Abstract
Stevenson engaged eagerly with the new anthropological discourse. As a young man coming to maturity among the 1870s Edinburgh intellectual élite, he enjoyed a ringside seat as mental and spiritual evolution was debated. Indeed, despite the conventional impression that after the 1830s Scotland was unable to sustain a distinctive literary culture, Edinburgh remained a vibrant intellectual capital.1 The new science of anthropology sprang largely from Scottish soil: J. F. McLennan, Andrew Lang, William Robertson Smith, and J. G. Frazer were all Scots. Robert Crawford describes the interweaving of ‘literary and anthropological enterprises’ in Scottish culture, and cites the friendship between Stevenson and Lang as exemplary.2 In the early 1870s, though, Stevenson was yet to meet Lang, and his access to anthropological ideas would have been secured rather through attendance at the Edinburgh Evening Club (as well as through his reading).
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Notes
On the dissolution of Scottish literary culture, see Ian Duncan, ‘North Britain, Inc.’, Victorian Literature and Culture 23 (1995), 339–50, 339–44.
Robert Crawford, Devolving English Literature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 156 and passim.
John Sutherland Black and George Chrystal, The Life of William Robertson Smith (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1912), 116, 140.
Adam Kuper, The Invention of Primitive Society: Transformations of an Illusion (London: Routledge, 1988), 4.
George W. Stocking, Jr., Victorian Anthropology (New York: Free Press, 1987), 297.
On Smith, see Kuper, Invention, 82–8; George W. Stocking, Jr., After Tylor: British Social Anthropology 1888–1951 (London: Athlone Press, 1995), 63–81.
Cargill Gilston Knott, Life and Scientific Work of Peter Guthrie Tait: Supplementing the Two Volumes of Scientific Papers Published in 1898 and 1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1911), 72. (Murray, a fellow student, became an eminent marine scientist.)
Adrian Desmond, Huxley: From Devil’s Disciple to Evolution’s High Priest (London: Penguin, 1997), 406, 370.
Desmond, Huxley, 370. On Fleeming Jenkin, subsequently Stevenson’s friend, see Stevenson, ‘Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin’ (1888), in The Merry Men and Other Tales, Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin (London: Heinemann et al., 1922), 337–562.
Balfour Stewart and Peter Guthrie Tait, The Unseen Universe or Physical Speculations on a Future State (London: Macmillan, 1875), 46, 64.
Thomas Stevenson, Christianity Confirmed by Jewish and Heathen Testimony and Deductions from Physical Sciences, etc. (1877), 2nd edn (Edinburgh: David Douglas, 1879), 108–20.
Edwin M. Eigner, Robert Louis Stevenson and Romantic Tradition (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1966), 111, 114, and passim.
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde has frequently been read in these terms, and the interpretation has been extended convincingly to other works such as The Ebb-Tide and Weir of Hermiston: see, for example, Joseph Bristow, Empire Boys: Adventures in a Man’s World (London: HarperCollins, 1991), 122.
Andrew Noble, ‘Highland History and Narrative Form in Scott and Stevenson’, in Andrew Noble, ed., Robert Louis Stevenson (London: Vision Press, 1983), 134–87, 145.
Peter Zenzinger, The Ballad Spirit and the Modern Mind: Narrative Perspective in Stevenson’s Weir of Hermistoń, in Horst W. Drescher and Joachim Schwend, eds, Studies in Scottish Fiction: Nineteenth Century (Frankfurt am Main: Verlag Peter Lang, 1985), 233–51, 246–7.
E. B. Tylor, Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Art, and Custom, 2 vols (London: John Murray, 1871), 1:15.
For the growing belief that the individual was conditioned by language, 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), Chapters 7 and 8.
T. C. Smout, A History of the Scottish People 1560–1830 (London: Collins, 1969), 198–207, 228–39.
Penny Fielding, Writing and Orality: Nationality, Culture, and Nineteenth-Century Scottish Fiction (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 27, 151–2.
