Robert Louis Stevenson and the Pictorial Text: A Case Study in the Victorian Illustrated Novel [1 ed.] 1472414225, 9781472414229

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Robert Louis Stevenson and the Pictorial Text

Robert Louis Stevenson and the Pictorial Text explores the genesis, production and the critical appreciation of the illustrations to the fiction of Robert Louis Stevenson. Stevenson is one of the most copied and interpreted authors of the late nineteenth century, especially his novels Treasure Island and Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. These interpretations began with the illustration of his texts in their early editions, often with Stevenson’s express consent, and this book traces Stevenson’s understanding and critical responses to the artists employed to illustrate his texts. In doing so, it attempts to position Stevenson as an important thinker and writer on the subject of illustrated literature, and on the marriage of literature and visual arts, at a moment preceding the dawn of cinema, and the rejection of such popular tropes by modernist writers of the early twentieth century. Richard J. Hill is Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Chaminade University of Hawaii, USA.

Studies in Publishing History: Manuscript, Print, Digital Series editors: Ann R. Hawkins, Texas Tech University, USA, and Maura Ives, Texas A&M University, USA

Exploring the intersection of publishing history, book history, and literary and cultural studies, this series supports innovative work on the cultural significance and creative impact of printing and publishing history, including reception, distribution, and translation or adaptation into other media. Proposals are welcome for interdisciplinary and comparative studies by humanities scholars and librarians working in a variety of fields, including literature; book history, periodicals history, and print culture and the sociology of texts; theater, film, and performance studies; library history; history; gender studies; and cultural studies. Other titles in the series: Baroness Orczy’s The Scarlet Pimpernel A Publishing History Sally Dugan The Rise of the Modernist Bookshop Books and the Commerce of Culture in the Twentieth Century Huw Osborne Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations A Cultural Life, 1860–2012 Mary Hammond Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford A Publishing History Thomas Recchio Modernist Experiments in Genre, Media, and Transatlantic Print Culture Jennifer Sorensen Emery-Peck

Robert Louis Stevenson and the Pictorial Text A Case Study in the Victorian Illustrated Novel Richard J. Hill

First published 2017 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2017 Richard J. Hill The right of Richard J. Hill to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Hill, Richard J., 1976– author. Title: Robert Louis Stevenson and the Pictorial Text: A Case Study in the Victorian Illustrated Novel / by Richard Hill. Description: New York: Routledge, 2016. | Series: Ashgate studies in publishing history: manuscript, print, digital | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016028776 (print) | LCCN 2016046695 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Stevenson, Robert Louis, 1850–1894—Criticism and interpretation. | Illustration of books—England—19th century. | Illustration of books, Victorian. | English fiction—19th century—History and criticism. Classification: LCC PR5497 .H46 2016 (print) | LCC PR5497 (ebook) | DDC 828/.809—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016028776 ISBN: 978-1-4724-1422-9 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-60672-9 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by codeMantra

For my boys, Scott and Evan, for whom, and in spite of whom, this book was lovingly written.

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Contents

List of figures Acknowledgements Introduction

ix xiii 1

1

A young author’s ideal illustrators

12

2

Stevenson and art pre-1887

46

3

Stevenson and the art of illustration

77

4

Illustrating Stevenson’s British subjects

110

5

Illustrating the Pacific

153

Conclusion

198

Bibliography Index

207 215

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List of figures

1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6 1.7

2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 3.6 3.7 3.8 3.9 4.1

Walter Crane, frontispiece for An Inland Voyage (1878). 16 Walter Crane frontispiece for Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes (1879). 18 Walter Crane illustration for his toy book How Jessie Was Lost (1868). 21 Randolph Caldecott illustration for “The Character of Dogs” for The English Illustrated Magazine. 28 Randolph Caldecott title page for Elegy on the Death of a Mad Dog. 28 David Stevenson, “Sketch of the Cruise of the Brig Covenant and the probable course of David Balfour’s wanderings.” 37 Frontispiece map to David Stewart’s Sketches of the Character, Manners, and Present State of the Highlanders of Scotland (1822), courtesy of the Huntington Library, California. 39 Anthony W. Henley, “Fontainebleau. – II.: The Bas-Bréau”. 64 Anthony W. Henley, “Fontainebleau: The Bridge at Gretz”. 66 Eunice Bagster illustrations for Samuel Bagster’s Pilgrim’s Progress. 68 “In the Chinese Quarter”. 71 R. L. Stevenson, for ‘A Peak in Darien’ in Moral Emblems I. 83 RLS, “Reader, your soul upraise to see”. 85 RLS, “Mark, printed on the opposing page”. 87 RLS, “With storms a-weather, rocks a-lee”. 88 RLS, “The Pirate and the Apothecary: Scene the First”. 92 RLS, “The Pirate and the Apothecary: Scene the Second”. 92 RLS, “The Pirate and the Apothecary: Scene the Third”. 93 George Roux, “The two men sat silently smoking for quite a while”. 102 George Roux, “If you do not put that knife this instant in your pocket”. 105 William H. Boucher, front cover for The Black Arrow, in Young Folks, 30 June 1883, courtesy of the National Library of Scotland. 113

x

List of figures

4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5 4.6 4.7 4.8 4.9 4.10 4.11 4.12 4.13 4.14 4.15 4.16 4.17 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4

Alfred Brennan for Scribner’s Black Arrow, “In bone and body he was unusually slender”. Alfred Brennan for The Black Arrow, “Just then the sun rose”. H. M. Paget frontispiece for The Black Arrow, “He carried in his hand a burning torch”. H. M. Paget for The Black Arrow, “The horse neighed and trampled”. William Allan for Illustrations of the Novels and Tales of the Author of Waverley (1820), courtesy of Edinburgh University Special Collections Corson Collection. Alexander Nasmyth title page for volume X of Novels and Tales of the Author of Waverley (1821). William Hole for Kidnapped, “And then there came a blinding flash”. William Hole for Kidnapped, “We began to slip from one rock to another”. William Hole for The Master of Ballantrae (1889), “Heads, I go; shield, I stay”. Illustration to volume I, p. 86 of Edmund Burt’s Letters from a Gentleman in the North of Scotland, courtesy of the Huntington Library, California. William Boucher’s cover illustrations for Kidnapped in Young Folks, 1 May 1886, courtesy of the National Library of Scotland. Boucher’s illustration of Alan Breck and Hoeseason for Young Folks, 15 May 1886, courtesy of the National Library of Scotland. Boucher’s illustration for Young Folks, 10 July 1886, courtesy of the National Library of Scotland. William Hole for Kidnapped, “It was meant to be a main entrance, but never finished”. William Hole for The Master of Ballantrae, “A tall, slender figure of a gentleman”. William Hole for Catriona, “She dropped me one of her curtseys”. Pencil sketch of Hatiheu, Nukahiva, courtesy of the Huntington Library. Gordon Browne for “The Beach of Falesá”, “Will you know what is in his heart?”. Gordon Browne for “The Beach of Falesá”, “Uma showed the best bearing”. James J. Williams, “Studio portrait – hula dancers,” in Hawaiian Historical Society Historical Photograph Collection.

116 117 119 121 124 125 126 127 128 135 136 139 140 141 145 148 159 160 161 163

List of figures 5.5 5.6 5.7 5.8 5.9 5.10 5.11 5.12 5.13 5.14 5.15 5.16 5.17 5.18 5.19 5.20 5.21 6.1

Will H. Low self-portrait for A Chronicle of Friendship (1908), “Painted in the ‘vine-trellised arbour’ at Montigny, 1876”. William Hole for The Wrecker, “‘Yes, it’s a queer yarn’”. William Hole for The Wrecker, “She lay head to the reef”. William Metcalf for The Wrecker, “And lo! There was disclosed but a trayful of papers”. William Metcalf for The Wrecker, frontispiece. William Hatherell for “The Bottle Imp” in Black and White, courtesy of the National Library of Scotland. William Hatherell for “The Bottle Imp”, “The imp looked out of the bottle”. William Hatherell for “The Bottle Imp”, “Keawe of the bright house is out of spirits”. William Hatherell for “The Bottle Imp”, “So off he went down the avenue”. William Hatherell for “The Isle of Voices” “While he was so thinking”. William Hatherell for “The Isle of Voices”, “There he was striding and dwindling”. Gordon Browne for “The Beach of Falesá”, “We stuck just the way we were”. Gordon Browne for Illustrated London News, “I lay quite still”, courtesy of the Huntington Library of California. Possibly by RLS, frontispiece for Island Nights’ Entertainments, “Sketch map of the beach and neighbouring country”. Alfred Brennan for “The Ebb-Tide” in McClure’s, Captain Tom. Alfred Brennan, for “The Ebb-Tide”, “The captain appeared upon the threshold”. Alfred Brennan illustration for “The Ebb-Tide”, Attwater. Harold Copping’s illustration for “Markheim” in Unwin’s Christmas Annual, courtesy of the Huntington Library, California.

xi

165 167 168 170 173 176 177 179 180 182 183 184 185 187 189 190 192 200

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Acknowledgements

This book has been a labour of love and a rewarding distraction from some great challenges. It owes its inception to Penny Fielding, who suggested Stevenson’s illustrations as a subject of interest at an MLA convention many years ago. Since then, many friends, family and colleagues have been instrumental in providing encouragement, help and the will to carry on; in no particular order, these people include Ann Donahue, Caroline McCracken-Flesher, Roslyn Jolly, Anthony Mandal, Ann Colley, Barry Menikoff, Robert-Louis Abrahamson, Linda Dryden, Brian Wall, Richard Dury, Alan Sandison, Allison Paynter and my colleagues at Chaminade University. I would like to thank the staff of the Huntington Library in California, Edinburgh University Library and the National Library of Scotland, all of whom were great resources to me in finding and researching the illustrations. I also owe a debt to the staff at Chaminade University’s Sullivan Family Library in helping me track down books and articles, and for forgiving many overdue library loans over the years. I must express my everlasting gratitude to several doctors who have, in much more important ways, provided support to me that I could never possibly repay, and without whom this book certainly would not have been finished. These doctors include Drs Chun, Devere, and most importantly Dr. Amy Reisenauer, as well as their wonderful nursing staff. This is my feeble thanks. Finally, I’d like to thank my family, both in the US and in England, who have been tremendous supports throughout the last few years. Most importantly, I thank my wife, Lauren, for her love and support through both difficult and wonderful times; thank you, most of all, for our two amazing children, Scott and Evan, to whom this book is dedicated.

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Introduction

Few Victorian writers have been interpreted in visual media as often as Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894). Stevenson wrote some of the most enduring stories of the nineteenth century at a pivotal moment in the history of illustrated fiction, and just before the dawn of motion pictures. Two works in particular, Treasure Island (1881) and Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), have secured Stevenson’s place in popular visual culture, both novels having received a variety of cinematic treatments through the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. However, Stevenson is also the author who coined the phrase “Death to the optic nerve”. This seems a strange comment from a writer who was capable of conjuring such powerful visual imagery. This comment was made in a letter responding to comments made by his friend and peer, Henry James, who amongst heavy praise for Stevenson’s Catriona (1893) mildly criticised the lack of visual imagery within the novel; Stevenson was delighted with this observation, writing, Your jubilation over Catriona did me good, and still more the subtlety and truth of your remark on the starving of the visual sense in that book. ’Tis true, and unless I make the greater effort—and am, as a step to that, convinced of its necessity—it will be more true I fear in the future. I hear people talking, and I feel them acting, and that seems to me to be fiction. My two aims may be described as— 1st War to the adjective. 2nd Death to the optic nerve. Admitted we live in an age of the optic nerve in literature. For how many centuries did literature get along without a sign of it?1 Stevenson here admits that he seeks “the starving of the visual sense”, a stylistic project which had begun long before this novel. Stevenson’s sought to eradicate unnecessary detail from his fictive prose, and evolved towards a style that eschewed any superfluous elements. Stevenson referred to such detail as “irrelevant dexterity”, a phrase he uses to describe the contemporary fashion in art that sought to perfect technique at the expense of artistic truth.2 The result is a style that is both vivid and sparse. Stevenson’s friend and correspondent, the French critic Marcel Schwob, perhaps articulated

2

Introduction

Stevenson’s style most succinctly: “La raison m’en paraît être dans le romantisme de son réalisme. Autant vaudrais dire que le réalisme de Stevenson est parfaitement iréel, et que c’est pour cela qu’il est tout-puissant”, (“The reason seems to me to be in the romanticism of his realism. As much to say that Stevenson’s realism is perfectly unreal, and that is why it is all powerful”).3 This “unreal realism” is achieved through a closely studied technique that often suggests rather than describes an image. Stevenson sought a maximum of effect through the minimum of naturalistic detail. However, this “starving of the visual sense” is at odds with the fact that he sought the illustration of his novels, including Catriona. In other words, while his prose attempted to resist visual description, he wanted this same prose to be visually represented through illustration. Discussing the illustration of Stevenson’s work, John Scally has commented that “Stevenson was the most visual of writers”.4 This is true; however, a close reading of Stevenson’s stories reveals how little Stevenson actually renders through literal description. The character of Long John Silver is possibly the most famous example of this technique: having read the novel, the reader is left with a very strong visual impression of Long John, but as Chapter 3 demonstrates, there is very little in the way of visual description of the character. However, in a literary marketplace drenched in illustration, any illustrator to Stevenson’s stories is presented with obvious challenges: how do you illustrate something that is merely suggested, rather than described, by an author who leaves so much to the imagination? In Silver’s case, for example, there is a lack of concrete information in the text for an illustrator to draw from, other than his missing leg; how, as an illustrator, do you create a face that is “as big as a ham”? Stevenson’s stories are also some of the most heavily illustrated novels of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as Scally’s centenary publication Pictures of the Mind: The Illustrated Robert Louis Stevenson has demonstrated. Treasure Island in particular has inspired some of the most famous book illustrations ever produced by N. C. Wyeth, which were painted in 1911, seventeen years after Stevenson’s death, and have been the reference point for many cinematic interpretations of this novel and other pirate films. However, what would Stevenson have made of these illustrations? Would the author himself have approved of Wyeth’s muscular, bullish Long John Silver? Wyeth’s illustrations were in fact the latest in a series of impressive illustrative interpretations, most notably by Walter Paget in 1899, and before that by the French artist Georges Roux for an 1885 edition. Roux’s illustrations were the first to be produced for the single book volume of the novel, and are therefore a very important template for what was to follow. Most significantly, however, Roux’s illustrations were produced during Stevenson’s lifetime, and Stevenson himself wrote an unpublished review of these pictures, from which we can learn a great deal about his opinions of the role and desired qualities of narrative illustration. Stevenson would find Roux’s illustrations “spirited”, but makes the comment that the faces

Introduction

3

of the characters were too “French”. It is unclear precisely what Stevenson means by this, but his review provides a theoretical platform from which to understand what he expected of illustrators, and the many ways in which an illustrator could subvert the narrative authority of the story they were illuminating. As this book will demonstrate, Stevenson not only sought the illustration of his stories from the very beginning of his career, but he wrote extensively on the art of illustration and the pictorial arts in general, in essays, letters and even in his experimental self-illustrated poetry, Moral Emblems. Stevenson’s essays and commentary on the art of illustration, and the manner in which he attempted to influence how his work was illustrated, demonstrate that he not only had a clear vision of how his published work should look to a consumer, but also that he considered the illustration of his work to be an important artistic exercise, not merely a commercial one. Stevenson clearly thought and created stories through pictures from a very young age. As Scally points out, Stevenson was drawing pictures for his literature almost from the time he would write stories, the earliest known example being a watercoloured narrative picture-story of Moses leading the Israelites from slavery, which he wrote and illustrated at the age of six. A wonderful sketchbook from a family trip to the Riviera in 1863 (Stevenson being then thirteen years old), held in the Huntington Library in California, contains a mixture of topographical and architectural sketches, amongst a series of strongly imagined and highly caricatured characters, including “Sir D. Beelzebub”, a grinning, cloven-hoofed Satan figure. In some of the sketches, characters begin to appear within the topography he is surrounded by; amongst these, scenes of battles, riots and naval assaults begin to emerge. Even at this young age, Stevenson’s creative imagination was being informed by what he saw both in the real world and in his mind’s eye.5 A few years later at school, he would self-pen a fully illustrated literary magazine, The Sunbeam Magazine: An Illustrated Miscellany of Fact, Fiction and Fun (dated on the pencil-drawn title page as January 1866). As a young adult in Scotland, then in France, and later in the Pacific, he would sketch the landscape, often demonstrating considerable raw talent and a competent compositional eye. Perhaps his ultimate experiment with illustrated fiction came with Moral Emblems: as will be discussed, Stevenson again demonstrates a degree of ability in wood-block engraving, and his compositions reveal a keen understanding of composition and narrative progression, but they fall very short of the professional standards of engraving and illustration. What is clear, however, was that Stevenson had a very lucid, sophisticated theoretical understanding of the difficult relationship of text and image, and that he also understood how potently they could be wrought for both artistic and commercial purposes. Stevenson was a great writer about art, and an author who wanted to illustrate his own fiction but lacked the technical expertise to produce images for a highly competitive, highly professional marketplace for illustrated literature. For this reason, Stevenson had to rely on the talents of other people, on the connections and preferences

4

Introduction

of publishers, and in his late life from great distances, for the illustration of his work. He had his favourites: as a young, little read author of travel narratives, he courted great illustrators such as Walter Crane and Randolph Caldecott; as his novels achieved traction in the marketplace in the 1880s, he favoured the Scottish artist William Hole; and for the illustration of his Pacific fiction, he developed great respect for William Hatherell and Gordon Browne. He also raged in private to his publishers when illustrations failed his very specific criteria, and tried to ban certain artists from ever illustrating him again, unsuccessfully in the case of Alfred Brennan. In fact, if there was ever a choice between bad illustration and no illustration, he would choose the latter, as was the case with the first publication of A Child’s Garden of Verses: failing to attain the services of Caldecott, Crane or Kate Greenaway, Stevenson, with his friend and agent W. E. Henley, opted against any illustration of the volume. This fact is surprising, given first that Stevenson conceived the collection as an illustrated book, even suggesting how to illustrate specific poems, and secondly that A Child’s Garden of Verses has been so heavily illustrated ever since this first publication; it is difficult to find nineteenth or twentieth-century edition of A Child’s Garden of Verses without illustration. However, this episode reveals that, not for the first or last time, Stevenson had a very strong mental image of how his books should look when published, and the kinds of imagery that he expected to illustrate his work. Stevenson’s writing about illustration, moreover, provides a complex and subtle appreciation of the nuances of narrative illustration in the nineteenth century, and therefore becomes an invaluable set of criteria by which to judge any contemporary narrative illustration. Much of this theory is provided by close analysis of his work in Henley’s Magazine of Art, for which he produced six essays on various aspects of contemporary visual arts, including illustration. A review of Samuel Bagster’s 1845 edition of Pilgrim’s Progress, for example, lauds the anonymous illustrations that lit up the narrative for Stevenson as a boy, who was given a copy of the volume as a seven year-old. He argues in “Byways of Book Illustration: Bagster’s Pilgrim’s Progress” that these illustrations helped his young self engage with and follow the story, and that they were both technically and compositionally strong narrative pictures. They aided narrative progression from one scene to the next, without robbing the text of its authority or undermining the poetic and metaphoric nature of the story.6 Stevenson understood that an illustrated book could and should be conceived as a single, unified work of art, even those produced for a mass market. Illustrators of stories, therefore, could also achieve artistic credentials as illustrators, and not simply as jobbing painters looking for work and exposure. For Stevenson, literary illustration was a great artistic skill. As his close friend and sometimes illustrator Will H. Low states in his Chronicles of Friendships, There are comparatively few born illustrators, the majority of our men have been trained as painters and drift into illustration, because of

Introduction  5 all the branches of art it is the one most founded upon a commercial basis of demand and supply, and entrance therein is comparatively easy for the young artist without fortune, reputation, or powerful friends. Its demands to-day are but little short of the most exclusive of our exhibitions; and, since the advent of reproduction in colour, many of the pages of our magazines demand but little change to prove most acceptable to our exhibitions, where the dearth of pictures of human interest—which is the key-note of all illustration—is most keenly felt.7 Low touches on an issue that Stevenson understood artistically and critically. It is one thing to be a great painter, but it’s another to be a great illustrator of stories. The one does not guarantee the other. It seemed to Low and to Stevenson that exhibition painters who dabbled in illustration could often disrupt the continuity between text and image that illustrations demanded. Of those artists who illustrated Stevenson, William Metcalf provides the best example of this. Metcalf would become one of America’s leading impressionist painters in the early twentieth century, but as Chapter 5 will demonstrate, he fell short as an illustrator of Stevenson’s stories. By contrast, Stevenson was impressed by the work of the great American illustrator Howard Pyle, who not only illustrated but also wrote his own stories. As Stevenson hit fame in 1886, it was in America that illustration as an art form was being pioneered and championed by Pyle and his followers, among whom was Wyeth himself. What constituted a good illustrator of fiction, however? An analysis of Stevenson’s writings on art, illustration and his correspondence with artists and publishers, helps to provide a very coherent critical framework from which to judge the success of narrative illustration. For Stevenson, technical ability was not enough; an illustrator had to understand his or her role within the production of a multi-media volume. In narrative illustration – the illustration of stories – the text should be the predominant, guiding medium. An illustration should elucidate text without deviating from it, in other words, without adding erroneous detail or missing crucial textual details; an example is provided in this book by H. M. Paget’s illustrations for the book-edition of The Black Arrow, which on first glance appear to be impressive, dynamic interpretations of the text, but which on closer examination betray Stevenson’s story through precisely such altering of narrative detail.8 A good narrative illustration should also, for Stevenson, depict moments of high action or drama in important settings, but without giving away the outcome of that action. For example, it was acceptable to depict two characters in a sword fight, but not to depict who wins the fight or how; the outcome was the text’s job, as Hole successfully demonstrates with his depiction of the duel between the Durrisdeer brothers in The Master of Ballantrae. Stevenson understood the high risks involved in bad illustration, which could derail the illustrated story as a hermetic work of art with a single vision defined by the author. An illustration has an advantage

