Keenness of sensation in each of its forms is a valuable natural gift, unfortunately no means are as yet easily accessible for testing it in different persons; there are no anthropometric laboratories as yet in existence to which any one may go, and on payment of a small fee have all his faculties measured and registered.
Francis Galton, Record of Family Faculties
WHEN HIS FORMER MENTOR Fleeming Jenkin died suddenly of blood poisoning in June 1885, aged only fifty-three, Stevenson’s reaction was almost as intense as that to Walter Ferrier’s death two years earlier. He was unprepared to survive his friends; it made him feel like a cheat. As with his impulse to comfort and care for Ferrier’s sister Coggie, Stevenson now showed anxious solicitude for Jenkin’s widow Anne, and immediately agreed to undertake a biographical memoir of Fleeming. This was a generous promise from a man so pressed to earn money, but Stevenson’s sense of gratitude to Jenkin kept him at the memoir with a fervour he could seldom maintain for other works, even though it took many months and meant laying by the novel he had just started, a gripping adventure about a Lowland boy stranded in the Highlands in the years just after the Jacobite Rebellion.
There were many visitors that summer, and excursions to London and Cambridge; too much activity for the frail author, who collapsed under the strain of an attempted holiday to Dartmoor. The holiday group, which included Sam and Katharine de Mattos, got as far as Exeter, where they had to stay put in a hotel for several weeks until Louis could be moved home. It was an alarming interval; the patient was brimful of ergotine and behaving very oddly: ‘he has just given up insisting that he should be lifted into bed in a kneeling position, his face to the pillow’, Fanny reported to Henley, ‘and then still kneeling he was lifted bodily around, and then a third time held up in the air while he drew out his feet. I never performed a feat as difficult.’1 The spectacle frightened Katharine, but not Fanny, who was in her element in these crises: ‘Strangely enough, I am not so cast down as I was before this. Here is something tangible that I understand, at least, and when I can do something.’
The aborted holiday had started well: on their way to Devon Stevenson and Fanny had called on Thomas Hardy at his new house, ‘Max Gate’, just outside Dorchester. Fanny sent her mother-in-law an amusing description of the ‘pale, gentle, frightened little man, that one felt an instant tenderness for, with a wife – ugly is no word for it, who said, “whatever shall we do?” I had never heard a living being say it before.’ The meeting between the two writers was an odd convergence of nineteenth-century literary misfits; Hardy the backward-looking modernist (ten years Stevenson’s senior, but living on till 1928); Stevenson the forward-looking traditionalist (whose early death sealed him into the Victorian age). In the summer of 1885, they were both probably eyeing each other up as to who would prove the worthiest successor to Meredith, with whom both men were friends. Stevenson was shocked, as we shall see, by the publication in 1892 of Tess of the d’Urbervilles, but in 1885 was a keen admirer of Far from the Madding Crowd, and was so taken with The Mayor of Casterbridge when it appeared in 1886 that he asked permission to dramatise it. It would have been an odd form of collaboration – somewhere between a homage to Hardy and hitching a ride. Hardy greeted the suggestion with touching eagerness, saying, ‘I feel several inches taller at the idea,’2 but nothing came of it.
The long wait for Prince Otto to go on sale hadn’t diminished Stevenson’s expectations for that novel, nor Fanny’s (who anticipated it would create much more of a sensation than Treasure Island even3). But all the things that Otto represented to Stevenson in terms of craft, authority, effort and polish were about to be brushed aside by the instant success of the novella-length ‘shilling shocker’ he composed at a gallop in the weeks immediately preceding Otto’s publication. If he had been asked at the end of 1885 which he considered the best of his works, there is little doubt he would have named the Bohemian romance on which he was staking his hopes as a serious novelist. The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde might not even have got a mention. Stevenson did not seek to be known as a sensationalist, and had felt compromised by the way the Pall Mall Gazette advertised ‘The Body Snatcher’ at Christmas 1884, sending six sandwich-men around the streets of London (at double rates) wearing coffin-shaped boards and plaster skulls specially made by a theatre property company – until the police ‘suppressed the nuisance’.4
The story of the composition of Jekyll and Hyde is that of Stevenson’s most thoroughgoing collaboration of all: the collaboration of his conscious and unconscious selves. The fact that the story ‘came to him in dream’ was always reckoned to be of significance: by the public, for whom it augmented or validated the supernatural content of the tale; by the promoters of the Stevenson myth, for whom it proved the author’s super-receptivity to inspiration; and of course by Fanny Stevenson, whose ‘management’ of the dream-material illustrated her own pivotal importance in the composition of her husband’s works. She told the story several times, the first official version in a letter to Stevenson’s biographer Graham Balfour in 1899:
Louis wrote Jekyll and Hyde with great rapidity on the lines of his dream. In the small hours of one morning I was wakened by cries of horror from him. I, thinking he had a nightmare, waked him. He said, angrily, ‘Why did you wake me? I was dreaming a fine boguey tale’. I had waked him at the first transformation scene. He had had in his mind an idea of a double life story, but it was not the same as the dream. He asked me, as usual, to make no criticisms until the first draft was done. As he didn’t like to get tired by discussing my proposed changes in his work it was the custom that I should put my criticisms in writing. In this tale I felt and still feel that he was hampered by his dream. The powder – which I thought might be changed – he couldn’t eliminate because he saw it so” plainly in the dream. In the original story he had Jekyll bad all through, and working for the Hyde change only for a disguise. I wrote pages of criticism, pointing out that he had here a great moral allegory that the dream was obscuring. I didn’t like the opening, which was confused – again the dream – and proposed that Hyde should run over the child showing that he was an evil force without humanity. I left my paper with Louis, who was in his bedroom writing in bed. After quite a long interval his bell rang for me, and Lloyd and I went upstairs. As I entered the door Louis pointed with a long dramatic finger (you know) to a pile of ashes on the hearth of the fireplace saying that I was right and there was the tale. I nearly fainted away with misery and horror when I saw all was gone. He was already hard at work at the new version which was finished in a few days more. I wanted to make further objections concerning the powder but after that pile of ashes had not the courage.5
Sam Osbourne (called here by his later name of Lloyd), who was hanging around at Skerryvore waiting for a decision about his return to college, wrote up his own version of the story years later in An Intimate Portrait of R.L.S., stressing the author’s possession by quasi-mystical forces. According to Sam, Stevenson appeared one day ‘very preoccupied’ and announced that he must not be disturbed, as he was ‘working with extraordinary success on a new story’. For three days the household maintained a reverential ‘tiptoeing silence’ as the work progressed, and Sam watched his stepfather through an open door (odd, under the circumstances, that this wasn’t closed) ‘sitting up in bed, filling page after page, and apparently never pausing for a moment’.6 Here is the iconic description of the writer, bed-ridden, battling with chronic illness, yet pouring out the pages.
