piety. For the contemporary reader, venturing out to the remote lighthouses of the Scottish firths, tracing the steps of the covenanting martyrs, and navigating the “wynds of Auld Reekie” may sound like quaint and arcane journeys, but each of these brief excursions holds a key to the person that Stevenson became. To understand him, both as a man and writer, we first travel back across centuries to a remote islet of jagged rocks and crashing waves.
On April 6, 1320, in what is now the county of Angus, north of Edinburgh and south of Aberdeen, on Scotland’s eastern coast, the Scottish parliament, under Robert the Bruce, met at Abroath Abbey and declared Scotland’s independence from the Roman Catholic Pope. Later in that same century, the Abbot of Abroath (or Aberbrothok, as it was called in the older Norse language) had a bell placed on Inchcape Rock eleven miles off the coast in the waters of the North Sea. The nineteenth-century poet Robert Southey commemorated this event and the subsequent stealing of the bell by the pirate Ralph the Rover in a well-loved poem, “Inchcape Rock.”
The Abbot of Aberbrothok
Had placd that bell on the Inchcape Rock;
On a buoy in the storm it floated and swung,
And over the waves its warning rung.
When the Rock was hid by the surge’s swell,
The Mariners heard the warning Bell;
And then they knew the perilous Rock,
And blest the Abbot of Aberbrothok.
From this fabled tale and these honorific verses, Inchcape Rock gradually became known as Bell Rock. Whatever name it went by, it was considered one of the most dangerous passages in the entire North Sea. In a typical winter, there might be a half dozen ships wrecked and sunk by its hidden reefs and swirling breakers.
Due to its danger and the remoteness of the Rock, very few men other than local fishermen had set foot on its surface since the time of the Abbot’s bell. However, in 1800, the dawn of a new century, filled with extraordinary progress in transportation, commerce, and industry, Robert Stevenson, the grandfather of Robert Louis Stevenson, scaled for the first time this legendary sea-ravaged slab. He surveyed the ruins of numerous ships—a cabin stove, the hinge of a door, a cannonball, a shoe buckle—and renewed his vow that he would build a lighthouse there. Having followed in his stepfather’s footsteps, as the chief engineer for the Northern Lighthouse Board of Scotland, he had already built lighthouses on Little Cumbrae Island in the Firth of Clyde and on the Orkney Islands further north. However, none of these projects approached the engineering challenges and physical risks of building a sea-washed lighthouse on ground submerged in water twelve feet deep as much as twenty hours a day.
After many setbacks, construction began in 1806 and continued through the end of 1810. Lives were lost; costs far beyond what had been budgeted were incurred; ships and equipment were damaged by the relentless storms and surf, but the first light shone from the tallest offshore lighthouse in the world on February 1, 1811. With much of its original masonry intact today, it remains the oldest surviving sea-washed lighthouse, and since its installation there has not been a single shipwreck off Bell Rock (with one exception during the blackout imposed during World War I).
On the basis of this accomplishment and many other engineering achievements, Stevenson Engineering became a worldwide name in lighthouse and civic construction. Robert’s sons, David, Alan, and Thomas, all became principals in the firm and helped dot both coasts of Scotland, as well as England, with lighthouses and beacons that protected mariners of all nationalities, contributing to a golden age of British sea trade and expansion. Their work on illumination extended to the gas lamps that lit the streets of Edinburgh and imprinted behind the yellow flame of these lights was the name “Stevenson and Sons.”
On November 13, 1666, in the parish of Balmaclellan, located in the Galloway hills of Southwest Scotland, soldiers of the Scottish Royal army grabbed hold of an elderly man, alternately dragging and beating him through the dusty road to town. His offense was that he had not paid the Church fine for his failure to attend the Episcopal service required by government law. This old man was a “Covenanter,” or nonconformist to the official Anglican doctrines, put in place when Charles II was restored as monarch over the British Isles after the regime of the revolutionary Puritan, Oliver Cromwell.
The Presbyterian Covenanters who traced their religious practices to the teachings of the Scottish Calvinist John Knox were fundamentally opposed to the Anglican hierarchy that based its structure on the “divine right of kings.” According to the Anglican or “Episcopalian” (Episcopus means bishop in Latin) regime, the king is the head of both state and church, and the bishops and their subordinates right down the eccelesiastical line follow his dictates. Presbyterian Covenanters (from Latin Presbyter for elders) strongly adhered to a more decentralized system of church governance based in committees drawn from the local congregation. Espousing the view that there is only one divine king, Jesus Christ, they refused to accept the statutes and strictures imposed by Charles’s church and government. Their various covenants throughout the seventeenth century were efforts to affirm their fundamental loyalty to Christ and to maintain the simplicity of their worshiping practices in response to the more “Romanized” rituals of the Anglican Church, such as kneeling during communion. By the 1660s, they had become outcasts and targets of persecution, imprisoned, exiled, tortured, and even murdered for their religious dissent.
On the fateful day of November 13, 1666, the beating of this defenseless elder led to a spontaneous resistance outside a local alehouse. This skirmish precipitated a full rebellion against the Anglican troops, leading to a disastrous defeat of the rebels in the Pentland Hills outside of Edinburgh. “The Pentland Rising” became a symbol of Covenanter resistance and royal oppression. Many further struggles ensued and distrust of the state and its official church has lingered in the minds of many Scots, even to the present day. Stevenson and every other Edinburgh youth of his day cut their teeth on this history of rebellion and similar stories that romanticized the Scottish spirit of defiance.
Sitting on an extinct volcanic rock ledge, Edinburgh Castle is the great landmark and focal point of the Old Town, the original and southern portion of the Edinburgh city center. Edinburgh itself is boundaried to the northeast by the Firth of Forth, which links to the North Sea some thirty miles away. In the southeast of the city are the Salisbury Crags, orange rows of cliffs crowned by Arthur’s Seat, an easily scalable rocky mount that gives panoramic views of the city, the Firth, and the Pentland Hills to the further south. Arthur’s Seat is a spot of rich mythology—rumored to be the site of Camelot, at its foot David I, King of Scots, saw a vision of a stag with a cross between its antlers, leading him to found Holyrood Abbey in sacred remembrance. The young girls of Edinburgh are said to bathe their faces in the morning dew each May Day as they turn to the ruins of the Abbey’s edifice. To the immediate northwest of Arthur’s Seat lies Calton Hill with its tower monument commemorating Admiral Nelson, as well as the columned façade of the National Monument, a Parthenon-like structure honoring the Scottish dead from the Napoleonic Wars, never finished due to lack of money, and once derisively known as “Scotland’s disgrace.”