David Richards, Masks of Difference: Cultural Representations in Literature, Anthropology and Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 125–36; Colin Kidd, ‘The Strange Death of Scottish History Revisited: Constructions of the Past in Scotland, c. 1790–1914’, Scottish Historical Review 76.1 (1997), 86–102, 87–8; Noble, ‘History’, 153–63.
T. M. Devine, The Scottish Nation 1700–2000 (London: Penguin, 1999), 233.
J. W. Burrow, Evolution and Society: a Study in Victorian Social Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966), 11–14.
Andrew Lang, ‘At the Sign of the Ship’, Longman’s Magazine 9 (1886–87), 105–12, 109; ‘At the Sign of the Ship’, Longman’s Magazine 16 (1890), 234–40, 236.
R. G. Cant, The Writing of Scottish History in the Time of Andrew Lang: Being the Andrew Lang Lecture Delivered before the University of St Andrews 8 February 1978 (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1978), 11.
J. H. Burton, History of Scotland from Agricola’s Invasion to the Extinction of the Last Jacobite Insurrection, 2nd edn, 8 vols (Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1873), 1: viii.
James Buzard, Disorienting Fiction: the Autoethnographic Work of Nineteenth-Century British Novels (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2005), 8.
Stevenson, ‘The Foreigner at Home’ (1882), in Memories and Portraits (London: Chatto and Windus, 1904), 1–23, 6, 23.
Stephen Shapiro, ‘Mass African Suicide and the Rise of Euro-American Sentimentalism: Equiano’s and Stevenson’s Tales of the Semi-Periphery’, in W. M. Verhoeven and Beth Dolan, eds, Revolutions and Watersheds: Transatlantic Dialogues, 1775–1815 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999), 123–44, 132.
Donald McFarlan, ‘Introduction’, in Stevenson, Kidnapped (1886) (London: Penguin, 1994), vii–xvi, xii.
The novel’s fragmentation was probably exacerbated by its composition, under pressure, during its serialization in Scribner’s Magazine: Roger Swearingen, The Prose Writings of Robert Louis Stevenson: a Guide (Hamden, Connecticut: Archon Books, 1980), 119–22.
On the Tullibardine case, see Stevenson, ‘Note to “The Master of Ballantrae”’ (1921), in Stevenson, The Master of Ballantrae: a Winter’s Tale, ed. Adrian Poole (London: Penguin, 1996), 224–6, 225.
Douglas Gifford, ‘Stevenson and Scottish Fiction: the Importance of The Master of Ballantrae’, in Jenni Calder, ed., Stevenson and Victorian Scotland (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1981), 62–87, 66, 84–5.
Joseph Egan, ‘From History to Myth: a Symbolic Reading of The Master of Ballantrae’, Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 8 (1968), 699–710, 704–5.
Douglas Gifford, ‘Myth, Parody and Dissociation: Scottish Fiction 1814–1914’, in Douglas Gifford, ed., The History of Scottish Literature, vol. 3: Nineteenth Century (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1988), 217–59, 249.
Fielding, Writing, 156–73; Alan Sandison, Robert Louis Stevenson and the Appearance of Modernism (Basingstoke: Macmillan, now Palgrave Macmillan, 1996), 270–312.
For a stimulating reading of James’s association with the supernatural and folk tradition, see J. M. Harris, ‘Robert Louis Stevenson: Folklore and Imperialism’, English Literature in Transition 1880–1920 46 (2003), 382–99, 392–6.
Alexander B. Clunas, ‘“A Double Word”: Writing and Justice in The Master of Ballantrae’, Studies in Scottish Literature 28 (1993), 55–74, 74.
His sympathetic knowledge of the Iroquois is also indicated by his paper on ‘Languages, Customs, and Manners of the Indian Six Nations’ (1772): H. Manners Chichester, ‘Sir William Johnson’, in Leslie Stephen and Sidney Lee, eds, Dictionary of National Biography, vol. 30 (London: Smith, Elder, 1892), 50–2, 51.
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© 2006 Julia Reid
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Reid, J. (2006). ‘The Foreigner at Home’: Stevenson and Scotland. 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_6
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