Abstract
In 1885 Sir Percy Shelley, son of the famous poet, took a series of photographs of Robert Louis Stevenson. Describing these pictures, Fanny Stevenson wrote: ‘It is very odd that while one represents an angel, the devil must have posed for another, so ghastly, impishly wicked, and malignant is it. Plainly Jekyll and Hyde’.1 Her comment indicates that each of Shelley’s photographs denotes only one aspect of their subject; together they suggest that ‘man is not truly one, but truly two’, as Henry Jekyll famously puts it in Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886).2 For his part, the subject of the photograph seems to have held a similar opinion. In fact, Robert Louis Stevenson’s understanding of the divided self had a close connection to photography. He was attracted to devices that allowed multiple images to be shown simultaneously, and to technologies that displayed numerous exposures. He used metaphors and images of the latest photographic advances to represent the schizoid effect of urban modernity upon the consciousness and behaviour of the bourgeois male — a figure, as Stevenson portrayed him, with a fragmented, multi-layered and unstable identity.
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Notes
Fanny Stevenson to Sidney Colvin, 1885, cited in E. V. Lucas, The Colvins and their Friends (New York: Scribner & Sons, 1928), p. 166.
Robert Louis Stevenson, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (London: Longmans, Green and Co, 1886), p. 108. All subsequent references to this text are given parenthetically in the body of this chapter.
Elizabeth F. Evans, ‘“We are photographers, Not Moutebanks!”: Spectacle, Commercial Space and the New Public Woman’ in Amy Levy: Critical Essays, ed. Naomi Hetherington and Nadia Valman (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2010), pp. 25–46.
See Ann C. Colley, Robert Louis Stevenson and the Colonial Imagination (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), pp. 99–133. Also see Ann C. Colley, ‘Exposure and Image: A Visual Approach’ in Approaches to Teaching the Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, ed. Caroline McCracken-Flesher (New York: The Modern Languages Association of America, 2013), pp. 141–5.
Rosella Mallardi, ‘Stevenson and Conrad: Colonial Imagination and Photography’ in Journal of Stevenson Studies, 6 (2011), 97–115 (p. 114).
Robert Louis Stevenson, In the South Seas (London: Kegan Paul, 1988), p. 239.
See Maud Ellmann, The Poetics of Impersonality: T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1987).
See, respectively, Jason Marc Harris, Folklore and the Fantastic in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), pp. 149–62; Roslyn Jolly, ‘Robert Louis Stevenson, Henry Maine, and the Anthropology of Comparative Law’ in Journal of British Studies, 45:3 (2006), 556–80; and Glenda Norquay, Robert Louis Stevenson and Theories of Reading: The Reader as Vagabond (Manchester; New York: Manchester University Press, 2007).
Alan Sandison, Robert Louis Stevenson and the Appearance of Modernism (London: Macmillan, 1996), p. 8.
Linda Hunt Beckman, Amy Levy: Her Life and Letters (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2000), p. 2.
Christine Pullen, The Woman Who Dared: A Biography of Amy Levy (London: Kingston University Press, 2010), p. 114. Also see Marianne Hirsch, Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997).
Elizabeth Ludlow, ‘Christina Rossetti, Amy Levy, and the Composition of Roundels in Late-Victorian Bloomsbury: Poetic Snapshots of Urban Subjects’ in English Literature in Transition, 1880–1920, 56:1 (2013), 83–103 (p. 90).
Robert Louis Stevenson, ‘Ӕs Triplex’ in Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson, ed. William Lyon Phelps (New York: Scribner & Sons, 1906), pp. 43–55 (p. 53).
Anne Roller Issler, Happier for His Presence: Robert Louis Stevenson and San Francisco (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1949), p. 133. None of her pre-1880 images seem to have survived.
See Robert Louis Stevenson, ‘A Humble Remonstrance’ in The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Swanston Edition, 13 Vols (London: Chatto and Windus, 1912), VIIII, pp. 148–60 (p. 152).
