Abstract
Cruising between the Pacific islands in the late 1880s, Robert Louis Stevenson gathered ideas for an ambitious work of travel writing, which he hoped would capture the essence of the South Seas.1 In May 1889, his wife Fanny confided her fears to their friend, Sidney Colvin: ’Louis’, she wrote, ’has the most enchanting material that any one ever had in the whole world for his book, and I am afraid that he is going to spoil it all’.2 Instead of entertaining his readers with all ’the extraordinary adventures that befell us’, she lamented, he had ’taken into his Scotch Stevenson head, that a stern duty lies before him, and that his book must be a sort of scientific and historical impersonal thing’.3 Fanny’s complaint opposes the domains of dry, ’impersonal’ science, and a romantic literature steeped in authorial personality. Twenty months later, she recalled her frustration over the ’South Sea book’:
[m]any times I was almost in despair. He had got… [Darwin’s] Coral Reefs; somebody else on Melanesian languages, books on the origin of the South Sea peoples, and all sorts of scientific pamphlets and papers… Instead of writing about his adventures in these wild islands, he would ventilate his own theories on the vexed questions of race and language. He wasted much precious time over grammars and dictionaries, with no results, for he was able to get an insight into hardly any native tongue.4
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Notes
Fanny Stevenson to Sidney Colvin, May 1889, in The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson, ed. Bradford Booth and Ernest Mehew, 8 vols (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1994–95), 6: 303 (hereafter, Letters).
Fanny Stevenson to Colvin, January 1891, Letters, 7: 80. Despite Fanny’s efforts to make the work less scientific, critical reaction confirmed her fears about its aridity: see Neil Rennie, ‘Introduction’, in Robert Louis Stevenson, In the South Seas (1896; comp. Sidney Colvin) (London: Penguin, 1998), viii-xxxv, xxi.
Matthew Arnold,’Literature and Science’ (1882), in The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold, ed. R. H. Super, vol. 10 (Ann Arbor, Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 1974), 53–73, 62.
Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago, Illinois: University of Chicago Press, 1962), 3–4, 151.
See also George Levine, ‘One Culture: Science and Literature’, in George Levine, ed., One Culture: Essays in Science and Literature (Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), 3–32, 5–22.
Gillian Beer, Open Fields: Science in Cultural Encounter (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 173.
Gillian Beer, Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (1983), 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
George Levine, Darwin and the Novelists: Patterns of Science in Victorian Fiction (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1988), 2–3, 8, 13.
Sally Shuttleworth, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Science: the Make-Believe of a Beginning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), and Charlotte Bronte and Victorian Psychology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
Peter Allan Dale, In Pursuit of a Scientific Culture: Science, Art, and Society in the Victorian Age (Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989).
Laura Otis, Organic Memory: History and the Body in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries (Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 1994).
Helen Small, Love’s Madness: Medicine; the Novel, and Female Insanity 1800–1865 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 35–40.
Stevenson, ‘Selections from His Notebook’ (1923), in Memories and Portraits, Memoirs of Himself, Selections from His Notebook (London: Heinemann, 1924), 171–94, 184, 176; Stevenson to Frances Sitwell, September 1873, Letters, 1: 287; Stevenson to James Walter Ferrier, November 1872, Selected Letters, 28; on his essays, see Chapter 1.
John Jay Chapman, ‘Robert Louis Stevenson’, in Emerson and Other Essays (London: David Nutt, 1898), 217–47, 223. The reference is to Hannah More’s widely read novel, Cœlebs in Search of a Wife (1808).
Andrew Noble, ‘Highland History and Narrative Form in Scott and Stevenson’, in Andrew Noble, ed., Robert Louis Stevenson (London: Vision Press, 1983), 134–87.
Christopher Harvie, ‘The Politics of Stevenson’, in Jenni Calder, ed., Stevenson and Victorian Scotland (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1981), 107–25.
Vanessa Smith, Literary Culture and the Pacific: Nineteenth-Century Textual Encounters (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), Chapters 3 to 5.
Rod Edmond, Representing the South Pacific: Colonial Discourse from Cook to Gauguin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), Chapter 6.
Barry Menikoff, Robert Louis Stevenson and’The Beach of Falesá’: a Study in Victorian Publishing (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1984).
Robert Hillier, The South Seas Fiction of Robert Louis Stevenson (New York: Peter Lang, 1989).