Sam’s story goes on in a manner that stretches credulity, but by 1924, when he published this, all the other witnesses to the incident were dead and Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde was one of the most famous stories in the world, available in dozens of languages and already filmed twenty times (including the classic 1920 John Stuart Robertson version starring John Barrymore). Sam claimed that Stevenson’s initial three-day frenzy of writing ended with him reading the piece aloud to Fanny and Sam, being bitterly disappointed by Fanny’s cool response and ready criticisms (as opposed to Sam’s ‘spellbound’ attention) and then having an almighty row with his wife, ‘so impassioned, so outraged, and [ … ] so painful’ that the boy had to creep away, ‘unable to bear it any longer’.7 Sam later discovered his mother sitting ‘pale and desolate before the fire, staring into it’; Stevenson then came down the stairs, ‘burst in’, shouted at Fanny again and threw his manuscript on the fire: ‘Imagine my feelings – my mother’s feelings – as we saw it blazing up; as we saw those precious pages wrinkling and blackening and turning into flame!’8 But all was not lost. Though it looked like a fit of temper, Stevenson’s destruction of the script – according to Sam – was actually an act of submission to his wife’s judgement. The first version was mainly a ‘shocker’; on reflection Stevenson thought Fanny was right to insist he bring out the story’s allegorical potential. Another three days of wild scribbling followed, during which Stevenson produced the printed version; ‘sixty-four thousand words in six days’, Sam marvelled, ‘more than ten thousand words a day [ … ] and on top of that copied out the whole in another two days, and had it in the post on the third!’9 A true nine-days’ wonder, except that it actually took Stevenson more like six weeks to have the manuscript ready, if his own remark to Frederick Myers in March 1886 is to be believed: ‘Jekyll was conceived, written, rewritten, re-rewritten, and printed inside ten weeks.’10
Stevenson himself emphasised the significance of the story’s dream genesis in an interview he gave to a reporter from the New York Herald on his arrival in America in September 1887:
I was very hard up for money, and I felt that I had to do something. I thought and thought, and tried hard to find a subject to write about. At night I dreamed the story, not precisely as it is written, for of course there are always stupidities in dreams, but practically it came to me as a gift, and what makes it appear more odd is that I am quite in the habit of dreaming stories [ … ] I go on making them while I sleep quite as hard, apparently, as when I am awake. They sometimes come to me in the form of nightmares, in so far that they make me cry out aloud. But I am never deceived by them. Even when fast asleep I know that it is I who am inventing, and when I cry out it is with gratification to know that the story is so good.
[ … ] For instance, all I dreamed about Dr Jekyll was that one man was being pressed into a cabinet, when he swallowed a drug and changed into another being. I awoke and said at once that I had found the missing link for which I had been looking so long, and before I again went to sleep almost every detail of the story, as it stands, was clear to me. Of course, writing it was another thing.11
A few weeks after this interview, and clearly prompted by the interest journalists had shown in the dream story, Stevenson was writing ‘A Chapter on Dreams’, an essay elaborating this idea of his subconscious as a story-mill. The argument was reversed, however: he no longer said that he was ‘never deceived’ by the provenance of his dream-work, and that ‘even when fast asleep I know that it is I who am inventing’. Now, he claimed to be always deceived. He represented his subconscious as a separate and independent state, personifying its forces (plural, as against a single, conscious ‘I’) as ‘the Brownies’, spirit-like, anarchic and amoral: ‘my Brownies are somewhat fantastic, like their stories hot and hot, full of passion and the picturesque, alive with animating incident; and they have no prejudice against the supernatural’.12 This fanciful figure helped him dissociate himself from the eruption of imaginative ‘dark forces’ in The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, the literary equivalent of a dramatic and violent ‘return of the repressed’.
The dreams Stevenson uses as examples in his essay – presented in the third person as those of an unnamed ‘dreamer’ – are ‘irresponsible inventions, told for the teller’s pleasure, with no eye to the crass public or the thwart reviewer: tales where a thread might be dropped, or one adventure quitted for another, on fancy’s least suggestion’.13 Though he depicts the artful/artist dreamer (i.e. the writer who uses dreams as source-material) as one who harnesses the power of the subconscious in order to turn ‘[the] amusement of story-telling to (what is called) account’, the power of The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde derives largely from its innovative use of the former, unimpeded, ‘irresponsible’ impulses. Clearly the process of slipping out of one mode of consciousness into another, less ‘accountable’, one was pertinent to the shaping of the Jekyll/Hyde schism.
But the main thrust of Stevenson’s essay proposes that he can take neither credit nor responsibility for his creations; his conscious self has so little to do with it. It is a statement of what an ego-psychologist would now call the problem of self-appointment:
For myself – what I call I, my conscious ego, the denizen of the pineal gland unless he has changed his residence since Descartes, the man with the conscience and the variable bank-account, the man with the hat and the boots, and the privilege of voting and not carrying his candidate at the general elections – I am sometimes tempted to suppose he is no story-teller at all, but a creature as matter of fact as any cheesemonger or any cheese, and a realist bemired up to the ears in actuality; so that, by that account, the whole of my published fiction should be the single-handed product of some Brownie, some Familiar, some unseen collaborator, whom I keep locked in a back garret, while I get all the praise and he but a share (which I cannot prevent him getting) of the pudding. I am an excellent advisor, something like Molière’s servant; I pull back and I cut down; and I dress the whole in the best words and sentences that I can find and make; I hold the pen, too; and I do the sitting at the table, which is about the worst of it; and when all is done, I make up the manuscript and pay for the registration; so that, on the whole, I have some claim to share, though not so largely as I do, in the profits of our common enterprise.14
The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, the story which had sparked these odd protestations of innocence or irresponsibility, was the product, Stevenson reveals, of years worrying at the same theme: ‘I had long been trying to write a story on this subject, to find a body, a vehicle, for that strong sense of man’s double being which must at times come in upon and overwhelm the mind of every thinking creature.’15 Stevenson’s interest in the subconscious shaped both the use he made of his dreams (putting them ‘to (what is called) account’) and their preoccupations with the divided self, of which Jekyll and Hyde can be seen as the most cogent and ‘analytical’ instance. Jekyll’s ‘Strange Case’ inevitably suggests to the modern mind the case-studies of Sigmund Freud, though Stevenson’s very public display of his own ‘dream-work’ predates the birth of Freudian psychoanalysis by several years. The two men were possibly reading the same scientific literature, though, for Fanny’s subscription to the Lancet put her and Louis in touch with the latest research into hysteria and ‘moral insanity’ which was being undertaken by Freud’s teacher Jean-Martin Charcot at the Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris.* Fanny later claimed that her husband had got the germ of the Jekyll and Hyde story from ‘a paper he had read in a French scientific journal on subconsciousness’.16 Stevenson spoke of having read an article on the case of ‘Louis V’ – a young Frenchman who suffered dramatic personality changes after severe shock – but said it was sent him by F.H.W. Myers after the publication of Jekyll and Hyde. ‘Louis V’; ‘Louis S’: they both sound like patients of Dr Freud, whose own publication of ‘strange cases’, beginning in the 1880s, was to change so radically the understanding of identity and revolutionise the ways in which readers read and writers write. Coming in just before this wholesale professionalisation of psychology, Stevenson’s story is not just full of latent meanings, but heaving with blatant ones too.