Unfortunately, it is unlikely that much or any of these scenic heights might have been visible on a typical day in the mid-nineteenth century. Edinburgh had gained the name, “Auld Reekie,” or in the Scottish language, “Old Smokey,” as a result of the coal fire smog that suffocated the city with its yellow-brown haze slithering through the streets and hugging the city’s stonewalls. And if not obscured by smog, there was always the weather.
But Edinburgh pays cruelly for her high seat in one of the vilest climates under heaven. She is liable to be beaten upon by all the winds that blow, to be drenched with rain, to be buried in cold sea fogs out of the east, and powered with the snow as it comes flying southward from the Highland hills. The weather is raw and boisterous in winter, shifty and ungenial in summer, and a downright purgatory in the spring. (Edinburgh Picturesque Notes)
Even with limited visibility due to weather or man-made haze, it is easy to tell from the vantage point of Edinburgh Castle’s walls that the city is divided into two halves, the Old Town and the New Town. The Old Town shows the remnants of a medieval walled city with “wynds” and “closes”—narrow winding streets, alleyways, and greystone buildings with shops and dwellings piled on top of each other. By the mid-nineteenth century, the Old Town featured many pockets of poverty, raw sewage draining past the cobbled lanes, prostitutes, beggars, criminals, public houses, and flimsy stalls of every variety along the Grassmarket. Just south of the Old Town was Greyfriars Church, where Covenanters had signed their names and taken open stands against the Scottish Church and the royal government. A few blocks away reposed the original campus of Edinburgh University on South Bridge, the fabled site of the eighteenth-century Scottish Enlightenment where luminaries such as David Hume (at the ripe age of twelve) began his studies, and Adam Smith gave his most important public lectures, articulating his vision of a “free market” economy.
From The Mound that descends just north of George IV Bridge, one spies the orderly grid of the New Town stretching out with its neat rows of Georgian brick facades, running east-west, beginning with Princes Street, followed by George Street, and then by Queen Street (just in case there was any doubt of the Anglicized influence on this part of the more affluent and thoroughly “civilized” sector of the city). The New Town was to become the symbol of the 1707 Act of Union—a vision of a modern Scotland that would provide housing and amenities to the rising merchant and business classes of Edinburgh, the beneficiaries of peaceful trade with its southern English partner, as well of the growing industrialization, transforming every town and city in the land. Along with impressive three-story row homes, terraced gardens, and fashionable boutiques, the New Town hosted museums, galleries, and botanic gardens. It offered a well-woven social fabric of prosperity and propriety; yet it was just a hillside away from the darker tenements of the Old Town and only blocks from the sprawling warehouses, open-air markets, and stockyards of Leith Walk to the east. On its opposite western border ran the Water of the Leith, snaking from south to north, carrying its muddied flow from the suburban areas of Redford and Colinton across Union Canal and Dean’s Bridge, heading to the Forth.
Into this contradictory hodgepodge of natural beauty and city squalor, history and modernity, wealth and poverty, respectability and vice, religious observance and dissenting rebellion, in the year 1850, Robert Lewis Balfour Stevenson was born on November 13 (the very fitting anniversary of the Pentland Rising) at 8 Howard Place, in the northern portion of the New Town, near the botanical gardens. Louis, as he was known to his intimates, was the only child of Thomas Stevenson and Margaret Isabella Balfour Stevenson. (He changed the spelling from Lewis to Louis in his late teens, partly after his father took a dislike to a religious dissenter with the last name of Lewis, and partly after his own embrace of all things French; nevertheless, although the spelling changed, he retained the English pronunciation.) Thomas Stevenson, age thirty-two, a lighthouse engineer, was the third son, after Alan and David, of Robert Stevenson, principal owner of the Stevenson Engineering Firm. Robert, the grandfather, died four months before Louis’s birth, and it is likely that Thomas was still in the throes of mourning this loss.
Thomas Stevenson was a volatile and childlike man with intense passion for his work, his wife, and his faith. He projected a stern presence with broad shoulders, a wide bald pate and thick sideburns, black frock coat, and often severe temper. He had the rigidity of a true believer in the doctrines of Christ, but he was also a deeply sentimental and caring man. An indifferent student, he hated school growing up and showed little aptitude for the mathematics that formed a foundation for his designated career within the family’s engineering firm. On the contrary, he loved literature; had a knack for storytelling; and displayed facility for dialects, humor, and tall tales. Yet whatever literary ambitions he might have harbored needed to be suppressed in favor of his familial calling. To his own and his family’s benefit, he soon displayed more than enough practical skills in the nuts and bolts of engineering construction along with a genuine interest in the vagaries of waves, coastlines, and currents.
Working under his brother, Alan, he contributed to the building of Skerryvore, the tallest lighthouse off the coast of Scotland, and with his brother, David, built two other important sea-based lighthouses, and no fewer than twenty-seven shore-based lighthouses and two dozen beacons, along with many other harbor engineering projects. His greatest scientific accomplishment was in the development of revolving intermittent flashing lights that greatly enhanced the visibility of the lighthouses’ warning signals. Yet despite this distinguished record of success, Thomas was a pessimistic fellow who possessed a fundamental sense of unworthiness, perhaps due to the even more celebrated accomplishments of his father and older brother, but also traceable to the powerful messages of original sin and fatalism at the heart of his Calvinist faith. It was difficult for Thomas to maintain a positive vision of the world; he was self-doubting, hypochondriacal, and prone to expect the worst of outcomes. His son wrote of him shortly after his death in 1887:
He was a man of somewhat antique strain: with a blended sternness and softness that was wholly Scottish and at first somewhat bewildering; with a profound essential melancholy of disposition and (what often accompanies it) the most humorous geniality in company; shrewd and childish; passionately attached, passionately prejudiced; a man of many extremes, many faults of temper, and no very stable foothold for himself among life’s troubles. (“Thomas Stevenson”)
Thomas’s dark moods were no small matter in the household. Stevenson described him as capable of falling to his knees in “paroxysms of anger.” Thomas’s older brother, Alan, considered the most brilliant of the three sons, eventually retired from the firm due to mental instability that included delusional ideas and unpredictable rages. There were occasional fears that Thomas’s gloom might take him in the same direction. Still, he could often be gracious, endearingly funny, and very loving to his family and friends.
