Robert Louis Stevenson: A Biography

Robert Louis Stevenson’s many autobiographical essays and memoirs leave vividly contrasting impressions of his childhood. On the one hand, it contained the idyllic pleasures described in essays such as ‘The Manse’ and ‘Child’s Play’ and poems such as ‘My Kingdom’ and ‘Foreign Lands’, on the other it was a time of chronic ill-health and piquant terrors. There is a temptation, given the subject’s own obsessive recourse to images and tropes of duality, and his ‘clinching’ creation of the Jekyll-Hyde poles, to see his life in terms of strong contrasts. But Stevenson was unusual – in those last days before Freud – in recognising not just the co-existence of states of mind (in childhood particularly), but their inextricability. The author of A Child’s Garden of Verses was to say of his own earliest memories, ‘I cannot allow that those halcyon-days or that time of “angel infancy” have ever existed for me. Rather, I was born, more or less, what I am now – Robert Louis Stevenson, and not any other, or better person.’28 The ‘good’ and ‘bad’ parts of his childhood could no more be pulled apart than could the child and adult self. In its puzzling variability and dizzying plunges into dark and light, life was all of a piece.

Looking back on his childhood when he was twenty-nine, Stevenson concluded that he had been ‘lovingly, but not always wisely treated’ by his parents.29 In fact, there were aspects of his upbringing that seem not only ill-advised, but even dangerous. It is a minor mystery, for instance, how the frail little boy survived the custom of the time to seal up a nursery ‘almost hermetically’30 so that it was always draught-free (i.e. airless), or how he ever slept, given Cummy’s treatment for insomnia, which was to give the fretful child a soothing drink of strong coffee in the middle of the night. Fanny Stevenson retrospectively blamed her husband’s ‘feverish excitement’ as a child on the powerful drugs he was given during bouts of gastric fever, and the regular use of antimonial wine, which Margaret Stevenson’s doctor brother George later believed had ruined the boy’s constitution. These remedies were held to be sovereign by the parents, and if the child seemed overwrought they would sooner remove his toys or send his playmates away to calm him, than lower the doses of strong or inappropriate medicine.

Even his parents’ happy marriage was problematic, for, as Stevenson was to say memorably in his essay ‘Virginibus Puerisque’, ‘the children of lovers are orphans’. Margaret gave over much of the childcare to Cummy, not thinking any harm could come of it, the nanny being such a religious body. But the strength of Cummy’s religious views (possibly a source of mild amusement to her employers) made hers a very troubling influence. Cummy was a devout member of the Free Church, and far more stringent in her interpretation of doctrine than Lou’s Church of Scotland parents. The theatre was the mouth of hell, cards were ‘the Devil’s Books’ and novels (meaning romances) paved the road to perdition. She filled the little boy’s head with stories of the Martyrs of Religion, of the Covenanters and the Presbyters and the blood-drenched religious fundamentalists of the previous two centuries, stories that were rendered, confusingly enough, in highly dramatic style. (Stevenson later told Cummy mischievously that her declamations had sparked his own obsessive interest in the drama.) The Bible and the Shorter Catechism were to Lou what Mother Goose might have been to a luckier child, visits to the Covenanters’ graves in Greyfriars churchyard were the substitute for playing in the park, and though there was opportunity to read adventure stories, Cassell’s Family Paper and (clandestinely) bound copies of Punch downstairs, Cummy’s regime of spiritual education was based around Low Church tract-writers and theologians, ‘Brainerd, M’Cheyne, and Mrs Winslow, and a whole crowd of dismal and morbid devotees’, as Stevenson recalled about twenty years later.

Cummy had mutually respectful relations with her employers and was trusted implicitly, but her religious brainwashing of her charge clearly subverted their authority over him. She was a simple woman who undoubtedly meant no harm, but her anxieties about the religious liberalism of the household were always clear. The Stevensons gave dinner parties and were known to drink wine; Mrs Stevenson had been flagrantly evasive of the ban on Sunday recreation by sewing a little pack onto the back of Lou’s doll so that his game could pass as ‘Pilgrim’s Progress’. One of Stevenson’s early memories was of his nurse ‘comforting’ him at night by pressing him to her in a ferment of prayer for the souls of his parents, who had broken the Sabbath by playing a game of whist after dinner. The scene sounds ludicrous now, but to the child spelled eternal damnation for his mother and father. He was wound up to such a pitch that he sometimes thought none of them would be saved, for even Cummy had lapses: he remembers them both straining to make out the contents in the printer’s window of serial stories she herself had cut short on the grounds of them threatening to turn out to be ‘regular novels’.