6

Introduction

over text, in that it is always seen before the text is read. For this reason, it should be subservient to the text, and not abuse its power of immediacy over the viewer. Stevenson would articulate his frustration with bad illustration privately through correspondence to his publishers or associates, and even sometimes publicly, as he does with illustrations produced by Henley’s brother Anthony, for an essay entitled “Fontainebleau: Village Community of Painters” in The Magazine of Art; in the collected volume of the magazine for 1884, Stevenson adds a paragraph that takes issue with some of the illustrations that were published with the original number a few months previously, as if he were attempting to reclaim authority for the author over the illustrator, whom, he felt, had misrepresented some of the scenes he had written about.9 In an illustrated novel, the text, not the image, should be the authoritative medium, and good illustrators should be loyal the details and the spirit of the story they were illustrating. Stevenson’s theories on the art of illustration would evolve further once he relocated to the Pacific, following the death of his father and his yearning for climes that would improve his health. Stevenson would immerse himself in the cultures and populations he encountered in the Pacific, with the initial intention of producing a “definitive” documentary work on Pacific Island civilizations. This tome would not materialize before his early death in 1894, but much of his fiction from the Pacific sought a truth to the life and conditions of his new home and its peoples. To this end, Stevenson now required even more from illustrators: not only did any illustrator of his Pacific fiction need to obey the laws of narrative illustration already laid out, but now they had to achieve a level of visual authenticity to Pacific topography, ethnicities, costumes and even flora. These challenges were compounded by the logistical complexities of late nineteenth-century transglobal publication. Stevenson, now writing from Tahiti, Hawaii, Sydney or Samoa, but being published from New York and London, had to trust publishers and artists thousands of miles away, while relying on transcontinental and trans-oceanic mail services. To generalize this process, Stevenson would produce a manuscript in his home of Vailima in Samoa, which would be sent to his publisher, Charles Scribner’s Sons, in New York and then on to Cassell and Co., in London; proofs would be worked up, sent back to Stevenson and returned again for publishing, often in numbers (such as Scribner’s Magazine or Black and White). If the works were to be illustrated (which they most often were), Stevenson would have to recommend illustrators he trusted, send draft chapters or outlines to those illustrators and then hope that the final illustrations were everything he expected from narrative illustration. In some cases, as with Hatherell and Browne, he was pleasantly surprised at the results; in others, as with Metcalf and Brennan, he was left disappointed. In all these cases, he had little to no control over how his stories were going to be illustrated. From the perspective of the illustrators, they were now having to draw scenes set in locations they had never set eyes on, such as the port of Papeete in Tahiti, or Native Hawaiian characters

Introduction

7

of Polynesian descent. Stevenson, aware of this disadvantage, would often direct illustrators – potential or actual – to photographs that had either been published in popular photographic albums, or that he had taken himself and sent on with his suggested scenes. As will be explained, photography was a constant source of inspiration and visual reference for Stevenson throughout his career, which took on a greater significance once in the Pacific. This book therefore separates the illustration of his fiction between his European and his Pacific subjects. First, Chapter 1 will examine Stevenson’s early professional career as a writer, and his efforts to engage illustrators both to enhance the commercial appeal of his work in the marketplace, and to produce books of artistic integrity and beauty. Indeed, this balance of the commercial and the artistic was a constant source of tension with Stevenson, and when they did achieve the ideal balance, some of the most impressive illustrated novels of the nineteenth century were the result, including Kidnapped (1886) and The Master of Ballantrae (1889). In order to judge the merits of the first illustrations to Stevenson’s novels – referred to here as lifetime illustrations (illustrations produced with Stevenson’s knowledge or consent) – Chapter 2 will then analyze Stevenson’s essay writing on the subject of art and illustration, including his work for The Magazine of Art and essays produced throughout his career on the relationship between imagery and literature. Stevenson wrote on such apparently disparate subjects as the forests of Fontainebleau and Japanese art, but a close reading reveals common threads of artistic appreciation and theory, which in turn provides a useful framework for analyzing Stevenson’s style and his expectations of illustration. Chapter 3 will examine how Stevenson explored some of these theories for himself in a little-known, privately published experiment in illustrated fiction called Moral Emblems, and how he applied his theories to critique the first lifetime illustrations of Treasure Island by the French artist George Roux in a posthumously published essay. Using Stevenson’s own criteria, Chapter 4 will then closely examine the illustrations produced for those novels set in Britain (some of which were written from the Pacific). These are the novels that helped to create the visual language of the new romance for the late nineteenth century. Chapter 5 will discuss the novels and stories set in the Pacific. These works differ from the British novels, in that they move away from a discourse of romance towards one of exoticism; Stevenson invokes a vibrant world of Pacific islands and peoples, but one that is infused with the grating realism of white colonial intrusion. This is Stevenson’s contribution to the literary-visual discourse of the exotic, one that punctures the previous stereotypes of the Pacific that were predicated on the sexualised, available island maids or generalised African-type males. With both the British and Pacific novels, Stevenson’s guiding advice and subsequent critiques will be analysed, so that we can understand precisely what he valued as artistically successful illustrated productions. The purpose of this analysis is to argue that Stevenson was responsible for the creation of a new literary-visual discourse, an aesthetic of the

8

Introduction

“new romance”, that reinvented and reinvigorated outdated models from earlier in the century, and which influenced popular literary-visual culture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, including the new medium of cinema. My previous work focused on the illustration of a pioneer in illustrated fiction, Sir Walter Scott. However, Scott was writing and publishing in an era in which illustration was reserved for volumes of poetry, or for the illustration of long dead “canonical” writers; Scott and his publishers, in fact, established the platform from which the illustrated Victorian novel could be launched by Dickens and Thackeray.10 By stark contrast, Stevenson, in many ways the literary heir of Scott’s historical-romance mantle, was publishing in a marketplace drenched in various forms of illustration, including photography. In addition, the Waverley-style romance had come to be held as outdated by the 1870s, just as Stevenson was beginning his literary career, and the Waverley novels themselves were beginning to be sold and marketed as “boys’” books. Peter Keating quotes Kenneth Graham in marking 1887 as the year of “‘the recognition for the new romance’ because in that year George Saintsbury, Rider Haggard and Andrew Lang— the writers who, with the addition of Stevenson, were the major propagandists for romance—issued ‘manifestos on its behalf’”.11 In fact, these writers owed debts in part to Stevenson’s re-invigoration of historical romance over the previous four years, placing Stevenson at the forefront of an aesthetic movement that offered an alternative road to the realistic novels of Zola, Meredith and James. As Roslyn Jolly has remarked, “Stevenson’s name became associated […] with a kind of self-conscious anachronism: the revival of romance in an age of realism”.12 As Keating states, The attractiveness of Stevenson rested on his possession of two highly-developed qualities which are rarely found together. He was an Aesthete and a writer of exciting stories. In an age which was becoming obsessed with the need to separate Art from Entertainment, Stevenson spoke and acted on behalf of both. If the experimental range of his work worried his admirers, there was still at the heart of it Treasure Island, Kidnapped, The Black Arrow and The Master of Ballantrae. They were the perfect antidote to naturalism. They were absorbing for children and adults; committed to action rather than analysis. …13 An overlooked factor in Stevenson’s reinvigoration of the romance, however, is illustration, and the visual presentation of his fiction in the marketplace. This new aesthetic was enhanced further by illustration, and that illustration was very often guided by Stevenson himself. This book, therefore, will build on Keating’s claim that Stevenson interwove high-art and popular fiction through the visualisation of his work, and actively helped to create a visual aesthetic that navigated a path between the high-concept publications of the Aesthetes (such as Walter Crane, William Morris and Aubrey Beardsley) and the new “black and white” illustrations of the realist novelists (such as James and Meredith).

Introduction

9

Stevenson’s stories were competing with many forms of professionally illustrated, highly popular fiction. A glance through one of the magazine numbers in which Stevenson was published, such as the final story to be published with illustrations during his lifetime, The Ebb-Tide, reveals the importance of illustration to a browsing reader, and how they can betray the author in many different ways if they do not respect the authority of the author. The illustrations to The Ebb-Tide by an unidentified “W. H.” published in Jerome K. Jerome’s To-Day magazine, for example, lack any obvious narrative continuity; they depict objects of little importance to the story, often out of order in which they appear in the narrative, or loosely depicted characters who are not consistent either with their depiction in the text or with each other. The result is a very confusing set of images that undermine narrative progression or textual detail, and which conform to generalized, stereotyped imagery of the Pacific of the sort that Stevenson was deliberately attempting to deconstruct. Moreover, these images are small, unremarkable and are lost on the page amongst the text, doing little to encourage reader curiosity. Such imagery was a commercial problem for authors, who, especially if they were little known or attempting to establish themselves, relied heavily on the visual presentation of their works amongst the dozens of other authors and illustrations contained within these magazines. This book will demonstrate how Stevenson shared this precise concern at the beginning of his own career; he was desperate to secure the services of Crane, for example, in publishing his first book, An Inland Voyage, because he understood that a good illustration by an established artist would help sales. As if to prove his concern, the first publication of Treasure Island in Young Folks Paper in 1881 was accompanied by one sparse illustration, and did not move the kind of numbers he would become used to later in his career; and by contrast, he was delighted with the efforts of Young Folks’ syndicated artist William H. Boucher in 1883, who illustrated The Black Arrow in the same magazine with a series of very strong pictures. It might be little coincidence, therefore, that it was The Black Arrow, and not Treasure Island, that established Stevenson’s early fame amongst his boy-readers, before the crowning successes of Kidnapped and Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde in 1886. Good illustration contributed towards initial success in this popular market, establishing a foothold for a struggling author. It is also important to note that Stevenson’s new literary-visual aesthetic was born, like his career, in the pages of boys’ magazines; indeed, children’s fiction and childhood imagery were crucial to Stevenson’s literary imagination, and also his development of theories on art and illustration. Finally, however, a close look at Stevenson’s consideration of illustration and the visual arts helps scholarship to understand the authorial imagination. Stevenson’s correspondence and essays reveal the visual aspects of the creative process behind some of his greatest fictional work. What becomes clear repeatedly is that stories often began with an image, whether in the author’s imagination, a photograph, a portrait, an illustration in another’s work or, in the case of Treasure Island, a map. Maps, as Chapter 1 will demonstrate,

10

Introduction

often both inspired and illustrated narrative. The two most famous maps of Stevenson’s novels, for Treasure Island and Kidnapped, both begin and complete the stories for the author, his characters and his readers. While the first was fictional, drawn by Stevenson and his son-in-law Lloyd Osbourne (and then re-drawn by Stevenson’s father following the loss of the original), and the second is a map of Scotland with an imaginary journey inscribed into the landscape, both these maps shape how the narrative is constructed by the author, and then read by the reader. As letters and essays reveal, Stevenson made sure that his stories were believable according to the topography of these maps: David Balfour’s journey, for example, was carefully considered for both time and physical prowess, so that the reader could believe that such an epic journey was at least possible. Stevenson wrote these novels with the maps as reference material; on completion, the maps became required visual material for the reader, so that the same references could be made by both young and adult consumers. In essence, Treasure Island and Kidnapped, in their book formats, became interactive texts, objects of play toys. The map is also the motif that connects Stevenson’s British novels with his Pacific books, as both Island Nights’ Entertainments and A Footnote to History, Stevenson’s cultural history and plea for protection of his new home in Samoa, were published with maps. Understanding Stevenson’s various uses of maps can help us get much closer to the creative processes of one of the English language’s great story-tellers; glimpses of Stevenson’s pictorial creative processes reveal themselves. These examples are just few of many that help elucidate the authorial process; they help us to understand the skill of the stories themselves; they help us understand the complexity of the markets for illustrated fiction in the late nineteenth century; and they help us to understand what qualities might constitute effective literary illustration. This study also marks an important moment in the development of precinematic popular visual culture, as Stevenson moulded a new type of fiction that enthralled a generation of readers and influenced the next generation of romance writers, illustrators and film-makers. Stevenson’s works are finally receiving the serious critical attention they deserve, and an analysis of his lifetime illustrations bring us closer to some of his theoretical, technical and commercial attributes as an author of his own time.

Notes 1. Robert Louis Stevenson, The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson, ed. Bradford A. Booth and Ernest Mayhew, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995, 8 vols., 8:192–93. 2. Robert Louis Stevenson, “A Note on Realism”, Magazine of Art, London: Cassell & Co., 1884, p. 28. Chapter 2 will discuss this phrase and theory in detail. 3. Marcel Schwob, “Le Dynamiteur”, La Revue hebdeomadaire, 2 June 1894. My gratitude to Mark Fitzpatrick for both guiding me to this review, and most importantly for his translation.

Introduction

11

4. John Scally, Pictures of the Mind: The Illustrated Robert Louis Stevenson, Edinburgh: Canongate, 1994, p. 9. 5. Simply titled Sketch book kept during a visit to Riviera 1863 in the Huntington catalogue (call no. HM 2402), this notebook seems to represent two important sides of Stevenson’s imagination: the observational (especially of architecture and topography), and characterization. When they are brought together on the page, stories begin to suggest themselves. In some images, he will contrast characters, he will experiment with profiles or he will play with action scenes. This is the inward-looking author at play. Sketching like this was clearly a creative stimulus, a pattern that is more famously seen in his development of Treasure Island. 6. As Chapter 2 will discuss, these illustrations were completed by Samuel Bagster’s daughter, Eunice Bagster, though Stevenson would not know this at the time of writing the essay. “Byways of Book Illustration: Bagster’s Pilgrim’s Progress” was published in The Magazine of Art for 1882. 7. Will H. Low. A Chronicle of Friendships: 1873–1900, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1908, p. 370. 8. H. M. Paget illustrated the British edition of The Black Arrow, published by Cassell & Co. in 1891. These illustrations are analysed in Chapter 4. 9. This paragraph is quoted and discussed in full in Chapter 2. 10. See Richard J. Hill, Picturing Scotland through the Waverley Novels: Walter Scott and the Origins of the Victorian Illustrated Novel, Farnham and Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2010. 11. Peter Keating, The Haunted Study: A Social history of the English Novel, 1875–1914, London: Fontana Press, 1991, p. 345. 12. Roslyn Jolly, Robert Louis Stevenson in the Pacific: Travel, Empire, and the Author’s Profession, Farnham and Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2009, p. 4. 13. Peter Keating, A Haunted Study, p. 347.

1

A young author’s ideal illustrators

Stevenson’s first illustrated novel was published in 1884 in America, with four illustrations that he would later complain were “disgusting”.1 The novel was Treasure Island, which had been previously published in serial format in the boys’ magazine Young Folks Paper with one illustration; the artist referred to unceremoniously was Frank T. Merrill, who had gained a reputation in America as an illustrator of novels by, among others, Nathaniel Hawthorn, Mark Twain and Louisa May Alcott. The first European illustrated edition of Treasure Island was published in 1885 by Cassell and Co., using illustrations by the French artist Georges Roux, whose style of illustration was much more to Stevenson’s liking. In fact, as this book will demonstrate, Stevenson had clear and evolving ideas about the importance of suitable illustration of his novels, and that he was keen to marry his texts to imagery that would entice the reader, reflect and compliment his texts in the appropriate manner, and produce an attractive physical object for the purchaser. The problem lies in defining what Stevenson defined as “suitable” and “appropriate” illustration. This is further problematised by the vast array and long history of illustrated texts that had proliferated by the time Stevenson was publishing his novels. By the 1880s, there were many theories, practices and innovations within the field of illustrated literature, and there were many disagreements about its application and suitability for “serious” or high literature. The 1890s, in particular, saw the Arts and Crafts Movement of William Morris, Walter Crane and Aubrey Beardsley create sumptuous illustrated books that were heavily designed from cover to cover, almost making the text a facet of the books’ designs. At the same time, “children’s” illustrators were earning a reputation of their own: they were revered, publically and critically, but not considered as serious artists so much as highly skilled popular draughtsmen and women, interpreters of texts and trusted purveyors of popular culture and taste. Stevenson admired this latter group, which included luminaries such as Randolph Caldecott, Kate Greenaway and, in America, Howard Pyle. These artists in particular were attempting to marry imagery and text of their own composition, in addition to creating illustrations for famous authors of the day and great authors of the past. Stevenson did not necessarily see popular and high art as mutually exclusive; for him, a good story published for the masses in illustrated format

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could achieve the status of great art if appropriately conceived. Indeed, his novels tread this fine line between high art and popular entertainment, and his reputation as a serious artist has been threatened through popular interpretation as a consequence; we need only to consider the multifarious cinematic and television treatments and derivatives of Treasure Island and Jekyll and Hyde to appreciate this phenomenon. However, it was precisely this marriage of high art and popular entertainment which led to Stevenson’s conception of a new visual discourse in illustrated literature: popular fiction of high artistic merit, illustrated by talented artists in a manner that would enhance the romance of the texts they adorned. As Stevenson understood, any visual interpretation of his work by an artist other than himself meant losing a level of aesthetic control over his creation. Visualisation by a third party is, to a greater or lesser extent, an adaptation, or appropriation of the author’s original vision; the illustration of the original novels is the point at which these adaptations begin.2 The end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth saw the ever increasing proliferation of illustrated literature that directly prefigured and influenced the cinematic age. It is essential, therefore, to understand how the authors themselves wanted their work illustrated, and, if possible, to glean how they themselves might visualize their own characters and settings. This is a difficult task given the breadth and depth of illustrative styles during this period. In between the designs of the Pre-Raphaelites, on the one hand, and the popular illustrated children’s fiction of Caldecott and Greenaway on the other, was a vast array of illustrative treatment of creative writing, much of which Stevenson was highly wary. By the 1880s, there were many different methods of printing and reproducing imagery, which had evolved from copper-plate engraving at the beginning of the century, through steelplate engraving, wood-block and wood-engraving, lithography and various forms of photographic reproduction. Late Victorian Britain was awash in illustrated literature, and illustration of texts heavily influenced the interpretations of those texts by children and adults alike. While Stevenson was versed in many of the aspects of contemporary book illustration, his tastes for the illustration of his own work tended towards the more figurative, narrative style that can be traced back through the Hogarth-inspired works of George Cruikshank, Halbot Browne (Phiz), William Makepeace Thackeray and the illustration of Walter Scott’s Waverley novels. It is important to understand an essential difference in the role of illustration here: where the Kelmscott artists and publishers, for example, used illustration to decorate books, Stevenson wanted illustration to emphasize and elucidate narrative; in other words, illustration for Stevenson served his stories, and should never be merely decorative of the page. This chapter will discuss the earliest illustrations of Stevenson’s published works, particularly those of the children’s illustrator Walter Crane. In doing so, it will help to elucidate Stevenson’s priorities and tastes in the illustration of his work from the beginning of his career as a writer, from both an artistic and a professional perspective.

14 A young author’s ideal illustrators It will end with a discussion of another crucial type of illustration that is indelibly linked to Stevenson’s oeuvre: maps. Maps were important visual stimuli to Stevenson’s creative imagination; moreover, in at least two instances, they become significant in not only illustrating the stories being told, but also in transforming the novels into interactive objects of recreation, or toys. This aspect of Stevenson’s literary-visual discourse would have a great influence on a subsequent generation of adventure and children’s writers, from Rider Haggard and J. M. Barrie, through Rudyard Kipling and J. R. R. Tolkien.

Walter Crane’s frontispieces The three foremost children’s illustrators of the 1870s, Walter Crane, Randolph Caldecott and Kate Greenaway, would all be approached to illustrate Stevenson’s earliest works. In 1878, the year in which Stevenson was attempting to publish his first book-length work, An Inland Voyage, Crane’s was the most sought-after talent, being the most senior and experienced illustrator for Edmund Evans’s series of “toy books”. It is therefore of some significance that he was successfully recruited to illustrate An Inland Voyage in its first edition, years before Stevenson would achieve his fame. Crane cuts a curious figure in the subject of Stevenson illustration. He was Stevenson’s very first book-illustrator, providing the wood-cut frontispiece plate for An Inland Voyage, an artful travelogue recording a canoe trip up the River Oise through Belgium and France taken by Stevenson (Arethusa in the narrative) and his friend Sir Walter Grindley Simpson (Cigarette).3 When he provided this image, Crane was doing Stevenson and his publisher, Kegan Paul, a favour; Stevenson was an aspiring author of some critical but no popular success, while Crane was one of the most accomplished and famous illustrators of the day. Stevenson’s anxiety that Crane’s name appear in the title-page is revealed in a letter of 16 March 1878, in which he politely begs Crane to produce the illustration for the publisher as soon as he can: You have written to him promising a frontispiece for a fortnight hence for a little book of mine—An Inland Voyage—shortly to appear. Mr Paul is in dismay. It appears that there is a tide in the affairs of publishers which has the narrowest moment of flood conceivable: a week here, a week there, and a book is made or lost; and now, as I write to you, is the very nick of time, the publisher’s high noon. I should deceive you if I were to pretend I had no more than a generous interest in this appeal. For, should the public prove gullible to a proper degree, and one thousand copies net, counting thirteen to the dozen, disappear into its capacious circulating libraries, I should begin to perceive a royalty which visibly affects me as I write. I fear you will think me rude, and I do mean to be importunate. The sooner you can get the frontispiece for us, the better the book will swim, if swim it does.4

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Stevenson’s anxiety that the book “swim” in the market is a familiar refrain of aspiring authors who are dependent upon others for the successful publication of their first major work. Before the publication of Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde in 1886, Stevenson’s name alone might not have been enough to move large numbers of a travel journal. In this case, Crane’s name and work would be an asset to the sale of An Inland Voyage. However, this did not stop a young Stevenson (28 when he wrote to Crane) from privately critiquing and criticising the proof-design Crane had produced for the volume. In a letter dated 27 February 1878, before he writes to Crane above, Stevenson writes to Sidney Colvin to offer a critical comment on Crane’s initial design: “I think you know all about the Crane sketch; but it should be a river, not a canal, you know, and the look should be ‘cruel, lewd, and kindly’, all at once’”.5 This is a reference to specific lines in his essay “Pan’s Pipes”, first published in London, on 4 May 1874, and republished in Virginibus Puerisque, in which he writes, “For it is a shaggy world, and yet studded with gardens; where the salt and tumbling sea receives clear rivers running from among reeds and lilies; fruitful and austere; a rustic world; sunshiny, lewd, and cruel”.6 The final illustration seems to have followed the author’s suggestion, as Pan is depicted sitting luxuriantly among the reeds, hidden “lewdly” from two canoes in a large river behind, which carry the two protagonists on their voyage up the Oise River (Figure 1.1). Stevenson’s critical comments and his personal address to Crane may seem presumptuous, even arrogant, given his age, comparative inexperience and his low profile. However, retrospectively it provides evidence of an already acute critical appreciation of the power of illustration either to mould or usurp a text. On picking up his book, Stevenson understood that a cursory glance at the illustration inevitably shapes both reader curiosity and expectation. If Crane’s image depicted a canal, the reader would expect the book, naturally, to describe a journey on a canal, and would be confused by the subsequent narrative of a journey up a large river. Such variance would raise questions for the reader: who is in charge, author or illustrator; which is the dominant medium, text or image; should we trust Crane, whom we’ve heard of, or Stevenson, of whom we have not? None of these questions may seem particularly important to the casual reader, but when text and illustration deviated in this way, the book, as a cohesive work of art, failed for Stevenson. As Chapter 2 will demonstrate, text and image, author and illustrator, had to be working towards a common artistic vision, a vision which in a literary text had to be defined by the author. A close examination of the frontispiece provides affirmation of Crane’s talent as an illustrator of others’ texts. Crane took as his inspiration Stevenson’s allusion to Pan in the chapter “The Oise in Flood”. In this chapter, the author is enjoying the apparently serene but fast-moving flow of the swollen river in the Arethusa when, coming round a corner, he is caught by a low-hanging tree and lifted into the air, while his canoe carries on downstream without him. This semi-comical episode becomes a musing on