This was to be part of the dilemma for Louis as he worked to find his own place in the world. Despite his fundamental warmth, Thomas’s difficult temperament and unbending commitment to his religion often put him on the other side of conflicts with Louis. Although they reconciled some years before Thomas’s death, a good decade or more of strained relations prevailed between the two from Louis’s late teens to early thirties. Recognizing the contradictions and quicksilver emotions that became signatures of Louis’s personality, it is not difficult to trace their origins to his father’s alternating bouts of pique and indulgence toward his only son.
There is more than Thomas’s volatile temperament and dogma that laid the seeds for Stevenson’s own identity struggles. Thomas’s Calvinism expressed itself in a profound sense of his own unworthiness in the eyes of his divine ruler. He seemed to carry with him a persistent shame that might be traced to a sense of his own inhibited desires. Whether this was due to sexual repression, as Stevenson’s biographer, Claire Harman, suggests, or his stunted literary ambitions, or both, is hard to say, but certainly the tension between emotional release and restraint was communicated to his son.
The result over the years may have been what psychoanalysts define as the defensive process of “projective identification” transpiring between father and son. Unable to tolerate what he perceived as his own transgressive love of art and imagination, Thomas unconsciously located these desires in Louis (projecting them on to his son). Louis accordingly displayed these artistic desires, while simultaneously identifying with his father and experiencing the same aura of shame. Completing the defensive reversal, Thomas could then release his anger at these “illicit” impulses, which were being expressed by Louis rather than himself. Bound together in this way, father and son danced a pas de deux of desire and condemnation for much of Louis’s upbringing and early adulthood.
Margaret Stevenson was twenty-one when Louis was born. She had met Thomas on a train when she was eighteen years old and traveling with an aunt and uncle; they were married a year later in 1848. Margaret was the twelfth of thirteen children, nine of whom survived into adulthood from infancy. Her father, Lewis Balfour, was minister of Saint Cuthbert Church in Colinton four miles from Edinburgh center; her mother was Henriettta Scott Smith. Louis’s grandparents lived in the manse of the church, and the home was a hub of activity for scores of cousins who visited every weekend and holiday. Margaret, or Maggie, as she was known by all family members, was a slim, tall, and extremely attractive woman with clear, sculpted features, rich brown hair, and smooth skin that she maintained to her death at age sixty-eight. Although she shared some of Thomas’s proneness toward sickness, she exhibited little of his darker disposition. If anything, she was rather unquestioningly cheerful and aggressively dismissive of any hint of negativity. Early biographers of Stevenson noted her “blithe spirit”; her motto was “Do good yourself; make others happy.”
I do want to linger for a moment on Maggie’s physical fragility during the early years of Louis’s life; there is something important to note on several counts. Maggie’s father had displayed some respiratory concerns as a young man and had been sent south for his condition. Maggie, too, appeared to suffer an acute problem with her lungs and required a good deal of bed rest when Louis was in his toddler years. Similarly, it appeared that her labor and delivery had been very difficult and health concerning. Thomas and she reached an understanding on medical advice that it would be best for her not to have any more children. This restriction only highlighted how precious Louis was to his parents as their only child.
I raise this theme of potential hereditary illness because Louis was himself soon to show health problems, despite starting out as a chubby-cheeked, healthy baby. We know a great deal about Louis’s early years because Maggie kept a detailed diary, logging his early milestones and the frightening list of ailments he endured. At various times these entries have been published as a supplement within Stevenson’s collected works. Before he was two years old, Maggie recorded his pleasure in stories, especially bible stories of Cain and Abel, the burning bush, Daniel in the lion’s den, but also Eva and Uncle Tom (from Uncle Tom’s Cabin). In recording her young son’s remarks to her, she repeatedly highlighted his heightened concern with morality and his propensity to worry about doing the right thing. Not yet two-and-a-half years old, he fretted that he went outside without making “an elegant bow to Mamma.” Again before he turned three, he was asking his mother why God would make a woman “naughty” enough to pour hot ointment on Christ’s wounds. His favorite occupation, according to Maggie, was making “a pulpit with a chair and stool, and [he] reads sitting and then stands up and sings by turns.”
Yet by March in his third year, he had begun to show signs of illness and was confined to bed for several weeks with fever and croup. Maggie also mentioned her own illness, removing her from much contact with Louis for the first weeks of May of that same year. Claire Harman summarizes the parade of maladies:
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, chicken pox, and scarlet fever.
On top of this list, there are sixteen separate entries in the diary for “colds” of various severity in his first eleven years. Louis’s propensity to coughs, fevers, and severe congestion incessantly worried his parents, making them fear asthma, or even worse, tuberculosis. The chubby cheeks were soon gone, and for the rest of Louis’s life, he would be absurdly thin and sallow-cheeked. There were times in his adult life when, despite being five feet ten inches tall, he weighed no more than 110 pounds! His thinness, coughing fits of sputum and blood, night sweats, and fever all pointed to tuberculosis or the old-fashioned term, “consumption.” Yet none of the many doctors who examined Stevenson ever pronounced a definitive tuberculosis diagnosis and in late 1887–1888, Stevenson, while under the care of the American physician Edward L. Trudeau (great-grandfather of Doonesbury cartoonist, Gary Trudeau), at Saranac Lake in the Adirondacks, produced a negative test for the bacillus. If Stevenson was not a tuberculosis sufferer, then what really caused his astonishing range of ailments?