Dread of judgement, midnight coffee and a predisposition to overheated dreaming and daydreaming made much of the sick little boy’s life a misery. He speaks of fevers that seemed to make the room swell and shrink, and ‘terrible long nights, that I lay awake, troubled continually with a hacking, exhausting cough, and praying for sleep or morning from the bottom of my shaken little body’.31 He had a recurring nightmare of standing before the Great White Throne and being asked to recite some form of words, on which salvation or damnation depended; ‘his tongue stuck, his memory was blank, hell gaped for him’,32 for the idea of eternal punishment had been ‘seared’, as he said, into his infant consciousness. When his night-horrors were particularly bad, Cummy would call for Thomas Stevenson, who would try to calm his son by sitting by the bed, or outside the bedroom door, feigning conversations with imaginary coachmen or inn-keepers. But, as the adult Louis recalled, ‘it was long, after one of these paroxysms, before I could bear to be left alone’.33

Though in time the severity of his nightmares lessened, Stevenson continued to dream vividly and with disturbing conviction of reality, so that he was unable to distinguish whether his conscious or subconscious was in control. By the time he was a student his dreams produced the impression in him, nightmarish in itself, of leading a double life, at which point he began to fear for his reason. He learned in time to control his night-terrors, more or less (partly by the use of drugs), but if he hadn’t been terrified by hellfire rantings as a child, this habit of feverish dreaming and neurotic invention, that was to prove important to his writing, might possibly never have set in.

Stevenson avoided much reference in his published works to his ‘Covenanting childhood’, but left some strong words about it in manuscript (some of which were published in posthumous collections or used by his first biographer). There is a controlled savagery in these fragments about the adults who infected his young mind with ‘high-strung religious ecstasies and terrors’:

I would not only lie awake to weep for Jesus, which I have done many a time, but I would fear to trust myself to slumber lest I was not accepted and should slip, ere I awoke, into eternal ruin. I remember repeatedly [ … ] waking from a dream of Hell, clinging to the horizontal bar of the bed, with my knees and chin together, my soul shaken, my body convulsed with agony. It is not a pleasant subject. I piped and snivelled over the Bible, with an earnestness that had been talked into me. I would say nothing without adding ‘If I am spared,’ as though to disarm fate by a show of submission; and some of this feeling still remains upon me in my thirtieth year.34

Of the ‘morbid devotees’ whose works were his constant diet, the adult Stevenson had this to say: ‘for a child, their utterances are truly poisonous. The life of Brainerd, for instance, my mother had the sense to forbid, when we [he and Cummy] were some way through it. God help the poor little hearts who are thus early plunged among the breakers of the spirit!’35

He makes it – for politeness’ sake – sound as if he was not one of those ‘poor little hearts’ himself, but the accusation of negligence against his parents and Cummy is unmistakable – especially against his mother for knowing better than Cummy, but being inattentive. Colvin’s description of Margaret Stevenson as ‘shutting her eyes to troubles’ seems pertinent here. The child’s precocious utterances, recorded faithfully in her diary notes, clearly struck the young mother as amusing and a source of pride, but to less sentimental readers they brim with complex fears. Little Lou worried constantly about the quality and quantity of his prayers, whether his family were good or bad in the Lord’s eyes, and whether he would be sufficiently adept at harp-playing during an eternity in heaven – and all this before the age of six. Adding to his discomfort was a strong rational streak and a quick intellect. His mother relates that when she told him of ‘the naughty woman pouring the ointment upon Christ’ he asked why God had made the woman so naughty,36 and, hearing it confirmed that Christ had died to save him, concluded, ‘Well, then, doesn’t that look very much as if I were saved already?’37 These exchanges, engaging so adroitly with Calvinist theology, were not intended as cute additions to the Baby Album. The child must have been puzzled why they only elicited fond smiles.