See Roslyn Jolly, ‘Introduction’, in Stevenson, South Sea Tales (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), ix–xxxiii, xxxiii.
Alan Sandison, Robert Louis Stevenson and the Appearance of Modernism (Basingstoke: Macmillan, now Palgrave Macmillan, 1996), 100, 139–40, 12–13.
Barry Menikoff, ‘New Arabian Nights: Stevenson’s Experiment in Fiction’, Nineteenth-Century Literature 45 (1990–91), 339–62, 343.
Stephen Heath, ‘Psychopathia Sexualis: Stevenson’s Strange Case’, in Lyn Pykett, ed., Reading Fin de Siècle Fictions (London: Longman, 1996), 64–79.
Stephen D. Arata, ‘The Sedulous Ape: Atavism, Professionalism, and Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde’, Criticism: a Quarterly Journal for Literature and the Arts 37 (1995), 233–59.
Robert Mighall, A Geography of Victorian Gothic Fiction: Mapping History’s Nightmares (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 145–53, 187–95.
‘Introduction’, in Elazar Barkan and Ronald Bush, eds, Prehistories of the Future: the Primitivist Project and the Culture of Modernism (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1995), 1–19, 2.
Elaine Showalter, Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle (London: Bloomsbury, 1991), 105.
Roger Cooter and Stephen Pumfrey, ‘Separate Spheres and Public Places: Reflections on the History of Science Popularization and Science in Popular Culture’, History of Science 32 (1994), 237–67, 251.
See also Bernard Lightman,’“The Voices of Nature”: Popularizing Victorian Science’, in Bernard Lightman, ed., Victorian Science in Context (Chicago, Illinois: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 187–211.
Ed Block, ‘James Sully, Evolutionist Psychology, and Late Victorian Gothic Fiction’, Victorian Studies 25 (1982), 443–67, 444.
Ed Block, Rituals of Dis-integration: Romance and Madness in the Victorian Psychomythic Tale (New York: Garland, 1993), 7–8.
On the origin of the term ‘evolution’, see Peter J. Bowler, The Invention of Progress: the Victorians and the Past (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 10.
See Peter J. Bowler, Biology and Social Thought (Berkeley, California: Office for History of Science and Technology, University of California at Berkeley, 1993), and The Non-Darwinian Revolution: Reinterpreting a Historical Myth (Baltimore, Maryland: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988).
J. W. Burrow, Evolution and Society: a Study in Victorian Social Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966), 11–14.
George W. Stocking, Jr., Victorian Anthropology (New York: Free Press, 1987), passim; Bowler, Biology, 38–9.
Rick Rylance, Victorian Psychology and British Culture 1850–1880 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 203–50; Stocking, Anthropology, 154–64.
Martin Fichman,’Biology and Politics: Defining the Boundaries’, in Bernard Lightman, ed., Victorian Science in Context (Chicago, Illinois: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 94–118, 97.
For the traditional view, see Jeremy MacClancy, ‘Anthropology: “The latest form of evening entertainment”’, in David Bradshaw, ed., A Concise Companion to Modernism (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2003), 75–94, 82–8. Sinéad Garrigan Mattar suggests, along similar lines to my argument, that the work of W. B. Yeats and J. M. Synge foreshadows modernism’s evolutionist interests: Primitivism, Science, and the Irish Revival (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004), 1–5.
Gregory Castle, Modernism and the Celtic Revival (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 11.
David Richards, Masks of Difference: Cultural Representations in Literature, Anthropology and Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 216.
Nicholas Daly, Modernism, Romance and the Fin de Siècle: Popular Fiction and British Culture, 1880–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 118.
Peter Broks, ‘Science, Media and Culture: British Magazines, 1890–1914’, Public Understanding of Science 2 (1993), 123–39.
Paul White, ‘Cross-cultural Encounters: the Co-production of Science and Literature in Mid-Victorian Periodicals’, in Roger Luckhurst and Josephine McDonagh, eds, Transactions and Encounters: Science and Culture in the Nineteenth Century (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), 75–95.
Unsourced quotation, cited in Roger Lancelyn Green, Andrew Lang: a Critical Biography with a Short-Title Bibliography of the Works of Andrew Lang (Leicester: Edmund Ward, 1946), 115.
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© 2006 Julia Reid
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Reid, J. (2006). Introduction: Stevenson, Evolution, and the ’Primitive’. In: Robert Louis Stevenson, Science, and the Fin de Siècle. Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230554849_1
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