The story is now so embedded in popular culture that it hardly exists as a work of literature. Everyone knows what ‘Jekyll-and-Hyde’ signifies: there is little motivation to read the book. Indeed, reading the book spoils ‘the story’, which we all know is about an over-vaunting scientist whose experiments in the chemical induction of personality-change unleash an increasingly bestial alter-ego who eventually destroys him. Not surprisingly, coming from an author who had virtually been adopted into the Shelley family, the story’s themes are strongly reminiscent of Frankenstein and the Prometheus myth; there were also, as critics were ready to point out, clear echoes of Poe’s artful doppelgänger story ‘William Wilson’ and James Hogg’s Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, with its overlapping third- and first-person narratives and its linking of the murderous, self-licensed Robert Colwan to his demonic alter-ego, Gil-Martin. But the dissimilarities between Poe and Hogg and Stevenson are revealing, too, as one reviewer of Jekyll and Hyde suggested:
The double personality does not in [Stevenson’s] romance take the form of a personified conscience, the doppel ganger of the sinner, a ‘double’ like his own double which Goethe is fabled to have seen. No; the ‘separable self’ in this ‘strange case’ [ … ], with its unlikeness to its master, with its hideous caprices, and appalling vitality, and terrible power of growth and increase, is, to our thinking, a notion as novel as it is terrific. We would welcome a spectre, a ghoul, or even a vampire gladly, rather than meet Mr Edward Hyde.17
The believability of the story, its familiar, smog-filled urban setting (purportedly London, but with a strong flavour of Old Town Edinburgh) and its cast of solid Victorian professional men, ‘intelligent, reputable [ … ] all good judges of wine’, made the gothic elements more striking. Dr Jekyll is a prosperous, philanthropic, ‘smooth-faced’ middle-aged man, his friend Utterson is a lawyer, Lanyon another doctor and Utterson’s godson Enfield a man-about-town. The introduction of young, classless and criminal-looking Edward Hyde into this society shatters its gentlemen’s-club cosiness, and Jekyll’s friends can only account for the doctor’s choice of ‘protégé’ in terms of a hidden vice and possible black-mailing.
The story is laid out like a dossier of witness statements, with three overlapping narratives. The first is a detective story (a term not yet in use, but which this book helped form), detailing Utterson’s growing suspicions about Hyde, his puzzling over the nature of the Jekyll/Hyde relationship, his urging on of the police in the search for Carew’s murderer and his lone pursuit of the investigation once the police have given up. When Utterson is called in by the servants to break down Jekyll’s laboratory door with an axe and discovers not his friend, as anticipated, but Hyde, writhing in his death agonies after taking poison, the story looks as if it is over, but there are more puzzles, notably Jekyll’s will, and a note that suggests he is still alive, not lying murdered somewhere by his psychopathic companion.
The second and third sections consist of two documents found in the laboratory. One is a letter by Lanyon telling for the first time of Jekyll’s self-experimentations with ‘powders’ and how Lanyon once agreed to supply some of them to a friend of Jekyll, hitherto unknown to him. The reader recognises the description of Hyde immediately, but it is only now, well over halfway through the book, that Stevenson reveals the identity of the two characters.
[Hyde] put the glass to his lips, and drank at one gulp. A cry followed; he reeled, staggered, clutched at the table and held on, staring with injected eyes, gasping with open mouth; and as I looked there came, I thought, a change – he seemed to swell – his face became suddenly black, and the features seemed to melt and alter – and the next moment I had sprung to my feet and leaped back against the wall, my arm raised to shield me from that prodigy, my mind submerged in terror.
‘O God!’ I screamed, and ‘O God!’ again and again; for there before my eyes, pale and shaken, and half fainting, and groping before him with his hands, like a man restored from death – there stood Henry Jekyll!18
Here, with its gestures and speeches straight out of ‘melo’, Jekyll and Hyde turns instantly into psychological horror. The last document, a long suicide note, lets us read in Jekyll’s own words the exact nature of his experimentations and their consequences. Jekyll is smoothly articulate, even poetical, as he relates how the misdeeds of his youth led him to concealment and ‘a profound duplicity of life’. Something of that duplicity is evident even at this confessional moment, for Jekyll’s ‘statement’ is, unsurprisingly, a highly subjective piece of self-justification. The vague ‘irregularities’ which he admits to are placed in the context of such ‘high views’ as to render them more an indicator of his super-fine sensibilities than objectively or inherently bad. Jekyll seems to be preparing his audience (Utterson) for an aspirational reading of his self-experimentations, a Promethean interpretation, with himself cast as the doomed romantic striver-after-knowledge.
I thus drew steadily nearer to that truth, by whose partial discovery I have been doomed to such a dreadful shipwreck: that man is not truly one, but truly two. [ … ] It was on the moral side, and in my own person, that I learned to recognise the thorough and primitive duality of man; I saw that, of the two natures that contended in the field of my consciousness, even if I could rightly be said to be either, it was only because I was radically both.19
There follows Jekyll’s description of the first mixing and taking of ‘the powders’ and the subsequent transformation into Hyde, an insistently physical piece of writing:
The most racking pains succeeded: a grinding in the bones, deadly nausea, and a horror of the spirit that cannot be exceeded at the hour of birth or death. Then these agonies began swiftly to subside, and I came to myself as if out of a great sickness. There was something strange in my sensations, something indescribably new, and from its very novelty, indescribably sweet. I felt younger, lighter, happier in body; within I was conscious of a heady recklessness, a current of disordered sensual images running like a mill race in my fancy, a solution of the bonds of obligation, an unknown but not an innocent freedom of the soul.20
The person who emerges from this quasi-sexual, chemically-induced convulsion is Edward Hyde. When he creeps out from the laboratory, situated symbolically at the back of Jekyll’s house and opening onto a different street, he is able for the first time to see himself in a mirror. Not only is he smaller than Jekyll, but, in a highly inventive detail, he is also thinner and younger, being young and undeveloped in vice: ‘I was conscious of no repugnance, rather of a leap of welcome,’ he says. ‘This, too, was myself.’ Much of the book’s fascination can be summed up in that simple statement, so evocative of Whitman’s similarly shocking and liberating ‘I contain multitudes’. The meaning was perhaps too clear for comfort. Of Stevenson’s friends, Henry James complained of the book’s sensationalism, Myers sent a long list of possible revisions and refinements, and Symonds wrote, ‘It is indeed a dreadful book, most dreadful because of a certain moral callousness, a want of sympathy, a shutting out of hope. [ … ] Most of us at some epoch of our lives have been upon the verge of developing a Mr Hyde.’21
Symonds may have been voicing here a worry similar to that of Jekyll’s bachelor friends in the story itself: that a comfortable, if hypocritical, status quo was being threatened with exposure. Certainly the Strange Case is full of latent sexual meanings, and its huge cultural impact derived in part from its frank acknowledgement that there was plenty in late-Victorian life which Victorian fiction could not, or refused to, deal with. In his defence of the story in a letter to Robert Bridges in 1886, the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins expressed the shrewd opinion that the scene in Jekyll and Hyde where Hyde tramples over the little girl in the street ‘is perhaps a convention: [Stevenson] was thinking of something unsuitable for fiction’.22