In the years following Stevenson’s death, a minor cult grew up around the figure of his old nurse, fuelled mostly by his emotional dedication to her of A Child’s Garden of Verses, and a passage in his fragmentary memoir in which Cummy is singled out for her tender care of him when he was sick:

She was more patient than I can suppose of an angel; hours together she would help console me in my paroxysms; and I remember with particular distinctness, how she would lift me out of bed, and take me, rolled in blankets, to the window, whence I might look forth into the blue night starred with street-lamps, and see where the gas still burned behind the windows of other sickrooms.38

But in all honesty, it hardly constitutes excess of attention or devotion to attend to a chronically sick child at night. ‘My second mother [ … ] angel of my infant life’; the epithets are cloyingly excessive, and one can’t help wondering if Stevenson’s retrospective praise of his nurse was a desperate attempt to accentuate the positive. His fond memories of his father soothing him with nonsense-stories are also in the context of the child on the other side of the door being too terrified to sleep. And the same Cummy who was ready to calm the child with cuddles and blankets was just as likely to wake him up and assault him with prayers. It was, to say the least, a confusing world.

The boy learned to read quite late (aged six), but was lazy about reading on his own and preferred to get Cummy to do it for him. He liked to be attended to as much as possible, especially by women. He had been composing his own stories some time before this, using his mother and aunt Jane Balfour as amanuenses, and his first recorded work was a history of Moses, which won him the prize of ‘The Happy Sunday Book of Painted Pictures’ in an informal competition among the cousins. The text is illustrated with some wonderful drawings by Lewis of the Israelites, all wearing mid-Victorian chimneypot hats, with pipes in their mouths, gathering in the manna or crossing the Red Sea.39 He was good at drawing, in a speedy, impressionistic style: one blotchy ink picture of ‘A steamer bound for Londonderry’ has written on it in Thomas Stevenson’s hand: ‘Note. This steamer may be bound for Londonderry but I fear she will never reach it.’40

Religion entered everything and dominated play; when he was aged two and a half, Lou’s favourite game was ‘making a church’, which he did by putting a chair and stool together to form a pulpit and conducting his own solitary services in the character of both minister and congregation. At ‘an astoundingly tender age’41 he voiced strong antipathy to a theological iconoclast then attending the Edinburgh Kirk assembly. His sayings, many of them parroted from his parents or nurse (such as Cummy’s constant refrain of ‘If I’m spared’), were noted and preserved by his mother with the utmost care. At home, this little ‘dictator’ strove to be the centre of attention, and he later remembered his young self unflatteringly: ‘I was as much an egotist as I have ever been; I had a feverish desire of consideration.’42 To other children he was a bit of a liability; being an only child, he didn’t know how to handle rivals and expected to dominate play. As so often with children who insist on taking the lead, he had a markedly sadistic streak too, devising a ritual involving whacks on the hand with a cane when he and his cousins were bartering items for their ‘museums’. If the ‘buyer’ flinched during the transaction, the whole procedure had to start again.43

Among the flocks of Balfour and Stevenson cousins with whom he played at Colinton Manse (his grandfather Balfour’s house), or Cramond (his uncle George Balfour’s house), or the Royal Crescent (Uncle David Stevenson’s house), or Heriot Row, Louis remained an essentially lonely figure. But school was worse, and schoolwork a great trouble. Fortunately for him, he had minimal exposure to it; the combination of his father’s views on pedagogy and his parents’ shared hypochondria ensured he was often at home, ‘too delicate to go to school’, as Margaret records.44 That was Mr Henderson’s in India Street, his first school. It didn’t last long. Perhaps Louis recited in his father’s hearing the unofficial school song:

Here we suffer grief and pain

Under Mr Hendie’s cane.

If you don’t obey his laws

He will punish with his tawse.45

At age ten, he went to the Edinburgh Academy for a while (contemporary with Andrew Lang, the future folklorist, although they had nothing to do with each other at this age). There was a brief attempt at a private tutor from England, but that didn’t work out either. In the interstices of these arrangements months at a time would be spent having informal lessons with Cummy, or simply being cosseted in bed, surrounded by picture books and toy soldiers and with a little shawl pinned round his shoulders. Indulged so thoroughly over the years, he could have become an appallingly spoilt brat.