Alan Guttmacher, now the director of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development at the NIH, a pediatrician and medical geneticist, along with coauthor J. R. Callahan offered one possibility. Osler-Rendu-Weber syndrome, or hereditary hemorrhagic telangiectasia (HHT), is a genetic disease of the blood vessels, affecting both the capillaries and larger veins and arteries of the body. Weakening and causing malformations in the vessels, its defining symptoms are nosebleeds, ruptured veins near the surface of the skin, coughing-up blood, gastric ulcers, and cerebral hemorrhage. It is an autosomal dominant disease, meaning it can be passed on by only one parent who also carries the gene. Based on Maggie’s records of her own bouts of respiratory difficulty and coughing hemorrhages, and a stroke-like episode that incapacitated her for five months at the age of thirty-eight, the authors surmised that Maggie was the carrier who passed her vulnerability on to Stevenson.
The course of HHT is unpredictable because the bleeding caused by the weakened vessels and the diverted blood flows created by the fistulas between arteries and veins are widely dispersed and difficult to detect. Individuals can have periods of reasonably normal health until a vessel or vessels give way and a more acute condition emerges. Stevenson had suffered only minor episodes of nosebleeds and coughing blood until the age of twenty-nine, when, at the time of his pursuit of Fanny in California, he had a full-fledged hemorrhage in his lung and expectorated copious amounts of blood. He dubbed this episode a visitation from “Bluidy Jack,” and this personage returned to him numerous times in the subsequent fifteen years. However, HHT does not always generate constant difficulties, and there were long stretches, especially toward the end of his life, when Bluidy Jack was absent from his life. Still, it does not take much to imagine how being a sickly and only child of wealthy hyperattentive parents might have subsequently affected Stevenson’s tendency to self-importance, as well as his prolonged dependence on their support of his often costly ventures. To Maggie, her sickly and precocious child was a fragile creature of genius that could do no wrong.
Doted on by both parents, Louis grew up in relative affluence in his New Town homes, first at Howard Place, then Inverlieth Terrace, and finally at age seven, 17 Heriot Row, the home his parents occupied until his father’s death in 1887. Seventeen Heriot Row was a majestic three-story row house with a spiral staircase and glazed window cupola, an impressive second-story drawing room, and a kitchen and wine cellar in the basement. It looked directly out upon the block-long Queen Street Gardens and to Queen Street beyond. As was customary for upper middle-class families of the time, Louis was attended to by a nurse/governess. After his first few nurses did not work out (there is some suggestion that one of them brought him to a pub and set him on the bar counter), the Stevensons hired Alison Cunningham (or “Cummy”) when Louis was eighteen months old.
Cummy looms large in all biographies of Stevenson and he himself made multiple references to her in his memoirs and essays. Her importance in Stevenson’s psychological life is indisputable. As Lesley Graham points out in a recent article on Cummy’s shifting status in biographical accounts of Stevenson, she has been alternately portrayed as the very archetype of the “selfless” Victorian nurse and as a pernicious influence on Stevenson with her religious “fanaticism” and overwrought emotionality. After reviewing Stevenson’s writings, contemporaries’ accounts of their interactions with her, both during her time in the Stevenson household and after, as well as her own diary entries during her travels with the Stevenson family, I find it hard not to assign Cummy both praise and blame.
Cummy was born in the coastal town of Torryburn, on the banks of the Firth of Forth, northwest of Edinburgh. She was raised in a Calvinist tradition that revered the Covenanters. As a member of the Free Church of Scotland, her religious views were even stricter than Louis’s father; theater going, wine on the Sabbath, and card playing were all anathema to her. At the same time, her small-town roots were bathed in the bloody stories of the Covenanters’ rebellions along with folk tales of the “black man” (aka, the devil) haunting graveyards and moonless nights. All who knew her described her great theatrical capacity for conveying these dramatics in a broad Scots delivery with waving hands and swaying body. Pious and determined to convey to her young charge an appreciation of original sin and the fathomless dangers of hell, she also could not resist stories of adventure, heroism, and the supernatural. As Lord Guthrie, an Edinburgh barrister, who knew Stevenson from law school days and maintained a relationship with Cummy until her death at ninety-two, wrote,
… [S]he stored his hospitable mind, in childhood and in boyhood, with Scripture passages, tales of Bible heroes and of Bunyan heroes, stories of Scots Reformers and Covenanters, privateers and press-gang, and legends, in prose and verse, of pirates and smugglers, witches and fairies.
All of these tales were imparted, according to Stevenson, in a manner “as a poet would scarce read his own; gloating on the rhythm, dwelling with delight on assonances and alliterations” (“Rosa Quo Locorum”).
In addition to these indulgences, Cummy also allowed Louis to make his weekly purchases of paper cut-out figures (known at that time by their manufacturer’s name, as “Skelt’s Juvenile Drama”), which he would color and place in a wooden miniature theater. The cut-outs (a penny for plain and “two-pence coloured”) were accompanied by melodrama scenarios that specified each scene to be displayed and gave brief background on the assembled characters. An abbreviated list of some of the Skelt titles imparts a flavor of the stories that thrilled Louis’s receptive imagination—“Three-Fingered Jack,” “The Red Rover,” “The Terror of Jamaica,” “Aladdin,” “The Old Oak Chest,” and “The Smuggler.” Stevenson wrote of his enchantment with Skelt, “Every sheet we fingered was another lightning glance into obscure, delicious story; it was like wallowing in the raw stuff of story-books. I know nothing to compare with it save now and then in dreams, when I am privileged to read in certain unwrit stories of adventure, from which I awake to find the world all vanity.”
Cummy, herself, sensed the contradiction that the mixture of pirate tales and pious tracts might provoke in her charge. Sometimes she cut off stories and encouraged Stevenson to pray for forgiveness for wicked inclinations. Other times, she brought Louis to the same stationery store to take a quick look at the “penny dreadful” magazines to discover how the aborted tale had concluded. On occasion, Louis’s own hyperdeveloped religiosity kicked in, and he scolded Cummy for sharing a tale in which the ghoulishness or violence went too far.