See Eadweard Muybridge, Muybridge’s Complete Human and Animal Locomotion: All 781 Plates from the 1887 Animal Locomotion (New York: Dover Publications, 1979).
A notable exception being John Ott, ‘Iron Horses: Leland Stanford, Eadweard Muybridge, and the Industrialised Eye’ in Oxford Art Journal, 28:3 (2005), 407–28.
Roy Nickerson, Robert Louis Stevenson in California: A Remarkable Courtship (San Francisco: Chronicle, 1982), p. 83. Admittedly, Stevenson makes no reference to it in his notebooks.
Katherine D. Osbourne, Robert Louis Stevenson in California (Chicago: McClurg, 1911), p. 73.
Nancy Everett, ‘Dora Norton Williams: A New England Yankee in Bohemian San Francisco’ in The Argonaut: Journal of the San Francisco Museum and Historical Society, 21:1 (2010), 72–91.
Arthur P. Shimamura, ‘Muybridge in Motion: Travels in Art, Psychology and Neurology’ in History of Photography, 26:4 (2002), 341–50 (p. 342 & p. 349).
Gordon Hirsch, ‘The Commercial World of The Wrecker’ in Journal of Stevenson Studies, 2 (2005), 70–97 (p. 71 & p. 78).
George Augustus Sala, Living London: Being ‘Echoes’ re-echoed (London: Remington & Co., 1883), p. 103. This article was originally published in Illustrated London News in 1882. It should be noted that Muybridge’s device was not called ‘the zoopraxiscope’ when it was first displayed.
Georg Simmel, ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’, in On Individuality and Social Forms: Selected Writings, trans. Edward A. Shils, ed. Donald N. Levine (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), pp. 324–39 (p. 325).
Clayton Hamilton, On the Trail of Stevenson (New York: Doubleday, 1915), p. 61.
Judith Halberstam, Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), p. 80.
Peter K Garrett, ‘Cries and Voices: Reading Jekyll and Hyde’ in Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde after One Hundred Years, ed. William Veeder and Gordon Hirsch (Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press, 1988), pp. 59–72 (p. 68); Matthew Wickman, ‘Stevenson, Benjamin, and the Decay of Experience’ in International Journal of Scottish Literature, 2 (2007), cited at <http://www.ijsl.stir.ac.uk/issue2/wickman.pdf> [accessed 10 November 2011].
David Lodge, ‘Thomas Hardy and Cinematographic Form’ in NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, 7:3 (1974), 246–54 (p. 249).
David Annwn, ‘“The Gnome’s Lighted Scrolls”: Consumerism and Pre-Cinematic Visual Technologies in The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde’ in Journal of Stevenson Studies, 7 (2010), 9–31 (pp. 26–7).
James Sully, Illusions: A Psychological Study (New York: D. Appleton, 1888), pp. 149–50. In his autobiography, Sully wrote that his thoughts on dreams were inspired by discussions with Stevenson. James Sully, My Life and Friends: A Physiologist’s Memories (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1918), pp. 194–5.
Francis Galton, Hereditary Genius (London: Collins, 1962, first published 1869), p. 46.
Nicholas Wright Gillham, A Life of Sir Francis Galton: from African Exploration to the Birth of Eugenics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 6.
Julia Reid, Robert Louis Stevenson, Science, and the Fin de Siècle (Basingstoke, UK, and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), p. 65.
Robert Louis Stevenson, ‘Pastoral’ in Memories and Portraits (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1895), pp. 90–105 (p. 90).
Henry Peach Robinson, Pictorial Effect in Photography (London: Piper and Carter, 1869), p. 198.
Nancy Armstrong, Fiction in the Age of Photography: The Legacy of British Realism (Cambridge, MA; London: Harvard University Press, 1999), pp. 16–9.