His closest friend in childhood was his cousin Bob, three years his senior, a tall, dreamy boy ‘more unfitted for the world [ … ] than an angel fresh from heaven’.46 Bob spent the whole winter of 1856 with his relations at Inverness Terrace, possibly because of his father Alan’s mental breakdown. Louis was delighted; he had been praying for a brother or sister for years. ‘We lived together in a purely visionary state,’ he wrote in ‘Memoirs of Himself’; the two boys invented countries to rule over, with maps and histories and lead-soldier armies, they coloured in the figures for the pasteboard theatre – Skelt’s Juvenile Drama – that had been the inspired gift on Lewis’s sixth birthday from his aunt Jane Warden, they talked and daydreamed. ‘This visit of Bob’s was altogether a great holiday in my life,’ Louis recalled later.47

The acute sensibility that made his nights a torment also afforded the child intense pleasures. He loved going to his grandfather Balfour’s house, Colinton Manse, in a quiet village southwest of Edinburgh, where there was a large garden and other children of the family to play with, and his charming, devoted aunt Jane Balfour on call. His happiness there was ‘more akin to that of an animal than of a man’, he thought later:

The sense of sunshine, of green leaves, and of the singing birds, seems never to have been so strong in me as in that place. The deodar upon the lawn, the laurel thickets, the mills, the river, the church bell, the sight of people ploughing, the Indian curiosities with which my uncles had stocked the house, the sharp contrast between this place and the city where I spent the other portion of my time, all these took hold of me, and still remain upon my memory, with a peculiar sparkle and sensuous excitement.48

The garden was divided up into sections by a large beech hedge and adjoined the church and churchyard. This fascinated and horrified the child, a connoisseur of graves, who imagined ‘spunkies’ dancing among the tombstones at night and the glinting eye of a dead man looking at him through a chink in the retaining wall. The paper mill just upstream from the manse and the snuff mill next to it made a constant sound of industry, which was as much a part of the place’s charm for the child as the birdsong and running water. Stevenson recalled ‘the smell of water all around’, and admitted ‘it is difficult to suppose it was healthful’, an opinion stoutly shared by his wife Fanny, who wrote in her preface to A Child’s Garden of Verses rather crushingly that ‘in any other part of the world [the situation] would suggest malaria’.49

Aunt Jane lived at the manse with her widower father and was Margaret Stevenson’s only unmarried sibling, older by thirteen years and by far the more motherly of the two sisters. She had been ‘a wit and a beauty’ when young, ‘a wilful empress’ whose social and marriage prospects were reversed after some accident left her sight and hearing permanently damaged. She used to say that it was a riding fall that had effected the change, but that was accepted in the family as a euphemism, and the cause was probably a disease such as scarlet fever or typhus. She proved an invaluable matriarch, as Louis recalled with affection: ‘all the children of the family came home to her to be nursed, to be educated, to be mothered [ … ] there must sometimes have been half a score of us children about the Manse; and all were born a second time from Aunt Jane’s tenderness’.50 Stevenson had a charming, intensely sensual memory of sitting on the stairs at Colinton when he was a small boy and being passed over, rather than passed by, his aunt descending precipitately in her full-skirted dress:

I heard a quick rustling behind: next moment I was enveloped in darkness; and the moment after, as the reef might see the wave rushing on past it towards the beach, I saw my aunt below rushing downwards.51

Aunt Jane’s good spirits and kindness compensated for grandfather Balfour’s withdrawn and intimidating manner. The Reverend Lewis Balfour was a man of few words, and those mostly broad Scotch, which to his grandson Louis was almost a foreign language. Scotch had been thoroughly displaced in middle-class life by English by the 1850s, but Balfour was of the old school, and only spoke English in the pulpit as a concession to his bourgeois parishioners. Louis guessed that his sermons were ‘pretty dry’, for the minister was an unemotional and unapproachable man. His grandson regarded him with a certain discomfort, and recalled vividly his last sight of the old gentleman at Colinton in 1860, when the boy was nine and his dying grandfather eighty-three:

He was pale and his eyes were, to me, somewhat appallingly blood-shot. He had a dose of Gregory’s mixture administered and then a barley-sugar drop to take the taste away; but when my aunt wanted to give one of the drops to me, the rigid old man interfered. No Gregory’s mixture, no barley sugar, said he. I feel with a pang, that it is better he is dead for my sake; if he still see me, it is out of a clearer place than any earthly situation, whence he may make allowances and consider both sides. But had he lived in the flesh, he would have suffered perhaps as much from what I think my virtues as from what I acknowledge to be my faults.52