16 A young author’s ideal illustrators

Figure 1.1 Walter Crane, frontispiece for An Inland Voyage (1878).

the theme of the myth of Pan, who’s playing often leads us into dangers we do not see. Stevenson draws a comparison between the beauty of the wind playing in the reeds by the side of the river, and the “terror” it produces in the river’s animal life, which can read in this sign the portents of the swollen and fast-flowing waters: There should be some myth (but if there is, I know it not) founded on the shivering of the reeds. There are not many things in nature more striking to man’s eye. It is such an eloquent pantomime of terror; and

A young author’s ideal illustrators

17

to see such a number of terrified creatures taking sanctuary in every nook along the shore, is enough to infect a silly human with alarm. Perhaps they are only a-cold, and no wonder, standing waist-deep in the stream. Or perhaps they have never got accustomed to the speed and fury of the river’s flux, or the miracle of its continuous body. Pan once played upon their forefathers; and so, by the hands of his river, he still plays upon these later generations down all the valley of the Oise; and plays the same air, both sweet and shrill, to tell us of the beauty and the terror of the world.7 Next to this passage, it is possible to interpret Crane’s illustration as thematically loyal to the text. Pan is concealed in the reeds, his every movement therefore shaking them and providing the river life with the warning they need of the powerful current. To the uninitiated, like Arethusa and Cigarette, it’s a beautiful, evocative sound, a song of nature, but they are unable to interpret the danger it foreshadows. Looking at Crane’s illustration, it is clear that Stevenson would have appreciated the final product. It is best described by Crane himself, who recalls his interactions with Stevenson in An Artist’s Reminiscences in 1907: The frontispiece was duly designed and engraved on wood. It shows Pan among the reeds by a riverside, with his pipes, resting after the classical river-god manner on a hydria from the mouth of which the water flows. R. L. S. and his friend are seen paddling their canoes beyond the reeds, and on the crest of a hill in the distance a ploughman appears against the rays of a setting sun. The subject is framed by an architectural border in which the two canoes Arethusa and Cigarette figure, and a medallion of a centaur bearing off a nymph, all of which details are allusive to passages in the book, which was very charmingly written. So that I may be said to have helped to launch Stevenson’s first (canoe) book, which was to be the forerunner of such a remarkable literary career.8 Crane’s comments here reveal the approach of a reliable and professional illustrator. Each aspect of the frontispiece weaves together images and allusions from the text, in a manner that creates curiosity for the reader that the text will then satisfy. The allusion to Pan’s pipes in “The Oise in Flood” is a motif that reveals one of the themes of the book: the inherent and thrilling threat of danger in such a beautiful journey. The travellers are beset by beauty on all sides, but it’s a beauty that could lead them at any time into danger at a stamp of Pan’s hoof. Even Crane’s inclusion of the centaur carrying off a nymph can be identified in the text: “The canoe was like a leaf in the current. It took it up and shook it, and carried it masterfully away, like a Centaur carrying off a nymph”.9 The illustrator, therefore, creates artistic continuity with the author’s theme, meaning that although the text “opens” with an image, the image is subservient to the text: it relies on the

18 A young author’s ideal illustrators text to give it meaning, and it realizes both the physical world in which they travel (the canoeists on the river) and the metaphorical world that the author evokes (Pan hiding in the reeds). Unfortunately, Stevenson does not provide us with a critique of the final version, but it should be noted that Crane went on to illustrate Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes in 1879, and would be considered by Stevenson and Henley four years later to illustrate A Child’s Garden of Verses, discussed below. However, despite Crane’s perceived importance to the sale of An Inland Voyage, it did not do well in the market; neither did Travels with a Donkey. Stevenson does not comment at all on Crane’s illustration for the latter text (Figure 1.2), and he certainly doesn’t blame Crane for the failure.

Figure 1.2 Walter Crane frontispiece for Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes (1879).

A young author’s ideal illustrators

19

Rather, Stevenson expresses private anger at Kegan Paul’s handling of the publication. An Inland Voyage was Stevenson’s first attempt to earn enough money to provide himself with financial independence, a desire expressed in a letter to Colvin during the writing stage on 1 January 1878: “God grant Paul may take the thing; I want coin so badly”.10 However, once the publication was complete, Stevenson regretted his dealings with Paul; he places the poor sales of An Inland Voyage squarely at the publisher’s door. Writing to Arthur Patchett Martin in September, he says I shall write to my people to send you off a copy of my little book, which I see has not yet reached the Colonies. Such, my dear Mr Martin, is fame. Fame is also a sale of about four hundred copies in three months, and the happy consciousness that you have been played like a fish by a publisher.11 However, his anger clearly did not extend to Crane, who above all seems to have demonstrated considerable professionalism in producing his two frontispieces and responding in the appropriate professional and artistic manner to the author’s critiques.12 Most importantly, it is clear from this episode that a suitable illustration by a popular illustrator was considered beneficial, if not essential, to good sales in the marketplace, especially for a book whose author was as yet unknown.

Illustrating stories Crane’s style of illustration, however, did not really suit Stevenson’s preconceptions of narrative illustration. As static frontispieces laced with decorative symbolism, Crane’s designs were ideal gateways into Stevenson’s travelogues, but they would not do to illustrate a story. As Robert J. Desmarais has stated, when looking at Crane’s illustrations, particularly for children, one gets the sense of walking through a particularly impressive museum exhibit. While his pictures of ornate and richly decorated rooms evoke the feeling of looking at a grandiose painting, his work also seems to carry a hushed subtext of “look but don’t touch”. Crane’s primary concern was that of a fastidious decorator …13 While this may be a little dismissive of Crane’s talents and range, it is true to say that, as a member of the Arts and Crafts Movement and a friend and co-conspirator of William Morris, Crane was interested in design, and his illustrations can seem relatively static when illustrating narrative. In addition, Crane’s conceptions of the ideal illustrated text evolved towards the holistic design of both the printed page and the book. As Rodney K. Engen has pointed out, “Crane believed all book decoration, including the type or script and the cover design, should be subservient to the concept of the book

20 A young author’s ideal illustrators as a whole. The plan, the scale of illustrations, the balance between page and drawings, and the proportions between type size and drawings, should all be taken into account for the overall design”.14 Such theories were articulated in Crane’s history and manifesto on the art of illustration, Of the Decorative Illustration of Books Old and New (1896). A good example of Crane’s deeply considered theories on book illustration is provided by a paragraph on frontispieces. A frontispiece may be more pictorial in treatment [than purely ornamental] if desired, and it is reasonable to occupy the whole of the type page both for the lettering of title and the picture in the front; then, if richness or effect is desired, the margin may be covered also almost to the edge of the paper by inclosing borders, the width of these borders varying according to the varying width of the paper margin, and in the same proportions recto and verso as the case may be, the broad side turning outwards to the edge of the book each way.15 This close attention to the entirety of the page, particularly in regards to balance of type, picture and composition, was a hallmark of Crane’s designs for Morris’s Kelmscott publication, The Story of the Glittering Plain (1894). As part of the socialist Arts and Crafts Movement, which attempted to bring back a sense of craftsmanship and decorative aesthetic to the masses based on medieval notions of the marriage of beauty and labour, the Kelmscott press produced beautiful illustrated texts that were heavily conceptualized from cover to cover. These books, as with many of Crane’s previous works, often seem to use text as an inherent visual aspect to the design, so that, while text is still crucial to the reading of the book, it also – because of the type setting and placing within the page in relation to the picture – became part of the visual experience of the book (see Figure 1.3 for an example; although this is from one of Crane’s toy books, the balance of type and picture anticipates the Kelmscott pages).16 The Kelmscott Press, and the ideas expressed by Crane in Of the Decorative Illustration of Books Old and New, were crystallized and brought to life several years after Stevenson had left the British publishing scene for warmer climes in 1887. However, as Lorraine Janzen Kooistra and Julia Thomas have amply demonstrated, these theories of illustration and design found roots as early as the 1850s and 1860s in the works of John Everrett Millais, William Holman Hunt, and both Dante and Christina Rossetti.17 Of primary importance was the illustration of the 1857 Moxon Tennyson edition, by Pre-Raphaelite illustrators including Millais, Hunt and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. This text was a pivotal moment in Victorian illustration, and marked a point at which illustrators, and illustrations, took on a new centrality to the reception and marketing of literary texts. Thomas reveals an interesting observation from Tennyson himself that helps us understand why Stevenson would not have opted for this style of illustration to his work. On seeing one of Hunt’s illustrations to The Lady of Shallott, “Tennyson

A young author’s ideal illustrators

21

Figure 1.3 Walter Crane illustration for his toy book How Jessie Was Lost (1868).

laid it down that ‘an illustrator ought never to add anything to what he finds in the text. […] Why did you make Cophetua leading the beggar maid up a flight of steps? I never spoke of a flight of steps’”. In response, Hunt defends himself by quoting Tennyson’s lines back to him, “‘In robe and crown—/The King stepped down,/To meet and greet her/On her way?’” Hunt goes on to say “I feel that you do not enough allow for the difference of requirements in our two arts. In mine it is needful to trace the end from the beginning in one representation. You can dispense with such a licence. In both arts it is essential that the meaning should appear clear and strong. Am I not right?’ ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘but I think the illustrator should always adhere to the words

22 A young author’s ideal illustrators of the poet!’”18 Thomas explains that this argument is a perfect example of a wider conflict within the field of illustrated literature in the nineteenth century, in which the author insists that the text must be served by the image, while the artist argues that a single image has to conflate several pages of text, or several images and incidents, into one single moment for it to do justice to the text. In doing so, however, the artist runs the risk of usurping the text, providing the narrative with a meaning or interpretation that the author never intended. As casual readers, we always see the picture first and read the text afterwards, which gives any illustration a dangerous advantage over the author of the work. As Thomas argues, These differences in modes of representation inevitably lead to multiple stories and meanings. Hunt’s comments imply that this difference is insurmountable: the genres have their own distinct codes and conventions, which means that they can never be identical, while Tennyson’s repeated insistence that the illustration should adhere to the text suggests that this difference can and should be overcome.19 These are concerns and arguments that Stevenson, twenty years later, engages with. Stevenson would have wholeheartedly agreed with Tennyson’s comments on the authority of the text in an illustrated book; imagery, within a narrative text, should be subservient to the text; any illustration that deviated from textual authority only undermined the cohesion of the illustrated text, which should be considered a single work of art. However, Stevenson understood the power of illustration to draw a reader into his text. He was also not afraid of artists interpreting his texts in the manner that Crane did with his frontispieces, as long as these interpretations were artistically consistent with the author’s intentions. However, illustrators could pose many problems for their respective authors, which Thackeray satirically points out in the 1840s in a critique of George Cruikshank’s illustrations for his rival, Dickens. In an essay on the first illustrations to Treasure Island by Georges Roux, discovered and posthumously published by Kevin Carpenter, Stevenson refers to Thackeray’s essay “George Cruikshank”, published in the Westminster Review in 1840.20 In this essay, Thackeray lauds the talents of Cruikshank, whom he identifies as the natural heir to Hogarth. He also highlights the dangers of such talent illustrating aspiring authors. Thackeray points out that some of the famous books that Cruikshank illustrated, such as Pierce Egan’s Life in London (1821) and Dickens’s Pickwick Papers (1836) were made famous in part, if not in chief, because of the illustrations.21 This thesis is compounded by the famous argument regarding the creative process behind Oliver Twist, in which Cruikshank claimed that he himself, as much if not more than Dickens, developed the story. There has been much critical debate on this creative process between Cruikshank and Dickens, and it is usually split along disciplinary lines: literary critics claim Cruikshank is exaggerating

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to the point of lying, and art historians defend Cruikshank as the graphic genius who inspired a young author. In a defence of Cruikshank’s claims that his imagery and observations inspired, and in some case directly influenced, Dickens’s writing of Oliver Twist and Sketches by Boz, Richard A. Volger has made a compelling case arguing that Cruikshank and Dickens were involved in a collaborative process, in which text and image were often created simultaneously, and in certain instances, it could be shown that Cruikshank may indeed have inspired some of the episodes and characters of the novels. The most pertinent defence of Cruikshank, however, parallels the Crane-Stevenson relationship: the idea that the best known illustrator in England [Cruikshank] at the age of forty-six, after having illustrated over a hundred and fifty books including the works of Smollett, Fielding, and Sterne, should submit drawings for approval to a twenty-five-year-old author at the beginning of his career seems more unlikely than that he should have taken it upon himself to play mentor to this promising neophyte.22 I find this argument, supported as it is by Volger’s analysis of previously unpublished correspondence, convincing, and it points to another problem for mid-to-late nineteenth-century aspiring authors in the market of illustrated literature: if a known, respected and experienced illustrator is hired by your publisher to illustrate your first work(s), there is a chance that the illustrations – and thereby the illustrator – might usurp the authority and the popularity of the text. In citing Thackeray’s observations, Stevenson raises a common danger inherent in the illustration of literary texts: the imagery, especially by talented and insightful artists like Cruikshank, can dominate the texts they illustrate, and, in certain cases, like that of Ainsworth’s Jack Sheppard, become the reason that the novel becomes famous.23 Readers might remember the pictures, but forget the story; or more likely, the story will inevitably be read through the pictures, a scenario in which the author actually plays an illustrative role to the draughtsman. This scenario foreshadows Stevenson’s conundrum with Crane’s frontispieces, although to Crane’s credit, he defers to the author’s judgement, “cheeky” as it was.24

Randolph Caldecott The best narrative illustrators – illustrators of stories – for Stevenson’s money were those who would complement text, and not allow their imagery to upstage the texts they were illustrating. Caldecott was such an artist; with Crane and Greenaway, he was celebrated as one of the greatest children’s illustrators of the day, but this moniker is slightly reductive of his talents. As a contemporary biography by his friend Henry Blackburn describes, Caldecott was largely self-taught as an observational draughtsman and cartoonist, first hired as an illustrator-journalist for the Illustrated London

24 A young author’s ideal illustrators News in 1861, then plying his trade as a satirist for The Daily Graphic and The Pictorial World. This work required Caldecott, like his satirical forebears, to tell a story within a picture, or within a series of pictures: narrative was essential, and while there was always text in the form of subheadings or speech bubbles, the primary mode of communication was through composition of character, setting and incident. Then, in 1874, the opportunity arose to illustrate a literary text, Washington Irving’s Old Christmas (eventually published in 1876). Caldecott’s talents as a literary illustrator became clear with this publication, as Blackburn points out: Nothing could be more characteristic, or in touch with the period illustrated, than the picture of Frank Bracebridge, Master Simon, and the author of Old Christmas, walking about the grounds of the family mansion “escorted by a number of gentleman-like dogs, from the frisking spaniel to the steady old staghound. The dogs were all obedient to a dog-whistle which hung to Master Simon’s button-hole, and in the midst of the gambols would glance an eye occasionally upon a small switch he carried in his hand.” Thus the minute observation of the writer is closely followed by the illustrator, who here, from his own habit of close observation of the ways of animals, was enabled to give additional completeness to the picture; and the effect was greatly heightened by a wise determination of the part of Mr. Cooper the engraver, that the illustrations should be “so mingled with the text that both united should form one picture.”25 Blackburn’s description of this illustration touches on a central point that would resonate with Stevenson: that text and image should “form one picture”. Caldecott’s genius as an illustrator of others’ works was to be true not only to the technical elements of the texts – what the characters look like, what they wear, where they are situated – but also to the spirit of the text. “Spirit” is difficult to define, and can be applied very broadly, but one example is through characterisation. As will be demonstrated in later chapters, Stevenson would complain about illustrators who would misconstrue the visual interpretations of his characters, even where visual description was not actually supplied by the text, and praise those who he felt had caught their likenesses. “Spirit” also has to do with the depiction of the incidents in question, how the characters interact with each other, and not giving up information in the illustration that should be left to the text to reveal, or adding details where none exist in the text. All this is achieved through the skill of the illustrator, and in his or her close attention to, and understanding of, the text. Caldecott’s skills as a children’s artist-writer overshadow his achievements as an illustrator of other writers’ works. He was recruited by Edmund Evans to work with Crane and Greenaway to illustrate his series of Picture Books, often referred to as “toy books”.26 He “authored” (a catch-all phrase

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for such a publication, given he both wrote and illustrated) sixteen Picture Books between 1878 and 1885, including The House that Jack Built, The Diverting History of John Gilpin, The Babes in the Wood and Sing a Song of Sixpence. Most of the tales he illustrated were re-tellings of older stories and nursery rhymes, but as Desmarais points out, unlike his predecessors, “Caldecott illustrated from the principle that one should have a view from the inside of the child’s mind, to re-create what it felt like to experience a full range of everyday occurrences and exciting adventures”.27 This child’seye-view also meant that like his literary forebears, Lewis Carroll and Mark Twain, Caldecott “never used his [art] to pressure children to learn moral lessons or other forms of social pedantry”.28 He also wasn’t afraid to reveal the world’s potential darkness and dangers to his young readers, as is demonstrated in his disturbing interpretation of Babes in the Woods: images of children sick, frightened and alone in the woods did not conform to traditional Victorian models of healthy childhood. All of these attitudes, of course, would appeal to Stevenson, whose Treasure Island takes similar attitudes to the depiction of a very violent world witnessed through the eyes of young Jim Hawkins. For these reasons, Stevenson identified Caldecott as his ideal illustrator for some of his first short stories. Sometime in 1879, Henley had suggested to Stevenson that his stories “Will O’ the Mill” (first published in the Cornhill Magazine in January 1878) and “Providence and the Guitar” (also 1878, in London) be published with illustrations by Caldecott in a collection of his short stories. Stevenson reacted with glee to this proposal, writing to Colvin on 11 December 1879 concerning a collection of his “Fables and Tales” that would, in fact, never materialize: Here is my scheme. Henley already proposed that Caldecott should illustrate ‘Will o’ the Mill’. The ‘Guitar’ is still more suited to him; he should make delicious things for that. And though the ‘Lie’ is not much in the way for pictures, I should like to see my dear Admiral in the flesh. (I love the Admiral; I give my head, that man’s alive.) As for the other two [“A Lodging for the Night” and “Sire de Malétroit’s Door”] they need not be illustrated at all, unless C. likes.29 It seems Colvin did not share Stevenson’s and Henley’s vision of Caldecott illustrating “Will O’ the Mill”, but did like the idea of “Providence and the Guitar”. In a letter of late February, Stevenson writes to Colvin that “I was glad you like the ‘Guitar’; I always did: and I think C.—could make lovely pikters to it: it almost seems as if I must have written it for him express”.30 A  week or two later, in a letter of early March 1880, Henley writes to Stevenson that “I doubt the ‘Will’ scheme won’t come off; Colvin loves the ‘Guitar’, & thinks it cut out for Caldecott, who, he says is, above all a realist. I think he’s wrong, & that ‘Will’ (where he doesn’t see an opportunity for C.) is full of opportunities. I must try to convert him”.31 Here we see

26 A young author’s ideal illustrators an interesting pull of personalities and creative instincts between Stevenson, Henley and Colvin, making often conflicting judgements on what will “suit” illustration in the literary market place. Stevenson’s comment to Colvin that “It will be Caldecott’s book or nobody’s” was prophetic: the scheme failed.32 It is not clear why; however, a hint is given in a letter Stevenson wrote to his parents on 22 October 1880, in which he complains of a meeting he was meant to have with Caldecott personally: “I had to stay yet another day to try to see Caldecott, à propos of a Xmas story which I hoped might do for this year. It appeared it was too late; now—next year”. It is unclear if this meeting took place, but either way, Stevenson was forced to make plans around the illustrator’s schedule. Again, nothing materialized from this plan. The only other direct mention of Caldecott that Stevenson makes is made some years later, in a letter to Colvin of late January or early February 1883, discussing a plan to illustrate a series of nursery rhymes he was writing that would become A Child’s Garden of Verses: “I pour out nursery verses again, Henley having seemed to indicate some hope of their coming to the point. I think Crane had better be got; Caldecott will never come to the point. If you do decide on Crane, let me have a chance to advise him”.33 This comment reveals Stevenson’s preferences and his pragmatism: clearly Caldecott would have been the desirable illustrator of nursery rhymes, given his particular skills, but he won’t “come to the point”, which could be interpreted to mean that he was too busy, too distracted, or not someone who could be relied upon. Whatever the reason, Crane could be relied upon, artistically and professionally, and although perhaps second choice, would live up to the challenge. The ultimate failure to land Caldecott as illustrator for A Child’s Garden of Verses grated on Henley, both personally and professionally, as he worked hard to try to lure the artist. In a letter of mid-November 1881, he writes to Stevenson: Colvin has the verses, & is to impose them upon Caldecott with all the weight of his influence & authority. He thinks that Caldecott will turn out of his way to oblige him, & that, deep in work as he says he is, he will probably prove to be not so deep but he can buckle to at the Songs of Innocence [Henley’s working title for Child’s Garden of Verses]. Once we have his promise, your own action begins. You will add as much as you think fit to the MS., & you will—or Colvin will for you—make a formal offer of the book to C., P., G., & Co., associating yourself with Caldecott, &, if possible naming a price. That done, the matter will be settled in two twos; & you’ll be, I reckon, in a fair way of getting at the biggest public in existence, & of becoming a household oracle in the Universal Nursery. Am I too sanguine? I don’t think so. Everything depends on Caldecott & on Colvin. If Colvin works the oracle aright, he will nick his Caldecott exactly; & if Caldecott ain’t a hass [sic], he’ll be only too

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grateful for such an opportunity—of a new departure & a steady & abiding popularity—as your verses give him. […] I’ve written more pleasantly & more steadily about him than I’ve written about anybody living—yourself alone excepted. While I am dealing with the subject, I may as well notify the fact that Greenaway—whose little book, Mother Goose, is immensely popular—was sounded by Austin Dobson, & found to be impossible. She has had three years’ work in hand, & doesn’t know which way to turn.34 Several things can be learned from this letter. Firstly, as Stevenson had yet to attain the popularity he would achieve later that decade, his name alone was clearly not enough to attract Caldecott or Greenaway away from their existing projects. This was understandable, but as Henley points out, Caldecott should have “owed” him something due to a favourable review he had written of the artist’s work for the Art Journal of July 1881; perhaps Caldecott had proved to be a “hass” after all. Secondly, it reveals the tactics employed in gaining a contract with a publisher: Colvin, who had the “influence & authority” would approach Caldecott, relying on the quality of the verses Stevenson had supplied, in hopes of getting an agreement from him to illustrate the volume; this would “associate” Stevenson with Caldecott, whose name would ensure not only a contract but remuneration from eager publishers. And finally, it is clear that Henley perceived the success of Stevenson’s poems to lie in its presentation in the marketplace, employing an artist of suitable skill and renown, in spite of the fact that he highly rated Stevenson’s verses. Again, Caldecott did not produce illustrations, and the only work he illustrated for Stevenson was his essay “The Character of Dogs”, published in the English Illustrated Magazine for February 1884. Given the apparent artistic sympathies and talents of the two men, it seems a shame that the only pictures Caldecott would produce were of a series of different breeds of dog: a glance at these illustrations (Figure 1.4) demonstrates Caldecott’s powers of characterization, and recalls his pictures for his own toy book Death of a Mad Dog (Figure 1.5). Whatever the reasons their working relationship did not materialize, and “The Character of Dogs” leaves a tantalizing taste of what might have been a powerful creative rapport between a great author and a great illustrator. We can only imagine what Caldecott might have done with A Child’s Garden of Verses, but Stevenson’s comment above that he would not “come to the point” reveals that an illustrator not only had artistic duties to an author, but professional ones too: work had to be done, deadlines had to be met, and standards had to be maintained for a successful publication. By February 1883, Stevenson had given up on Caldecott entirely, writing to Henley on the 2nd that “I said in my last I believe that I voted for Crane, because I don’t believe the other’ll [Caldecott] come to the scratch. If it’s

28 A young author’s ideal illustrators

Figure 1.4 Randolph Caldecott illustration for “The Character of Dogs” for The English Illustrated Magazine.

