Abstract
Stevenson’s life in the South Seas, from 1888 until his death in 1894, exerted a powerful fascination for the late-Victorian literary public (see Figure 6.1). His compulsive writing of Scottish historical novels during these years inspired a romantic legend of the exile yearning for his native homeland. By contrast, his Polynesian fiction, travel writing, and letters were condemned for their perceived realism and grimily contemporary concerns. As Henry James judged, ‘[f]or the absent and vanished Scotland he has the image … The Pacific… made him “descriptively” serious and even rather dry … and this left the field abundantly clear for the Border, the Great North Road and the eighteenth century’.1 Oscar Wilde echoed this privileging of ‘romance’ over realism. ‘I see that romantic surroundings are the worst surroundings possible for a romantic writer’, he wrote, noting sardonically that ‘[i]n Gower Street Stevenson could have written a new Trois Mousquetaires. In Samoa he wrote letters to The Times about Germans’.2 By the late twentieth century, new critical and political values had overturned this hierarchy. Commentators now deprecate his Scottish fiction for its perceived nostalgia (in Christopher Harvie’s words, ‘why didn’t Stevenson tackle the social realities of Scotland of his own day?’), while celebrating his Pacific writings for their visionary concern with a multicultural world.3
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Notes
Henry James, Notes on Novelists: With Some Other Notes (London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1914), 16–18.
Oscar Wilde to Robert Ross, April 1897, in The Selected Letters of Oscar Wilde, ed. Rupert Hart-Davis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 246.
Christopher Harvie, ‘The Politics of Stevenson’, in Jenni Calder, ed., Stevenson and Victorian Scotland (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1981), 107–25, 124.
Leslie Stephen, The Science of Ethics (1882; Bristol: Thoemmes, 1991), 120.
Jonathan Lamb, Vanessa Smith, and Nicholas Thomas, ‘Introduction’, in Jonathan Lamb, Vanessa Smith, and Nicholas Thomas, eds, Exploration and Exchange: a South Seas Anthology 1680–1900 (Chicago, Illinois: University of Chicago Press, 2000), xiii–xxv, xxii–xxv.
Paul M. Kennedy, The Samoan Tangle: a Study in Anglo-German-American Relations 1878–1900 (Dublin: Irish University Press, 1974), Chapters 2 and 3.
Robert Hillier, ‘Folklore and Oral Tradition in Stevenson’s South Seas Narrative Poems and Short Stories’, Scottish Literary Journal 14 (1987), 32–47, 32.
Grant Allen, ‘Sacred Stones’, Fortnightly Review 53 (1890), 96–116.
Andrew Lang, ‘Was Jehovah a Fetish Stone?’, Contemporary Review 57 (1890), 353–65, 355–6.
Scott Ashley, ‘The Poetics of Race in 1890s Ireland: an Ethnography of the Aran Islands’, Patterns of Prejudice 35 (2001), 5–18, 18.
George W. Stocking, Jr., Victorian Anthropology (New York: Free Press, 1987), 267.
For a survey of the debate, see James Buzard and Joseph Childers, ‘Introduction: Victorian Ethnographies’, Victorian Studies 41.3 (1998), 351–3; James Buzard, Disorienting Fiction: the Autoethnographic Work of Nineteenth-Century British Novels (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2005), 5–11.
For a survey of the debate, see James Buzard and Joseph Childers, ‘Introduction: Victorian Ethnographies’, Victorian Studies 41.3 (1998), 351–3; James Buzard, Disorienting Fiction: the Autoethnographic Work of Nineteenth-Century British Novels (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2005), 5–11.
Adam Kuper, Culture: the Anthropologists’ Account (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1999), 60–7.
Christopher Herbert, Culture and Anomie: Ethnographic Imagination in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago, Illinois: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 28–9.
Carlo Ginzburg, ‘Tusitala and His Polish Reader’, in No Island Is an Island: Four Glances at English Literature in a World Perspective (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 69–88, 79.
David Richards, Masks of Difference: Cultural Representations in Literature, Anthropology and Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 191.
An initial version, The South Seas, was published as a copyright edition of 22 copies in 1890; the material was then serialized in 1891 in Black and White, the New York Sun, and the Auckland Star. In the South Seas, a compilation selected and edited by Sidney Colvin, first appeared in volume form in 1896: Swearingen, Writings, 134–43. Citations are to In the South Seas, ed. Neil Rennie (London: Penguin, 1998).
Rod Edmond, Representing the South Pacific: Colonial Discourse from Cook to Gauguin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 167–8.
Roslyn Jolly, ‘Robert Louis Stevenson and Samoan History: Crossing the Roman Wall’, in Bruce Bennett, Jeff Doyle, and Satendra Nandan, eds, Crossing Cultures: Essays on Literature and Culture of the Asia-Pacific (London: Skoob Books, 1996), 113–20, 115.
Gillian Beer, Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (1983), 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 12.