These early influences were critical in Stevenson’s developing sense of the world around him. The brain is still coordinating neural connections and maturing anatomically throughout childhood and into late adolescence. As children first take in the world, a vocabulary of initial imagery and then language is laid down that becomes the cognitive filter through which they organize and categorize the world. For Louis, a precious and highly sensitive child, these graphic images of good and evil, of excitement and repentance, were initial structures by which to perceive and measure the world around him. An only child, often confined to bed due to his respiratory problems, his close companionship with Cummy exposed him to an emotionally heightened and inevitably confusing world that veered between sin and pleasure at a vertiginous rate.
The elements that I have collected—the prominence of his family’s engineering conquests, the religious history of Covenanter resistance and piety, the marked contrasts of Auld Reekie, his father’s volatility, his mother’s benevolence, his chronic illness, and Cummy’s zealotry—are the raw ingredients of characters, settings, and memories that contribute to Stevenson’s internalized narrative of his childhood. There is strong evidence that Stevenson did indeed create a rather stable narrative of these early years of his life that can be found in his essays, poems, and letters over the course of three different decades. In particular, there are a few significant autobiographical fragments unpublished at the time of his death that coalesce around a specific vision of his early childhood (e.g., “Early Memories,” “Notes on Childhood,” “Rosa Quo Locorum,” and “Reminiscences of Colinton Manse”). There is evidence that he returned to these writings repeatedly, revising and adding to them at different junctures. In tracing Stevenson’s narrative identity, they provide a window into what themes and recurring images he highlighted from his childhood. Building on Stevenson’s own depictions of his memories, we are able to extract the outlines of his early life story, as he himself understood it, and then from within that life story, we can discern a critical narrative script.
The beginnings of Stevenson’s life story, not surprisingly, are traceable to his first experiences of being read to aloud. They are described in “Rosa Quo Locorum,” one of his unpublished essays that he wrote in the last year of his life, but that drew on notes from over twenty years. His title comes from a Latin quotation from a brief Horace ode that scolds a servant for his efforts at artifice and adornment—the full line is mitte sectari, rosa quo locorum followed by sera moretur, meaning “stop searching places where the last rose may linger.” Stevenson is making the connection between this phrase and his efforts to return to the sensual pleasure and wonder of hearing stories and poems read to him by Cummy. He cites one of the first and most enduring influences as a verse from a poem by the evangelical minister, Robert Murray M’Cheyne.
Cummy cherished the writings of this minister who died at the age of twenty-nine of typhus, and who became a kind of saint to his Free Church followers. Stevenson quotes the phrase, “Jehovah Tsidkenu is nothing to her” and comments that it is “quite unintelligible even to my comparatively instructed mind, and I know not even how to spell the outlandish vocable that charmed me in my childhood.” He goes on to say that “He was nothing to me either, since I had no ray of a guess of what He was about; yet the verse, from then to now, a longer interval than the life of a generation, has continued to haunt me.”
When I tracked down this quotation from the M’Cheyne poem, I found some other verses that accompanied it (keeping in mind that Jehovah Tsidkenu means “The Lord, Our Righteousness” in Hebrew),
I once was a stranger to grace and to God,
I knew not my danger, and felt not my load;
Though friends spoke in rapture of Christ on the tree,
Jehovah Tsidkenu was nothing to me.
I oft read with pleasure, to soothe or engage,
Isaiah’s wild measure and John’s simple page;
But e’en when they pictured the blood-sprinkled tree
Jehovah Tsidkenu seemed nothing to me.
And later in the poem
When free grace awoke me, by light from on high,
Then legal fears shook me, I trembled to die;
No refuge, no safety in self could I see—
Jehovah Tsidkenu my Savior must be.
And finally,
Even treading the valley, the shadow of death,
This “watchword” shall rally my faltering breath;
For while from life’s fever my God sets me free,
Jehovah Tsidkenu my death-song shall be.
How ironic that M’Cheyne would speak of life’s fever in this poem and then die himself of a feverish ailment! How easy it is to see why Stevenson was “haunted” by this verse for at least a generation after hearing it. Imagine being a young boy prone to fever and hearing that this strange foreign name, Jehovah Tsidkenu, would be his death song or that there could be no refuge or safety in self except through this strange creature. Despite the joy that he took in the hours of shared reading, this particular verse became for him the equivalent of a childhood terror—an inexplicable image associated with threat and fear.
In exploring other writings of M’Cheyne, the minister repeatedly returns to the image of being one who in his younger days “kissed the rose nor thought about the thorn.” M’Cheyne uses this metaphor to capture his immature embrace of pleasure and sensuality without taking into account the sin that would keep him from his savior. In Stevenson’s recollection of his first encounters with reading and the extraordinary pleasure it brought him, it is significant that his title invokes the Horace quotation about not being seduced by the search for the lingering rose.
Many psychological theorists, from Adler up to the contemporary writings of Harold Mosak, have suggested that individuals’ earliest memories reflect familiar life themes and preoccupations. Early memories are not veridical accounts of actual events, but more like projections of our enduring concerns on to fragmented imagery of our earliest experiences. In Stevenson’s case, this early memory encapsulates his persisting life theme of the indulgence of giving in to imagination’s seductive power. Even in channeling his earliest joyous memories of words and reading, there is a nestled ambivalence about “searching for the rose,” while invoking latent memories of Jehovah and his righteous death song. Perhaps unconsciously, he is invoking M’Cheyne’s imagery of the pursuit of pleasure at the expense of piety.
