Abstract
In his essays on romance, literary pleasure, and the creative imagination, Chapter 1 has shown, Stevenson was fully engaged in scientific debate about the lingering primitive heritage in the modern world. Nonetheless, critics have been reluctant to examine how this depth of intellectual inquiry informs his own romance fiction, which — at least in its earliest 1880s manifestations — has typically been considered as childish, playful, and buoyantly unreflective. Ironically, the dismissive critical valuation of Stevenson’s early romance fiction, and of late-Victorian romance more generally, is perhaps the legacy of the contemporary belief that romance appealed to primitive energies. This belief, of course, was encouraged by romance’s supporters as much as its enemies: Stevenson hailed as ’the real art… that of the first men who told their stories round the savage camp-fire’.1 Romance, according to this model of literary evolution, was the undeveloped form of realism. Thus realism became securely associated with the contemporary, the rational, the adult, and the literate, while romance, increasingly a residual cultural form, bore connotations of the primal, the instinctual, the immature, and the oral. W. D. Howells accordingly praised readers’ graduation from the ’childish … demand’ for romance to more sophisticated appreciation of the ’new kind of fiction’ offered by realism, and H. Rider Haggard reluctantly viewed realism as ’the art of the future’.2
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Stevenson, ‘A Humble Remonstrance’ (1884), in Memories and Portraits (London: Chatto and Windus, 1904), 275–99, 284.
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, 323, 319.
H. Rider Haggard, ‘About Fiction’, Contemporary Review 51 (1887), 172–80, 176.
Gillian Beer, The Romance (London: Methuen, 1970), 8.
Elaine Showalter, Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle (London: Bloomsbury, 1991), 80–2.
Stephen Arata, Fictions of Loss in the Victorian Fin de Siècle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 80.
Andrew Lang, ‘Mr. Kipling’s Stories’, in Essays in Little (London: Henry and Co., 1891), 198–205, 200.
Joseph Bristow, Empire Boys: Adventures in a Man’s World (London: HarperCollins, 1991), Chapter 1, ‘Reading for the Empire’.
Arata, Fictions, 80, 94–5; Peter Keating, The Haunted Study: a Social History of the English Novel 1875–1914 (London: Seeker and Warburg, 1989), 353–6.
Leslie A. Fiedler, ‘R. L. S. Revisited’, in No! in Thunder: Essays on Myth and Literature (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1963), 77–91, 77.
David Daiches, Robert Louis Stevenson (Glasgow: William Maclellan, 1947), 55, 73.
Edwin Eigner, Robert Louis Stevenson and Romantic Tradition (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1966), ix.
Roslyn Jolly, ‘Stevenson’s “Sterling Domestic Fiction”: “The Beach of Falesá”’, Review of English Studies n.s. 50 (1999), 463–82.
Patrick Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830–1914 (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1988), 41. Vanessa Smith challenges this model of Stevenson’s transition from romance to realism, arguing that his texts should not be located within ‘British debates about genre and authorial politics’, but read as transactions between Pacific and metropolitan print cultures: Literary Culture and the Pacific: Nineteenth-Century Textual Encounters (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 15.
Stevenson, Treasure Island (1881–82), ed. Emma Letley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), xxx. Subsequent page references appear in the text.
Stevenson to Henley, August 1881, in The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson, ed. Bradford Booth and Ernest Mehew, 8 vols (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1994–95), 3: 224 (hereafter, Letters).
Stevenson, ‘A Gossip on Romance’ (1882), in Memories and Portraits (London: Chatto and Windus, 1904), 247–74, 255.
H. Rider Haggard, King Solomon’s Mines (1885), ed. Dennis Butts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 1.
Recalling his ‘passion for maps’, Marlow describes how uncharted territory fired him with the ‘glories of exploration’: Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (1899, 1902), in Heart of Darkness with The Congo Diary, ed. Robert Hampson (London: Penguin, 1995), 3–139, 21.
Stevenson, ‘The English Admirals’ (1878), in Virginibus Puerisque, The Amateur Emigrant; The Pacific Capitals, Silverado Squatters (London: Heinemann et al., 1922), 137–55, 138.
Stevenson, ‘The Persons of the Tale’ (1895), in Juvenilia, Moral Emblems, Fables, and Other Papers (London: Heinemann et al., 1923), 183–7, 184–5.
R. M. Ballantyne, The Coral Island (1858; London: Bloomsbury Books, 1994), 156, 197–204.
Robert Kiely, Robert Louis Stevenson and the Fiction of Adventure (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1964), 81.
Stevenson, ‘Memoirs of Himself’ (1912), in Memories and Portraits, Memoirs of Himself, Selections from His Notebook (London: Heinemann, 1924), 147–68, 161–2.
Stevenson to Frances Sitwell, June 1875, in Selected Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson, ed. Ernest Mehew (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1997), 110 (hereafter, Selected Letters).
Stevenson, A Footnote to History: Eight Years of Trouble in Samoa (1892), in Vailima Papers (London: Heinemann et al., 1924), 67–240, 160.
Osbourne drafted the first three or four chapters, but the rest of the book was Stevenson’s alone. The novel was serialized in To-day (1893–94), and published as a book by Heinemann in 1894: Roger G. Swearingen, The Prose Writings of Robert Louis Stevenson: a Guide (Hamden, Connecticut: Archon Books, 1980), 187, 186.
Unpublished letter, cited in Catherine Kerrigan and Peter Hinchcliffe, ‘Introduction’, in The Ebb-Tide: a Trio and a Quartette, ed. Catherine Kerrigan and Peter Hinchcliffe (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1995), xvii–xxxi, xx.
At the close of The Black Arrow, the hero recognizes sadly that he must renounce adventure’s delights and retires to live in a secluded ‘green forest’, far from ‘the dust and blood of that unruly epoch’: Stevenson, The Black Arrow: A Tale of the Two Roses (1883; London: Heinemann et al., 1923), 262.
This debate, in its British context, was encouraged by James Sully’s critique of pessimism: see Pessimism: A History and A Criticism (London: H. S. King, 1877), 357–9, 399, and passim. On late-Victorian pessimism, see Peter Allan Dale, In Pursuit of a Scientific Culture: Science, Art, and Society in the Victorian Age (Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), Chapter 9.
Andrew Lang, ‘At the Sign of the Ship’, Longman’s Magazine 18 (1891), 215–33.
Andrew Lang, ‘At the Sign of the Ship’, Longman’s Magazine 9 (1887), 552–9, 554.
Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne, The Ebb-Tide: A Trio and Quartette (1893–94), in Stevenson, South Sea Tales, ed. Roslyn Jolly (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 123–252, 123. Subsequent page references appear in the text.
Stevenson, In the South Seas (1896; comp. Sidney Colvin), ed. Neil Rennie (London: Penguin, 1998), 5.
Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne, The Wrecker (1891–92; London: Heinemann et al., 1924), 119.
On the continuities between fin-de-siècle homoeroticism and romance’s conservative homosocial bonds, see Arata, Fictions, 79; on The Ebb-Tide’s homoerotic resonances, see Wayne Koestenbaum, Double Talk: the Erotics of Male Literary Collaboration (London: Routledge, 1989), 145–8.
W. E. Henley, ‘Invictus’ (1875), in M. H. Abrams and Stephen Greenblatt, eds, The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 7th edn (New York: W. W. Norton, 2000), 2: 1747.
Copyright information
© 2006 Julia Reid
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Reid, J. (2006). Romance Fiction: ‘stories round the savage camp-fire’. 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_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230554849_3
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-0-230-23032-3
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-55484-9
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature & Performing Arts CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)