Figure 1.5 Randolph Caldecott title page for Elegy on the Death of a Mad Dog.

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decided for Crane, I want to write to him ere he begins”.35 Stevenson needed an artist he could trust, someone he could work with and advise as the illustrations developed: Caldecott it seems would not do, but Crane was reliable. A Child’s Garden of Verses Henley, however, persisted with Caldecott; in 1882, Henley had become the editor of the Magazine of Art, and was constantly recruiting artists, illustrators and writers to produce works for the numbers. Caldecott was one of his illustrators, as were Crane and Greenaway, and in an effort to help Stevenson further his career, he attempted to have at least one of these artists illustrate some of Stevenson’s verses that would later be collected in A Child’s Garden of Verses. He writes to Stevenson on 1 March 1883, “Try & draw me your idea of ‘The Wind’. I’ve a mind to ask the Greenaway, or the Caldecott, to work it off for me; & I should like to send him, or her, your own idea”.36 Stevenson was very keen to have A Child’s Garden of Verses well illustrated, and he had a very clear vision of how the book should look. In a detailed letter to Henley of May 1883, he outlines specific designs and illustrations, to the point of suggesting the number of lines per page and the suggested size of the book: I do not want a big ugly quarto; my soul sickens at the look of a quarto. I want a refined octavo, not large—not larger than the Donkey Book, at any price. I think the full page might hold four verses of four lines, that is to say, counting their blanks at two, of twenty-two lines in height. The first page of each number would only hold two verses or ten lines, the title being low down. At this rate, we should have seventy-eight or eighty pages of letterpress.37 Stevenson is rarely this specific about the look of a page or the presentation of the book. Of interest to the current discussion is his vision of the illustrations, and how they were to be presented in relation to the text. The designs should not be in the text, but facing the poem; so that if the artist liked, he might give two pages of design to every poem that turned the leaf, i.e. longer than eight lines: i.e. to 28 out of the 46. I should say he would not use this privilege (?) above five times, and some he might scorn to illustrate at all, so we may say fifty drawings.38 This text was, therefore, to be heavily illustrated, but not so that the illustrations would overwhelm the text: image and text, while working together, were to be on opposing pages, in a manner reminiscent of more traditional literary illustration of the gift-books and illustrated novels of the early to mid-nineteenth century. This is in contrast to many contemporary designs of Greenaway and even Crane (see Figure 1.3); their works often melded

30 A young author’s ideal illustrators text into imagery, or vice versa, in a fashion that was meant to employ the entire page. Stevenson’s letter therefore outlines his preferences of illustration, in which text and image are separated, complementing each other on opposing pages. This is a practice that, by 1883, he had already explored in his experimental illustrated poems Moral Emblems, discussed at length in Chapter 3. Stevenson’s poems were to be poems, and illustrations were to be illustrations; he was not writing “picture-poems”. By contrast, Greenaway, who published her enormously popular Mother Goose in 1881, often incorporated her illustrations into a rectangular format directly above their poems, which clearly privileges image over text, particularly given the colours and movement of her designs. This is indicative of an approach to illustrated literature from the artist’s perspective, rather than the writer’s; in other words, it is only natural that for artists like Greenaway and Caldecott, whose primary discipline was graphic art, pictures would pre-figure text. Stevenson, as a writer, approaches the same discipline from the opposite direction, privileging text over pictures. The letter goes on to give specific guidance to the as-yet unidentified illustrator. Again, this is an example of Stevenson trying to establish a certain authorial authority over the visual presentation of his work. Not all the poems are listed, but Stevenson outlines his ideal pictures for certain poems: IV. The procession - the child running behind it. The procession tailing off through the gates of a cloudy city. IX. FOREIGN LANDS. - This will, I think, want two plates - the child climbing, his first glimpse over the garden wall, with what he  sees  - the tree shooting higher and higher like the beanstalk, and the view widening. The river slipping in. The road arriving in Fairyland. X. WINDY NIGHTS. - The child in bed listening - the horseman galloping. XII. The child helplessly watching his ship - then he gets smaller, and the doll joyfully comes alive - the pair landing on the island - the ship’s deck with the doll steering and the child firing the penny canon. Query two plates? The doll should never come properly alive. XV. Building of the ship - storing her - Navigation - Tom’s accident, the other child paying no attention. XXXI. THE WIND. - I sent you my notion of already. XXXVII. FOREIGN CHILDREN. - The foreign types dancing in a jing-a-ring, with the English child pushing in the middle. The foreign children looking at and showing each other marvels. The English child at the leeside of a roast of beef. The English child sitting thinking with his picture-books all round him, and the jing-a-ring of the foreign children in miniature dancing over the picture-books. XXXIX. Dear artist, can you do me that?

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XLII. The child being started off - the bed sailing, curtains and all, upon the sea - the child waking and finding himself at home; the corner of toilette might be worked in to look like the pier. XLVII. The lighted part of the room, to be carefully distinguished from my child’s dark hunting grounds. A shaded lamp.39 Given the clarity of his vision for these illustrations, and the imagery these brief descriptions conjure before a reader’s imagination, it is a great shame that the first edition of A Child’s Garden of Verses appeared without any illustration at all. This must have been disappointing to all concerned, including Henley and Stevenson, who closes the above letter with the question to Henley, “Who do you think for the pictures? Greenaway? Crane? a new man? Pray relieve my panting buzzum”.40 By this point, he was leaning towards Crane, writing to Henley in June that “my view is to give the Penny Whistles to Crane or Greenaway. But Crane I think is likeliest; he is a fellow who at least always does his best”.41 Caldecott, by this point, had been forgotten entirely by Stevenson. However, Henley held out hope that Crane or Caldecott could still be employed on the project until as late as November 1884. He wrote on the 17th that “I am sure that when the pictures are produced, they will be the work of swells—like Caldecott & Crane & Alice Havers. If they’re not, I take it, there’s no reason why they should exist at all”.42 This last comment is pertinent, because this is what transpired. Cassell and Co had been interested in publishing A Child’s Garden of Verses, as they were in the process of publishing the book-format of Treasure Island (1883); however, when they demanded full rights to the poems, Henley took Stevenson’s business elsewhere, and began to negotiate with Andrew Lang, who was working on behalf of Longmans, Green and Co., the eventual publishers of the book.43 In the next paragraph, Henley alludes to a scheme that Stevenson himself proposed: “Perpend this … in favour of your scheme: that a set of American picters may possible [sic] be the means of securing you an American copyright”.44 It seems from their correspondence that Stevenson and Henley were in favour of producing an unillustrated edition of the book in England, in return for which they would keep the rights to the poems; Stevenson could then approach an American publisher and illustrator for a separate publication across the Atlantic.45 In fact, Stevenson had a specific illustrator in mind: his friend Will H. Low, whom he had met and befriended during his visits to the Barbizon in France in the 1870s. Stevenson writes to Henley on 15 November 1884 that “My object is to give a chance to a friend of mine in the States to illustrate them and of course no time is to be lost”.46 Following  the publication of the unillustrated edition by Longman’s in England in 1883, Stevenson writes to Low on 10 March 1885: “Perfect satisfaction with all that you propose, or anything you shall be able to accomplish, in re the Garden”.47 Therefore, after almost

32 A young author’s ideal illustrators two years of wrangling, Stevenson’s and Henley’s preferences could be listed as follows: the ideal scenario would be to have Caldecott or Crane illustrate an English edition; if not, there was no one else in England worth trusting and it were better left unillustrated; this would lead to a quicker publication in England and would mean keeping the rights to the poems, in order to sell them in America; an American publication could then be illustrated by an artist of Stevenson’s personal approval (ultimately, it was not illustrated). We can deduce, therefore, that although illustration was highly preferred by Stevenson, who lists some of his preferences, if not of the requisite quality, it should be dispensed with entirely. The emphasis, therefore, was on quality, which should not be sacrificed to professional considerations of timing: if a good artist could not produce quality illustration to a deadline, it was better to have no illustration at all.

Howard Pyle and American illustration In their notes to Stevenson’s letter to Low quoted above, Booth and Mehew remark that Low was too busy with the work for Lamia to have time to illustrate A Child’s Garden of Verses, but Stevenson’s approach is interesting for two reasons: first, he wanted a tried and trusted friend as an illustrator, presumably because he knew the quality of his work and he could advise or guide Low personally; and secondly, the American market was rapidly becoming the stronger market for quality illustrated literature in the style that Stevenson preferred for his work. This theory is supported by the contemporaneous emergence of the great American illustrator Howard Pyle. Pyle is a pivotal figure not only in the development of American illustration but of American visual and literary culture, and his rise to prominence was almost exactly contemporaneous with Stevenson’s in Britain. As Jill P. May and Robert E. May have recently pointed out, the explosion in U.S. illustrating came in the 1870s, when publishing firms unleashed monthly journals with heavily illustrated lengthy articles and stories—sometimes in serialized format—and released lavishly illustrated books. Perhaps as many as nine thousand U.S. non-newspaper periodicals, many of them illustrated, had runs between 1865 and 1885 […] Illustrative art was a lucrative pursuit for Americans who hoped to draw and paint for a living […] Illustrators became prominent public figures. At a time without electronic diversions such as movies, television, or music videos to engage mass audiences, magazine artists became the equivalent of today’s rock stars.48

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Pyle entered the field at this moment in American publishing in 1876, and within ten years was at its forefront. Perhaps his most significant contribution to American art was his rejection of the typical European schools; as May and May write, “[c]onsciously choosing to remain an American artist untainted by foreign techniques and perspectives, Pyle linked his future to an American quest for a national culture”.49 Through Pyle and his contemporaries, the illustrated book became an authentic artistic form in the American market, no longer considered a secondary or subsidiary medium to the separate arts of writing and painting. Pyle, as a pioneer of this form in the U.S., wanted both to write and paint, and as Henry C. Pitz has pointed out, the easy solution was to combine the two and illustrate his own work.50 Pyle’s creative ambitions mirrored those of Stevenson, who also would have preferred to illustrate his own work, but lacked the necessary technical qualities as a draughtsman to do so for a mass market. Like Stevenson, Pyle wanted to narrate the story of his own country, producing illustrated texts of the Revolutionary War of 1776; he was also interested in pirate stories, at precisely the time Stevenson was writing Treasure Island. By the time Stevenson arrived on the shores of America in 1887, never to return to Britain, Pyle had been a staple illustrator of Scribner’s and Harpers’ for years. In 1883 he had published his first self-penned illustrated book The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood, and followed it up with Within the Capes in 1885, Pepper & Salt, or Seasoning for Young Folk in 1886 and The Wonder Clock in 1888, among several others, all published by Scribner’s, who would recruit Stevenson once he migrated west through America and the Pacific. Like Stevenson’s fiction for boys, Pyle’s historical imagery and writing were strenuously researched to achieve an authenticity to the moments he was depicting, and, also like Stevenson, he achieved an aesthetic that concealed this erudition behind an economic style of expression. Given these similar artistic and professional sensibilities, therefore, it is perhaps surprising – and unfortunate – that the two never worked together. Stevenson first mentions Pyle in a letter of 20 October 1887, discussing a proposed illustrated edition of Treasure Island for Scribner’s in New York; in deriding “the disgusting American illustrations” for his first illustrated edition of the novel (published by Roberts Brothers’ in 1884) by F. T. Merrill, and complimenting the French artist George Roux’s illustrations for the 1885 edition, Stevenson writes, “Roux is really very spirited, though I wish I had known of Pyle, for the French faces jar”.51 It seems, therefore, that Stevenson came into contact with Pyle’s work through Charles Scribner and his publications. In fact, Pyle’s work made such an impression that only nine days later, on 29 October 1887, Stevenson wrote to Scribner again, asking him to have Pyle illustrate a volume that would never be published, an illustrated edition of Captain Frederick Marryat’s The Phantom Ship: “I want you to set Howard Pyle to work on Marryat’s Phantom Ship: he will never get so good a subject; and if you and he will do your part, I will do mine

34 A young author’s ideal illustrators and write a preface. […] This is pure gold”.52 The only other reference to Pyle Stevenson makes in his correspondence is praise of Pyle’s illustrated book, A Modern Aladdin (1892), in a letter of 25 March 1892 to Elizabeth Fairchild. He writes, “I thought Aladdin capital fun; but why, in fortune, did he pretend it was moral at the end? The so-called nineteenth century, où va-t-il se nicher? ‘Tis a trifle, but Pyle would do well to knock the passage out, and leave his boguey tale a boguey tale, and a good one at that”.53 Unfortunately, Stevenson makes no comments on the illustrations, but his approval is implied, not only by his previous statements to Scribner, but by his general praise for the volume. It must be noted that Stevenson was well placed to critique a version of this particular Arabian Night, not only because of his lifelong fascination with them, but because he had recently reworked the “boguey tale” into his own short story “The Bottle Imp”, that had been published with Island Nights’ Entertainments in 1891; again, Stevenson and Pyle demonstrate artistic sympathies through their choice of story. The growing industry and aesthetic of American illustration at this time, therefore, suited Stevenson’s oeuvre much better than its English counterpart, particularly with its insistence that illustration did not necessarily dilute the “high-art” value of the literary text in the public imagination. Most importantly, however, Pyle seems to have elicited from Stevenson a certain type of professional admiration, even jealousy – good-natured and generous as it was – as a writer who could illustrate his own work. There are several instances in his correspondence and private experiments, such as Moral Emblems, discussed in Chapter 3, in which Stevenson either attempts to illustrate his work, or bemoans the fact that he is unable to. The point is best made by Stevenson himself, writing to Henley about his poem “The Wind”, mentioned above. He writes, “If Crane can catch it, the Wind is the fellow to illustrate. Ah, if I could only draw! I see the blame thing so clearly in outline; and if I try to put it down—but you have, ahem! seen my work”.54 This is an off-the-cuff remark, but reveals a central premise of this chapter: given the appropriate talents, Stevenson would gladly have illustrated his own work for the marketplace, but lacking them, he had to rely on others. As Chapter 2 will demonstrate, Stevenson had the critical faculties to appreciate good illustration, but like most great critics, he perhaps lacked the skills to achieve it. A good illustrated text would bring “ringing money in the mart”, but the exercise was not just pecuniary for Stevenson, it was also artistic. Good illustration, in Stevenson’s mind, could and should enhance a reader’s engagement with his texts, but good illustration was difficult to come by. Stevenson was amiably jealous of those writers and artists who could both draw and write, such as Thackeray, Caldecott and Pyle, but he had to concede that the standards of professional illustration for a mass market eluded him. Nonetheless, even famous illustrators would not do if those illustrators did not perform to his expectations, and as several of his projects reveal, including Treasure Island, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, and most significantly here, A Child’s Garden of Verses, no

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illustration at all was preferable to illustration that was irreconcilable to Stevenson’s texts.

Stevenson’s maps: the book as toy There is one type of image that is inextricable from two Stevenson novels: the map. There is much literary criticism on the map for Treasure Island, most recently and helpfully by Oliver Buckton, who highlights the map’s purpose in transforming the novel into a “commodity-text”. Buckton defines the commodity-text as produced within the capitalist mode of production… aimed at mass distribution, and [creating] a surplus value from which both publisher and author will claim a share of the profit. Rather than appealing to a pre-existing audience, the commodity-text produces its own readership, and this work of creating desire in the reader is the “labor” that the text performs.55 I would like to further this claim by looking at the aesthetic and practical function of the maps of Treasure Island and Kidnapped for Stevenson’s contemporary readers, and in particular at the way in which the map for Kidnapped creates a series of intertextualities which positions the novel within historical and contemporary cartographical texts, and in the process creates something new. Stevenson’s map-illustrated texts would influence a series of authors, illustrators and film-makers over the following decades; this discussion will focus on Stevenson’s innovation of using maps as textual references with a fictional narrative. Firstly, all the illustrations discussed in this book, including the maps, help create commodity-texts. This book concentrates on the artistic merits and potentialities of the illustrated novel, but the commercial aspect must not be overlooked. Especially with “boys’” fiction, good pictures help to move stock, particularly if those pictures, like Hole’s, invite curiosity in the casual reader. Nothing intrigues a reader more than a treasure map, as with Treasure Island, or a map with an improbably difficult journey, as with Kidnapped. A map that suggests an intriguing story is an invitation to a curious reader to buy and read the book. A map, to a child, can suggest limitless possibilities, as Stevenson describes in his essay “My First Book”: here is an inexhaustible fund of interest for any man with eyes to see or twopence worth of imagination to understand with! No child but must remember laying his head in the grass, staring into the infinitesimal forest and seeing it grow populous with fairy armies. Somewhat in this way, as I paused upon my map of Treasure Island, the future character of the book began to appear there visibly among imaginary woods; and their brown faces and bright weapons peeped out upon

36 A young author’s ideal illustrators me from unexpected quarters, as they passed to and fro, fighting and hunting treasure, on these few square inches of a flat projection.56 Buckton describes in depth the layered commercial and pecuniary implications of this process: the map is a key to finding treasure, but as part of the novel, it’s also a key to moving books, which, of course, earns the author’s pecuniary “treasure”. However, the map contains properties as an illustration, and as a means of turning a text into a toy. Stevenson’s discussion of the map focuses on its centrality to the creative process; however, its value as an illustration - an image that helps explain or elucidate the text - is as important. As the reader progresses through the story, he or she can and should constantly refer back to the map to check the progress of the tale’s location. A game is played between text and map as the reader is required to jump from text to frontispiece and back again, turning the book into an object of play: a toy-book. Such a process, I suggest, is educational for boy-readers, who learn to trace maps through stories; for adult readers, it is play, as they challenge the author’s accuracy through close observation of the story and its terrain against the map that Stevenson (or Jim) provides. The book becomes a fully interactive object for both readerships. The same is true of the map for Kidnapped (Figure 1.6), because in this case, the topography is real: it is a map of Scotland. The story therefore has to be superimposed onto real terrain. There is less room for creative tinkering with the journey David takes through the Highlands once he lands on the Isle of Mull, and one of the remarkable aspects of this story is how Stevenson fits this narrative into the geographical space in such an authentic timeframe. It demonstrates his devotion to topography within the construction of his stories. However, what makes this map of Scotland qualify as an illustration? First is its inherent aesthetic qualities: we should admire the map’s innate visual beauty on the page. Second is its position within the text as a fold-out frontispiece to the novel: it inhabits the traditional place of the illustrative frontispiece. Finally, the map illustrates the “probable” fictional journey of David in the novel that follows, inscribing the fictional narrative onto a real landscape. The line tracing the journey transforms the map from objective ordinance into a fictional journey, particularly where the line is dotted: the topography is real, the journey is fictional. It is not the topography, but rather the dotted line, that makes this a fictional illustration. The dotted sections that punctuate the solid line are the “probable” parts of the journey, in which we lose sight of David and Alan momentarily and have to guess at their course. This is confirmed by the letter Stevenson sent to his cousin David Stevenson in March 1886, who created the map for the novel: “On the large map, a red line is to show the wanderings of my hero after his shipwreck. It must be sometimes dotted to show uncertainty; sometimes full”.57 Following this, Stevenson provides a scrupulously detailed location-by-location breakdown of David’s journey, telling David where to make the line dotted, where full. At the end of the letter, he even

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Figure 1.6 David Stevenson, “Sketch of the Cruise of the Brig Covenant and the probable course of David Balfour’s wanderings.”

makes it clear that Stevenson understands the physical demands of such a journey, writing that “The improbability of the itinerary is not so great as it appears, for my hero was trying to escape—like all heroes”.58 This is a Scotsman, writing to another Scotsman, in defence of his understanding of their national terrain, explaining his hero’s seemingly improbable speed through the urgency of flight. The dotted line, along with the important word “probable”, gives Stevenson creative space for allowing his heroes their improbable speed, as if he acknowledges that he cannot be certain of their actual path. It turns the factual map into a fictional illustration of the journey. Also, as with the map of Treasure Island, it turns the book into an interactive text, an object of both education and play, as the reader can check the course of the narrative through the visual reference of the map. Accuracy in the rendering of historical and topographical locations was important to Stevenson’s prose because it formed a factual framework in which to weave his fictitious narratives. However, they also helped to form a series of intertextual references with historical and contemporary texts. Maps of various landscapes in and around the British Empire and Europe were exciting to young boys with fiery imaginations, as explorers like Sir Leslie Stephen (father of Virginia Woolf) began to chart the Alps for walking tours.59 Texts by such real-life adventurers were published with fold-out maps, which Treasure Island and especially Kidnapped clearly emulated.