As Stevenson elaborated in his further recollections of this period, Cummy’s florid religiosity, combined with his father’s embrace of Calvinist doctrines of predestination and original sin, did indeed create a hypertrophied sense of both piety and shame in young Louis. At the ages of three to four years old, he would preface simple intentions or actions with the cautionary statement, “If I’m spared,” as in, “It would be pleasant to go to the park today, if I’m spared.” Even more concerning, he developed a preternatural sense of his own inherent sinfulness or “badness.” Stevenson, writing about what he called his “covenanting childhood,” described himself in the following way:
That I was eminently religious, there could be no doubt. I had an extreme terror of Hell, implanted in me I suppose by my good nurse, which used to haunt me most terribly on stormy nights, when the wind had broken loose and was going about the town like a bedlamite: I remember that the noises, on such occasions, always grouped themselves into the sound of a horseman, or rather a succession of horsemen, riding furiously past the bottom of the street and away into town; I think even now that I hear the terrible howl of his passage and the clinking that I used to attribute to his bit and stirrups. On such nights I would lie awake and pray and cry—until I prayed and cried myself asleep; and if I can form any notion of what an earnest prayer should be, I imagine that mine were such. Nevertheless, while I was so good a Christian, I was a very bad child; indeed my early years were just about as bad as any in my whole life and I cannot talk of
‘the days when I
shined in my angel infancy,’1
with any colour of truth. (“Notes of Childhood”)
Stevenson imagined his “precocious depravity” as a kind of predestined portion of evil—that he would never be able to change. He saw in himself,
the persistence of attributes of faults and virtues and tastes and talents—of character in fact which I can trace through all my back years, even from these earliest recollections … I find the same small cowardice and small vanity, ever ready to lead me into petty falsehood … I was born, more or less, what I am now—Robert Louis Stevenson, and not any other, or better person. (“Notes of Childhood”)
Stevenson was also convinced that the Manichean extremes that Cummy espoused about goodness and sin drove him toward a fascination with this “badness” within him.
The idea of sin, attached to particular actions absolutely, far from repelling, soon exerts an attraction on young minds. Probably few over-pious children have not been tempted, sometime or other and by way of dire experiment, to deny God in set terms. The horror of the act, performed in solitude, under the blue sky; the smallness of the voice uttered in the stillness of the noon; the panic flight from the scene of the bravado: all of these will not have been forgotten. But the worse consequence is the romance conferred on doubtful actions; until the child grows to think nothing more glorious, than to be struck dead in the very act of some surprising wickedness. (“Memoirs of Himself”)
All of these young boy’s ruminations about good and evil, and the nature of God, came to a head at bedtime. Troubled by his frail constitution and overactive mind, sleep was a terrifying ordeal for Louis. When he was able to let go of worries and succumb to sleep, he often suffered agonizing nightmares, usually prefaced by a strange brown aura that would fill his inner sight (“Disproportion and a peculiar shade of brown, something like that of sealskin, haunted me particularly during these visitations”).
Stevenson returned repeatedly in his autobiographical writings to this imagery of the sick child in bed, tormented by nightmarish visions of hell, and comforted by his nurse (but also by his father who would stand at his door and create imaginary dialogues with the driver of the mail coach or a sentry in order to distract the frightened boy). He wrote of these torturous nights in “Notes of Childhood,” “Memoirs of Himself,” “Rosa Quo Locorum,” “Nurses,” and “A Chapter on Dreams,” among other essays. This entrenched image of the troubled child at night pervades a number of the poems of A Child’s Garden of Verses. Similarly, he recalled the following emotionally intense memory of a particular dream:
One [nightmare] that I remember seemed to indicate a considerable force of imagination: I dreamed that I was to swallow the world: and the terror of the fancy arose from the complete conception I had of the hugeness and populousness of our sphere. (“Memoirs of Himself”)
This memory of terrifying power is linked to many similar nighttime disruptions:
I remember repeatedly, although this was later on, and in the new house, waking from a dream of Hell, clinging to the horizontal bar of the bed, with my knees and chin together, my soul shaken, my body convulsed with agony. It is not a pleasant subject. (“Memoirs of Himself”)
These memories certainly reflect an enduring early conflict that Stevenson zeroed in on in all of these autobiographical narratives—the presence of evil in his life and his simultaneous attraction to and repulsion from this underside of piety.
Within these recorded memories, the rudiments of a narrative script are already there to discern—Stevenson’s poor health, combined with a heightened concern over his “moral worthiness,” leads to a kind of quasi-delirium, foreshadowed by a brown aura, culminating in nightmares and desperation. Comfort comes through the calming caresses from his nurse:
She was more patient than I could suppose of an angel; hours together she would help console me in my paroxysms; and I remember with particular distinctness, how she would lift me out of bed, and take me in rolled blankets, to the window, whence I might look forth into the blue night starred with street-lamps, and to see where the gas still burned behind the windows of the other sickrooms … the sight of the outer world refreshed and cheered me: and the whole sorrow and burden of the night was at an end with the arrival of that first long string of country carts… . (“Memoirs of Himself”)
He also draws comfort from his father’s stories, or from his own imagination, used to shift his thoughts away from religious preoccupations:
When at night my mind was disengaged from either of these [religious] extremes, … I told myself romances in which I played the hero. Now and then the subject would be the animation of my playthings; but usually these fantasies embraced the adventures of a lifetime, full of far journeys and Homeric battles. They had no reference to religion; although that filled my mind so greatly at other moments, I was pure pagan when I came to practice. Secondly, for as far back as I remember, they bore always some relation to women, and Eros and Anteros must have almost equally divided my allegiance. And lastly they would be concluded always with a heroic, and sometimes with a cruel, death. I never left myself till I was dead. (“Memoirs of Himself”)
In this same essay, right after recalling the refuge he could find in these fantasies of adventure, he immediately launches into an anecdote about his cousin, Bob Stevenson, who was three years older than him. Bob visited Louis’s home for the winter when Louis was five, and they became inseparable, endlessly playing imaginary games together. They created two made-up kingdoms with maps and royal lineages; Bob’s was Nosingtonia; Louis’s was Encyclopedia. At breakfast, they designed new countries—Bob’s, a land of snow (due to the sugar in his porridge); Louis’s, a land of floods (due to the milk in his cereal). Bob, as we shall see, was to become Louis’s main ally in his bohemian years and colluded with his efforts to break from the strict Calvinism in which he had been bred.
Erikson asserted that the early challenges of identity prior to adolescence were organized around trust, autonomy, initiative, and competence. To build a fundamental sense of trust in the world and a stable and positive self-concept, children require what attachment theorists, like John Bowlby or Margaret Mahler, call a “secure base” or what the psychoanalyst, Heinz Kohut, referred to as healthy parental “mirroring” of approval and encouragement. As Kohut elaborated, children need to be admired and loved as they cultivate an early “grandiose sense of self” that feels omnipotent and immortal. Building on this strong base, they then learn to accept limitations and frustrations, while still drawing on a fundamentally positive view of self. Loving and trusting relationships with adult caregivers also allow them to accept others’ limitations and to feel safe enough to express both anger and disappointment without jeopardizing relationships. Successive interactions that combine triumphs and disappointments in an empathetic context allow for the development of a “healthy narcissism”—a self-love that is securely in place but not overweening or dismissive of others. This self-confidence provides the fuel for the development of autonomy, initiative, and competence that moves the child toward an emerging sense of identity.
