Abstract
Stevenson’s autobiographical writing, in letters, memoirs, and essays, shares degeneration theorists’ interest in psychological pathologies. His preoccupation with his own nervous morbidity runs through his writing, uniting his adolescent outpourings to his cousin with his final letters from Samoa, and demonstrating his enduring concerns about mental instability and fractured identity. His study of his own ‘borderlands’ coalesces around three areas of degenerationist apprehension: childhood, loss of faith, and masculinity. Like the neo-Gothic tales which he wrote in the 1880s, his autobiographical writing focuses on the causes of morbid psychologies, scrutinizing the relative influence of heredity, environment, and volition, and questioning whether degenerative tendencies can be controlled.
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Notes
Jenny Bourne Taylor, ‘Obscure Recesses: Locating the Victorian Unconscious’, in J. B. Bullen, ed., Writing and Victorianism (London: Longman, 1997), 137–79, 141.
James Crichton-Browne, ‘Psychical Diseases of Early Life’, Journal of Mental Science 6 (1859), 284–320, 313.
Stevenson, New Arabian Nights (1878; London: Heinemann, 1923), 18, 21.
For Argyll’s discussion of the human will as an ‘image’ of the ‘Divine Will’, see G. D. Campbell, Duke of Argyll, The Reign of Law (London: Alexander Strahan, 1867), 10, 20–1.
Stevenson, ‘The Manse’ (1887), in Memories and Portraits (London: Chatto and Windus, 1904), 106–19, 117.
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.
Stevenson to Myers, July 1892, rpr. in F. W. H. Myers, Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death, 2 vols (London: Longmans and Green, 1903), 1: 301–2.
Oppenheim, ‘Nerves’, 141–8; Mark Micale, Approaching Hysteria: Disease and Its Interpretations (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1995), 25, 161–8, 239–60.
Lloyd Osbourne, ‘Prefatory Note’, in Stevenson, Further Memories (London: Heinemann et al., 1923), 191–6, 191.
Henry Maudsley, The Physiology and Pathology of Mind (London: Macmillan, 1867), 204.
Henry Maudsley, Responsibility in Mental Disease (London: H. S. King, 1874), 273.
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.
Stevenson, ‘Thomas Stevenson: Civil Engineer’ (1887), in Memories and Portraits (London: Chatto and Windus, 1904), 132–43, 141.
Francis Galton, Records of Family Faculties: Consisting of Tabular Forms and Directions for Entering Data, with an Explanatory Preface (London: Macmillan, 1884), 1.
See William Greenslade, Degeneration, Culture and the Novel 1880–1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 88–99.
Crichton-Browne, ‘Diseases’, 291, 290. Cited in Jenny Bourne Taylor and Sally Shuttleworth, eds, Embodied Selves: an Anthology of Psychological Texts 1830–1890 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 337.
Max Nordau, Degeneration, tr. from 2nd edn (London: Heinemann, 1895), vii–ix.
See for example James Sully, Illusions: A Psychological Study (London: Kegan Paul, 1881), 122–3.
J. M. Fothergill, The Maintenance of Health: A Medical Work for Lay Readers (London: Smith, Elder, 1874), 260–1.
Henry Maudsley, ‘Hallucinations of the Senses’, Fortnightly Review n.s. 24 (1878), 370–86, 376.
Michael J. Clark, ‘The Rejection of Psychological Approaches to Mental Disorder in Late Nineteenth-Century Psychiatry’, in Andrew Scull, ed., Madhouses, Mad-doctors, and Madmen: the Social History of Psychiatry in the Victorian Era (London: Athlone Press, 1981), 271–312, 274.
James Sully, ‘Genius and Insanity’, Nineteenth Century 10 (1881), 573–87.
Cited in Ed Block, ‘James Sully, Evolutionist Psychology, and Late Victorian Gothic Fiction’, Victorian Studies 25 (1982), 443–67, 452.
Karl Miller, Doubles: Studies in Literary History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 22.
James Crichton-Browne, ‘Dreamy Mental States’, in Stray Leaves from a Physician’s Portfolio (London: Hodder and Stoughton, [1927]), 1–42.
James Sully, ‘Poetic Imagination and Primitive Conception’, Comhill Magazine 34 (1876), 294–306, 299; Sully, Illusions, 224–7. See Ed Block’s discussion of the similarities between Stevenson’s and Sully’s treatments of dual consciousness, in Block, ‘Sully’, 451, and passim.
Stevenson, ‘A Chapter on Dreams’ (1888), in Further Memories (London: Heinemann, 1923), 41–53, 43.
Stefan Collini, Public Moralists: Political Thought and Intellectual Life in Britain 1850–1930 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 65.
Stevenson, The Day After Tomorrow’ (1887), in Ethical Studies, Edinburgh: Picturesque Notes (London: Heinemann et al., 1924), 113–23, 120.
Stevenson, Nights, 103; Stevenson, ‘The Pavilion on the Links’ (1880), in New Arabian Nights and Other Tales (London: Heinemann et al., 1922), 249–343, 253–4.
Stevenson, Thrawn Janet’ (1881), in Weir of Hermiston and Other Stories, ed. Paul Binding (London: Penguin, 1979), 203–15, 206.
James Sully, The Dream as a Revelation’, Fortnightly Review n.s. 53 (1893), 354–69, 364.
Stevenson, ‘A Gossip on Romance’ (1882), in Memories and Portraits (London: Chatto and Windus, 1904), 247–74, 258–9.
Kate Flint, The Woman Reader 1837–1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 90.
Stephen Arata, ‘Close Reading and Contextual Reading in Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde’, a paper delivered at the ‘Stevenson, Scotland and Samoa’ conference, Stirling, 2000.
Kelly Mays, ‘The Disease of Reading and Victorian Periodicals’, in John O. Jordan and Robert L. Patten, eds, Literature in the Marketplace: Nineteenth-Century British Publishing and Reading Practices (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 165–94, 179.
Patrick Brantlinger, The Reading Lesson: the Threat of Mass Literacy in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1998), 15–24.
Stevenson refers to his ‘crawlers’ in a letter to W. E. Henley, August 1881, Letters, 3: 224; Fanny Stevenson recounts how she awoke Stevenson from a dream which inspired him with the central scene for Jekyll and Hyde, to be indignantly reprimanded, ‘I was dreaming a fine bogey tale’: Graham Balfour, The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson, 2 vols (London: Methuen, 1901), 2: 13.
Thomas Bodley Scott, ‘Memories’, in Rosaline Orme Masson, ed., I Can Remember Robert Louis Stevenson (Edinburgh: Chambers, 1922), 212–14, 213.
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© 2006 Julia Reid
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Reid, J. (2006). ‘There was less me and more not-me’: Stevenson and Nervous Morbidity. 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_4
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