38 A young author’s ideal illustrators The clearest examples are provided by the Baekdecker publications with fold-out maps that Kidnapped clearly emulates in scale and style. The publishing firm established in 1825 by Karl Baedecker in Germany set the standard for portable, tourist guide books in the nineteenth century, and by the 1880s, such volumes included sight-seeing tips in the relevant cities, complete with town plans and fold-out maps of the local regions; they were the original tourist guides we are familiar with today. However, in connection with this discussion, the key facet of the Baedecker volumes is the fold-out maps. Anyone purchasing Kidnapped in its book-format at the end of the nineteenth century would not fail to recognize the map’s similarity with the Baedecker editions. One example of many is Baedecker’s Rhine: The Rhine from Rotterdam to Constance, published in the same year as Kidnapped in 1886. The title-page proudly boasts “30 Maps and 22 Plans”, the “Plans” referring to town plans along the Rhine. The volume lists hotels, walking tours, tourist attractions, modes of transportation, wineries and art galleries. There is also a fold-out map of the Rhine demarcating two routes, one either side of the river with solid black lines. The map folds out in both directions, transforming the book into a different object entirely. As with Kidnapped, the reader is required to look at the map and refer back to the text to corroborate where places are that the text references (anyone who has travelled with the modern equivalent pocket guide is familiar with this process). Kidnapped therefore dramatizes this process by using a real map with fictional, historicized characters and events. While fold-out maps were common in the market-place in volumes like Baedecker’s, Stevenson and his publishers utilize the format to create something new, or, to use Buckton’s phrase, a commodity-text. In addition to the topography being real, however, it is also historicized: David’s journey takes place in 1751 Scotland, not 1886. I suggest, therefore, one other textual reference that Stevenson makes with the map to Kidnapped: one of his primary sources for the novel, Colonel David Stewart’s 1822 publication Sketches of the Character, Manners, and Present State of the Highlanders of Scotland. The Huntington Library contains a notebook Stevenson made from Edmund Burt’s Letters from a Gentleman in the North of Scotland (1754) and Stewart’s Sketches, which Barry Menikoff has discussed in detail. Menikoff points out the incredible depth of historical detail Stewart provides in the conception and writing of Kidnapped, particularly regarding the history of the highland regiments for the preceding century. However, unlike Burt’s Letters, it is unillustrated, except for one important image: a large fold-out map at the beginning of the first volume. This map, seen in Figure 1.7, inhabits the same frontispiece position in its text that David Stevenson’s map does in Kidnapped, and like all in-text maps, including Baedecker’s volumes, it provides a visual framework and counterpoint to the accompanying text. Most importantly, it delineates the “districts or countries inhabited by the Highland clans”, according to its legend. The different colours delineate the different clan territories in Scotland, which

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Figure 1.7 Frontispiece map to David Stewart’s Sketches of the Character, Manners, and Present State of the Highlanders of Scotland (1822), courtesy of the Huntington Library, California.

must have been an invaluable guide to the construction of the narrative of Kidnapped, as David, and more importantly Alan, traverse the Highlands through friendly and hostile lands. It can be no coincidence, therefore, that the physical presentation of Kidnapped imitates Stewart’s volume.60 As keys to imaginative possibilities, Stevenson is unequivocal about the importance of maps. He writes, “It is perhaps not often that a map figures so largely in a tale; yet it is always important. The author must know his countryside whether real or imaginary, like his hand; the distances, the points

40 A young author’s ideal illustrators of the compass, the place of the sun’s rising, the behaviour of the moor, should all be beyond cavil”.61 Topographical accuracy performs a narrative function for Stevenson; a map is a visual template upon which narrative can be constructed, and by including these maps in the final publication, the reader can check the author’s rigour in this construction. With a dig at the topographical inaccuracies of his great literary forbear, Sir Walter Scott, Stevenson writes, With the almanack at hand, he will scarce allow two horsemen, journeying on the most urgent affair, to employ six days, from three of the Monday morning till late in the Saturday night, upon a journey of, say, ninety or a hundred miles, and before the week is out, and still on the same nags, to cover fifty in one day, as may be read at length in the inimitable novel of ‘Rob Roy.’62 Topographical accuracy, especially when tied to a map of the terrain, ensures the author constructs action that is believable. Attention to topographical detail for Stevenson aids narrative continuity, and helps suspend disbelief. The reader is encouraged to follow the action over the terrain, using the map provided as an authenticating device. The map, Stevenson suggests, is irreplaceable as an inspiration to the authorial imagination, helping to suggest narrative development and scenes of action: “even with imaginary places, he will do well in the beginning to provide a map; as he studies it, relations will appear that he had not thought upon; he will discover obvious, though unsuspected, shortcuts and footprints for his messengers; and even when a map is not all the plot, as it was in ‘Treasure Island,’ it will be found to be a mine of suggestion”.63 Here he describes the adult writer undertaking the child’s pastime of gazing at maps and imagining stories: he draws the map himself, uses it as a visual aid in constructing narrative, uses the map within the narrative itself as a physical object, and then has it published with the story as an illustration. The map frames both the creation and consumption of the novel, preceding the narrative and ultimately illustrating it. Maps were crucial to the imagining and construction of stories for Stevenson, but he shares that fascination with the reader by providing them with the very maps that so inspired him. This is what makes maps in Stevenson’s work so engaging: we are looking at the very image that inspired the stories we are enjoying, and in this sense sharing in the pleasure of the author’s imaginative travel. As Stevenson argues in “My First Book”, we should all look at maps and wonder (and wander). In many ways, the use of maps to authenticate narrative conceit is as old as the novel itself, most famously being employed by Jonathan Swift in Gulliver’s Travels (1726). Swift’s maps are important and intriguing forerunners of Stevenson’s Treasure Island, particularly in the fictionality of the islands Gulliver visits (Lilliput, Blufescu, Brobdingnag, Laputa and the land of the Houyhnhnms).64 Swift imagines islands that could conceivably

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exist on the edges of the then-known world, such as off the coast of Van Diemen’s Land or in the Indian Ocean. These islands exist in plausible, unchartered territories beyond the horizon, within an otherwise knowable world: while Gulliver’s journeys begin from England and take him to the edge of the known world, Jim’s adventure begins in Bristol and takes him to an uncharted island in the Caribbean. The imagined islands exist within the realms of geographical possibility, lending a sense of wonder and plausibility to these fantastical journeys. However, Stevenson’s innovation with maps is to focus not on geographical location, as Swift does, but on topographical specificity. Stevenson is more concerned with terrain and how it shapes his heroes’ journeys and the progression of the narratives. The late-Victorian gaze rested not on distant, undiscovered shores, but inwards, on unchartered terrain within known borders. Overwhelming terrain no longer represented the sublime as it had to tourists of the Grand Tour of earlier generations; rather, it represented a dangerous challenge, a test of humans’ ability to chart a topography and survive such landscapes. As Ann Colley writes in Victorians in the Mountains, “By the end of the 1800s, the mountains [Alps] that had once been thought unapproachable, even grimly horrifying, had not only been precisely measured and ‘conquered’ but also institutionalized through maps, guidebooks, and board games that led a player all the way from London to the summit of the Matterhorn or Mont Blanc”.65 Stevenson’s maps are a fictionalized extension of this phenomenon: they are detailed with terrain, coastlines, mountain ranges, nautical depths, wind patterns and natural barriers, all of which his protagonists must negotiate just like real-life adventurers and thrill-seekers. Tapping into late Victorian fascination with adventures of discovery and mapping the landscapes of empire, maps in Stevenson’s novels appropriate the discourse of contemporary cartography for popular historical fiction. In the age of tourism and middle-class consumption, the average reader-consumer in the late nineteenth century expected topographical detail and authenticity from their maps, imagined or otherwise. It is the focus on topographical detail in these maps that helped shape a visual discourse of the new romance of the late nineteenth century, perhaps the most striking examples of which include H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines, or from the twentieth century, Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy.66 In conclusion, this chapter has traced Stevenson’s experiences with and understanding of illustration from the very beginning of his career. In doing so, it has articulated the challenges he faced as an aspiring author in obtaining the illustration he desired, against what he was actually able to obtain through his various publishers, agents and connections. It is strange that Walter Crane should be a Stevenson illustrator, because Crane’s subsequent work and theories of illustration evolve away from the type of illustration Stevenson sought out: Crane’s work for the Kelmscott press in particular foregrounded design and decoration over narrative continuity. However, Crane was also a reliable professional, an artist who worked to deadlines

42 A young author’s ideal illustrators and who would listen to the author’s suggestions, even if that author was (at the time) young, inexperienced and pushy. This, combined with his experiences as a Routledge illustrator of children’s books, made him a valuable contributor to Stevenson’s early works, and it is a shame for literary posterity that he was unable to illustrate A Child’s Garden of Verses. It is also a shame that nothing more came of Stevenson’s and Henley’s attempts to lure Caldecott to the Stevenson table; however, it is instructive to learn that exigencies of publishing for the popular market, such as time-pressures and remuneration, meant that an artist of Caldecott’s standing could pick and choose his clients, even one as promising and ultimately as famous as Stevenson. We also learn that Stevenson’s insistence on quality meant that he would rather be published without illustration than with bad illustration, and it is for this reason (primarily) that some of his first editions were not illustrated. And finally, the maps in Treasure Island and Kidnapped must be considered as illustrations; they are aesthetically satisfying images in their own right, they illustrate and elucidate the narrative, and they provide visual frameworks for the texts they illustrate. For this reason, Stevenson, his father Thomas, and his cousin Davie (David), should all be listed as illustrators to these novels because of their contributions to the maps.67 Narrative illustration, as we can see, is a complex theoretical field once we consider its various purposes, pitfalls, and include non-traditional forms of imagery. As the next two chapters will articulate, Stevenson developed complex, sometimes innovative theories of the artistic potential of literary illustration. The illustration of his work was always a commercial consideration, because illustration by famous artists could help move stock off the shelves; however, not just any illustration would do, and an illustrator had many artistic duties to fulfil if he or she were to be considered successful in illustrating Stevenson’s texts.

Notes 1. Robert Louis Stevenson, The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson, ed. Bradford A. Booth and Ernest Mayhew, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995, 8 vols., 6:40. 2. For example, there are aesthetic continuities between the pirates drawn for Treasure Island by N. C. Wyeth in 1911 and their counterparts in the 1934 film version starring Walter Beery and Jackie Cooper. 3. For recent critical discussion of Stevenson’s travel narratives, including An Inland Voyage, see Caroline McCracken-Flesher’s “Travel Writing”, in The Edinburgh Companion to Robert Louis Stevenson, ed. Penny Fielding, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010, pp. 86–101. 4. Robert Louis Stevenson, Letters, 8 vols., 2:247–48. 5. Robert Louis Stevenson, Letters, 8 vols., 2:246. 6. Robert Louis Stevenson, “Pans Pipes”, Virginibus Puerisque and Other Papers, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1946, p. 149.

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7. Robert Louis Stevenson, An Inland Voyage, London: Chatto & Windus, 1892, pp. 103–104. 8. Walter Crane, An Artist’s Reminiscences, New York: The MacMillan Company, 1907, p. 197. 9. This myth is a reference to the myth of the abduction of Deianeira by the centaur Nessus. In book IX of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Hercules and Deianeira, recently married, encounter the Evenus River, but Nessus offers to ferry them across one by one. Half way across with Deianeira, Nessus attempts to rape her, who is saved by Hercules who fires an arrow at the centaur. 10. Robert Louis Stevenson, Letters, 8 vols., 2:233. 11. Robert Louis Stevenson, Letters, 8 vols., 2:269. It seems that Martin published this letter, embarrassing Stevenson and angering Paul; Stevenson writes to his parents on 15 October 1880 that Paul “has behaved so well that I am his bondslave for life” following the publication. 12. In his book An Artist’s Reminiscence, Crane gives a knowing and amused account of this letter, noting that “He writes characteristically to me about it [the frontispiece], and with all a young author’s impatience, and is amusing, but a little ‘cheeky’ perhaps”. Crane clearly bit his tongue and undertook the task in a professional manner. Also, Crane seems to think that both this book and Travels With a Donkey were “extremely successful” (198), but this may be a retrospective assessment of the sales of the books following Stevenson’s later successes. 13. Robert J. Desmarais, Randolph Caldecott: His Books and Illustrations for Young Readers, Edmonton: University of Alberta Libraries, 2006, pp. xi–xii. 14. Rodney K. Engen, Walter Crane as Book Illustrator, London: Academy Editions, 1975, p. 9. 15. Walter Crane, Of the Decorative Illustration of Books Old and New, London: George Bell & Sons, 1905, p. 288. 16. William S. Peterson describes Crane’s illustrations for The Glittering Plain as “the most feeble that appeared in any Kelmscott book”, and that Morris, and even Crane himself, thought they were not suited to the aesthetic of the Kelmscott canon. See The Kelmscott Press: A History of William Morris’s Typographical Adventure, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1991, p. 154. 17. See Lorraine Janzen Kooistra, Christina Rossetti and Illustration: A Publishing History, Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2002; Julia Thomas, Pictorial Victorians: The Inscription of Values in Word and Image, Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2004. 18. Quoted from Julia Thomas, Pictorial Victorians, p. 55. 19. Julia Thomas, Pictorial Victorians, p. 56. 20. Kevin Carpenter, “R. L. Stevenson on the Treasure Island illustrations”, Notes and Queries 29 (1982): 322–325. 21. William Makepeace Thackeray, “George Cruikshank”, The Works of William Makepeace Thackeray, vol. XXI, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1911, pp. 468–9. Chapter 3 will discuss Thackeray’s study of Cruikshank’s illustrations for W. H. Ainsworth’s Jack Sheppard. 22. Richard A. Volger, “Cruikshank and Dickens: A Reassessment of the Role of the Artist and the Author”, George Cruikshank: A Revelation, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1992, p. 72.

44 A young author’s ideal illustrators 23. In “George Cruikshank”, Thackeray uses Ainsworth’s Jack Shepperd as the primary example of the illustrations outshining their respective texts; see Chapter 3 for discussion. 24. See footnote 22 above. 25. Henry Blackburn, Randolph Caldecott: A Personal Memoir of his Early Art Career, London: Sampson Low, Marston & Co., 1892, pp. 108–9. 26. The phrase “toy books” is attributed to the children’s illustrated stories of the 1860s and onwards. Wood-engraving allowed for coloured plates to be produced in greater numbers, and instead of a miscellany of stories with individual pictures, now an entire “book” (often more of a long pamphlet format) of images could be produced more economically. In the 1870s, Edmund Evans, an engraver-turned-publisher, sought to improve both the colouring and the artistic quality of these children’s books, that he would call his Picture Books, in part by using more tasteful colours in his plates, and most importantly by identifying and employing talented artists, including his famous triumvirate of Crane, Caldecott and Greenaway. 27. Robert J. Desmarais, Randolph Caldecott, p. xiv. 28. Robert J. Desmarais, Randolph Caldecott, p. xv. 29. Robert Louis Stevenson, Letters, 8 vols., 3:34. 30. Robert Louis Stevenson, Letters, 8 vols., 3:65. 31. W. E. Henley, The Letters of William Ernest Henley to Robert Louis Stevenson, ed. By Damian Atkinson, High Wycombe: Rivendale Press, 2008, p. 91. 32. Robert Louis Stevenson, Letters, 8 vols., 3:65. 33. Robert Louis Stevenson, Letters, 8 vols., 4:63. 34. W. E. Henley, The Letters of William Ernest Henley, p. 144. 35. Robert Louis Stevenson, Letters, 8 vols., 4:68. 36. William Ernest Henley, The Letters of William Ernest Henley, p. 181. 37. Robert Louis Stevenson, Letters, 8 vols., 4:113. 38. Ibid. 39. Robert Louis Stevenson, Letters, 8 vols., 4:114–15. 40. Robert Louis Stevenson, Letters, 8 vols., 4:116. 41. Robert Louis Stevenson, Letters, 8 vols., 4:132. 42. W. E. Henley, The Letters of William Ernest Henley, p. 269. 43. W. E. Henley, The Letters of William Ernest Henley, p. 204: Henley writes that “Cassell will not treat unless we sell them outright. That, of course, I do not purpose”. 44. Ibid. 45. On 9 November 1884, Henley writes “I did not stipulate for an unillustrated edition; but told him you & I were strongly in favour of one. He is quite with us; so I imagine that we shall begin in that way. [...] The American right is reserved for picture discussion” (The Letters of William Ernest Henley, 266). 46. Robert Louis Stevenson, Letters, 8 vols., 5:32. 47. Robert Louis Stevenson, Letters, 8 vols., 5:82. 48. Jill May and Robert E. May, Howard Pyle: Imagining an American School of Art, Urbana, Chicago, and Springfield: University of Illinois, 2011, p. 9. 49. Jill May and Robert E. May, Howard Pyle, p. 22. 50. Howard C. Pitz, Howard Pyle: Writer, Illustrator, Founder of the Briandywine School, New York: Clarkson N. Potter, Inc., 1975, p. 41.

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51. Robert Louis Stevenson, Letters, 8 vols., 6:40. This comment, and Roux’s illustrations, are discussed at greater length in Chapter 3. 52. Robert Louis Stevenson, Letters, 8 vols., 6:49. 53. Robert Louis Stevenson, Letters, 8 vols., 7:253. 54. Robert Louis Stevenson, Letters, 8 vols., 4:73. Mid-February 1883. 55. Oliver Buckton, Cruising with Robert Louis Stevenson: Travel, Narrative, and the Colonial Body, Athens: Ohio University Press, 2007, p. 101. 56. Robert Louis Stevenson, “My First Book”, The Lantern-Bearers and Other Essays, New York: Cooper Square Press, 1999, p. 279. 57. Robert Louis Stevenson, The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson, ed. Bradford A. Booth and Ernest Mayhew, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995, 8 vols., 5:230. 58. Robert Louis Stevenson, Letters, 8 vols., 5:231. 59. For a discussion of Leslie Stephen as both a mountaineer and editor of the Cornhill Magazine, see Ann Colley, Victorians in the Mountains: Sinking the Sublime, Farnham and Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2010. 60. In a neat coincidence, the Highland map for Stewart’s Sketches was produced by William H. Lizars, a friend of Walter Scott, and in fact the very first illustrator of Scott’s Waverley novels. See Richard J. Hill, Picturing Scotland through the Waverley Novels: Walter Scott and the Origins of the Victorian Illustrated Novel, Farnham and Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2010. 61. Robert Louis Stevenson, “My First Book: Treasure Island”, p. 283. 62. Ibid. 63. Robert Louis Stevenson, “My First Book: Treasure Island”, p. 284. 64. Glasgow University Special Collections has reproduced two of these maps, in addition to some of the early illustrations, at http://special.lib.gla.ac.uk/exhibns/ month/jan2006.html. 65. Ann C. Colley, Victorians in the Mountains: Sinking the Sublime, Farnham and Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2010, p. 2. 66. A recent discovery of Tolkien’s personally annotated map of Middle Earth, drawn by Pauline Baynes, confirms the intrinsic significance of the map to the understanding of the trilogy; an article in The Guardian confirms that Tolkein intended Hobbiton to exist on the same latitude as Oxford, Tolkien’s home. In this instance, topography becomes highly symbolic in interpreting the different locations and peoples of The Lord of the Rings. See Alison Flood, “Tolkien’s Map of Middle-earth Discovered Inside Copy of Lord of the Rings”, The Guardian, 23 October 2015, web, 27 December 2015, http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/oct/23/jrrtolkien-middle-earth-annotated-map-blackwells-lord-of-the-rings. 67. Thomas Stevenson helped RLS to re-draw the original map, which was lost in the post to the publisher.

2

Stevenson and art pre-1887

Stevenson and art pre-1887 The web, then, or the pattern, a web at once sensuous and logical, an elegant and pregnant texture: that is style, that is the foundation of the art of literature. (“On Some Technical Elements of Style in Literature”, Contemporary Review 47 [April 1885]) Stevenson wrote a great deal on the art of writing and on the art of pictures. In essays produced from the mid-1870s through the 1880s, Stevenson laid down an evolving theoretical foundation pertaining to the relationship between the literary and visual arts. The subject “Stevenson on Art” would require a much more in-depth treatment than this chapter can provide, given the breadth and complexity of Stevenson’s views of contemporary culture. The word “art” itself is broadly used by Stevenson to refer to the major arts of literature, painting and music. Letters to his cousin Bob (the artist Robert Stevenson) from the 1870s detail various opinions and theories on these topics, and through his correspondence and essay output from the mid-1870s, we can discern an evolving set of theories pertaining to the sister-arts in relation to his own. Drawing from these essays, including six he wrote for The Magazine of Art which was edited by his friend William Ernest Henley, this chapter will focus on Stevenson’s understanding of the visual arts, in particular painting and book-illustration. The illustration of texts is the natural point at which literature and painting meet, and as such, there is an often uncomfortable power-dynamic between the two forms. The illustration of literary texts was a firmly established commercial and cultural practice by the 1880s when Stevenson hit the heights of his fame, and early correspondence reveals Stevenson’s commercial understanding of the form. However, he also saw the vast artistic potential of marrying text and image. This chapter will build on recent scholarship that is devoted to repositioning Stevenson as a major writer about art.1 It will identify and discuss Stevenson’s theories on contemporary visual art and illustration from his extensive essay writing on the subject produced before he left Britain in 1887. In doing so, it is possible to trace Stevenson’s creation of his literary-visual aesthetic for popular fiction, from theory to application.

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Illustration was never just a commercial exercise for Stevenson, and his essay writing on the subjects of painting and illustration reveal the different ways in which he valued image as a means of complementing, even enriching, text. Theories and views he framed in his famous essays on art, such as “A Gossip on Romance” (1882), “A Note on Realism” (1883) and “A Humble Remonstrance” (1884), can be compared against and complemented by lesser known works such as “Forest Notes” (1876), his unpublished “On the Art of Literature” (1880) and his “Byways of Book Illustration” essays for the Magazine of Art. Also important in understanding Stevenson’s views of book illustration are his critical appreciation of and personal admiration for Japanese art; Stevenson admired the “new” art of Japan that had so inspired his contemporary artistic peers in France, particularly the impressionists and post-impressionists. However, where Japanese painting and print-making had clearly inspired French painting in terms of visual style and subject matter, they impacted on Stevenson’s understanding of literary style and the value of illustration. By analysing some of his essays and correspondence, this chapter will trace Stevenson’s theories on painting and illustration in the years leading up to his departure from Britain in 1887, and draw conclusions pertaining to his understanding of the art of book-illustration.