Generally, Stevenson experienced loving and positive mirroring relationships from both of his parents and Cummy. Yet that Calvinistic streak in his upbringing and his father’s mercurial moods, not to mention his mother’s withdrawal due to illness, may have also left some doubt in Stevenson about his own worthiness. His own poor health and indifference to his studies as he entered his school-age years may have compounded his tendency toward self-derogation. To compensate for feelings of inadequacy, his fantasy life placed him in “heroic stances” and spurred a thirst for fame to assure him of his value in his own and others’ eyes. Although many young people dream of deeds of distinction, Stevenson’s particular dogged pursuit of these ends may partly reflect the underlying shame he felt about himself, especially in light of his ultimate choice of a profession so far afield from his family’s stock-in-trade. His family’s status, his invalidism, and consequent dependence on maternal figures may have allowed this unintegrated sense of himself, vacillating between grandiosity and self-disgust, to remain unreconciled and to persist deep into his adult years.
In his earliest years, confined often to his sick bed, he lived more in his head than in the world and to the degree that he experienced competent forceful action, it was more in his daydreams than in his daily acts. The result of this stunted identity development was to find refuge in play and imagination rather than engage with his academic studies and day-to-day concerns. This seductive escape into his imagination and corresponding shame over this indulgence became the recurring thematic tension of Stevenson’s narrative identity. It led to a repetitive sequence of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that shaped the direction of his life and often paralyzed his efforts to take effective action in the world. In the language of narrative identity, it was Stevenson’s nuclear script.
According to Tomkins, the originator of the script concept in psychology, scripts build out of scenes. Scenes consist of a salient event and a significant emotional response. Some representative negative scenes might be a child’s panic at getting lost in a crowded mall; a moment of unexpected anger from a parent and the child’s fearful response; a shaming encounter on a playground. In contrast, representative positive scenes might be the deep pleasure at a grandmother’s loving embrace in a kitchen filled with cooking smells; joy at a successful first recital; the thrill of speed down a challenging ski slope. When scenes similar in content and emotion are replicated (what Tomkins called magnification), they coalesce as a schematic pattern in the personality—the collected scenes become the script. Critical to Tomkins’s theory, and unlike earlier psychoanalytic formulations of personality development, he did not believe that script formation ended in early childhood. Magnification—the linking of scenes—was an ongoing and reciprocal process that never fully stopped. As new experiences occur in individuals’ lives, they can be absorbed into the script, both reinforcing and slightly modifying its characteristics of event sequences and emotional responses. The basic outline and thematic concerns of the script are unlikely to vary, but nuances of actions and feelings can be introduced and subtly alter its shape.
There are many types of scripts—for example, commitment scripts; addiction scripts; hoarding scripts, but for Stevenson, our focus is on what Tomkins called the “nuclear script.” Nuclear scripts are born from a collection of negative scenes magnified around a repetitive and unresolved conflict—the wish for a parent’s love; the recognition of an inadequacy; the failure to outdo a sibling. They most often involve powerful themes of shame and humiliation.
The self victimizes itself into a tragic scene in which it longs most desperately for what it is too intimidated to pursue effectively. That part of the personality that has been captured by a nuclear script constitutes a seduction into lifelong war that need never have been waged, against enemies (including the bad self) who were not as dangerous or villainous as they have become, for heavens, that never were as good as imagined, nor would if attained be as good as they are assumed. Nuclear scripts are inherently involved in idealized defenses against idealized threats to idealized paradises. (Tomkins 2008)
Stevenson’s nuclear script emerged from the pattern of tortured nights and repentant prayers that he shared with Cummy over his early years. These earlier scenes later merged with adolescent and adult episodes that included conflict with his father about his break with religious tradition, his continued bouts of illness, Fanny’s caretaking, and persisting shame over his indulgence in imagination at the expense of a concrete and income-generating vocation.
Stevenson’s quest for identity is the story of his evolving effort to overcome this script and break free from its constraining and, at times, paralyzing influence over his life. Much of his greatest writing is an effort to portray these fundamental tensions of imaginative release versus piety; unconstrained action versus inhibited passivity; goodness versus badness, while simultaneously complicating and challenging these categories. As Tomkins emphasized, nuclear scripts are reductive; they project on to the world a narrowing and redundant vision—they suck new experiences into the vortex of the same bad scenes over and over again. Similar to a recurring nightmare, the nuclear script within our personality leads us to ask how we have ended up once again in the same rabbit hole of frustration and unhappiness. As we shall see, Stevenson found a way both through his writing and ultimately in how he lived his life to emerge from this suffocating trap created by his own mind.
Here then is a schematization of Stevenson’s nuclear script (which I shall call, “Escape from Shame”) along with its key variations and emotional components:
Striving to Be Good and Avoid “Damnation”
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Attraction to “Badness” or “Pleasure in Self-Assertion” (Excitement and Fear)
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Images of Condemnation and Repentance (Shame, Self-Disgust, Inadequacy)
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Physical Expression of His Anguish in Illness and Collapse (Lassitude, Passivity)
Reliance on Women, Especially Older Women to Comfort and Nurse Him (Gratitude and Humiliation)
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Seeking His Father’s Good Will and Comfort (Later Mixture of Shame and Frustration)
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Escaping His Religious/Moral Anguish Through Imagination and Stories of Heroic Adventure and Romance (Pride, Excitement, Joy, Release)
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These Adventures Are Linked to Images of a Glorious and Premature Death—A Mixture of Both Triumph and Punishment (Pride, Self-Pity, Sadness)
As Stevenson grew older, new experiences further shaped this basic structure. From a desired source of comfort, Stevenson’s father shifted, at times, to a source of frustration and an inflictor of shame. Despite years in which Stevenson sought to combat this negative influence, he was unable to shake a desire for his father’s validation, so in some ways the initial image of his father’s benign presence never completely faded.