Vanessa Smith, Literary Culture and the Pacific: Nineteenth-Century Textual Encounters (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 130, 134.
Arthur Johnstone, Recollections of Robert Louis Stevenson in the Pacific (London: Chatto and Windus, 1905), 293, 148.
O. Plumacher, ‘Pessimism’, Mind: A Quarterly Review of Psychology and Physiology 4 (1879), 68–89, 85–6.
Grant Allen, The Great Taboo (London: Chatto and Windus, 1890), 280.
Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992), 6.
Patrick Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830–1914 (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1988), 39.
Roslyn Jolly, ‘Stevenson’s “Sterling Domestic Fiction”: “The Beach of Falesá’”, Review of English Studies n.s. 50 (1999), 463–82, 463.
Roslyn Jolly, ‘South Sea Gothic: Pierre Loti and Robert Louis Stevenson’, English Literature in Transition 1880–1920 47 (2004), 28–49.
Jason Marc Harris, ‘Robert Louis Stevenson: Folklore and Imperialism’, English Literature in Transition 1880–1920 46 (2003), 382–99.
Linda Dowling, Language and Decadence in the Victorian Fin de Siècle (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1986), 61–7, 175–243.
Flora Masson, ‘Louis Stevenson in Edinburgh’, in Rosaline Orme Masson, ed., I Can Remember Robert Louis Stevenson (Edinburgh: Chambers, 1922), 125–36, 128.
William Thomson, ‘On the Age of the Sun’s Heat’, Macmillan’s Magazine 5 (1862), 388–93, 393.
R. G. Tait used the theory in Balfour Stewart and Peter Guthrie Tait, The Unseen Universe or Physical Speculations on a Future State (London: Macmillan, 1875), 64, 91.
For discussion of the ‘death of the sun’, see Gillian Beer, Open Fields: Science in Cultural Encounter (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 219–41.
Gillian Beer, ‘Origins and Oblivion in Victorian Narrative’, in R. B. Yeazell, ed., Sex, Politics, and Science in the Nineteenth-Century Novel (Baltimore, Maryland: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 63–87, 85.
Edwin M. Eigner, Robert Louis Stevenson and Romantic Tradition (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1966), 97.
Andrew Noble, ‘Highland History and Narrative Form in Scott and Stevenson’, in Andrew Noble, ed., Robert Louis Stevenson (London: Vision Press, 1983), 134–87, 139.
Emma Letley, ‘Introduction’, in Stevenson, Kidnapped and Catrìona, ed. Emma Letley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), vii–xxviii, xx.
See Paul Maharg, ‘Lorimer, Inglis and R. L. S.: Law and the Kailyard Lockup’, Juridical Review (1995), 280–91.
Eigner, Stevenson, 97–8; see Alan Sandison, Robert Louis Stevenson and the Appearance of Modernism (Basingstoke: Macmillan, now Palgrave Macmillan, 1996), 210.
Susan R. Gannon, ‘Repetition and Meaning in Stevenson’s David Balfour Novels’, Studies in the Literary Imagination 18 (1985), 21–33, 29.
Stevenson, ‘To My Wife’, in Weir of Hermiston and Other Stories, ed. Paul Binding (London: Penguin, 1979), 53.
Eric Anderson, ‘The Kailyard Revisited’, in Ian Campbell, ed., Nineteenth-Century Scottish Fiction (Manchester: Carcanet, 1979), 130–47, 144, 146.
Penny Fielding, Writing and Orality: Nationality; Culture, and Nineteenth-Century Scottish Fiction (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 184–5; Sandison, Stevenson, 381.
Peter Zenzinger, ‘The Ballad Spirit and the Modern Mind: Narrative Perspective in Stevenson’s Weir of Hermiston’, in Horst W. Drescher and Joachim Schwend, eds, Studies in Scottish Fiction: Nineteenth Century (Frankfurt am Main: Verlag Peter Lang, 1985), 233–51, 238.
John Veitch, The History and Poetry of the Scottish Border: Their Main Features and Relations (Glasgow: James Maclehose, 1878), 556.
Veitch, History, 458. On Stevenson’s annotated copy of the 1893 edition, see State University of New York, Robert Louis Stevenson: a Catalogue of His Works and Books relating to Him in the Rare Book Collection (Buffalo, New York: State University of New York at Buffalo, 1972), 61.
David Vincent, ‘The Decline of Oral Tradition in Popular Culture’, in Robert D. Storch, ed., Popular Culture and Custom in Nineteenth-Century England (London: Croom Helm, 1982), 20–47.
See Catherine Kerrigan, ‘Introduction’, in Stevenson, Weir of Hermiston, ed. Catherine Kerrigan (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1995), xvii–xxxvi, xx.
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© 2006 Julia Reid
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Reid, J. (2006). ‘[T]he clans disarmed, the chiefs deposed’: Stevenson in the South Seas. 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_7
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