Carlo Ginzburg, ‘Family Resemblances and Family Trees: Two Cognitive Metaphors’ in Critical Inquiry 30:3 (2004), 537–56 (p. 549).
Nellie Van de Grift Sanchez, The Life of Mrs Robert Louis Stevenson (New York: Scribner & Sons, 1920), p. 37.
See Barbara Gates, Victorian Suicide: Mad Crimes and Sad Histories (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), p. 50 & p. 125.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, ‘Doings of the Sunbeam’ in Soundings from the Atlantic (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1864), pp. 228–81 (p. 237).
Ariella Azoulay, The Civil Contract of Photography (New York: Zone Books, 2008).
The Kodak would make the taking of photographs more acceptable for women. See Naomi Rosenblum, A History of Women Photographers (New York: Abbeville Press, 1994), pp. 39–72.
Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ in Screen 16:3 (1975), 6–18.
Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, 2nd Edition (New York and London: Routledge, 2007), p. 45.
The reference to Harleth is also an implied rejection of male sexuality since, according to Bonnie Zimmerman, that character possesses a morbidity that Eliot connected with ‘the emerging theory of congenital homosexuality’. Bonnie Zimmerman, ‘“The Dark Eye Beaming”: Female Friendship in George Eliot’s Fictions’ in Lesbian Texts and Contexts: Radical Revisions, ed. Karla Jay and Joanne Glasgow (New York; London: New York University Press, 1990), pp. 126–41 (p. 144).
According to her sister, Levy was one of the first women in London to ‘show herself on the tops of omnibuses’. Katie Solomon, letter to the London Observer, 1929, cited in Ana Parejo Vadillo, Woman Poets and Urban Aestheticism: Passengers of Modernity (Basingstoke, UK, and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), p. 39.
Levy was as likely to be subject to typological theories as to wield them herself. In an essay written shortly after her death, Harry Quilter describes looking at a photograph of Levy and declaring her to be of ‘an unmistakably Jewish type’. Harry Quilter, Preferences in Art, Life and Literature (London: Swann Sonnenschein, 1892), p. 138.
See Amy Levy, ‘The Poetry of Christina Rossetti’ in The Woman’s World, Vol. 1, ed. Oscar Wilde (London: Cassel and Company, 1888), pp. 178–80. On the relationship between Levy, Christina Rossetti, and William Michael Rossetti, see Vadillo, Woman Poets, pp. 51–4.
Elaine Showalter, Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle (New York: Viking, 1990), p. 11.
Howard LeRoy Malchow, Gentlemen Capitalists: The Social and Political World of the Victorian Businessman (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1991), p. 8.
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985) & Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), pp. 182–212; Showalter, Sexual Anarchy, p. 107.
Carol Mavor, Becoming: the Photographs of Clementina, Viscountess Hawarden (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1999), p. 175.
See, for example, Valerie Sanders, The Brother-Sister Culture in Nineteenth-Century Literature (Basingstoke, UK, and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002).
Denis Flannery, On Sibling Love, Queer Attachment and American Writing (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), p. 10.
Kate Flint, ‘The “hour of pink twilight”: Lesbian Poetics and Queer Encounters on the Fin-de-siècle Street’ in Victorian Studies, 51:4 (2009), 687–712 (pp. 687–9).
For more on electricity and ‘extrasensory forms of communication’, see Pamela Thurschwell, Literature, Technology and Magical Thinking, 1880–1920 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University. Press, 2001), pp. 25–31 (p. 31).
Patricia Smith, Lesbian Panic: Homoeroticism in Modern British Women’s Fiction (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), pp. 3–4.
On romantic friendships, see Lillian Faderman, Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendships between Women from the Renaissance to the Present (New York: William Morrow, 1981). For a critique of this concept, see Terry Castle, The Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and Modern Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), pp. 92–106.
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Clayton, O. (2015). Composing Gendered Selfhoods in Robert Louis Stevenson and Amy Levy. In: Literature and Photography in Transition, 1850–1915. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137471505_4
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