Similarly, there were times when Stevenson’s genuine physical frailty and illnesses were more the driving source of shame and self-condemnation than his body’s responses to stress created by his internal tensions. And at the core of his recurrent feelings of shame and self-loathing was an additional underlying foreboding that he would never fulfill his father’s ambitions—that he was not only likely to miss the mark in his moral resolve but also in his mettle as a man.
Combining with Stevenson’s psychological struggles (what Erikson would call his personal identity), the harsh contrasts of his native city, its extreme disparities in wealth; its contested religious history; its changeable climate, contributed to the dualistic nature of his early script, filling out the societal dimension of his identity. Some of his biographers offer the image of Cummy walking him, bundled up in coat and cap, past squalid neighborhoods to take him to cemeteries of Covenanters’ graves. The family traditions, the “ghosts” of the Covenanters, and the Edinburgh milieu form the social “settings” that give flesh to the bones of this script. There between Bell Rock and the raging sea, Jehovah’s embrace and the fires of hell, the grime of the Old Town and the safe Georgian rows was the figure of a very young and all too impressionable Robert Louis Stevenson.
There is one other crucial component of the script that I have outlined, and I have only held off mentioning it because it forms the heart of a later chapter in this book focused on A Child’s Garden of Verses. This is Colinton manse—the home of his mother’s parents and his beloved dowager aunt Jane. Stevenson once summed up his childhood in the following way, “I have three powerful impressions of my childhood; my sufferings when I was sick, my delights in convalescence at my grandfather’s manse in Colinton, near Edinburgh, and the unnatural activity of my mind after I was in bed at night.”
Four miles from the main city, it was a country haven for Louis, and his mother brought him there as much as possible for its salutary effects, combined with the social stimulation of his cousins. The Colinton home with its natural beauty, the surging river at the bottom of its slope, and the constant games of play and fantasy released something in Stevenson that in force was equal to, if not greater, than the force of his early Calvinistic torments. So, in tracing the origins of his personality and art, and in defining the critical script that articulates these origins, we necessarily must add
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Travel into Nature—Engagement with the Forces of Wind and Water—As Imaginative Releases from Illness and Constraint
The energy and release that he drew from the natural world extended from his time to Colinton to his adolescent years when his parents rented a cottage in Swanston, just a few miles further from town and nestled in the Pentland Hills. There Stevenson found his greatest moments of youthful vigor, walking the fields and hillsides, taking on the persona of the “solitary wanderer,” identifying with Wordsworth and later with Whitman. We can trace his embrace of the natural world through his travel books (An Inland Voyage, Travels with a Donkey, and Across the Plains), his brilliant depiction of landscape in Kidnapped, and his immersion in the exotic world of the South Seas, where he experienced the greatest health of his adult years. In fact, these last years of health and removal from the “old world” structures were vital factors in finally releasing him from the tyranny of the repetitive script that had so often shaped his earlier life.
Still, in his early years the bucolic respites of Colinton and Swanston could not fully neutralize the nuclear script that festered in Louis since early childhood. He was still a cosseted youth—doted on by Cummy and treated with precious regard and hypochondriacal attention by his parents. Known as the “little Frenchman” by the neighborhood mothers, he had the affected manners of a child who spent too much time among adults, fawning over his intellectual loquaciousness. Due to his illnesses, and his mother’s spotty health, he missed a great deal of school and traveled for rest cures in Germany and France. When he was in school, he often expressed boredom and restlessness. He learned to use his illnesses to manipulate his way out of schools he did not like and work he did not want to do. Skinny, but with a large head, he was not the most attractive of boys; even his father, perhaps in a particularly foul mood, referred to him as “stupid-looking.” With his dandy-esque manner and wardrobe, his peers basically could not stand him.
His major solaces were reading and writing. By the age of six, he had won a contest among his cousins for dictating and illustrating the story of Moses. He continued to write stories and poems throughout his boyhood and adolescence. In general, one could characterize Stevenson up to the time that he began university as an unusually bright, but unaccomplished, student with a rather sheltered upbringing and a tendency toward invalidism. He longed for a life of soldierly adventure, but had already resigned himself to the likelihood that his physical frailty would severely limit his endeavors. The one sure thing he knew was that his greatest joy and his best escape from the “Chinese finger trap” of his Calvinist script of piety and shame was to write.
As a number of critics have pointed out (e.g., Ann Colley, Julia Reid, Jerome Buckley), Stevenson’s imaginative writing was a response to his hatred of his own inclination to religious and physical passivity. Whether he refrained from action due to fear of sin or lacked the strength and energy to take up more bold activities, he could compensate by creating worlds of adventure and romantic intrigue. As Reid has argued, embarrassed by the “effeminacy” of his physical limitations and the nervous fears instilled by Cummy, Stevenson’s script constantly pushed him to find solace in the heroes and villains of the battlefields, high seas, and king’s highways.
Yet writing stories was one thing; becoming a “writer” was another. His father could enjoy a good story, but would he be able to accept a son who made the telling of stories the central occupation of his life? How could such a frivolous pursuit be reconciled with the Stevenson family tradition of industry, duty, and religious devotion? Whatever private identity concerns that Stevenson might have had about his own inherent goodness, there was the more practical problem of his occupational identity, and how he would define himself in the middle-class society of professionals, merchants, and industrialists to which he belonged. The script driving Louis toward an embrace of imaginative flight and artistry was taking him into waters that were likely to stir up both external conflict with his father’s wishes and ratchet up his internal sense of shame and self-loathing. As his secret desire to be a writer took a deeper and deeper hold on him, it was as if he was steering a course directly toward Bell Rock, and no warning peal or flashing light could divert him from collision.
1. The reference to “angel infancy” comes from a poem, “Retreat,” by H. Vaughan, collected in Palgrave’s Golden Treasury (1875). Here is the first stanza from which he takes the phrase:
Happy those early days, when I
Shined in my Angel-infancy!
Before I understood this place
Appointed for my second race,
Or taught my soul to fancy aught
When yet I had not walk’d above
A mile or two from my first Love,
And looking back, at that short space