Many – indeed, most – modern critics have interpreted the novel as a psycho-sexual allegory. Elaine Showalter has called it ‘a fable of fin-de-siècle homosexual panic, the discovery and resistance of the homosexual self, in which ‘Jekyll’s apparent infatuation with Hyde reflects the late nineteenth-century upper-middle-class eroticisation of working-class men as the ideal homosexual objects’;23 Wayne Koestenbaum has written that Jekyll and Hyde ‘defines queerness as the horror that comes from not being able to explain away an uncanny doubleness’;24 and Karl Miller, in his Doubles: Studies in Literary History, has identified Stevenson as the leading figure in the ‘School of Duality’ that ‘framed a dialect, and a dialectic, for the love that dared not speak its name – for the vexed question of homosexuality and bisexuality’.25 These opinions obviously pick up on Stevenson’s own ‘doubleness’, his confusion and disruption of what was expected from an effeminate-looking man, but there was an assumption at the time of its first publication that the story dealt with unspeakably shameful heterosexual practices, the scope of which was being made public for the first time that year by Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s groundbreaking work on deviant sexuality, Psychopathia Sexualis. The film versions of Jekyll and Hyde abound in added prostitutes to accommodate this interpretation (of course there are no prostitutes in the book itself), and to reflect the historical fact that only two years after the story began to cause a sensation among the reading public on both sides of the Atlantic, the savage Whitechapel murders of ‘Jack the Ripper’ also began (targeting ‘fallen’ women and characterised by evisceration, thereby suggesting the work of a psychopathic moralist with a medical/anatomical background). The novel has thereby become co-opted into the (highly mythologised) real-life Whitechapel story, which, like the mystery of Jekyll, has never been satisfactorily resolved. At the time of the murders, the connection with Stevenson’s book seemed so close that a stage version of Jekyll and Hyde was taken off at the Lyceum as a gesture to public feeling: ‘There is no taste in London just now for horrors on the stage. There is quite sufficient to make us shudder out of doors.’26
Jekyll and Hyde is about the secrets which respectability hides, and the pleasures of that deception, so it is appropriate enough that Stevenson leaves the nature of Jekyll’s sins (not Hyde’s) unspecified. The fragments of early draft that survive show the author muting significantly the story’s sexual content: ‘disgraceful pleasures’ in the draft becomes the euphemism ‘certain appetites’, and Jekyll no longer confesses to ‘a career of cruel, soulless and degrading vice’ and vices that were ‘at once criminal in the sight of the law and abhorrent in themselves’.27 ‘Criminal’ certainly indicates that Stevenson meant ‘homosexual’, but it would be entirely in keeping with his views on sexual tolerance that he removed this term in order not to link any specific sexual behaviour with the psychopathic Hyde mind-set. The resulting implication that the ‘certain appetites’ hinted at were to do with masturbation or illicit heterosexual sex were also not what the author intended, as is evident from his response to an early stage version of the story, which made Hyde into a ‘voluptuary’:
[Hyde] was not good-looking [ … ] and not, Great Gods! a mere voluptuary. There is no harm in a voluptuary; and none, with my hand on my heart and in the sight of God, none – no harm whatever – in what prurient fools call ‘immorality’. The harm was in Jekyll, because he was a hypocrite – not because he was fond of women; he says so himself; but people are so filled full of folly and inverted lust, that they can think of nothing but sexuality. The Hypocrite let out the beast Hyde – who is no more sexual than another, but who is the essence of cruelty and malice, and selfishness and cowardice, and these are the diabolic in man – not this poor wish to have a woman, that they make such a cry about.28
So much for the author’s view, trampled down in the street early on in the story’s life and never revived. Film versions of the novel rely on the voluptuary as much as they do the Missing-Link makeover always allotted Hyde (notably in Rouben Mamoulian’s 1931 version and Victor Fleming’s remake ten years later, starring Spencer Tracy). In the book, Hyde’s repulsiveness is essentially indefinable. Enfield recalls ‘something wrong in his appearance, something downright detestable [ … ] He must be deformed somewhere; he gives a strong feeling of deformity, although I couldn’t specify the point,’ while Utterson can’t account for the fear and loathing he feels when looking at Hyde: ‘There is something more, if I could find a name for it. God bless me, the man seems hardly human! Something troglodytic, shall we say? [ … ] or is it the mere radiance of a foul soul that thus transpired through, and transfigures, its clay continent?’29 Hyde and Jekyll could never be mistaken for each other, even when, as in the description of ‘The Last Night’ at the laboratory, they both resort to wearing a mask as cover, because they are not just dissimilar in stature, demeanour and age (Jekyll is about fifty, Hyde a youth), but totally different personae. The young Jorge Luis Borges made this point forcibly in his review of the 1941 Victor Fleming film, which, he said, ‘avoids all surprise and mystery: in the early scenes [ … ] Spencer Tracy fearlessly drinks the versatile potion and transforms himself into Spencer Tracy, with a different wig and Negroid features. [ … ] In the book, the identity of Jekyll and Hyde is a surprise: the author saves it for the end of the ninth chapter. The allegorical tale pretends to be a detective story; no reader guesses that Hyde and Jekyll are the same person.’30 Borges returned to the subject many times, emphasising the story’s lost impact: ‘I don’t think anyone would have guessed that [Jekyll and Hyde were the same man]. Have you ever suspected that Sherlock Holmes was the Hound of the Baskervilles? Well, no, you haven’t … Have you ever suspected that Hamlet may be Claudius?’31
Longman’s must have realised that they were on to a winner, for on receipt of the manuscript they decided to make Jekyll and Hyde into a small book rather than a serial for their magazine. It was a rapid success on both sides of the Atlantic, selling 40,000 copies in six months in Great Britain and – unknown to the author – an astonishing 250,000 legal and pirated copies in North America. Passing through Southampton in April, Fanny heard a vendor shouting it on the streets, ‘DOCtor Jekyll! DOCtor Jekyll!’,32 Margaret Stevenson got wind of a sermon being preached about the book in Glasgow, and Charles Baxter heard that Queen Victoria was reading it. The story quickly became common property, as Stevenson’s first biographer, Graham Balfour, wrote in 1901: ‘Its success was probably due rather to the moral instincts of the public than to any conscious perception of the merits of its art. It was read by those who never read fiction, it was quoted in pulpits, and made the subject of leading articles in religious papers.’33 It was, in other words, an instant classic.
The ‘Brownies’ had done so well with Jekyll and Hyde that Stevenson may have become a little superstitious about them. Between finishing the story and its publication in January 1886, he wrote another story derived from a dream, ‘Olalla’. As Edwin M. Eigner has shown,34 ‘Olalla’ owes even more to Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s ‘Strange Story’, of which it seems to be an unwitting plagiarism. This was another sort of ‘dreaming’ that Stevenson was prone to (as with Washington Irving and Treasure Island), perhaps more truly subconscious than the ordinary, sleep-engendered sort.
