Abstract
In a cluster of essays written during the 1880s, Stevenson explored — and celebrated — the persistence of precivilized states of consciousness in the modern world, in the guise of romance, oral narratives, childhood make-believe, and the literary imagination. These essays, which appeared in popular journals and enjoyed a wide readership, mark Stevenson’s engagement with the emergent evolutionist approach to literature. A new school of psychologists, following Herbert Spencer, examined the imagination as a connection between modern individuals and humanity’s collective past. The psychologist James Sully and others used an evolutionary model of the mind to explore the affinity between dreaming, myth-making, and literary inspiration. An increasing interest in the unconscious mind also informed the writings of psychical researchers including F. W. H. Myers and the new sciences of comparative mythology and physiological aesthetics, as practised by Andrew Lang and Grant Allen. Similarly, contemporary writers often expressed evolutionist understandings of creativity: for Kipling, the artist’s imagination represented his memory of past lives and, for Wilde, ’concentrated race-experience’.1
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Notes
Rudyard Kipling, ‘The Finest Story in the World’ (1891), in Selected Stories, ed. Sandra Kemp (London: J. M. Dent, 1987), 54–82.
Oscar Wilde, ‘The Critic as Artist’ (1890), in The Artist as Critic: Critical Writings of Oscar Wilde, ed. Richard Ellmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1969), 340–408, 384.
James Sully, My Life and Friends (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1918), 195, 194.
Alvin Sullivan, ed., British Literary Magazines: the Victorian and Edwardian Age, 1837–1913 (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1984), 82–3.
Ed Block, ‘James Sully, Evolutionist Psychology, and Late Victorian Gothic Fiction’, Victorian Studies 25 (1982), 443–67, 444.
Herbert Spencer, The Principles of Psychology (1855), 2nd edn, 2 vols (London: Williams and Norgate, 1870–72), 2: 648.
Stevenson, ‘Books Which Have Influenced Me’ (1887), in Essays Literary and Critical (London: Heinemann et al., 1923), 62–8, 64–5. On Spencer’s influence on Stevenson, see Chapter 3.
W. D. Howells, ‘Henry James, Jr.’ (1882), in Selected Literary Criticism, ed. Ulrich Halfmann and Christoph K. Lohmann, 3 vols (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1993), 1: 317–23, 319, 323.
Andrew Lang, ‘Realism and Romance’, Contemporary Review 52 (1887), 683–93, 689.
Oscar Maurer, ‘Andrew Lang and Longman’s Magazine, 1882–1905’, University of Texas Studies in English 34 (1955), 152–78.
Marysa Demoor, ‘Andrew Lang’s Causeries 1874–1912’, Victorian Periodicals Review 21.1 (1988), 15–22.
H. Rider Haggard, ‘About Fiction’, Contemporary Review 51 (1887), 172–80.
Stephen D. Arata, Fictions of Loss in the Victorian Fin de Siècle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 79–104.
Peter Keating, The Haunted Study: a Social History of the English Novel 1875–1914 (London: Seeker and Warburg, 1989), 344–56.
Discussions of the ‘Art of Fiction’ debate, for example, typically downplay Stevenson’s contribution, comparing his ‘conventional’ aims to James’s innovative conception of literature: see Mark Spilka, ‘Henry James and Walter Besant: “The Art of Fiction” Controversy’, Novel: a Forum on Fiction 6 (1973), 101–19, 118.
Stevenson, ‘A Gossip on Romance’ (1882), in Memories and Portraits (London: Chatto and Windus, 1904), 247–74, 252, 258.
Walter Edwards Houghton, Esther Rhoads Houghton, and Jean Harris Slingerland, eds, The Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals 1824–1900, 5 vols (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1966–89), 4: 430–3. The 1870 Elementary Education Act introduced compulsory elementary education; the 1880 Education Act, strengthening school attendance laws, effectively made the earlier provisions standard across England and Wales.
N. N. Feltes, Literary Capital and the Late Victorian Novel (Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993), 79.
Henry James, ‘The Art of Fiction’, Longman’s Magazine 4 (1884), 502–21, 510.
Stevenson, ‘A Humble Remonstrance’ (1884), in Memories and Portraits (London: Chatto and Windus, 1904), 275–99, 281, 283.
Henry James to Stevenson, July 1888, in The Letters of Henry fames, ed. Percy Lubbock, 2 vols (London: Macmillan, 1920), 1: 139; Spilka, ‘James’, 115.
James Sully, ‘The Undefinable in Art’, Comhill Magazine 38 (1878), 559–72.
See also Kate Flint, The Victorians and the Visual Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 247–8.
Stevenson, ‘On Some Technical Elements of Style’ (1885), in Essays Literary and Critical (London: Heinemann et al., 1923), 33–50, 33.
Stevenson, ‘Pastoral’ (1887), in Memories and Portraits (London: Chatto and Windus, 1904), 90–105, 97, 102.
Laura Otis, Organic Memory: History and the Body in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries (Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 1994), 5–6.
On Spencer’s Lamarckism, see Robert Nye, ‘Sociology and Degeneration: the Irony of Progress’, in J. Edward Chamberlin and Sander L. Gilman, eds, Degeneration: the Dark Side of Progress (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 49–71, 56–7.
Samuel Butler, The Way of All Flesh (written between 1872 and 1884 but not published until 1903), ed. Richard Hoggart (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966), 158–9.
Stevenson, ‘Pastoral’, 103–4. The phrase ‘Probably Arboreal’ was a favourite of Stevenson’s, and also occurs several times in ‘The Manse’. It originated with Darwin, who observed, ‘[w]e thus learn that man is descended from a hairy, tailed quadruped, probably arboreal in its habits’: Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871), 2nd edn (1874; London: Folio Society, 1990), 533.
