Robert Louis Stevenson: A Biography

Of all the engineering works that the Stevenson family were involved in, the Bell Rock lighthouse was the most impressive, firing the public imagination with its combination of romantic endeavour and futuristic technology. It already had a celebrator in the Poet Laureate Robert Southey, whose ballad ‘The Inchcape Rock’, published in 1803, commemorated the story of the Abbot and the bell in thrumming lines:

When the rock was hid by the surge’s swell,

The mariners heard the warning bell;

And then they knew the perilous rock,

And blessed the Abbot of Aberbrothok.

Walter Scott also took a keen interest in the Bell Rock, which he visited in 1814. The NLB Commissioners had invited him on a tour of the lighthouses conducted by ‘the celebrated engineer’ (Scott’s phrase) Robert Stevenson. The party went all round the coast, from the Isle of May in the Firth to the Inner Hebrides, calling in at Bell Rock (where Scott wrote some verses in the visitors’ book) and getting out, with difficulty, to survey a jagged reef off Tiree called Skerry Vohr which Stevenson was trying to persuade the Commissioners to build a light on. The novelist was gathering material for his next book, The Pirate, and worked on his notes with an application which impressed Robert Stevenson, who had not at this date read any of Scott’s works. ‘[Scott] was the most industrious occupier of time,’ Stevenson recorded in his journal,

he wrote much upon deck – often when his seat on the camp stool was by no means steady. He sometimes introduced Rob Roy’s exploits in conversation so fully that when I read the Book many parts of it were like a second reading to me.10

The description is oddly prophetic of another industrious writer who composed much upon deck and was able to talk of his fictional creations as if they were real, Robert Stevenson’s grandson. But it was Scott’s work ethic, not his genius, that won Robert Stevenson’s approval; he clearly thought artists in general to be rather a waste of space. Two generations later, Robert Louis Stevenson judged himself by the same rigid family standards, which venerated professionalism, inventiveness, hard work and money-making and thought little of self-expression and art. He came to feel that he was a very inadequate heir to these active men, a mere ‘slinger of ink’, sunk in comparative idleness. When he was writing his Records of a Family of Engineers in the last year of his life, Stevenson burst out in a letter to his friend Will Low, ‘I ought to have been able to build lighthouses and write David Balfours too.’11 A poem Stevenson wrote in the 1880s (when, incidentally, he was living in a house named after his uncle’s most famous lighthouse and surrounded by lighthouse memorabilia) expresses the same feeling of having failed his inheritance:

Say not of me that weakly I declined

The labours of my sires, and fled the sea,

The towers we founded and the lamps we lit,

To play at home with paper like a child.

But rather say: In the afternoon of time

A strenuous family dusted from its hands

The sand of granite, and beholding far

Along the sounding coast its pyramids

And tall memorials catch the dying sun,

Smiled well content, and to this childish task

“Around the fire addressed its evening hours,12

How neatly the change in typeface separates what the poet would like to have said about himself from what he thinks will be said. And how much more striking than his engrossed images of the strenuous family and their colossal achievements is his bitter description of himself left ‘playing at home with paper like a child’.

The paternal line dominates Robert Louis Stevenson’s family history, for ‘the celebrated engineer’ made it one of the most respectable names in Edinburgh at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Robert and his sister-wife Jean had thirteen children, only five of whom survived infancy: one girl (Jane) and four sons, three of whom followed their father into the family business, with greater or lesser enthusiasm, and the youngest of whom, Thomas, became the father of our subject.* They lived in the large house that Thomas Smith had built in 1803 in Baxter Place, fronting onto busy Leith Street, with a long garden at the back running to the bottom of the Calton Hill. The Stevenson children played in the cellars or the orchard, and hung around their father’s office or the specially-built workshops, where there was always ‘a coming and going of odd, out-of-the-way characters, skippers, lightkeepers, masons, and foremen of all sorts’.13 Though the Stevensons were not known for keeping a lavish table (Jean Stevenson, a strict Calvinist, made a habit of choosing both her butcher and her cook on religious grounds), the house was always open to employees of the Northern Lighthouse Board. Robert Stevenson was a paternalistic boss, minutely concerned with all aspects of the men’s lives: their wives’ confinements, their children’s schooling, the welfare of the sick and the conduct of prayers. ‘My grandfather was much of a martinet,’ Stevenson reported,

with his powerful voice, sanguine countenance, and eccentric and original locutions, he was well qualified to inspire a salutory terror in the service [ … ] In that service he was king to his finger-tips. All should go his way, from the principal lightkeeper’s coat to the assistant’s fender, from the gravel in the garden walks to the bad smell in the kitchen, or the oil-spots on the storeroom floor.14