‘Olalla’ deals explicitly – and to the modern eye rather crudely – with racial degeneration, a subject which was coming increasingly into debate through the work of contemporary gene theorists such as Francis Galton, and which had always intrigued Stevenson. In the story, an English officer is sent to convalesce from his wounds at the home of a formerly grand provincial family in Spain. His hosts are puzzling; the beautiful but impassive ‘Senora’ remains aloof, presumably from pride, while her half-witted, hairy, ‘dusky’ son Felipe shows evidence of a profound sadism and bestial lack of control. In a series of sensational incidents, culminating in a quasi-vampiric attack by the Senora (who bites his hand through to the bone), the Englishman discovers a strain of insanity in the family, but by this time he has fallen in love with the daughter of the house, the stunningly beautiful, pious, poetry-writing Olalla, whom he wishes to marry. Their early meetings are wordless and instantly, powerfully erotic. Olalla, with her perfect face and form (which Stevenson dwells on at some length, especially her breasts, which are exposed by a split-bodiced dress), ends up renouncing her feelings for the Englishman in order not to pass on and perhaps intensify the family’s bad blood, an act of what could be called sui-eugenics.
Stevenson hardly ever mentioned this story without apologising for its ‘not very defensible’ nature, but whether he was referring to the eroticism, the vampirism or the theory is not clear. It was probably the first of these; the dishonourable treatment of women (in life) was getting to be an obsessive issue for the author, and here he was representing (in fiction) one woman as a blood-sucking degenerate and another as a sex object. And one wonders what Fanny made of this story, with its melting heroine so clearly not modelled on herself and the insane Moorish matron replicating so closely the scene in the Paris cab years before when she had bitten Louis’s hand and drawn blood.
Sam, who was eighteen in 1886, had not done well in his first year at Edinburgh University, and Stevenson thought he should hold back from the exams rather than fail. After the event, Stevenson admitted that his cautious pessimism over his stepson’s chances was just like his father’s treatment of himself – ‘my conduct has been exactly his all through’.35 History did seem to be repeating itself; in fact, Sam’s career was becoming so like a reprise of Stevenson’s own as to suggest conscious copying. Not only was Sam living at Heriot Row (in Louis’s old room), studying engineering, attending meetings of the ‘Spec’, and wearing a velvet coat, he was about to drop out, just as Louis had done. The rapid success of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde had impressed the boy deeply (he kept a close record of his stepfather’s sales), and in the autumn following its publication he announced that he too wanted to become a writer. He was even preparing to share Louis’s fate as an invalid, convinced as he was in the summer of 1886 that he ran the risk of permanent blindness. He started to practise the piano blindfold, and pleaded to have a typewriter bought for him so that he could pursue his writing vocation in the coming darkness. The threat of Sam losing his sight aroused his mother’s acute anxiety (which must have been gratifying), and she whipped him from one specialist to another in the hope of a cure, but as the eye problem coincided with exam-time in Edinburgh, and was completely rectified by the acquisition of a pair of glasses, it is unlikely to have been too severe in the first place.
The winter of 1886–87 was an important period of transition for the boy. While he was in Barbados on a long holiday he got news that his father, now remarried to a Miss Paul (known dismissively by Fanny as ‘Paulie’) and with a second family in California, had disappeared suddenly without trace. No’ one ever found out what happened to Sam Osbourne Senior, though there were ‘evil rumours’ that he might have run off with another woman, committed suicide or been murdered. This dark turn in the family history naturally disturbed Sam, who from this point onwards decided to drop his ill-starred patronymic and be known by his middle name, Lloyd. His allegiances turned wholly towards Stevenson as the father-figure, and he strove to cement their bond with proofs of special affinity, cutting short his very long holiday in Barbados because he had had a premonition of Louis being critically ill. This sort of psychic phenomenon always went down well at home: Fanny was a great visionary herself.
Lloyd’s decision to ‘become a writer’ was a course of action (or inaction) to which neither Louis nor Fanny could reasonably object, nor did they. Stevenson positively encouraged the boy, though his 1888 essay addressed to Lloyd, ‘A Letter to a Young Gentleman who Proposes to Embrace the Career of Art’, strikes many warning notes about writing as a profession: ‘the temptation is almost as common as the vocation is rare’, ‘perpetual effort’ was necessary, and ‘what you may decently expect, if you have some talent and much industry, is such an income as a clerk will earn with a tenth or perhaps a twentieth of your nervous output’.36 The difficulties which Lloyd’s decision posed for the whole family were obvious: he would continue to be a dependant, possibly an expensive one, and his work would be hard to criticise or praise honestly. But the lengths to which Stevenson went to accommodate his stepson’s desires and requirements show a trust in and affection for him that remained almost entirely unclouded for the rest of his life, most of which they spent sharing a home together, and during which they collaborated on three books. Lloyd had not grown up to be a particularly attractive character, and he didn’t improve with age; he was lazy, not very clever, addicted to being ‘kept’, made two bad marriages, had children out of wedlock and wrote lots of poor or indifferent books (at one point admitting that he could get anything published because of his association with Stevenson). His conduct as co-keeper of the flame with his mother in the years following Stevenson’s death was characterised by raw self-interest, his letters by speciousness and bully’s stratagems. All in all, it is hard to see what his stepfather saw in him, yet Stevenson loved him and cared for him, to the point of dotage even, as he wrote to Henley in the early summer of 1887:
I find in the contemplation of the youth Lloyd much benefit: he is [a] dam fine youth. Happy am I, to be even this much of a father! [ … ] Perhaps as we approach this foul time of life, young folk become necessary? ‘Tis a problem. We know what form this craving wears in certain cases. But perhaps it is a genuine thing in itself: the age of paternity coming, a demand sets in. Thus perhaps my present (and crescent) infatuation for the youth Lloyd; but no, I think it is because the youth himself improves so much, and is such a dam, dam, dam fine youth.37
The context of this is important: Henley and his wife Anna had been married nine years and had not yet had a child (though Anna had suffered many miscarriages). Stevenson recognised frustrated paternity as a cause of sadness in his friend – and indeed when Henley’s only child, Margaret, was born the following year, Henley proved the most obsessively fond father imaginable. Frustrated paternity did not play half so great a role in Stevenson’s own life, but even so he derived ‘much benefit’ from the presence and the fact of Lloyd (Belle at this point was completely out of the picture).
The quotation has another current running in it which should not pass unremarked: the proximity of the two ‘cravings’, one parental, the other sexual. Perhaps, Stevenson suggests (in a trope that would become familiar in psychoanalysis), they are essentially the same. It’s a rather remarkable statement, deliberating using charged words such as ‘infatuation’, ‘craving’ and ‘demand’ to distinguish his feelings from those in ‘certain [paedophilic or homoerotic] cases’. And those cases themselves are, characteristically, acknowledged rather than condemned or vilified.
Stevenson’s admiration for his stepson was never again so emphatically expressed but, as I have indicated, didn’t diminish significantly, despite trials later. Wayne Koestenbaum is the most explicit of those commentators who have read the relationship as homoerotic, representing Stevenson’s literary collaborations with Lloyd in terms of a pederastic seduction (they ‘began in a game’ but ‘marked a darker purpose’38). This seems to me a wilful sensationalisation of the available evidence in the specific case of Stevenson and Lloyd, though Koestenbaum’s alertness to homoerotic language and situations elsewhere in Stevenson’s work and life is instructive. In the spring of 1887, with Lloyd’s father vanished and Louis’s father dying, the two can be seen drawing together for comfort to form a new relationship which has almost more of a sibling flavour than that of father-and-son, a pale version of the closeness Louis had felt to Bob in the days of ‘the two Stevensons’.