On Romance Roger Swearingen has recently transcribed a previously unpublished essay by Stevenson provisionally entitled “On the Art of Literature”.2 Although no date is assigned to the manuscript, Swearingen has helpfully dated the draft to 1880, meaning that this was the first expression of what would become more concrete projects in subsequent years to outline his theories on the definitions, techniques and purposes of art. The work is an incomplete draft, occasionally only an outline, expressing theories that found more complete expression in later essays such as “A Gossip on Romance”, published in Longman’s Magazine in 1882, and “A Humble Remonstrance”, also in Longman’s Magazine in 1884. The only sections fleshed out – drafts of chapters entitled “Chapter I. Legitimate Forms” and “Chapter 2. Matter and Style” – provide insights into the value of his own art of literature when set against its counterparts of painting and music. Comments he makes regarding the strengths of the literary arts help us to understand his depth of appreciation for competing media. For example, in a section discussing “Narrative literature”, he states, Its first and natural business is to narrate. When one man began to tell to another what he had seen or suffered, how far his sheep had strayed, or where and how he had slain a deer, the art of literature begun to be practised. History, Biography, the Epic, and the novel, are thus all of them legitimate forms. Language had been shaped directly

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Stevenson and art pre-1887 to this purpose; nor is there any other art which can compete with literature in such a task.3

By contrast, painting and music intrinsically lack this ability to move through narrative time. Stevenson writes, “The painter can but indicate one moment of a tale and imply the rest, by one significant grouping; the musician, though his art is so influential on the feelings, can neither state a fact nor follow an argument, but dwells in a world of purely abstract emotion”.4 His comments on the restrictions of painting here echo those of Sir Walter Scott, who, in a barely concealed defence of his own art in the face of a growing public desire for literary illustration, maintained that the painter is restricted to “a single NOW”, suggesting that painting requires literary context for it to make sense to the viewer.5 Stevenson develops the draft further regarding artistic “matter and style”, making comments that foreshadow theories he proposes more forcefully two years later in “A Gossip on Romance”. In “On the Art of Literature”, he tackles the difficult late nineteenth-century question of art-for-art’s sake, using Scott’s Lady of the Lake as an example of the difference between style and matter. This poem, Stevenson argues, is a triumph of the “romantically picturesque; the reader being led on from one scene to another, each of a winning and romantic beauty”; Stevenson argues that such artistic production, “art for art: the picturesque or the beautiful for their own sake”, are “worthy”, “legitimate” and even “beneficial”.6 These comments anticipate those he makes in “A Gossip on Romance”, in which he states that “… even after we have flung the book aside, the scenery and adventures remain present to the mind, a new and green possession, not unworthy of that beautiful name, The Lady of the Lake, or that direct, romantic opening—one of the most spirited and poetical in literature—‘The stag at eve had drunk his fill’”.7 However, such art falls short of the true test of great art, in which style should be a means of achieving a moral or philosophical truth, which The Lady of the Lake fails to do in Stevenson’s opinion. However, Stevenson then proceeds to defend Scott as an artist of flickering greatness: Thus you will perceive, whenever Scott rises from his level, and becomes, as he does every now and again, for a moment, a great and noble artist, it is when he has been stirred out of his indifferency to a moral heat. So the scene with the Presbyterian minister stands out of Woodstock. So the Shakespearian death scene of Elspeth Mucklebackit, stands, not only above the rest of the admirable Antiquary, but, to my taste, above all that he has written.8 In these examples, imagery and incident, brought together through Scott’s best style, combine with “a moral heat” to achieve moral insight. This is when Scott becomes the “great and noble artist”, instead of merely a great technician of his trade. Scott’s imagery, Stevenson suggests, when combined

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with a powerful story and imbued with human inquiry, imprints itself on the reader’s memory and becomes great art. However, elsewhere Stevenson also critiques Scott’s occasional lack of technical discipline. Discussing Scott’s novels in “A Gossip on Romance”, Stevenson identifies poor style in Scott’s prose. In deconstructing a scene from Guy Mannering, in which Harry Bertram lands at Ellangowan, Stevenson praises Scott’s prose as “a model instance of romantic method”.9 However, he demonstrates through close reading that Scott fails to support the feeling he generates with the required technical style of the great artist: Well, here is how it runs in the original: “a damsel, who, close behind a fine spring about half-way down the descent, and which had once supplied the castle with water, was engaged in bleaching linen.” A man who gave in such copy would be discharged from the staff of a daily paper. Scott has forgotten to prepare the reader for the presence of the “damsel”; he has forgotten to mention the spring and its relation to the ruin; and now, face to face with his omission, instead of trying back and starting fair, crams all this matter, tail foremost, into a single shambling sentence. It is not merely bad English, or bad style; it is abominably bad narrative besides.10 This is cutting critique of an author who undeniably influenced Stevenson, but it also helps elucidate his attitudes towards art: substance (matter) without style, or style without substance, is artistically incomplete. Stevenson writes in the next paragraph, almost despairingly, that Scott was “a man of the finest creative instinct touching with perfect certainty and charm the romantic junctures of his story; and we find him utterly careless, almost, it would seem, incapable, in the technical matter of style”.11 In “A Gossip on Romance”, Stevenson clarifies that narrative becomes memorable when imagery and incident come together in the narrative “web”. For example, in comparing the experience of reading Richardson’s Clarissa against Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, he identifies the former as a masterpiece of technical narrative. He writes that “Clarissa is a book of a far more startling import, worked out, on a great canvas, with inimitable courage and unflagging art”.12 However, it is Defoe’s imagery, combined with remarkable incident, which impress readers’ imaginations beyond the reading of the book. The images that last with a reader are those formed when narrative and setting combine in aesthetic harmony: The threads of a story come from time to time together and make a picture in the web; the characters fall from time to time into some attitude to each other or to nature, which stamps the story home like an illustration. Crusoe recoiling from the footprint, Achilles shouting over against the Trojans, Ulysses bending the great bow, Christian running with his fingers in his ears, these are each culminating moments

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As the following three chapters intend to clarify, this passage reads like a formula to almost every illustration Stevenson personally approved for his fiction. For Stevenson, narrative illustrations should depict moments of heightened drama or action, from key moments of the narrative, depicting characters in settings that were authentic to their textual descriptions. An illustrated text was, for Stevenson, a single work of art comprised of two different media: literature and painting. Deviation or license with detail on the part of the illustrator was counter-productive to the purposes of the work of art (the illustrated story), because it would mislead or distract the reader from the author’s purposes. The art of literature was Stevenson’s domain; the art of painting, however, had to conform to his theories on art if they were to adorn his literature in the form of illustration.

On Realism Another aspect of contemporary art that concerned Stevenson was realism. Realism is a slippery concept to define, and very broad in its application, but there are several helpful comments in correspondence, the Magazine of Art essay “A Note on Realism”, and his famous response to Henry James’s essay “The Art of Fiction” entitled “A Humble Remonstrance”, that can provide a sufficient platform for comprehension. Developing on his theme of balancing matter and style that he puts forward in “On the Art of Literature”, Stevenson several times identifies the age’s apparent obsession with observational verisimilitude – the often pedantic attention to the rendering of minute, naturalistic detail in art, both in painting and in literature – as the most common distraction of the artist from his true and ultimate purpose. In a letter of July 1883 to Trevor Haddon, Stevenson writes, “Beware of realism; it is the devil: ‘tis one of the means of art, and now they make it the end! And such is the force of the age in which a man lives, that we all, even those of us who most detest it, sin by realism”.14 Realism here is considered a style that has instead become the “end” or “matter” of contemporary art. Artists, Stevenson argues, have become preoccupied with technical bravura, with their ability to depict minutiae; in painting, such as in contemporary Pre-Raphaelite imagery, this might include the depiction of flora or background details of landscape or architecture; in literature, it might include flourishes of poorly constructed, laboured description, language or dialogue. In each case, the artist’s self-indulgence in showing off his or her technical abilities distracts the viewer, reader or artist from the purpose of the work of art. In other words, the purpose of the work has become the glorification of the technique, at the expense of any moral or human enquiry. This observation is echoed and supported by Stevenson in various places, the two most notable instances being in two essays that were both written

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and published close together: “A Note on Realism” in The Magazine of Art in November 1883, and “A Humble Remonstrance”. In “A Note on Realism”, Stevenson comments that, “what […] particularly interests the artist is the tendency of the extreme of detail, when followed as a principle, to degenerate into mere feux-de-joie of literary tricking. The other day even M. Daudet was to be heard babbling of audible colours and visible sounds”.15 In this example, the artist is confusing himself in his pursuit of a realistic rendering of language. Later in the essay, Stevenson writes “A  photographic exactitude in dialogue is now the exclusive fashion; but even in the ablest hands it tells us no more – I think it even tells us less – than Molière, wielding his artificial medium, has told to us and to all time of Alceste or Orgon, Dorine or Chsyale”.16 The phrase “photographic exactitude” is instructive when considering the purposes of art. Photography in Stevenson’s oeuvre will be discussed in Chapter 5, but here Stevenson makes it clear that the exacting, documentary properties of the photographic image do not necessarily belong in the creative work of art when that level of detail is either concealing or negating the ultimate moral purpose of the work. In “A Note on Realism”, Stevenson declares that the purpose of art is to communicate “truth to the conditions of man’s nature and the conditions of man’s life”; this echoes his comment in “On the Art of Literature”, that “[t]he justification of any art is that it shall be true”.17 Style and technique are essential means of communicating these truths, but not the ends in themselves. Realism is, for Stevenson, a style, and one that is fraught with dangers for the modern artist, because so much technique is required to perfect a realistic style that it often becomes both the means and the end for the artist. He closes “A Note on Realism” with the following passage: We talk of bad and good. Everything, indeed, is good which is conceived with honesty and executed with communicative ardour. But though on neither side is dogmatism fitting, and though in every case the artist must decide for himself […] yet one thing may be generally said, that we of the last quarter of the Nineteenth Century, breathing as we do the intellectual atmosphere of our age, are more apt to err upon the side of realism than to sin in quest of the ideal. Upon that theory it may be well to watch and correct our own decisions, always holding back the hand from the least appearance of irrelevant dexterity, and resolutely fixed to begin no work that is not philosophical, passionate, dignified, happily mirthful, or at the last and least, romantic in design.18 The phrase “irrelevant dexterity” is the most concise in discerning what Stevenson valued in art, and what he would value in illustration. His own literary style attempts to emulate this theory: his descriptions of characters, landscapes and incidents are delineated with a clarity and sparseness that demonstrate this premise perfectly. For example, his description of

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Long John Silver, as Chapter 3 will discuss, mentions very few physical details other than his one leg and his physical size, yet the reader is given a clear impression of the character. It is the paired down selectivity of his vocabulary, phrasing, sentence structure and punctuation that mark out Stevenson’s narrative style. Stevenson bemoans realism’s obsession with “completion”, as John Lyon has argued, and sought to remove irrelevancy from his writing.19 Perhaps Stevenson’s most famous thesis on his own art is made in “A Humble Remonstrance”. This essay was a response to his friend Henry James’s “The Art of Fiction”. James, in response to a lecture given by Walter Beasant on the purposes of literature, puts forward the idea that art should “compete with life”. James differentiates between popular fiction and “the artist in literature”, whose purpose is to find truths that compete with the realities of lived experience. James argues, particularly of romance writing, that it is the artificiality and the repetitive structures that rob the work of art of its truth to life. This is to simplify James’s argument, and Lyon has recently helped to elucidate both James’s point and Stevenson’s response in more nuanced terms.20 However, Stevenson somewhat wilfully simplifies James’s point himself, and in addressing it, helpfully, uses painting to explain. Where James argues that a “painting is reality”, Stevenson argues that “[p]ainting, ruefully comparing sunshine and flake-white, gives up truth of colour, as it had already given up relief and movement; and instead of vying with nature, arranges a scheme of harmonious tints”.21 The painter, by composing a scene, selecting colours and arranging “harmonious tints” to complement each other, has by definition lost the “truth” of life by imposing an artificial structure on nature. Art, Stevenson argues, cannot compete with life precisely because of structure; by contrast, “Life is monstrous, infinite, illogical, abrupt and poignant; a work of art, in comparison, is neat, finite, self-contained, rational, flowing and emasculate”.22 For this reason, therefore, any attempt to create truth to life, especially in a pedantic observation of minute detail, is doomed to failure from the start; in fact, the harder an artist works to “compete with life”, the further from truth he or she is likely to stray: “No art—to use the daring phrase of Mr. James—can successfully ‘compete with life’; and the art that does so is condemned to perish montibus aviis [among the mountains without paths]”.23 Instead, Stevenson offers this advice to aspiring artists: “Let him choose a motive, whether of character or passion; carefully construct his plot so that every incident is an illustration of the motive, and every property employed shall bear to it a near relation of congruity or contrast … Let him not regret if this shortens his book; it will be better so; for to add irrelevant matter is not to lengthen but to bury”.24 Brevity, for Stevenson, is an acquired skill and a means to driving more directly towards truth. He closes “A  Humble Remonstrance” with the idea that for great men, “simplicity is their excellence”.

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Japanese masters and the art of omission Stevenson found such artful simplicity in paintings by the Japanese masters. Japanese art represents for Stevenson the perfect balance of style and matter. It was a balance he constantly sought in his own medium, and he did so through attempting an evocative economy of style that he identified in Japanese painting and print-making. In a letter of 30 September 1883, to Bob, he discusses the historical writer Balzac, identifying a similar fault that he shared (for Stevenson) with Scott: He [Balzac] was a man who never found his method. An inarticulate Shakespeare, smothered under forcible-feeble detail. It is astounding, to the riper mind, how bad he is, how feeble, how untrue, how tedious; and of course, when he surrendered to his temperament, how good and powerful. […] He could not consent to be dull, and thus became so. He would leave nothing undeveloped, and thus drowned out of sight of land amid the multitude of crying and incongruous details.25 [My emphases] It is the need to “complete” detail, to borrow Lyon’s phase, to overload the reader with complexity of observation, that distracts from narrative or incident, and which drowns out the dramatic voice of both Balzac and Scott. In the next sentence, Stevenson writes with a note of despair, “Jesus, there is but one art: to omit! O if I knew how to omit, I would ask no other knowledge. A man who knew how to omit would make an Iliad of a daily paper”.26 It is the omission of superfluous detail, or the selective inclusion of detail necessary to aid narrative, that Stevenson admires in Japanese art, and that he would learn from in considering his own style and purpose in literature. This technique of omission and selective inclusion is further supported by an essay recently unearthed and transcribed by Richard Dury. “Books and Reading. No. 2. How books have to be written” has been dated by Dury to probably 1882 (although with the caveat that it could have been written any time between 1881 and 1887); this date would fit with a period in which Stevenson was mulling over his theories on Japanese painting, writing essays on the relationship between literature and art in the Magazine of Art, and writing what would later become his most famous work, Treasure Island.27 In the essay, Stevenson articulates with great simplicity and economy (worthy of his own theory of omission) how, if a schoolboy were to write “a complete account of a day at school”, it would be filled with “twaddling detail”. As with “A Humble Remonstrance”, Stevenson points out that life is “infinite, illogical”, but also “dull” and “irksome”. The skill of the writer is knowing what to exclude from the day in the life of the soldier, the adventurer, or the buccaneer, which, if written in full, would be overwhelmingly

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dull; instead, the writer of romances “has left all the dulness [sic] out. He has skipped the days when his hero was merely tending to his business, and jumped from one adventure clean over to the next”.28 This is the trick of the writer: the omission of redundant detail. However, the writer has another task: in omitting irrelevant detail, what should be included in order to bring the reader to a sensational experience of the incident being described? Stevenson cites Shakespeare’s Macbeth as the perfect example of this technique: “He has left out the right things (which is the first business of the author); he has kept in the right things (which is the second); and by a singular kind of ingenuity, which we call literary genius, he has told those things in words that bring them right home to you—which is the third”.29 This articulation is a helpful summary of what Stevenson valued in all art, and what he identified in Japanese painting as refreshingly different from contemporary British trends in both the visual and literary arts. Stevenson’s deep critical appreciation for Japanese art placed him at the forefront of the European artistic movement, pioneered by some of the most famous names of nineteenth-century painting, including Monet, Manet, Pissarro, Renoir, Degas, Van Gogh, Cezanne, Toulouse Lautrec and Corot.30 The influence of Japanese art on these painters, following the opening of Japan’s borders to the outside world in 1854, has been well studied and documented by the discipline of art history, and its specific influence on each or any of these artists is too broad a subject for discussion here. Briefly, however, Japanese painting and print-making introduced an aesthetic that rejected traditional European modes of naturalistic representation of physical forms, flattened the visual plain into a more abstract field of colour and design, and suggested to European artists a new visual vocabulary that no longer competed with photography as a form of visual representation. Less obvious, however, is the influence it would have – tangentially – on Stevenson’s appreciation of art and his understanding of his own discipline. In fact, it was only natural that this art should influence Stevenson, especially given his extended visits to the French artists’ colony, the Barbizon, in the 1870s. These sojourns exposed Stevenson to a young, vibrant, avant garde group of artists who, for Stevenson, were refreshingly divorced from the stale British artistic establishment of London. This community could not fail to have been exposed to Japanese art, whether through exhibitions at Paris or through the increasing proliferation of imagery through prints. A letter to his artist cousin Bob Stevenson written in 1874, when Stevenson was only 24, makes it clear that Stevenson identified the sparseness and clarity of expression in Japanese art that he so valued not only in painting but in literary style. In addition, Stevenson recognized the Japanese masters’ ability to narrate story through a style that was not tied to a hyper-naturalistic representation of the world. This is best explained by Stevenson himself: Now just the other day I came across Japanese art, practically speaking for the first time, and it did seem to me as if here was something

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at last that fetched me. Of course, there is a good deal to be set down to the novelty of subjects, and the first effect of the bedevilled imaginative violence of the figures; but making all the allowance I can for this and that, the fact remains that this art is above all others in two points. First, in that it tells its story, not for the story’s sake only, but so as to produce always a magnificent decorative design. I have here by me, for instance, a picture in which an army is crossing an arm of the sea by night; the background is cool and solemn; black night sky and green water and gray coast of hills (the colour you know is never imitative, never what you call realistic, always quite imaginative [my emphasis]); in the foreground, the army goes past; or rather not the army, but the army’s banners; and if you could see the pattern, the splendid hurly burly of bright colours and strange forms that they have thus thrown out against the dark background, you would see what imaginative truth we sacrifice to nothing of decorative effect, by our limping, semi-scientific way of seeing things. Second. The colours are really fun. For themselves, you know; they are their own exceeding great reward; they’re not a damned bit like nature, and don’t pretend to be and they’re twice as nice. I know I’ve mixed up these two reasons for my preference and must explain again; I mean, first, because they treat a story decoratively, instead of really, and second, because their decoration is good—better than anything else in the world—Rubens and Raphael were two pretty men; so were Vinci, and others; and M. Angelo could do a thing or two, but they’re not such fun as the Japanese. I am quite the Japanese now-a-days: I love them better than anything on earth, I think, except Shakespeare and a few others who wrote and made music.31 A few phrases here recall comments he makes on realism: “the colour… is… never quite realistic”; “our [meaning European] limping, semi-scientific way of seeing things”; “they treat a story decoratively, instead of really”. By contrast to European insistence on the pedantic representation of physical forms, Japanese artists achieve an “imaginative truth” that is “not a damned bit like nature”. They also, through their style of colouring and composition, achieve “decoration”, “pattern” and narrative. In other words, they balance style and matter, and they are “fun”, and in this way fulfil one of the primary roles of art for Stevenson: entertainment. The phrase “imaginative truth” suggests that Japanese art, instead of “competing with life”, interpreted the world through a style of economy and suggestion, rather than naturalistic representation. This, as Stevenson’s defence of romance in “A  Humble Remonstrance” articulates, was a technique he sympathized with. This letter, written before his writing career had taken wing, foreshadows an essay he wrote eight years later for The Magazine of Art in November 1882. “Byways of Book Illustration: Two Japanese Romances” is a review of two illustrated versions of the heroic Japanese story, “Chiushingura, or

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the Loyal League”; one was a translation by Frederick Dickins, and the other was “Les Fidèles Rônins”, a French translation of an American edition. Stevenson used this opportunity to reflect more generally on the qualities of Japanese painting. In certain ways, this essay is a published response to W. E.  Henley’s own article “A Note on Japanese Art”, published earlier in February 1882 in the Magazine of Art. In a letter of early February 1882 from Davos, Stevenson comments to Henley that “The Mag has come; the only thing I  liked was your Japanese [“A Note on Japanese Art”]”.32 However, in the same missive Stevenson criticizes the reproductions of the pictures, stating “Your reproductions—here and there a little too black, particularly in the Effect of the sunbeams, which is quite spoiled by a dark patch—are perfectly admirable. You must have got the plates of some surely. The Combat is splendid”.33 The personal pronoun “your” makes this sound a little critical of Henley himself, and correspondence between the two men during the publication of the Magazine of Art, most specifically during the time that Stevenson was contributing material (1882–1884), is frayed by such off-the-cuff criticisms. It is interesting to note, therefore, first, that Stevenson has a critical appreciation of the prints themselves, commenting that the reproductions Henley included as editor were inferior in quality and “spoiled” to a degree; and secondly, that Stevenson should subsequently challenge Henley in print in the pages of Henley’s own magazine regarding Japanese art. In September 1882, having sent Henley the draft of “Two Japanese Romances” for editing and proofing, he wrote to Henley saying, You will have already seen my word on Japanese Art. I read it a little differently, but your view of their fidelity to natural impressions is true, as far as it goes. I don’t know a damn about modern art, nor I don’t know that I like it; but I do feel the Japanee [sic] game. I will sit about your feet about Millet, but by the Lord Harry, I’ll walk round you and round you over Hokusai. You see it’s my game, I like it almost as much as Dumas’s novels.34 In this letter, and in “Two Japanese Romances”, we can see Stevenson asserting his critical authority on the subject of Japanese painting. As his 1874 letter to Bob suggests, Stevenson had spent much time ruminating on this new art, and in letters to various friends and family members, he mentions different efforts to obtain Japanese prints for his own consumption. Indeed, in May 1883, he used the proceeds from the publication of Treasure Island to acquire a complete set of prints by Hokusai as a wedding present.35 All this points to the fact that Stevenson’s critical appreciation of Japanese painting and print-making was thoroughly considered, extensive and very personal. These insights are expressed in “Two Japanese Romances”. Having critiqued the two translations of the same story, Stevenson discusses the Japanese style of representation. He writes, “The eye of the Japanese is as quick to single out, as his hand is dexterous to reproduce, the truly pictorial

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features of a landscape or an incident. But with these features he appears to rest content”.36 The Japanese artist does not weigh his imagery down with superfluous detail. Later Stevenson writes: The mass of incidental information which goes to the making of a modern European landscape – the difference of planes, the intricacy of outline, the patient effort after a combination of local and general colour – contrasts strikingly indeed with the few, learned touches by which a Japanese will represent a mountain or a city. The Oriental addresses himself singly to the eye, seeking at the same time the maximum of effect and the minimum of detail.37 Here, eight years after his letter to Bob quoted above, we see Stevenson fully articulate his theories on Japanese style. The Japanese style seeks clarity of expression through simplicity of technique, recalling Stevenson’s comment in “A Note on Realism” that “simplicity” is the “excellence” of great men. We can identify a consistency with his criticism of realism in the phrase “the maximum of effect and the minimum of detail”; Stevenson would strive for this approach in his creative fiction. This is not to suggest that Japanese art directly influenced Stevenson’s literary style; Stevenson was a writer, and although he had a vivid pictorial imagination, he could not evoke these images through drawing like he could in writing (as Chapter 3 will demonstrate). Rather, what his correspondence and “Two Japanese Romances” does reveal is a deep-rooted sympathy with the Japanese aesthetic. The economic, decorative style that also conveyed meaning and humanity in a new fashion resonated with what Stevenson was seeking to achieve in his own discipline. He found in the works of Seitei and Hokusai the visual equivalent of the clarity of expression and exoticism he wanted to bring to his readers. His own writing brought readers to new and exciting places in his essays (“Fontainebleau”, discussed below), travel writing (An Inland Voyage) and novels (Treasure Island); his style of omission and selective inclusion of details, vocabulary and phrasing reflect in the literary medium what he so admired about Japanese painting; and this economic technique was used to narrate story, inspect aspects of the human condition, and entertain the reader, qualities which he also identifies in the Japanese masters. Japanese art clearly helped Stevenson to consider his own, to crystallize theories on painting and, as will be discussed below, illustration.