Oddly enough, with this Jove for a father, young Thomas Stevenson managed for years to evade discovery that he was doing very little schoolwork. Being the youngest of many children, seventeen years his sister Jane’s junior, perhaps he just adopted the tactic of keeping his head down at home. He wasn’t a stupid boy (although he never mastered mathematics, which was a considerable handicap in his professional life), but early on developed a strong aversion to book-learning. This amounted to an obsession in later life, when he would stop schoolboys on the street and advise them to learn only what seemed to them good. ‘There seems to have been nothing more rooted in him than his contempt for all the ends, processes, and ministers of education,’ his son was to claim; ‘he bravely encouraged me to neglect my lessons, and never so much as asked me my place in school. What a boy should learn in school he used to say is “to sit on his bum”. It could scarcely be better put.’15

Thomas’s hatred and fear of school were due to the teachers’ constant use of the cane, and he was to say that the sufferings he endured there were worse than any he experienced in later life. His survival strategy was based on maintaining a low profile, as this spirited incident, related by his son, shows:

He never seems to have worked for any class that he attended; and in Piper’s took a place about half-way between the first and last of a hundred and eighty boys. Yet his friends were among the duxes. He tells most admirably how he once on a chance question got to the top of the class among all his friends; and how they kept him there for several days by liberal prompting and other obvious devices, until at last he himself wearied of the fierce light that beat upon the upper benches. ‘It won’t do,’ he said. ‘Goodbye.’16

Thomas, like his son, was a dreamy, quirky child with a strong vein of the perverse: ‘there was always a remarkable inconsequence, an unconscious spice of the true Satanic, rebel nature, in the boy. Whatever he played with was the reverse of what he was formally supposed to be engaged in learning. As soon as he went, for instance, to a class of chemistry, there were no more experiments made by him. The thing then ceased to be a pleasure, and became an irking drudgery.’17 It was not the temperament to mould easily to Robert Stevenson’s expectations. Thomas worked for a short time in a printing office and toyed with the idea of becoming a bookseller or publisher – a practical slant to his deeper ambition, which was to be a writer. But his father was furious at this notion and before he was out of his teens Thomas had succumbed to the family fate of engineering, joining his two older brothers.

Alan, the eldest of the boys, had also needed some coercion to become an engineer. He was the scholar and polymath of the family, and wanted to study Classics and enter the Church. He turned out to be an outstanding engineer, making important improvements in optics and designing and building several lights, including the family’s most beautiful lighthouse, Skerry Vohr, on that dismal Atlantic reef surveyed by his father and Scott in 1814. Skerry Vohr proved a challenge as great as Bell Rock, though Alan was not the man to brag about it. He took over when his father retired from the post of chief engineer in 1842, but found the burden of work intolerable and in 1852, when he was forty-five, suffered a ‘sudden shattering of his nervous system’ which forced him ‘to withdraw absolutely from his profession and the world’. The few remarks about this collapse in an anonymous but highly sympathetic obituary notice indicate a family tragedy of large proportions:

What a trial this must have been to one of his keen, intrepid temper, his high enthusiasm, and his delight in the full exercise of his powers, no one but himself and those who never left him for these long dreary years can ever tell – when his mind, his will, his affections survived, as it were, the organ through which they were wont to act – like one whose harp is all unstrung, and who has the misery to know it can do his bidding no more.18

The collapse happened when Alan had been married only six years and had four tiny children, two of whom, Katharine and the brilliant, mercurial Bob, were to be Robert Louis Stevenson’s close friends in adult life. All through their childhoods their father was a nervous invalid, who beguiled his ‘great sufferings’ by reading, learning languages, committing Homer to memory, and making a verse translation of the hymns of Synesius. ‘During many an hour the employment helped to soothe my pain,’ Alan wrote pathetically in the prologue to his privately printed translation. It was a startling example of how violently a sensitive nature could be shipwrecked by mental breakdown.