Within weeks of Jekyll and Hyde being published, Stevenson’s remarkable engine was at work again on the novel he had laid by the previous summer in order to write the Jenkin memoir. Kidnapped (an arresting and novel title) was based around a notorious incident that took place in the troubled aftermath of the 1745 Jacobite Rebellion, and which Stevenson had previously thought to include in his ‘Transformation of the Highlands’, the assassination of Colin Campbell, the King’s collector, at Appin in 1752. This romantic subject was to make another ‘story for boys’ for Young Folks Magazine; it was also perhaps a bid to please Thomas Stevenson with a reassuringly Scottish, wholesome adventure story after all the flim-flam of Prince Otto, the crudeness of the Henley plays and the sensationalism of Jekyll. The evocation of the West Highland coastline was to be an oblique homage to the Stevenson family firm and the episode set on the islet of Earraid a specific reference to Louis’s years as an apprentice engineer. All this must have mollified the ailing old man’s anxieties, especially when Stevenson agreed – in theory, at any rate – to his father’s predictable suggestion that the new book ought to include ‘a scene of religion’.39
Though marketed as a children’s story, Kidnapped was not in quite the same key as Treasure Island and The Black Arrow, as Henry James recognised when he noted in his copy: ‘this coquetry of [Stevenson’s] pretending he writes “for boys”’.40 The narrator, David Balfour, a reserved, manly, Lowland, Low-Church sixteen-year-old, is very different from the prepubescent boy-heroes of the earlier stories, and has an unillusioned outlook on life. The story touches on weighty historical and cultural matters: the bungled management of the Jacobite cause in the aftermath of the ’45, the hardening of attitudes in the Calvinist Lowlands and the beginning of the process which led to the hated Highland clearances. The Appin murder itself was unusual matter for a Young Folks yarn. But in the dedication of Kidnapped (to Baxter), Stevenson makes a point of ‘how little I am touched by the desire of accuracy’, even to the extent of changing the year of the murder from 1752 to 1751 (it’s not at all clear why). Despite the high number of actual historical figures in the story, including Alan Breck Stewart, the probable assassin, Cluny Macpherson, the Jacobite chieftain, Robin Oig, son of Rob Roy and James Stewart, ‘James of the Glens’, Alan’s kinsman and the man who is tried and executed in his place, and his extremely clever use of all the ‘true’ material, Stevenson wanted to be judged here as a fiction writer rather than a historian.
The method is very like that of Sir Walter Scott, and Kidnapped stands comparison with the works of the master on any ground other than sheer length. The necessity of writing in instalments kept the narrative bowling along at a bracing pace in a series of superbly imagined episodes: the sinister House of Shaws where David’s wicked uncle Ebenezer tries to murder the boy by sending him up a staircase leading to a steep drop, the kidnap itself, the fight in the roundhouse, David’s ordeal after the shipwreck, Cluny Macpherson’s terrorist-cell hide-out ‘like a wasp’s nest’ in the mountains, the flight across the moorlands with Alan Breck, all done with sharp attention to detail, especially physical discomfort:
I would be aroused in the gloaming, to sit up in the same puddle where I had slept, and sup cold drammach; the rain driving sharp in my face or running down my back in icy trickles; the mist enfolding us like as in a gloomy chamber – or perhaps if the wind blew, falling suddenly apart and showing us the gulf of some dark valley where the streams were crying aloud.41
It’s a very unsentimental book; the gross Captain Hoseason and his crew (of the Covenant – surely a satirical choice of name) present a remarkable catalogue of vices and the character of Ransome the cabin boy a brief but arresting study in abuse:
He swore horribly whenever he remembered, but more like a silly schoolboy than a man; and boasted of many wild and bad things that he had done, stealthy thefts, false accusations, ay, and even murder; but all with such a dearth of likelihood in the details, and such a weak and crazy swagger in the delivery, as disposed me rather to pity than to believe him.
[ … ] It was the pitifullest thing in life to see this unhappy, unfriended creature staggering and dancing and talking he knew not what. Some of the men laughed, but not all; others would grow as black as thunder (thinking perhaps of their own childhood or their own children) and bid him stop that nonsense and think what he was doing. As for me, I felt ashamed to look at him, and the poor child still comes about me in my dreams.42
Kidnapped is both a romance and a novel of realism, and the odd coupling of the two things is symbolised and acted out in the relationship between the volatile, charismatic Alan Breck Stewart and his cautious companion David, whose politics and temperaments are so wildly different. This is reminiscent of the Hawkins/Silver relationship and anticipates the much darker and more destructive connection between the Durie brothers in The Master of Ballantrae, but it is also a fairly obvious way of separating and analysing the two different kinds of Scottishness in Stevenson himself. The ‘Shorter Catechist’ was always on duty in the author, but willing to be ‘kidnapped’ any moment by the romance of a vigorous, glamorous warrior culture. The disunity of Scotland is lamented throughout, for David is, like his creator, a ‘foreigner at home’, who knows no Gaelic, cannot recognise tartans and is loyal to an English King. Yet Alan, despite his pride in being a ‘Hieland shentleman’ of long pedigree, is so ‘native’ that he has had to spend years in exile, and with his lace cuffs and court mannerisms has all but turned into a Frenchman.
The vision of Scotland that the book projects is essentially tragic, for in the wide variety of Scots life it illustrates – Lowland churchmen, Highland chiefs, clansmen, fisherfolk, mariners, itinerant preachers, evicted crofters, Latin-spouting city lawyers – everyone is to a greater or lesser extent embattled or threatened. The effects of this traumatic, schismatic period in Scots history were all too plainly felt by the author, who longed to be a ‘native Maker’ in a language and culture which were almost too fragmentary and diverse to be usable. In the same year as he finished Kidnapped, Stevenson was writing the poems, in Scots and in English, which made up the collection Underwoods. It was a ‘two-minded’ book as well as a bilingual one: the first half, in English, contains highly personal poems mostly addressed to friends; the second half, in Scots, is quite different in style and tone, full of bracing lyrics and ballads. But the dialect in which he composed these ‘native’ verses was, he admitted in a prefatory note, far from pure. His remarks are in response to a contemporary research project on dialect which illustrated how multifarious and localised Scots language had become.
I am from the Lothians myself; it is there I heard the language spoken about my childhood; and it is in the drawling Lothian voice that I repeat it to myself. Let the precisians call my speech that of the Lothians. And if it be not pure, alas! what matters it? The day draws near when this illustrious and malleable tongue shall be quite forgotten; and Burns’s Ayrshire, and Dr MacDonald’s Aberdeen awa’, and Scott’s brave, metropolitan utterance will be all equally the ghosts of speech. Till then 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 of the heart rather than of the head, so restricted as it is in prospect of endurance, so parochial in bounds of space.43
It is a melancholy reflection, with an inbuilt irony: the writer admits the tragic fact that his native tongue is dying, and does so in the foreign tongue which is his first language, and of which he is a world-acknowledged master. What Underwoods illustrates very clearly is that Stevenson’s pre-eminence as an English stylist relied on his access to Scots. There were things he could only express in Scots – books, stories, poems, letters he felt compelled to write in it – and he revelled in the language like a holiday, for that is what it was.