Colinton was a place of leisure and licence, where Lewis could root through the library unhindered. The child was particularly drawn to the four volumes of Joanna Baillie’s melodramas, since Cummy had always enticingly denounced plays.53 These he approached with such furtiveness that he didn’t so much read them as just let a few wicked words flash into his consciousness before shutting the book up quickly. Murders and murderers, a decapitation, a dark forest, a stormy night; the child took away these strong ideas and spun them together when he was alone into stories probably much more sensational and alarming than Miss Baillie’s originals. He was fond of frightening himself: at home, he used to go at night into the dark drawing room ‘with a little wax taper in my hand … a white towel over my head, intoning the dirge from Ivanhoe, till the sound of my voice and the sight of my face in the mirror drove me, in terror, to the gas-lit lobby’.54

The stolen pleasures of the Colinton library linked directly with his sanctioned obsession, Skelt’s Juvenile Drama. Skelt produced dozens of different printed cutouts for use in children’s toy theatres, ‘a penny plain and twopence coloured’, which Lewis bought in quantity at the stationer’s on Antigua Street. He loved them, not so much because of the potent, transient joy of buying and colouring in a new set of characters or scenes – ‘when all was painted, it is needless to deny it, all was spoiled’ – but on account of the playbooks, with their stirring up of the sense of adventure and romance, the exoticism of the scenes and situations, the heart-stopping allure of the characters, highwaymen, smugglers and pirates:

What am I? What are life, art, letters, the world, but what my Skelt has made them? He stamped himself upon my immaturity. The world was plain before I knew him, a poor penny world; but soon it was all coloured with romance. [ … ] Indeed, out of this cut-and-dry, dull, swaggering, obtrusive and infantile art, I seem to have learned the very spirit of my life’s enjoyment; met there the shadows of the characters I was to read about and love in a late future; got the romance of Der Freischütz long ere I was to hear of Weber or the mighty Formes; acquired a gallery of scenes and characters with which, in the silent theatre of the brain, I might enact all novels and romances[.]55

The Stevensons and their queer little son, with his unexpressive face and out-of-proportion head, made a close-knit, self-protective trio. Their shared hypochondria became a great comfort to them. When Thomas developed some unspecified complaint and was ordered to take the waters at Homburg in 1862, the family went with him. The next year it was Margaret’s turn to be chief invalid and the destination was the South of France, where they stayed three months, returning through Italy on a splendidly leisurely tour and home via the Alps and the Rhine. All this time Lewis had been off school, but when Margaret was advised to return south for the winter of 1863–64, the Stevenson parents realised that if the boy was ever going to get an education they would have to leave him out of the next health tour. Thomas enrolled him at Burlington Lodge Academy in Isleworth, Surrey, chosen because three Balfour cousins were day boys there, looked after at weekends by the obliging Aunt Jane from her brother’s rented house nearby. It was a well-intentioned scheme, but not a particularly good one. Lewis could only feel the separation from his parents more keenly in a boarding school so far from home (and in a foreign country), however many little Balfours were on hand.

The twelve-year-old’s letters during his first and only term in Isleworth are full of characteristic touches: his stoicism, his distractibility (several times stopping mid-sentence), his mixed interest in and fear of other children. ‘I am getting on very well, but my cheif amusement is when I am in bed then I think of home and the holidays,’ he wrote to his ‘dear Parients’ in September.56 As the weeks went by, there were signs of education going on – bits of Latin and French, along with devil-may-care touches of sophistication – but the dreaded time was approaching when both parents would leave the country without him, which they did on 6 November. On the eve of his thirteenth birthday the following week, Lewis wrote his mother a letter in demi-French to thank her for the huge cake she had sent him, which, he noted, weighed twelve and a half pounds and cost seventeen shillings. There had been some trouble during the fireworks on Guy Fawkes’ Night when some bad boys (‘les polissons’) ‘entrent dans notre champ et nos feux d’artifice et handkercheifs disappeared quickly but we charged them out of the feild. Je suis presque driven mad par un bruit terrible tous les garcons kik up comme grand un bruit qu’il est possible.’ Writing to his parents this first time truly alone, with only a monstrous cake for company, seems to have been too much for the boy: he ends his letter abruptly and to the point: ‘My dear papa you told me to tell you whenever I was miserable. I do not feel well and I wish to get home. Do take me with you.’57