Thomas Stevenson was not as brilliant as his brother Alan, nor as versatile as his brother David, with whom he ended up running the family business. With his robust, serious, four-square face and figure, he looked every inch the Victorian paterfamilias, but there was instability at the centre of his character too: volatile, charming and puzzling, a straight-faced joker, he must have been a difficult man to have as father. In his obituary tribute, remarkable for its air of objectivity, his son characterised him as ‘a man of a somewhat antique strain’:

with a blended sternness and softness that was wholly Scottish and at first somewhat bewildering; with a profound essential melancholy of disposition and (what often accompanies it) the most humorous geniality in company; shrewd and childish; passionately attached, passionately prejudiced; a man of many extremes, many faults of temper, and no very stable foothold for himself among life’s troubles.19

Thomas was a staunch Tory and devout churchgoer, with a strong belief in ultimate salvation – not through any merits of his own, but through God’s infinite mercy. There was not a shred of complacency in his view of himself. In the speech he wrote to be read at his own funeral, he expressed the hope that he would not be ‘disowned by Him when the last trumpet shall sound’, a characteristically negative construction, and among the Bible verses to be read he chose ‘Who can bring a clean thing out of an unclean? Not one.’20 Over a lifetime’s constant service to the Kirk, he never accepted any sort of lay office, on grounds of a seemingly inexpungeable ‘unworthiness’.

Melancholic by nature, Thomas Stevenson’s awareness of his own sins seems morbid; like his son’s creation Dr Henry Jekyll, he had perhaps an over-fine conscience about his shortcomings, shown in the story as a mark of extreme moral vanity: ‘many a man would have even blazoned such irregularities as I was guilty of’.21 Sex seems to have been the focus of Thomas’s neuroses, as he held views so strong about the protection of women as to amount to a blanket condemnation of men. He believed, for instance, that any woman who wanted a divorce should be granted one automatically, whereas no man should ever have one. He also, intriguingly, set up a Magdalen Mission in Edinburgh for ‘fallen women’, which he supported financially all his adult life. Was this a gesture of general philanthropy or some private effort at atonement for real or imagined crimes against women – his own, or those of his sex in general? Thomas’s interpretation of chivalry did not lie anywhere on the usual axis between protectiveness towards women and the will to dominate them, but had a neurotic, slightly masochistic edge. It was taken on almost wholesale by his son.

In the autumn of 1847 this rather troubled man, then twenty-nine years old, was on a train to Glasgow when he met a young woman travelling with her uncle and aunt and got into conversation. Margaret Isabella Balfour was eighteen, cheerful, unaffected and a daughter of the manse. Thomas must have been looking out for a wife, for their first meeting was followed promptly by a brief formal courtship and a proposal; not the behaviour of an indecisive lover. On the brink of being thirty, Thomas was old enough to have had a considerable history of dealings with women, or a long-drawn-out history of wanting to have dealings with them.

Margaret came from genteel, Lowland stock and was the youngest surviving child of a family of thirteen, nine of whom had outlived infancy. Among her forebears were the Lairds of Pilrig and, possibly, the John Balfour who in 1656 was one of the religious zealots who murdered Archbishop Sharp. That notorious incident in the history of the ‘Covenanters’ (which became such an obsessive interest of her son Louis) formed part of Scott’s Tale of Old Mortality in which John Balfour appears as ‘Balfour of Burley’; so when Stevenson said that his father’s family played ‘the character parts in the Waverley Novels’ he might have added that his mother’s family appeared in the leading roles.