The last chapters of Kidnapped were churned out by Stevenson ‘without interest or inspiration, almost word by word’, as he wrote to George Iles in 1887.44 It shows: the novel stops rather than ends, with a sentence that is the beginning of a new paragraph: ‘The hand of Providence brought me in my drifting to the very doors of the British Linen Company’s bank.’ This is almost shockingly unsatisfactory. Stevenson had intended to write more, but simply ran out of energy, and on Colvin’s advice wrote a postscript explaining that the projected later episodes would appear in a sequel. It is remarkable that Young Folks did not revolt at this; all the reviewers complained about it.
Baling out of Kidnapped was a symptom of a general malaise which affected Stevenson in Bournemouth in the year following the publication of Jekyll and Hyde, despite the increase in renown and income he was enjoying. He was skittish and highly strung, had short, troubling rifts with three close friends (Henley, Bob and – astonishingly – Colvin), and got neurotically overheated about matters of public morals, in particular the notorious Crawford divorce case, about which he wrote an impassioned letter to the Court and Society Review. His pleasures were those of a bored adolescent; he spent whole days preparing and conducting war games, mostly with Bob, and tested Charles Baxter’s love of pranks to the limit by sending him a series of elaborate postal hoaxes. Even his ‘piano-pickling’ took on a neurotic intensity, to the extent that he was sometimes spending five hours a day at it straight, getting too exhausted to do anything else.
Thomas Stevenson’s steady decline and changed personality may have been more profoundly disturbing to his son than Louis ever expressed outright. Meeting his parents in London in March 1886, Stevenson was shocked to recognise that his father’s death was ‘thoroughly begun’,45 and foolishly but filially insisted on taking care of the old man for a while. So the two invalids went together to Smedley’s Hydropathic in Matlock, a state-of-the-art spa in the middle of the Derbyshire Dales, and spent just over a week being wrapped in wet flannel, having their feet soaked in mustard, their chests rubbed with chilli paste and limbs dabbed with vinegar. No wonder with this larder full of astringents on him, Stevenson quickly developed the itch. Thomas Stevenson was more agitated by the ‘nonconforming atmosphere’, and proved pettish and irritable. He didn’t seem to enjoy his son’s company much and both men missed their wives. When Louis mentioned that his mother might be able to visit, Thomas ‘laughed aloud like a little child for joy’.46 Louis tried to counter his own homesickness by studying the times of trains back to Bournemouth.
There are signs, though, that Thomas was trying to resolve his long-simmering grievances against his son. A few months after this, on another trip to London to see a specialist, he called at the Royal Institution to visit his old friend Sir James Dewar, to whom he had once complained vehemently about Louis’s desertion of the family firm. Dewar had defended the youth at the time and made a good-humoured bet that in ten years Louis would earn from writing ‘a bigger income than the old firm had ever commanded’, at which, to Dewar’s surprise, Thomas Stevenson became furious and ‘repulsed all attempts at reconciliation’. His visit to Dewar in London in 1887 was to make amends for this. The old man was so feeble that he had to be lifted in and out of the cab. ‘“I cudna be in London without coming to shake your hand and confess that you were richt after a’ about Louis, and I was wrong,”’ Dewar recalls him saying. ‘The frail old frame shook with emotion, and he muttered, “I ken this is my last visit to the South.”’47
Possibly because of his debility, Thomas Stevenson had got into an acrimonious dispute with his nephews David and Charles, who currently ran the family firm, over the distribution of the business profits. The matter turned on the fact that Thomas still received the greater part of the annual profits even though he was no longer working, which naturally had begun to agitate the nephews. The arrangement had been made when the elder David Stevenson had retired in 1883, and presupposed the whole business passing to his side of the family at Thomas’s death. So the temporary, unfair overpayment of Thomas was to compensate him and his heirs for soon being cut off from any income whatever.
In the middle of this bitter and distasteful family dispute, which threatened to go to law, Stevenson found a distraction in the most impetuous plan of gallantry of his whole career. His limited ability to act out his political principles in life had always been a source of profound frustration and shame to him. He tried, sporadically and unsuccessfully, to give up worrying about it for the sake of his health, saying he had ‘died to politics’ over the prosecution of the Sudan campaign of 1883–84: ‘If ever I could do anything,’ he declared then to his father, ‘I suppose I ought to do it; but till that hour comes I will not vex my soul.’48 Well, the hour did seem to have come in the spring of 1887, when the newspapers were full of the plight of a family called Curtin in County Kerry, boycotted and persecuted by Irish nationalists ever since a raid on their farm in November 1885 during which John Curtin and one of the marauders died. The issue was a straightforward one for the Unionist author: the tenants who had been evicted by the British government deserved their fate, the pro-British settlers didn’t. The parallels with the Highland clearances, over which his partisanship swung entirely the other way, did not seem to strike him.
It was the fact that the besieged family were mostly women that really agitated Stevenson, and that in all the months of the boycott no one had stepped in to protect them; ‘all the manhood of England and the world stands aghast before a threat of murder’, he wrote in disgust. His wild scheme, outlined in a letter to Anne Jenkin written one sleepless night, was to remove himself and his household to Ireland and either join the Curtins themselves, or rent another of the targeted farms. The likelihood of getting killed doing this seems to have been the main draw of the plan; ‘a writer being murdered would attract attention’, he wrote, adding that his health made him particularly expendable. His letter sets out the pros and cons in a compellingly immediate style, like thinking aloud. Did he talk like this, like a hyperactive barrister who can’t decide which brief to defend?
The Curtin women are probably highly uninteresting females. I haven’t a doubt of it. But the Government cannot, men will not, protect them. If I am the only one to see this public duty, it is to the public and the Right I should perform it – not to Mesdames Curtin. Fourth Objection: I am married. ‘I have married a wife!’ I seem to have heard it before. It smells ancient; what was the context? [It was what the publican said as excuse in Luke 14:20] Fifth Objection: My wife has had a mean life (1), loves me (2), could not bear to lose me (3). (1) I admit: I am sorry. (2) But what does she love me for? and (3) she must lose me soon or late. And after all, because we run this risk, it does not follow that we should fail. Sixth Objection: My wife wouldn’t like it. No, she wouldn’t. Who would? But the Curtins don’t like it. And all who are to suffer if this goes on, won’t like it. And if there is a great wrong, somebody must suffer. Seventh Objection: I won’t like it. No, I will not; I have thought it through, and I will not. But what of that? And both she and I may like it more than we suppose. We shall lose friends, all comforts, all society: so has everybody who has ever done anything; but we shall have some excitement, and that’s a fine thing, and we shall be trying to do the right, and that’s not to be despised.49
Fanny expressed her opinion of the scheme forthrightly: it was madness from every point of view, she didn’t want any part of it, yet would of course go along if Louis really felt there was no alternative. This was astute, as well as heartfelt, for she must have guessed that he would not be able to follow through. Lloyd remembered his mother being ‘much more calm than the circumstances warranted’ at the time, though he himself felt far from calm, being the only able-bodied male of the proposed party, and designated ‘chief martyr in this Irish fantasy’.50 He later thought that Stevenson’s plan to help the Curtins was an obvious example of ‘practical Tolstoyism’. His stepfather, he said, was at the time ‘steeped, not only in Tolstoy, but in all Russian literature’.51*
Stevenson was more likely to have been thinking of the Curtin boycott as a chance to be like General Gordon, besieged, holding the fort, dying in action rather than facing ‘inglorious death by disease’. He had somehow acquired a relic of the hero, a cigarette paper on which Gordon had written in Arabic his ‘last message’ from Khartoum. It is a request for information about troop locations, and still exists in the Yale archive. Stevenson treasured the tiny scrap of paper and, according to his mother, ‘took it with him wherever he lived’.52
Events overtook Stevenson, but not before he had tried to arrange a meeting with the Chief Secretary for Ireland, Arthur Balfour (with whom he could claim a distant blood tie, and whose brother, Eustace, was a fellow member of the Savile Club). He hoped to see the minister on his way through London to France, where he and Fanny were going for a holiday. But on 4 May news came that Thomas Stevenson was critically ill, so the couple set off at once for Edinburgh, arriving two days before the old man died. He didn’t recognise his son during that time, as Louis recalled in his bleak poem ‘The Last Sight’:
Once more I saw him. In the lofty room,
Where oft with lights and company his tongue
Was trump to honest laughter, sate attired
A something in his likeness. ‘Look!’ said one,
Unkindly kind, ‘look up, it is your boy!’