Childhood If the imagery of the Japanese masters inspired the adult Stevenson, he time and again refers to the importance of childhood imagery on his creative imagination. Specifically, Stevenson discusses the power of imagery to suggest story, to imprint it on the mind of a child in such a way that it remains an indelible part of how we come to perceive the world around us. In essays

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and correspondence Stevenson articulates how imagery, particularly that of picture books and toys, permeates a young child’s mind, and can influence and inform the creative imagination of the adult author. Two important essays that help us understand Stevenson’s professional and critical appreciation of illustrated literature occur in his essays “Penny Plain and Twopence Coloured” (1884) and “Popular Authors” (1888). In “Popular Authors”, he writes of the experience of gazing through the windows of book and print-shops at the latest illustrations, because if they could not get hold of the texts themselves, at least they could see the pictures and imagine the stories around them. This was a creative act for the young Stevenson, and one, which as Chapter 3 will demonstrate with Treasure Island, he carried through to adulthood. … when Saturday came round, we would study the windows of the stationer and try to fish out of subsequent woodcuts and their legends the further adventures of our favourites. […] The experience at least had a great effect upon my childhood. This inexpensive pleasure mastered me. Each new Saturday I would go from one newsvendor’s window to another’s, till I was master of the weekly gallery and had thoroughly digested “The Baronet Unmasked,” “So and so approaching the Mysterious House,” “The Discovery of the Dead Body in the Blue Marl Pit,” “Dr. Vargas Removing the Senseless Body of Fair Lilias,” and whatever other snatch of unknown story and glimpse of unknown characters that gallery afforded. I do not know that I ever enjoyed fiction more; those books that we have (in such a way) avoided reading, are all so excellently written! And in early years, we take a book for its material, and act as our own artists, keenly realising that which pleases us, leaving the rest aside.38 This is a brief but powerful description of a child hungry for story, and having, in some instances, to create his own through the illustrations on display through the print-shop windows. It also marks out the importance of visual media in childhood development. In a culture as visual as ours, we have come to take such visuality in children’s culture for granted, but as Stevenson’s essays clearly point out, children in the mid-nineteenth century were every bit as hungry for visual representation, particularly in books. The images that stories create in the child’s imagination – stories that more often than not are reinforced through illustration – stay with a person, however, subconsciously, into adulthood. Stevenson muses on this theory in more depth in the Magazine of Art essay “A Penny Plain and Twopence Coloured”, published in the April 1884 number. This essay focuses specifically on a childhood theatre playset, Skelt’s Juvenile Drama, and the imagery it left imprinted on Stevenson’s childhood. In essence, this essay is a review of the imagery that Skelt provided for the stories that children could act out using the miniature theatre. Stevenson, remembering back to the sensations of buying, opening and

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marvelling in the latest instalment of Skelt, evokes the aspects of the playset he remembers most powerfully: the imagery. Like his memories of the pictures in the shop-window, the cut figures and pre-designed landscape backdrops of Skelt overshadowed the actual stories that were published with the sets. “Every sheet we fingered was another lightning glance into obscure, delicious story [my emphasis]; it was like wallowing in the raw stuff of story-books. I know nothing to compare with it save now and then in dreams, when I am privileged to read in certain unwrit stories of adventure, from which I awake to find the world all vanity”.39 It is imagery that suggests story, a process familiar to all children. The artistic quality in child’s theatre is less important than the impression it leaves on the imagination, which is then taken subconsciously into adulthood: “If, at the ripe age of fourteen years, I bought a certain cudgel, got a friend to load it, and thence-forward walked the tame ways of the earth mine own ideal, radiating pure romance – still I was but a puppet in the hand of Skelt […]. What am I? what are life, art, letters, the world, but what my Skelt has made them?”40 In “A Penny Plain” the theatre playset designs – images of buccaneers, highwaymen, abductees – create an imaginative world around a visual structure. The narrative thread was supplied by the accompanying texts, but Stevenson points out that these stories, even to the child, were disappointing; in fact, the stories that the imagery suggested were demeaned by Skelt’s actual tales. The fable, as set forth in the play-book, proved to be not worthy of the scenes and characters: what fable would not? Such passages as: “Scene 6. The Hermitage. Night set scene. Place back of scene 1, No. 2, at back of stage and hermitage, Fig. 2, out of set piece, R. H. in a slanting direction” — such passages, I say, though very practical, are hardly to be called good reading. Indeed, as literature, these dramas did not much appeal to me. I forget the very outline of the plots. [My emphasis]41 Plots are forgettable to children; it is imagery that survives in the imagination. Imagery, like romantic names (“‘Lodoiska,’ ‘Silver Palace,’ ‘Echo of Westminster Bridge.’ Names, bare names, are surely more to children than we poor, grown-up obliterated fools remember”42), suggest story to children that few writers could possibly satisfy either to children or adults. Nonetheless, he again makes the crucial link between image and story. Imagery in this case is a way into story, a stimulation to the creative imagination; as the next chapters will demonstrate, imagery such as maps and woodcut designs would inspire Stevenson to construct narrative. The childish imagination, which is constructed around escapist imagery, is what Stevenson attempts to channel as an adult in writing some of his adventure stories; strong textual imagery, high drama and a good plot are central to interesting narration of romance stories.

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Textual illustration and text-plus-illustration With Skelt, a synecdoche for children’s culture in general, imagery always predominates over text, not only for the child, but for the adult looking back to childhood. This relationship is consciously manipulated and subverted by the older Stevenson when using illustration in his novels. The first of Stevenson’s novels to be illustrated in novel form was Treasure Island, a Roberts Brothers’ edition published in New York in 1884; the first to be illustrated in Britain was an 1885 edition of the same novel illustrated by Georges Roux. By this time, however, Stevenson had crystallized and expressed his theories on the illustration of fictional texts, and the complex relationships that exist between image and text, in numerous essays and letters. Stevenson’s appreciation of and experimentation with illustration was complex, even when he lost editorial control over the types of images that were produced by syndicated illustrators at Scribner’s. In many ways, Stevenson was forced to consider the relationship between image and text from the earliest years as a writer; when Stevenson began visiting the artists’ colony in France in 1876, he was surrounded by painters; despite some talent as an amateur draughtsman, however, Stevenson was not equipped to produce the kind of imagery in the visual medium that he could so clearly conjure through his writing. A relative lack of aptitude at painting (at least in comparison to his literary talents) forced him into a sharper consideration of his own medium and how it related to the sister art. In an essay produced from one of these visits to Grez, “Forest Notes”, we see Stevenson addressing this relationship in playful terms, but also working through some of the advantages that text inherently has over imagery in evoking feeling and narrative movement. In this essay, Stevenson competes with an unnamed painter (possibly Bob, or his friend Will H. Low) in recording the picturesque scene, in which he himself is relaxing. In essence, Stevenson uses the essay to observe the observers. The writer records the typical day of the painters around him, and in this way, records the scene in ways that painters cannot: we move through time, we hear sounds, smell fragrances and hold discussions with the painters; and at the end of the day, when the light has gone, the unnamed painter has to pack up his materials while the writer continues observing to go home and begin his craft. The sense of playful competition is introduced half way through, when the general description of the pastoral scene is interrupted by a request of the painter, who is working on a plein air piece: ‘I say, just keep where you are, will you? You make the jolliest motive.’ And you reply: ‘Well, I don’t mind, if I may smoke.’ And thereafter the hours go idly by. Your friend at the easel labours doggedly a little way off, in the wide shadow of the tree; and yet farther, across a strait of glaring sunshine, you see another painter, encamped in the shadow of another tree, and up to his waist in the fern.43

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As the painter “labours”, the observed writer relaxes smoking, while simultaneously observing the painter. Meanwhile, in describing the scene, the writer invokes a vivid picture of the labouring painter, with another a little way off comically working waist-deep in foliage in order to get his view. The author is able to produce imagery of his own from multiple perspectives – his eye moving from one painter to the next – within one sentence, thereby outperforming the painter who is always restricted to one single view. In the next paragraph, the author directly competes with the painter by evoking vividly in prose what the painter labours to produce in paint. In a somewhat cutting critique of the painter’s efforts, we hear echoes of the criticism of “irrelevant dexterity”: Your tree stands in a hollow paved with fern and heather, set in a basin of low hills, and scattered over with rocks and junipers. All the open is steeped in pitiless sunlight. Everything stands out as though it were cut in cardboard, every colour is strained into its highest key. […] Every tassel of their rusty foliage is defined with pre-Raphaelite minuteness. And a sorry figure they make out there in the sun, like misbegotten yew-trees! The scene is all pitched in a key of colour so peculiar, and lit up with such a discharge of violent sunlight as a man might live fifty years in England and not see.44 We have jumped from the actual landscape into the painter’s interpretation of it, and the interpretation, in its efforts to record every aspect of the scene meticulously, grates on the viewer as unrealistic: its hyper-realism undermines the reality of the landscape. In his effort to record the landscape in minute detail, the painter fails to capture the beauty and harmony of the vista. The next paragraph then proceeds to outperform the painter’s efforts by describing sounds, and what they suggest to the listener: “Meanwhile at your elbow someone tunes up a song, words of Ronsard to a pathetic tremulous air, of how the poet loved his mistress long ago, and press on her the flight of time, and told her how white and quiet the dead lay under the stones, and how the boat dipped and pitched as the shades embarked for the passionless land”.45 In a moment, the reader has been transported through song from a sensory description within the landscape to an exotic poetic analogy and a narrative diversion. The author has the power of transportation from one scene to the next, imbuing what is immediately before him with a poetic transportation that would be impossible to achieve in observational painting. The vision is then punctured by the painter, who announces to the “idling” author that “‘You can get up now […] I’m at the background’”. The waning light forces the painter(s) to retire for the day. The author describes the “cool air” and the “aromatic odour of the woods”, “as though court ladies […] still walked in the summer evenings, and shed,

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from their brocades, a breath of musk or bergamot upon the woodland winds”.46 With each sensory description (other than sight), and each poetic diversion to a metaphoric vision, the author demonstrates his authority to encapsulate a scene more thoroughly and artistically than a painter possibly can. The author has idled all day, enjoyed and absorbed the scene thoroughly, observed the observers (the painters) and begun writing when the painters have been forced to stop painting through failing light. The author wins his battle by capturing the scene in its totality, by participating in the scene himself for the painters, and by providing observations and imagery unavailable to them through the luxuries and skills of his literary medium. “Forest Notes: Idle Hours” is a playful but powerful assertion of the superiority of the written word – appropriately and artistically crafted – over the visual arts. It is also a comment on the limitations of realism. Nothing in the essay is rendered in stark visual detail; all is suggested through glimpsed imagery, movement, sound, metaphor and allegory, and it is done so with an economy of style that eschews “irrelevant dexterity”. “Forest Notes” was unillustrated when published in 1876. However, in 1883 Stevenson decided to rework the essay into a longer piece entitled “Fontainebleau” for the Magazine of Art, and this time it would be illustrated. In June 1883, Stevenson suggested to Henley that the Barbizon colony at Fontainebleau would make a “picturesque, artistic” subject for the Magazine; it would be based on “Forest Notes” but, he writes, he would “treat it differently, with an eye to artistic education in particular”. The essay would also be written with illustration in mind: “I could let you have a pretty early communication of what I should require for illustration”.47 Henley’s brother, Anthony Warton Henley, a former Barbizonian himself, would illustrate the essay after it was written. Stevenson, therefore, was writing conscious of the fact that there needed to be subjects for the artist to illustrate. As a comment in a letter to Henley a few days later suggests, this anticipation of illustration affected the writing process: “I have had the devil’s trouble to make a place for Anthony’s pictures, not being in the least in a descriptive mood; but I’ve elbow room enough for him now; I’ll send a list for him to choose from”.48 However, this arrangement – that the artist illustrate to the text, rather than a writer write to a picture – was for Stevenson the appropriate one. He writes again to Henley that “the idea that because a thing is a picter [sic] book, all the writing should be on the wrong tack is triste but widespread […]. The writer should write, and not illustrate pictures: else its bosh”.49 Again, Stevenson asserts, privately here, the authority of text over image. Stevenson articulates that illustration is, by definition, subservient to text. The problem for readers, of course, is that when a reader (especially a young one) picks up a picture-book, he or she will inevitably look at the pictures first. Image is immediately dominant over text: we see the image first on turning the page, and then read the text that explains it. Stevenson embraces this concept in narrative, because in this way image can be a way to draw a reader into a story. However, pictures

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in books are meaningless without text. Text is required in books, and a writer, Stevenson says, must stick to his own craft: writing. However, text and image can be very successfully artistically meshed, as long as writer and artist are working symbiotically towards the same goal. If an illustrator does not respect the text he or she is illustrating, the resulting art work – the illustrated text – fails artistically. This is precisely what Stevenson felt happened with the illustrations by Anthony Henley, and in a paragraph published only in the Magazine of Art, Stevenson provides an in-text critique of the illustrations themselves.50 In a letter to Henley of 1 May 1884, Stevenson initially appears content with the illustrations, writing on the month of its publication that “The Fontainebleaus, the Menzels, the Stryge, the Houdons (above all, Gluck) make a first-rate number”.51 These are references to the illustrations in the number. However, the paragraph that Stevenson includes, tacked onto the end of the essay in the second instalment, takes a much more critical view. I include the full paragraph here, because in subsequent reproductions, including in its collected form in Across the Plains (1892) it is omitted: I must add a note upon the illustrations, not to criticise, for they are all graceful, and the Bridge of Gretz (XII.) a little triumph, but to explain that, in the views of the Bas-Bréau (II.), the Reine Blanche (I.), and the Paris Road (VII.), Mr. Henley has, unfortunately – perhaps inevitably, for no two men see with the same pair of eyes – not found the point of view referred to in my text. Thus, with regard to the first, I described the appearance of the great central grove about the Bouquet de l’Empereur; Mr. Henley, on the other hand, has drawn the thicket either by the bornage or the road to the Carrefour de l’Épine – both rightly enough portions of the Bas-Bréau, but portions of a great dissemblance [see Figure 2.1]. In the Reine Blanche, again, the peculiar character referred to in the text, of great trees overshadowing boulders, has not found illustration in the cut. Mr. Henley and the writer, both good Barbizonians, and both studious of fidelity, have each followed his own taste and given different readings.52 When we compare the original text against A. Henley’s illustrations, we can begin to understand not only Stevenson’s criticisms of these specific illustrations, but also his wider concern about the potential pitfalls of illustration. Regarding the Bas-Breau, Stevenson writes in “Fontainebleau” that “the great oaks prosper placidly upon an even floor; they beshadow a great field; and the air and the light are very free below their stretching boughs”.53 Now the reader must look at the illustration (Figure 2.1). Instead of the “even floor” and the trees framing a “great field”, we are provided with a view of a forest floor that does not seem to depict any distinguishing characteristics that would mark it out as a location connected to the text. In this way, the illustration deviates from the text. In writing this

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Figure 2.1 Anthony W. Henley, “Fontainebleau. – II.: The Bas-Bréau”.

paragraph, Stevenson is re-asserting the authority of the author over the illustrator, and the text over the image. Text has the final word, and in providing a critique of the illustrations, assumes authority over them. It is the author’s responsibility to describe and invoke a scene, and the illustrator’s responsibility to illustrate, or realize the author’s vision in the visual medium. The problem here is not artistic skill, because as Stevenson points out, “no two men see with the same pair of eyes”; it is a problem of artistic cohesion. By straying, however unintentionally, from the text, the illustrator is confusing

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the reader: who is in charge, the author or the illustrator? Why does the illustration not seem to show the same scene described by the author? Who is wrong, the author or the illustrator? Which came first, the picture or the text? These kinds of questions are inevitably provoked by an inappropriate visual rendering of a specific topography described by the text. This was the problem for authors in highly visual texts that were proliferating in the second half of the nineteenth century. The importance of the author within a picture-book was often unclear, especially within children’s fiction. The Magazine of Art was, of course, a publication about the visual arts, and consequently included a lot of visual material; Stevenson’s comments therefore act as an assertion of the centrality of text to any illustrated publication. Why, therefore, does Stevenson say in the letter quoted above that the same pictures he critiques here contribute to a “first-rate number”? The reason for this apparent contradiction is not made clear by Stevenson, and it is difficult to explain. However, one explanation is that Stevenson, by referring to the “number” or instalment, means that the entire publication is “first-rate” as a “picter book”. In other words, it is an attractive publication to leaf through. His appreciation for the “Fontainebleaus, the Menzels, the Stryge, the Houdons (above all, Gluck)”, meaning specific illustrations in the number, does not necessarily contradict his criticism of Anthony Henley’s specific pictures as illustrations. The pictures are, to quote Stevenson, “graceful” as pictures. A glance back at Figure 2.1 confirms that it has technical and aesthetic qualities that make it an attractive image. The style is very reminiscent of Jean-Baptiste Corot’s, whose work Stevenson admired, and whose painting of Early Morning Stevenson saw when it was exhibited in the Royal Scottish Academy in 1877.54 Corot had even spent time in Grez, famously painting the bridge that Anthony Henley also chooses as a subject for Stevenson’s essay (Figure 2.2); and he had been a leader of the Barbizon school, along with another of Stevenson’s painter-heroes, Jean-Francois Millet. An image that so clearly owes a stylistic debt to these masters, and of a subject so dear to Stevenson’s heart, was bound to have been attractive to Stevenson as an independent image. However, this is not the point; these images fail as illustrations; they do not adhere to the text. By diverting the reader from the subjects and the specific images that the author conjures for them in prose, they subvert textual authority and compete with, rather than enhance, the text that they should serve. These two critiques, therefore – that the pictures make a “first rate number”, but that as illustrations they have given “different readings” to the text – help us to understand Stevenson’s complex appreciation of both contemporary painting and the art of textual illustration. Writing and painting are obviously very different disciplines; however, when they are brought together on the page, they must function as a single artistic vision, led by the author. The text must contextualize the image, and the image must bring the reader into the text. If the illustrator strays from this task, this cohesion, and the success of the artistic project, is undermined.

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Figure 2.2 Anthony W. Henley, “Fontainebleau: The Bridge at Gretz”.

As another essay in The Magazine of Art demonstrates, illustration that was appropriately married to a story could aid narrative. For a reader, such imagery can shape a specific text indelibly. Echoing the sentiments of “Popular Authors”, Stevenson’s essay “Byways of Book Illustration: Bagster’s Pilgrim’s Progress” articulates the power of imagery to imprint a story on a child’s imagination indelibly, with such power that the imagery lasts a lifetime. In the cinematic age, we are familiar with this process: for example, an entire generation of readers will inevitably read J. R. R.  Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy through the prism of Peter Jackson’s imagery. “Bagster’s Pilgrim’s Progress” demonstrates such a process on the imagination of a young Stevenson. The essay was first suggested by Stevenson, in the same letter of 20 October 1881 in which he suggests “Skelt”. In essence, it is a critique of the illustrations by an unnamed artist to John Bunyan’s famous narrative. The reason he wanted to write this review is that the publication in question, an 1845 illustrated edition of Pilgrim’s Progress published by Samuel Bagster, had clearly had a strong influence on Stevenson. He had received a copy from his parents in 1858, which, according to Swearingen, was inscribed “Robert L. Stevenson. From Pappa and Mamma, Jan. 1, 1858”, meaning he received it at the age of seven.55 Stevenson also mentions the book in a letter to Bob in November 1868, when Louis was 18. This book, therefore, as the essay makes clear, was influential in how Stevenson read, interpreted and remembered Bunyan’s narrative.

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Reviewing Bagster’s Pilgrim’s Progress afforded Stevenson the opportunity to find out who illustrated the text. Stevenson had thought that the artist was T. Condor, a map engraver and bookseller who had engraved the frontispiece of the edition. In fact, Henley was able to ascertain that it was Eunice Bagster, the daughter of the publisher, who had done the illustrations.56 As Stevenson did not have this information at the writing stage, Eunice is referred to anonymously as “he” in the essay. His praise for the pictures is almost effusive: Whoever he was, the author of these wonderful little pictures may lay claim to be the best illustrator of Bunyan. They are not only good illustrations, like so many others; but they are like so few, good illustrations of Bunyan. Their spirit, in defect and quality, is still the same as his own.57 The phrase “the same as his own” speaks to the cohesion of image and text that was lacking in Anthony Henley’s illustrations of “Fontainebleau”. Their “spirit” is a reflection of that of the text: they enhance the reading experience, and aid narrative. They are small images, sparse in design and punctuate the text. They are not concerned with erroneous detail, but rather focus on characters and incident within the narrative, in such a way as to draw the reader’s curiosity. In this way, they avoid the mistake of imbuing a highly allegorical, metaphysical text with lifelike detail or attempts to add to the narrative. Moreover, the illustrations aid narrative by often depicting two scenes almost simultaneously to each other: a before-and-after technique. Stevenson identifies this as very helpful to a youthful reading of the text: “[h]e loves, also, to show us the same event twice over, and to repeat his instantaneous photographs at the interval of but a moment”.58 This technique allows the reader to move through a narrative, but in such a manner that text is always required to explain the movement from one image to the next. A sample page can be seen in Figure 2.3. The immediate attraction of the page is clear, as a child can quickly see and read the action through the pictures and their captions: Christian is confronted by Appolyon who challenges him to combat; they fight, and Appolyon appears to get the upperhand; and finally Christian prevails and thanks God on his knees.59 These illustrations demonstrate some of Stevenson’s theories on the strengths and limitations of imagery in narrating a story. First, we can ascertain the action of the story from these images: our hero, confronted with an intimidating foe, defeats him and gives thanks. However, what cannot be discerned is the meaning or moral of the action. This can only be answered by the text. The images here draw the reader into the story because he or she wants to discover the “why” or the “how”, making these illustrations the ideal, subservient foil to the text they illustrate. Moreover, when viewed on their original page (Figure 2.3), we can see how these interspersed pictures both punctuate the text and simultaneously construct a parallel visual

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Figure 2.3 Eunice Bagster illustrations for Samuel Bagster’s Pilgrim’s Progress.

narrative that the text fleshes out. A child could easily enjoy this text as a picture book depicting action and interesting characters, possibly without even reading the text at all. In Bagster’s original publication, it is possible to “read” the story through the illustrations and their captions; however, as Stevenson’s closing comment articulates, no matter how strong the illustrations to a text, “to feel the contact of essential goodness, to be made in love with piety, the book must be read and not the prints examined”. Text is the authoritative medium, which the illustrations embellish.60 As an illustrated text for children, the images inscribe themselves on the child’s memory, and they help the returning, older reader to visualize and interpret the metaphorical aspects of the text.