Margaret was good-looking (though not a beauty), intelligent and lively. She was known as an indefatigable optimist, ‘a determined looker at the bright side of things’, as Sidney Colvin described her, ‘better skilled, perhaps, to shut her eyes to troubles or differences among those she loved than to understand, compose, or heal them’.22 She had none of the accomplishments, such as musical or artistic ability, that were valued as bargaining counters in the marriage market (in worldly society at least), but her plainness of manner was in itself a recommendation to the God-fearing Thomas Stevenson. His surviving letters to his young bride-to-be show the tenderness and teasing tone of a man who really wanted to get married, addressing her as ‘My dearest Mag’ and indulgently calling her ‘child’. Margaret must have drawn attention to his behaviour around children (clearly a matter of some concern), for he writes to reassure her, ‘Don’t think my love that because I am strict or inclined to be strict with children that I like them less than other people. [ … ] I have the family failing of taking strong views and expressing those views strongly.’23 He ends the letter ‘Your ever affectionate and devoted lover’, an intensity that deepened after the marriage, when he wrote home frequently from his work trips, pining to be reunited with ‘my own dear wife’.24 Thomas remained extremely protective and anxious about his young bride, strenuously encouraging the idea of her frailty and poor health. Their daughter-in-law Fanny’s judgement when she met them in 1880 was that Margaret – then well into middle age – was ‘adored by her husband, who spoils her like a baby’.25

Thomas and Margaret were married about a year after they first met, on a date in August deliberately chosen to coincide with the anniversary of her father’s ordination (he, naturally, performed the ceremony). Margaret proved a most devoted wife to Thomas Stevenson, subservient to his wishes and interests, protective of his well-being, mainstay of his morale. Her chief talent, Louis declared, in one of his very few analytical remarks about his mother, was for organisation, and she was good at identifying and diverting possible starting points of domestic tension. This presumably came of years dealing with her husband’s sporadic dips into melancholia, and was a technique that her son would emulate closely in his dealings with an equally volatile spouse.

Although she became, in later life, a remarkably enthusiastic and adventurous traveller, tolerant of discomforts and extreme temperatures, game for anything, Margaret Stevenson spent her youth half in and half out of a sort of vaporous decline. She was encouraged in this first by a valetudinarian father, himself a sufferer from weak lungs, then by her hypochondriac husband. All through her son’s childhood, she varied between high spirits and sickliness: her chest was weak, her heart; she must rest, she must take the waters. She was only twenty-one when the baby was born, but stayed in bed most mornings and was unable to play or go out with him when she was up. Most of the active side of mothering was left to the child’s nurses, yet there were welcome, if perplexing, surges of energy: one of Stevenson’s earliest memories was of his mother rushing him up the stairs at their house in Inverleith Terrace to see his grandfather, as excitable and skittish as a girl.

In the summer of 1850, when Margaret was pregnant for the first and only time, old Robert Stevenson died. He had been ill for some months, but had been looking forward to his annual inspection tour of the lighthouses. When his sons tried to convince him that no more travelling was possible, the old man seemed to acquiesce, but on the day of departure ‘was found in his room, furtively packing a portmanteau’.26 Thomas Stevenson was deeply affected by the pathos of his father’s decline and death and when his first child was born four months later, on 13 November, had no hesitation in naming the baby for him.

The little boy’s name was in fact an amalgamation of both grandfathers’, one inside the other: Robert Lewis Balfour Stevenson. The names were in strong demand in the family: Alan Stevenson had also called his first son Robert (the little boy was known as Bob), and there was a veritable epidemic of Lewis Balfours on the other side of the family; two born in 1850 (the same year as RLS), another called Lewis Henry two years earlier, Lewis (‘Noona’) in 1842, Lewis Charles in 1851. Despite that, Thomas and Margaret stuck with ‘Lewis’ for the baby’s everyday name. Or ‘Smout’, or ‘Lou’, or ‘Signor Sprucki’, or ‘Baron Broadnose’: Thomas Stevenson was a great coiner of comical aliases.

Margaret, who was weakened and possibly traumatised by the experience of childbirth, was not put through that hazard again: there were no more children. This in a family that showed typical Victorian fecundity – little Lewis had fifty-four first cousins – must have marked out the Stevenson household as a trifle eccentric. It wasn’t easy to limit a family to one child; to avoid conception successfully during a marriage that lasted another thirty-seven years must have required strict regulation of both partners’ sexual appetites. But Thomas Stevenson was not the man to put anything before his young wife’s well-being, and a challenge of this sort suited his self-mortifying temperament. However they solved the contraception issue, the couple remained conspicuously devoted and dependent, and fussed contentedly about each other’s health.