And the dread changeling gazed on me in vain.53
Louis arranged the funeral, which was a remarkably elaborate affair involving over a hundred invited guests and a procession of forty or fifty carriages, the largest private funeral anyone could remember in Edinburgh. It started from Heriot Row, where Louis, Bob and Lloyd received the guests, and went on to the New Calton Burying Ground on the other side of the town. The weather was bad, even though it was May, and Louis, who had been struggling with a cold all week, ran out of energy halfway through the proceedings and was unable to attend the interment, leaving Bob to act as chief mourner in his place. Poor Margaret Stevenson must have been wondering how long it would be till the next funeral.
Thomas Stevenson left his estate tied up in such a way that his wife had a life rent on the residue, to be passed on to Louis at her death. This was not a very helpful arrangement, given Louis’s uncertain hold on life, and though he was entitled to £3000 from the estate’s capital, his father’s death did not leave him as well off as many of his friends and family imagined. The people who benefited significantly from Thomas Stevenson’s careful custodianship of money from his share of the business, from his own father and from his uncle Robert – who had made him sole heir in 1851 to £4500 – were Fanny Stevenson and her children, but they had to wait another ten years.
Margaret Stevenson had every intention of sharing her resources with her son, and sharing her widowhood with him, too. Her brother George had examined Louis while he was in Edinburgh and recommended Colorado as a good place for him to winter, so Margaret generously offered to pay for the whole family’s removal there that August, including herself, Lloyd and Valentine. She was already thinking of selling up Heriot Row and going to live with Louis and Fanny permanently, a prospect which Fanny did not blench at, though it can’t have struck her as ideal.
It was clear that Scotland was out of the question as a home for Louis; just a few weeks in windswept Edinburgh had almost finished him off. He left the city on the last day of May 1887 and headed back to Bournemouth, mercifully unaware that he was taking his leave of his native country for good. Flora Masson saw the open cab pass on its way along Princes Street to the station, piled with untidily-packed luggage. A man stood up and waved his hat to get her attention, and she recognised Stevenson, calling, ‘Goodbye! Goodbye!’54
Thomas Stevenson’s valet, a man called John Cruikshank, came with them from Edinburgh, an unlooked-for kind of inheritance. He spent a few weeks opening the door at Skerryvore, but the arrangement was doomed not to last long. ‘We have a butler: by God! He doesn’t buttle, but the point of the thing is the style. When Fanny gardens, he stands over her and looks genteel,’ Stevenson wrote comically to Colvin.55 But Cruikshank fell in with ‘bad companions’ in Bournemouth and by July had been asked to leave, no doubt to mutual relief. The Stevensons must have been puzzling employers for a gentleman’s gentleman; their scruffy clothes, disarming manners and unconcern for the proprieties probably struck Cruikshank as insulting. His brief sojourn in their household marks the high-water mark of Stevenson’s ‘revolt into respectability’, a process inherently farcical, as evident the evening in June 1887 when the Stevensons attempted to impress an American millionaire by inviting him down to Bournemouth for dinner. Charles Fairchild was John Singer Sargent’s friend and patron, and had commissioned another portrait of Stevenson as a present for his wife, who, like Fairchild, was an ardent fan of the writer. When Sargent said that Fairchild wanted to meet them, the Stevensons could hardly refuse, especially as he seemed to want to bankroll their coming trip to the States. But on the afternoon of the dinner, the cat Ginger stole the fish from the cellar and Valentine forgot the cream for the white soup. Cruikshank had bungled the purchase of the wine, so they had only one bottle of indifferent hock to serve to the millionaire, and as the nation had ground to a halt that day for Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee, none of these deficiencies was remediable. Worst of all, on the same train as Fairchild from London was a surprise visitor, Teddy Henley, whom Fanny had to welcome in with a fixed smile. The soup was inedible, the leg of lamb Valentine had bought much too small, and all they could put together for dessert was ‘some hastily improvised custard in very small cups’, as Fanny recalled in an agonised, humorous letter to her mother-in-law: ‘Fortunately, your cheese was still to the fore, and it was pathetic to hear both Mr Fairchild and Teddy praise the cheese which they ate until for shame’s sake they had to leave off [ … ] I believe Valentine and John wept together in the pantry.’56
Despite the dinner, Fairchild stuck to his purpose. He proposed to arrange (and, presumably, pay for) all their travel from New York westwards, as well as accommodation when they got to Colorado. In the east, they were to stay at the Fairchilds’ home in Newport, Rhode Island, where, he promised, they would be safe from society and newshounds alike, for, as Fairchild knew better than the Stevensons themselves at this date, Jekyll and Hyde had turned its author into very hot property in America. Anywhere other than under the protection of powerful friends such as himself, he told Fanny, ‘our lives will be hunted out of us, as the people were all Louis mad’.
Right up to the last minute, Stevenson had wanted nothing but to get away, but taking his leave of the servants he was overcome by emotion and wept copiously. ‘It had suddenly come upon him that he loved Skerryvore, Westbourne, Bournemouth, even the Poole Road with an almost morbid sentimentality,’ Fanny wrote to Adelaide Boodle.57 To Colvin, with whom he had had a misunderstanding, all the more disturbing because such things were rare between them, Louis wrote emotionally on the eve of departure:
Here I am in this dismantled house hoping to leave tomorrow, yet still in doubt; this time of my life is at an end: if it leaves bitterness in your mind, what kind of a time has it been?
The last day – the last evening – in the old house – with a sad, but God knows, nowise a bitter heart; I wish I could say with hope.58
*It is even possible that Fanny (or Louis) had some experience of being treated at the Salpêtrière, a hospital for hysterics, as Stevenson refers familiarly to the great doctor in two later letters, and seems to have recommended him to Colvin, whom Henry James reports returning from ‘a long regime of Charcot’ in April 1889.
*This may well be true, though Tolstoy is not mentioned once in Stevenson’s letters.