Abstract
Weir of Hermiston was begun in October 1892 in a mood of great enthusiasm and worked on sporadically until the day of Stevenson’s death more than two years later. Again and again it was laid aside while he was distracted with other projects — St. Ives. The Ebb-Tide, the proofs of Catriona and many short stories and articles? and it was not until September 1894 that he resumed the novel in earnest. It was his practice to dictate each chapter to his secretary, Isobel Strong, revising the work very carefully until he was satisfied. Mrs. Strong noted in her diary for 24 September 1894:
Louis and I have been writing, working away every morning like steam-engines on Hermiston. … He has always been wonderfully clear and sustained in his dictation. … ‘Belle,’ he said, ‘I see it all so clearly! The story unfolds itself before me to the least detail — there is nothing left in doubt. I never felt so before in anything I ever wrote. It will be my best work; I feel myself so sure in every word.’62
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Notes
‘My First Book’, Idler, August 1894. Reprinted in Essays in the Art of Writing.
Ibid.
See, for example, Robert Kiely, ‘Adventure as Boy’s Daydream’, in Robert Louis Stevenson and the Fiction of Adventure (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1964)
W. W. Robson, ‘The Sea Cook: a Study in the Art of Robert Louis Stevenson’ in On the Novel (London: J. M. Dent, 1971).
RLS to Henley, October 1884.
Great Expectations, Ch. 2: ‘I was in mortal terror of the young man who wanted my heart and liver; I was in mortal terror of my interlocutor with the iron leg.’
‘My First Book’, op.cit.
RLS to Henley, May 1883.
‘My First Book’, op.cit.
‘The Sea Cook: a Study in the Art of Robert Louis Stevenson’, op.cit.
RLS to Sidney Colvin, 9 March 1884.
RLS to W. H. Low, December 1883.
Cf. Letters and reviews quoted in Maixner, Robert Louis Stevenson: The Critical Heritage, pp. 176–87.
Furnas, p. 217.
Ibid., p. 218.
RLS to J. A. Symonds, spring 1886.
The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Ch. 49.
See Robert M. Philmus, ‘The Satiric Ambivalence of The Island of Doctor Moreau’ in Science Fiction Studies, 23, vol. 8, March 1981.
RLS to his father, 25 January 1886.
Cf. ‘Memoirs of an Islet’ in Memories and Portraits.
Cf. David Lodge, ‘Tono-Bungay and the Condition of England’, in Language of Fiction (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966).
Henry James, ‘Robert Louis Stevenson’, Century Magazine, April 1888.
H. B. Baildon, Robert Louis Stevenson: A Life Study in Criticism (London: Chatto & Windus, 1901)p. 230.
Quoted in Balfour, p. 233.
September 1886. Cf. Stevenson’s essay ‘Some Gentlemen in Fiction’, Scribner’s Magazine, June 1888: ‘In one of my books, and in one only, the characters took the bit in their teeth; all at once, they became detached from the flat paper, they turned their backs on me and walked off bodily; and from that time my task was stenographic — it was they who spoke, it was they who wrote the remainder of the story.’ See also John Fowles, The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Ch. 13.
RLS to S. R. Crockett, 17 May 1893: ‘I shall never see Auld Reekie [Edinburgh]. I shall never set my foot again upon the heather. Here I am until I die, and here will I be buried.’
G. E. Brown, A Book of RLS, p. 49.
James to RLS, 21 October 1893; Vernon Lee, Contemporary Review, September 1895, pp. 404–7.
James to RLS, 21 October 1893.
Catriona, Ch. 20: ‘And till the end of time your folk (who are not yet used with the duplicity of life and men) will struggle as I did, and make heroical resolves, and take long risks.’
RLS to Colvin, October 1883.
Quoted in F. Masson (ed.), I Can Remember Robert Louis Stevenson (London: Chambers, 1922) pp. 206–8.
RLS to William Archer, March 1894.
See, for example, V. B. Lamb, The Betrayal of Richard III (London: Coram Publishers, 1959);
Josephine Tey, The Daughter of Time (London: Peter Davies, 1951);
Paul Murray Kendall, Richard III (London: Allen & Unwin, 1955).
The Times, 25 May 1919.
‘The Genesis of The Master of Ballantrae’ reprinted in Essays in the Art of Writing.
RLS to Colvin, 24 December 1887.
Letters of Henry James, ed. Percy Lubbock (1920) vol. I, p. 157;
W. E. Henley: ‘A Masterpiece in Grime’, Scots Observer, 12 October 1889.
RLS to Colvin, 24 December 1887.
Quoted in Kiely, op.cit., p. 204.
RLS to Adelaide Boodle, December 1887.
Cf. H. G. Wells, The Time Machine, Ch. vii: ‘The Time Machine was gone! At once, like a lash across the face, came the possibility of losing my own age, of being left helpless in this strange new world. The bare thought of it was an actual physical sensation. I could feel it grip me at the throat and stop my breathing.’
The influence of Poe on The Master of Ballantrae is remarkable throughout. There is, for example, the antagonism between the two brothers (‘William Wilson’); the voyage of the Nonesuch in Ch. 9 (cf. The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym)’, and the melodramatic ending which hinges on the idea of burial alive (‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ and ‘The Premature Burial’).
RLS to James, March 1888.
RLS to Colvin, 14 January 1889.
David Daiches, Robert Louis Stevenson and his World, p. 7 4.
Swearingen, op.cit., p. 126.
Preface to Tusitala Edition.
Epilogue to The Wrecker.
RLS to Colvin, 24 October 1891.
G. E. Brown, A Book of RLS, p. 285.
The Wrecker, Ch. 10.
RLS to Colvin, 24 October 1891.
G. B. Stern, Preface to RLS: An Omnibus.
RLS to Colvin, 25 April 1893.
RLS to Colvin, 29 May 1893.
‘In Defence of Ebb-Tide’, New York Critic, November 1894.
Jenni Calder, Introduction to Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Other Stories (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1979).
Cf. H. G. Wells, The Island of Doctor Moreau, Ch. 14: ‘They build themselves their dens, gather fruit, and pull herbs — marry even. But I can see through it all, see into their very souls, and see there nothing but the souls of beasts, beasts that perish — anger, and the lusts to live and gratify themselves.’ (Wells may have derived some of the details of Moreau’s island from New Island in The Ebb-Tide.)
Kiely, op.cit., p. 181.
Preface to Tusitala Edition.
RLS to R. A. M. Stevenson, 17 June 1894.
Isobel Strong and Lloyd Osbourne, Vailima Memories of R. L. Stevenson (London: Constable, 1903) pp. 69–71.
Arnold Bennett, Journals (1932) vol. i, p. 206.
RLS to R. A. M. Stevenson, June 1894. The phrase refers to Heathercat, another uncompleted novel, but could equally well be applied to Weir of Hermiston.
See Compton Mackenzie, Robert Louis Stevenson (London: Morgan-Grampian Books, 1968) appendix.
For a discussion on the relationship between Pip and Orlick see H. M. Daleski, Dickens and the Art of Analogy (London: Faber & Faber, 1970) pp. 242–4.
Balfour, op.cit., Ch. 3.
Saturday Review, 13 June 1896. Included in Parrinder and Philmus (eds), H. G. Wells’s Literary Criticism (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1980) pp. 99–103.
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© 1984 J. R. Hammond
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Hammond, J.R. (1984). Weir of Hermiston. In: A Robert Louis Stevenson Companion. Palgrave Macmillan Literary Companions. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-06080-1_16
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