The baby made a delicate third member of this hypochondriac household. He seemed healthy enough to begin with, but an attack of croup in his third year was so alarming that ever after his parents lived in fear of another chest infection carrying him off. Both Thomas Stevenson and his wife came from large families with a high incidence of infant mortality: between them they had twelve live siblings and twelve dead ones. Consumption was a threat – Margaret had developed a patch of ‘fibroid pneumonia’ after the baby’s birth – and incipient tuberculosis seemed an increasingly plausible explanation for the child’s uneven, rickety growth and extreme thinness.27 So whether from genuine danger, or from excessive solicitude, the child spent long stretches of time confined to bed. The catalogue of his ailments that appears in his mother’s diary is truly astonishing: in his first nine years, apart from numerous chills and colds, the boy had scarlatina, bronchitis, gastric fever, whooping cough, chickenpox and scarlet fever. But the persistent cough was what worried everyone most. It seems likely that the croup had damaged his lungs or that he suffered (among other possible things) from asthma, since his health often worsened in the damp, cold winters of smoggy Auld Reekie. The sound of his cough starting up was heard in the household with dread.

The Stevensons’ first home in Edinburgh was the one Thomas had prepared for his bride and where the baby was born, 8 Howard Place, on the northern fringes of the New Town, by the Botanic Garden. They moved in 1853 to 1 Inverleith Terrace, a larger property just around the corner. In the baby’s first years, Thomas and Margaret had a run of bad luck with nurses (or weren’t very good at choosing them): two left unbidden and the third took the infant Smoutie to a bar and left him wrapped in a shawl on the counter while she soaked up a few gins. But the fourth hire produced a family servant of the most reassuring type: sober, single and religious to a fault. Alison Cunningham was a weaver’s daughter from Fife, thirty years old when she came to the household (Margaret Stevenson was twenty-three that year) and an experienced nurse. ‘Cummy’ was given free rein with the toddler, and became a pivotal figure in the household.

Cummy was the type of servant who derived the keenest gratification from being indispensable, and turned down more than one suitor, it is said, to stay in the Stevensons’ service for twenty years. Her devotion to Lewis, intensified by his vulnerability and the emerging realisation that he was to be the Stevensons’ only child, went hand in hand with an equally powerful intention to mould the boy to her pattern. She could delight the child with her songs and dances and was selfless in the devotion of her time to his care (no trips to the bar for her, or even the usual nurse’s expedient of meeting with friends in the park). Her genuine interest in his company fed the child’s already pronounced egotism and her relation to him was – oddly enough – more that of companion than nanny, as Stevenson’s later description of her as ‘my first Wife’ would seem to corroborate.

In 1857 this compact household moved from Inverleith Terrace, which had proved damp and uncongenial, to a splendid house on Heriot Row in the heart of the elegant New Town, overlooking Queen Street Gardens from the south. Beyond the gardens, whose trees were only half-mature at this date, were the tall fronts of the houses on Queen Street and in the distance, beyond the great metal river of the railway line, the smoky wynds and tenements of the Old Town climbed towards the Castle. This was the view from Lou’s day and night nurseries on the top floor; Cummy’s room was at the back of the house on the same floor, with views, in clear weather, of the Firth and, distantly, the coast of Fife, her home. There was a wide landing, with other bedrooms and storerooms off, and then the grand spiral staircase running down the core of the house and lit from above by a large glazed cupola. As a student, Stevenson was to be grateful for the fact that the stairs were made of stone and made little or no sound when he crept past his parents’ bedroom on the first floor late at night.

Thomas and Margaret’s bedroom looked out to the back of the property and had a bathroom leading off it; at the front on the same level was the elegant drawing room, with its fireplace and recesses and twelve-foot-high windows looking out on the genteel greenery of the Gardens. Down the stairs again was the ground floor, with its high-ceilinged, panelled dining room and wide entrance hall. The kitchens and sculleries were in the basement, accessible to tradesmen by the area steps. Heriot Row was a truly substantial home, exuding an aura of wealth well-spent. Nobody seeing it could have the least doubt that the only son of the house was a privileged child.