Stevenson, ‘The Manse’ (1887), in Memories and Portraits (London: Chatto and Windus, 1904), 106–19, 112, 114.
Samuel Butler, Life and Habit (London: Trübner, 1878), 249.
Helen Small, ‘The Unquiet Limit: Old Age and Memory in Victorian Narrative’, in Matthew Campbell, Jacqueline M. Labbé, and Sally Shuttleworth eds, Memory and Memorials 1789–1914: Literary and Cultural Perspectives (London: Routledge, 2000), 60–79, 67–8.
Charles Darwin, The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication (1868), 2nd edn, 2 vols (1875; Baltimore, Maryland: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 2: 36.
Stevenson, ‘Popular Authors’ (1888), in Essays Literary and Critical (London: Heinemann et al., 1923), 20–32, 31, 21.
Stevenson to Haggard, July to August 1891, in The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson, ed. Bradford Booth and Ernest Mehew, 8 vols (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1994–95), 7: 145 (hereafter, Letters); Stevenson to Edward Burlingame, November 1891, Letters, 7: 189. The Saga Library was translated by William Morris and Eiríkr Magnússon.
Linda Dowling, Language and Decadence in the Victorian Fin de Siècle (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1986), 175–243, 181; Wilde, ‘Critic’, 351.
See for instance Andrew Lang,‘“Kalevala”: Or, the Finnish National Epic’, in Custom and Myth (London: Longmans, Green, 1884), 156–79.
Stevenson, review of James Grant Wilson, The Poets and Poetry of Scotland, from the Earliest to the Present Time, vol. 1, Academy 9 (1876), 138–9, 139.
Penny Fielding, Writing and Orality: Nationality, Culture, and Nineteenth-Century Scottish Fiction (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 135.
Stevenson, ‘Talk and Talkers: A Sequel’, Comhill Magazine 46 (1882), 151–8, 151.
Nicholas Daly, Modernism, Romance and the Fin de Siècle: Popular Fiction and British Culture, 1880–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 22.
Sigmund Freud, ‘Civilization and Its Discontents’ (1930), in The Freud Reader, ed. Peter Gay (London: Random House, 1995), 722–72, 752, 771.
Glenda Norquay, ‘Introduction’, in R. L. Stevenson on Fiction: An Anthology of Literary and Critical Essays (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), 1–25, 11.
Sally Shuttleworth, ‘The Psychology of Childhood in Victorian Literature and Medicine’, in Helen Small and Trudi Tate, eds, Literature, Science, Psychoanalysis, 1830–1970: Essays in Honour of Gillian Beer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 86–101, 97.
E. B. Tylor, Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Art, and Custom, 2 vols (London: John Murray, 1871), 1: 257.
Tylor, Culture, 1: 258. Lang echoes this association between children and’savages’ in Andrew Lang, Myth, Ritual, and Religion, 2 vols (London: Longmans, Green, 1887), 2: 325.
Stevenson, ‘Child’s Play’, Comhill Magazine 38 (1878), 352–9, 356–7.
Robert Louis Stevenson, ‘“Rosa Quo Locorum”’ (1896), in Further Memories (London: Heinemann et al., 1923), 1–8, 1.
Andrew Lang, ‘At the Sign of the Ship’, Longman’s Magazine 28 (1896), 313–22, 315.
Tylor, Culture, 1: 284; see also James Sully, ‘Poetic Imagination and Primitive Conception’, Comhill Magazine 34 (1876), 294–306, 295, 298.
Sigmund Freud, ‘Creative Writers and Day-dreaming’ (1908), in The Freud Reader, ed. Peter Gay (London: Random House, 1995), 436–43, 438.
Stevenson, ‘The Lantern-Bearers’ (1888), in Further Memories (London: Heinemann, 1923), 29–40, 34.
Grant Allen, PhysiologicalÆsthetics (London: H. S. King, 1877), 215–16, 276–7.
Lang, ‘At the Sign of the Ship’, Longman’s Magazine 11 (1887–88), 458–64, 458. Even before the article’s publication, Lang had already repeatedly and admiringly discussed Stevenson’s ideas about inspiration: ‘At the Sign of the Ship’, Longman’s Magazine 7 (1885–86), 439–48,441–2; ‘At the Sign of the Ship’, Longman’s Magazine 11 (1887–88), 234–40, 235.
Stevenson, ‘A Chapter on Dreams’ (1888), in Further Memories (London: Heinemann, 1923), 41–53, 43.
E. S. Dallas, The Gay Science, 2 vols (London: Chapman and Hall, 1866), 1: 201.
Jenny Bourne Taylor notes the similarity in’Obscure Recesses: Locating the Victorian Unconscious’, in J. B. Bullen, ed., Writing and Victorianism (London: Longman, 1997), 137–79, 155–6.
Elaine Showaiter, Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle (London: Bloomsbury, 1991), 105. On Stevenson’s familiarity with psychological debates about’multiplex personality’, see Chapter 4.
F. W. H. Myers, Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death, 2 vols (London: Longmans and Green, 1903) 1: 14–15.
See J. P. Williams, ‘Psychical Research and Psychiatry in Late Victorian Britain: Trance as Ecstasy or Trance as Insanity’, in W. F. Bynum, Roy Porter, and Michael Shepherd, eds, The Anatomy of Madness: Essays in the History of Psychiatry, 3 vols (London: Tavistock Publications, 1985–88), 1: 233–54.
F. W. H. Myers, ‘Multiplex Personality’, Nineteenth Century 20 (1886), 648–66, 659.
Stevenson, An Inland Voyage (1878), in Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes and Selected Travel Writings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 1–120, 91–2.
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© 2006 Julia Reid
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Reid, J. (2006). Stevenson and the Art of Fiction. 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_2
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