Authorial control over illustration The correspondence between Henley and Stevenson over “Bagster’s Pilgrim’s Progress” reveals a problem that would affect illustrated authors for the whole of the nineteenth century: if they were not illustrating their own work (like Thackeray, for instance), authors not only had to rely on illustrators

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to represent their work in the manner they expected, but often they had to rely on publishers to find illustrators, and then had to communicate with those illustrators through the publisher. For an author like Stevenson, who had such a clear visual projection of what he expected from illustration, this arrangement was fraught with potential problems. One problem was the practicality of publishing specific illustrations requested by the author. In a letter to Henley of 11 December 1881, Stevenson requested that certain illustrations be reproduced: I should suggest the party ‘Whispering Blasphemies’ almost immediately after the combat with Apollyon; the outset of Christiana, Mercy and the family, the women speaking together, the kids following, the city of Destruction behind, near the beginning of Part II, and if more were still wanted ‘Resolute Valour’, Greatheart peppering Giant Maul in Part II or the cut ‘They disregard his trouble’ (or words to that effect) on the second or third page of Part I. Don’t let them hash my book.61 Not for the first time, Stevenson is very clear about how his work should look on the printed page. Henley replies to Stevenson a few days later on 17th, to say “I am just now waiting for the electros of some twenty of the cuts, & hope to have it out in my February issue”.62 However, with the exception of “Whispering Blasphemies” and the Appolyon battle, the final publication did not include any of Stevenson’s suggestions. It is not clear why, and the correspondence between the two does not reveal the reasons. A number of reasons are possible: technical problems with the reproductions, a lack of space on the page, tight deadlines or simply editorial interventions. Whatever the reason, the final visual presentation of the essay in The Magazine did not match Stevenson’s vision. This is a demonstration of the difference between an authorial and editorial vision. Perhaps Henley did not have the prints available (Stevenson wrote to him complaining “You must have got the plates of some surely”63). More likely, however, is a difference of opinion between author and editor. The author envisions his text being illustrated in a certain manner, but the editor must put together an illustrated text that will make the most sense to the reader, even if the final product conflicts with the author’s original intentions. The deciding factor here is not who is right, but who has the last word; here, it is the editor. The correspondence regarding the Magazine of Art between these two men reveals a creative but sometimes strained relationship, in which Stevenson often has a specific artistic vision, but Henley makes editorial decisions that undermine or contradict them, such as with “Bagster’s Pilgrim’s Progress”. This is a strain that extended from difficulties they encountered when trying unsuccessfully to produce plays together, and culminated famously when Henley accused Fanny, Stevenson’s wife, of plagiarising a story from Katherine De Mattos.64 Following this, Stevenson broke

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off correspondence, but their Magazine of Art communications reveal much about the pitfalls of producing illustrated literature with artistic integrity. Moreover, Stevenson’s and Henley’s miscommunications over the visual aspects of his Magazine of Art pieces foreshadow very similar barriers that Stevenson would encounter in the illustration of his novels, especially once he relocated to the Pacific. As the discussion of the genesis of the illustrations to his Pacific works in particular will reveal, editorial authority often trumped Stevenson’s desired choices of illustrator, and often even forestalled any illustration at all. Finally, a different kind of problem encountered in The Magazine of Art for Stevenson was poor quality of illustration. He encountered this with his essay “A Modern Cosmopolis”, a travel essay produced like “Fontainebleau” about his previous travel experiences, this time to San Francisco. “A Modern Cosmopolis” was published in the May 1883 issue, which would later become known as “San Francisco”. A travel essay may seem a strange subject for a magazine devoted to art, but a quick reading reveals that Stevenson was participating in a visual project. The essay attempts to evoke strong visual imagery in the reader’s imagination, by using typically sparse but evocative phrasing and vocabulary. For example, the mountain of Tamalpais “springs” and “over-plumbs” the narrow entrance of the bay; “[t]he air is fresh and salt as if you were at sea”; “a forest of masts bristles like bulrushes about its feet”; and “hill after hill is crowded and crowned” with the homes of the wealthy.65 The description of the Chinese Quarter is typical of this suggestive, rather than explicit, visual rendering: Of all romantic places for a boy to loiter in, that Chinese quarter is the most romantic. There, on a half-holiday, three doors from home, he may visit an actual foreign land, foreign in people, language, things, and customs. The very barber of the Arabian Nights shall be at work before him, shaving heads; he shall see Aladdin playing on the streets; who knows, but among those nameless vegetables, the fruit of the nose-tree itself may be exposed for sale? And the interest is heightened with a chill of horror. Below, you hear, the cellars are alive with mystery; opium dens, where the smokers lie one above another, shelf above shelf, close-packed and grovelling in deadly stupor; the seats of unknown vices and cruelties, the prisons of unacknowledged slaves and the secret lazarettos of disease.66 A glance at the accompanying illustration confirms that the style of illustration – naturalistic, literal, and observational – does not match the spirit of the text, which uses allegory (“barber of Arabian Nights” and “Aladdin”) and suggestion (the illicit activity in “the cellars”). The lack of symbiosis between image and text can be explained through examining the creative process behind the essay. Henley had written to Stevenson on 3 July 1882, telling Stevenson that he was going to send images

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Figure 2.4 “In the Chinese Quarter”.

of San Francisco from which the author should write his essay: “There can be but one article on Frisco after all. The photos won’t run to two. So I shall send you pulls of our cuts, & ask you to write in and on about 1500 words more”.67 Six months later, in February 1883, Stevenson writes, “I’ll try and give you the article. It should as you say be easy; but when am I to find time

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and strength: but I’ll try. I have the pictures, and dam [sic] bad they are”.68 It is not clear precisely the type of “pictures” Stevenson has in front of him, whether photographs or proofs of the illustrations, but Stevenson certainly does not seem to have seen the final proofs of the illustrations until the eve of publication. This is revealed in a letter of 30 April 1883 to Henley, in which he mockingly disowns his own work, and derides the illustrations: I cannot think who this is by; it is not by me. But indeed, and in all calmness of spirit, in future you shall write all of the articles yourself. I will not take it at the hands even of a friend. The engravings are worse than the photographs, less pictorial and weaker in tone: it is another example of the evil of the modern, copying-clerk affair.69 From the above comment, it appears that Stevenson only laid eyes on the final engravings once the piece was published in the number, and had certainly seen the photographs from which the engravings were produced. Whether Stevenson was looking at photographs, proofs of the illustrations, or both, the fact remains that Stevenson was being asked to write his essay from visual stimuli. Stevenson had visited San Francisco personally in 1879, and was therefore writing about San Francisco using the images as aide memoires. In this way, the editor could “guide” the author’s creative imagination using the images, structuring the essay through the imagery he provided. This arrangement – Stevenson writing to pictures – was not unprecedented, and not even undesirable, as the next chapters will demonstrate. However, the quality of the imagery was problematic. Stevenson was not impressed with the engravings. This last phrase – “copying-clerk affair” – is a reference to the literal style of the imagery, and the lack of artistic interpretation of the scenes provided by the photographs. Figure 2.4 above provides a good example: compared against its text, the illustration becomes redundant, as the viewer is provided with a very generalized, unidentified street occupied with generic figures in Chinese clothing, all of which bear little to no relation to anything described or evoked by Stevenson’s prose; indeed, Stevenson’s references to Arabian Nights and Aladdin, and hidden “seats of unknown vices and cruelties”, seem like an attempt to enliven and enrich a very bland, unremarkable scene that the image puts before the reader. The text evokes imagery that is unseen, in resistance to the illustration, meaning that the work as an illustrated text is doomed to failure, because text and image are working in competition rather than harmony with each other. This chapter has attempted to draw together Stevenson’s theories on contemporary visual art and illustration from his considerable but fragmented writing on the subject. All this material was published before 1887, which is significant due to the fact that once he left Britain for the Pacific, illustration had to perform different functions, which Chapter 5 will discuss. However, before 1887, Stevenson’s consistency and clarity of artistic vision can be traced through his earliest works, from “Forest Notes” through to his

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Magazine of Art essays and “A Humble Remonstrance”. What might appear to the uninitiated as very disparate works of art – such as an illustrated Pilgrim’s Progress and Japanese painting – become hallmarks of taste, style and effective means of narration in Stevenson’s essays. We can ascertain from his correspondence and essays that he was wary of the over-emphasis of realism in contemporary art and literature, that he valued an economy of style, the marriage of incident and imagery, and that illustration, appropriately conceived and married to the text, was a valuable artistic enterprise. Illustration was fraught with pitfalls, however: “Fontainebleau” demonstrates that even a strong artist could spoil the cohesion of the illustrated text by veering away from the author’s vision and confusing the reader; “A Modern Cosmopolis” is an example of poor illustration resulting from a literal rendering of photographic views; and “Bagster’s Pilgrim’s Progress” demonstrates the relative lack of control over the visual presentation of the final text an author had over that of the editor. Nonetheless, Stevenson actively pursued illustration of many of his texts, especially his novels, at a time when the new wave of writers like Henry James were beginning to resist illustration. An examination of Stevenson’s illustrated texts provides an important example of the point at which “high art” meets popular fiction and reception. In many ways, Stevenson’s novels represent the focal point of this process in the late nineteenth century, in a period that directly precedes the cinematic age; it is at least partly for this reason that Stevenson lost his position as a serious writer and thinker for much of the twentieth century. This chapter has attempted to reposition Stevenson as a major writer about art; the following chapters will posit Stevenson as a writer who purposefully embraced the illustration of his work as both a commercial and artistic enterprise.

Notes 1. The publication of volume 9 of the Journal of Stevenson Studies (2012) is devoted to Stevenson’s essays, while The Edinburgh Companion to Robert Louis Stevenson (2010) and Robert Louis Stevenson: Writer of Boundaries (2006) have contributed to raising Stevenson’s reputation as a serious writer amongst literary scholarship. 2. Robert Louis Stevenson, “On the Art of Literature”, ed. Roger Swearingen, Journal of Stevenson Studies no. 7 (2010): 131–142. 3. Robert Louis Stevenson, “On the Art of Literature”, p. 135. 4. Ibid. 5. For an extended discussion of Scott’s statement on illustration from the short story “The Death of the Laird’s Jock”, see Richard J. Hill, Picturing Scotland through the Waverley Novels. 6. Robert Louis Stevenson, “On the Art of Literature”, p. 140. 7. Robert Louis Stevenson, “A Gossip on Romance”, The Lantern-Bearers and Other Essays, New York: Cooper Square Press, 1999, p. 180. 8. Robert Louis Stevenson, “On the Art of Literature”, p. 140.

74 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35.

36.

Stevenson and art pre-1887 Robert Louis Stevenson, “A Gossip on Romance”, p. 180. Robert Louis Stevenson, “A Gossip on Romance”, p. 181. Ibid. Robert Louis Stevenson, ‘A Gossip on Romance’, p. 176. Robert Louis Stevenson, ‘A Gossip on Romance’, The Lantern-Bearers and Other Essays, ed. Jeremy Treglown, New York: Cooper Square Press, 1999, p. 175. Robert Louis Stevenson, Letters, 4:141. Robert Louis Stevenson, “A Note on Realism”, Magazine of Art, London: Cassell & Co., 1884, p. 26. Ibid. Robert Louis Stevenson, “On the Art of Literature”, p. 134. Robert Louis Stevenson, “A Note on Realism”, p. 28. See John Lyon, “Stevenson and Henry James”, The Edinburgh Companion to Robert Louis Stevenson, ed. Penny Fielding, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010, pp. 134–146. Ibid. Robert Louis Stevenson, The Lantern-Bearers and Other Essays, ed. Jeremy Treglown, New York: Cooper Square Press, 1999, ‘A Humble Remonstrance’, p. 195. Ibid. Robert Louis Stevenson, ‘A Humble Remonstrance’, p. 194. Robert Louis Stevenson, ‘A Humble Remonstrance’, pp. 199–200. Robert Louis Stevenson, Letters, 8 vols., 4:169. Ibid. Robert Louis Stevenson. “Books and Reading. No. 2. How books have to be written”. Ed. Richard Dury. Journal of Stevenson Studies no. 9 (2012): 343–346. Richard Dury. “Notes on ‘Books and Reading’”. Journal of Stevenson Studies no. 9 (2012): 346–353. Robert Louis Stevenson, “Books and Reading. No. 2. How books have to be written”, p. 344. Robert Louis Stevenson, “Books and Reading. No. 2. How books have to be written”, p. 346. Hidemichi Tanaka, ‘Cezanne and Japonisme’, Artibus et Historiae, Vol. 22, no. 44 (2001), pp. 201–220. Robert Louis Stevenson, Letters, 8 vols., 2:64. Robert Louis Stevenson, Letters, 8 vols., 3:277. Ibid. Robert Louis Stevenson, Letters, 8 vols., 3:349–350. In a letter to Henley dated early May 1883, he writes “My dear lad, I have determined, dèche or no dèche, in the light of Treasure Island, to offer myself and my wife a wedding present in the shape of a complete Hokusai; you know where to get it, I believe, and I think you said it was not dear; I’ll go three pounds—O, I’ll go four—and—but I hope four’ll do. [] Pray, pray, send ‘em to me, skimming; I burn, I long, I die for ‘em. [] Divine Hokusai!”. The prints referred to here are thirteen printed volumes which, according to Booth and Mehew, are now housed in Silverado. See Letters, 8 vols., 4:122. Robert Louis Stevenson, “Byways of Book Illustration: Two Japanese Romances,” Magazine of Art, London: Cassell & Co., 1883, p. 14.

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37. Ibid. 38. Robert Louis Stevenson, “Popular Authors”, Scribner’s Magazine, no. IV (July 1888): 122–128, p. 125. 39. Robert Louis Stevenson, “A Penny Plain and Twopence Coloured”, Magazine of Art, London: Cassell & Co., 1884, p. 216–217. 40. Robert Louis Stevenson, “A Penny Plain and Twopence Coloured”, p. 230. 41. Robert Louis Stevenson, “A Penny Plain and Twopence Coloured”, p. 228. 42. Robert Louis Stevenson, “A Penny Plain and Twopence Coloured”, p. 229. 43. Robert Louis Stevenson, “Forest Notes: Idle Hours”, The Lantern-Bearers and Other Essays, ed. Jeremy Trelgown (New York: Cooper Square Press, 1999), p. 26. 44. Robert Louis Stevenson, “Forest Notes: Idle Hours”, p. 27. 45. Ibid. 46. Ibid. 47. Robert Louis Stevenson, Letters, 8 vols., 4:130. 48. Robert Louis Stevenson, Letters, 8 vols., 4:135. 49. Robert Louis Stevenson, Letters, 8 vols., 4:142. 50. “Fontainebleau” was reproduced with Across the Plains in 1892, in an edited form without Anthony Henley’s illustrations, and consequently without this final paragraph. 51. Robert Louis Stevenson, Letters, 8 vols., 4:286. 52. Robert Louis Stevenson, “Fontainebleau”, Magazine of Art, London: Cassell and Co., 1884, p. 345. 53. Robert Louis Stevenson, “Fontainebleau”, p. 269. 54. In a letter of late February or early March 1877 to his cousin Bob, who was exhibiting three landscapes of his own, Stevenson writes “One of them [Bob’s paintings] is in the same room with the Corot [Early Morning]; the Corot is better than yours. The damned raving maniacs up here don’t understand Corot. Chalmers, who got the thing for the exhibition, nearly wept with gratitude when he found I liked it”. See Robert Louis Stevenson, Letters, 8 vols., 2:204. 55. Roger Swearingen, The Prose Writings of Robert Louis Stevenson, p. 72. 56. W. E. Henley, The Letters of William Ernest Henley to Robert Louis Stevenson, ed. by Damian Atkinson, High Wycombe: Rivendale Press, 2008, p. 151 & n. Charles Scribner later discovered from Bagster’s firm that the publisher’s brother, Jonathan, had completed the illustration of the fight with Apollyon. 57. Robert Louis Stevenson, “Byways of Book Illustration: Bagster’s Pilgrim’s Progress”, Magazine of Art, London: Cassell & Co., 1882, p. 169. 58. Robert Louis Stevenson, “Byways of Book Illustration: Bagster’s Pilgrim’s Progress”, p. 173. 59. In The Magazine of Art, however, Henley only reproduced the first and the last of these pictures (the confrontation and the final victory), and not the page in its entirety. 60. Robert Louis Stevenson, “Byways of Book Illustration: Bagster’s Pilgrim’s Progress”, p. 174. 61. Robert Louis Stevenson, Letters, 8 vols., 3:260. 62. W. E. Henley, Letters, p. 151. 63. Robert Louis Stevenson, Letters, 8 vols., 3:237. 64. Their friendship ended when, in 1888, Henley insinuated that a short story published by Fanny was in fact plagiarized from a story by Katherine de Mattos.

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65. 66. 67. 68. 69.

Stevenson and art pre-1887 Stevenson was deeply pained by the suggestion and broke off correspondence, having defended his wife’s honour in a notably stiff, formal letter to his former friend, (Letters, 8 vols., 6:188–89, 7 May 1888). Robert Louis Stevenson, “A Modern Cosmopolis”, The Magazine of Art, London: Cassell & Co., 1883, p. 273. Robert Louis Stevenson, “A Modern Cosmopolis”, 274–5. W. E. Henley, Letters, 167. Robert Louis Stevenson, Letters, 8 vols., 4:72. Robert Louis Stevenson, Letters, 8 vols., 4:108.

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Stevenson and the art of illustration In a letter dated 8 April 1882, from his winter dwelling in Davos, Stevenson wrote to his mother protesting that “I have this winter, finished Treasure Island, written the preface to the Studies, a small book about the Inland Voyage size—The Silverado Squatters and over and above that upwards of ninety—90—Cornhill pages of Magazine work. No man can say I have been idle”.1 His tone is defensive, as if he were confronting charges of idleness that may or may not have been made by his parents. In fact, he undersells himself here, because during this stay in Davos he had also produced his first self-illustrated series of poems, Moral Emblems. Less than a month previous to this letter, on 20 March 1882, Stevenson had written to his mother about his favourite new endeavour: “Wood-engraving has now drave [sic] suddenly between me and the sun. I dote on wood engraving. I’m a made man for life. I have an amusement at last.”2 This is the first reference to a joint project Stevenson undertook with a thirteen year-old Lloyd Osbourne in producing the first series of illustrations and accompanying poems for Moral Emblems, a project that has been largely overlooked by Stevenson scholarship and biography, but one that must take a place of significance in the creative life of the author.3 By late March, Stevenson was sending completed copies of Moral Emblems – a total of five illustrated poems – to friends and family, deriding his own efforts, but also clearly proud of them. The series was produced at a very significant time in Stevenson’s life (and in Stevenson scholarship), while he was rewriting Treasure Island for its publication as a book, which he had hoped would be illustrated. It was also undertaken during a period in which Stevenson was writing his essays for the Magazine of Art; as this chapter argues, Moral Emblems therefore constitutes an experiment in practicing some of his own theories on textual illustration. Moral Emblems has not registered in Stevenson studies for several reasons: firstly, it is lost amongst the obvious interest in the contemporaneous rewriting of Treasure Island; secondly, it was arguably not a “real” publication, because it was self-produced on Osbourne’s printing press for private circulation; and lastly, because of this, it is seen as an interesting but frivolous side-note to more important artistic developments, such as his

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essays for the Magazine of Art, his “Gossip on Romance” and The Silverado Squatters. Indeed, Stevenson himself doesn’t mention it to his mother when boasting of his efforts, suggesting that even he did not see this as a serious enterprise. However, I will argue that we can trace important artistic developments and theories concerning the marriage of image and text in this amateur production, which can be identified and traced through subsequent opinions on illustrations to his novels. Moral Emblems, much like Treasure Island before it, came about through play: bored and attempting to entertain Osbourne in Braemar in 1881, Stevenson drew a treasure map, which would evolve into the famous novel; bored again (despite his heavy workload), and apparently penniless, in Davos in March in 1882, he began cutting blocks for Lloyd which he then undertook to illustrate with poems. Stevenson, who, according to Fanny, was happiest avoiding grown-up duties by paying attention to childish ones, encouraged Osbourne’s “publishing” by writing a poem for him to publish and sell to the locals.4 Osbourne relates the story as follows: Louis, as the little boy always called his stepfather, with a familiarity that was much criticised by strangers, followed this publishing venture with absorbing interest. Then his own ambitions awakened, and one day, with an affected humility that was most embarrassing, he called at the office [presumably Lloyd’s bedroom], and submitted a manuscript called, ‘Not I, and Other Poems,’ which the firm of Osbourne and Co. gladly accepted on the spot.5 It was an instantaneous hit, selling out an entire edition of fifty copies. The publisher was thrilled, and the author was equally jubilant, saying it was the only successful book he had ever written, and jingling his three francs of royalties with an air that made the little boy burst out laughing with delighted pride. In the ensuing enthusiasm another book was planned, and the first poem for it written. ‘If only we could have illustrations,’ said the publisher longingly. But his ‘cuts’ had all been used in Black Canyon, or Life in the Far West [blocks included in the play-set that Lloyd had worn out in his pamphlets for the theatre company]. Illustrations had to be put by as a dream impossible of fulfilment. No, not impossible! Louis, who was a man of infinite resourcefulness (he could paint better theatre-scenes than any one could buy), said that he would try to carve some pictures on squares of fretwood. … He had only a pocket-knife; real tools came later; but he was impelled by a will to win that carried all before it. After an afternoon of almost suffocating excitement—for the publisher—he completed the engraving that accompanied the poem: ‘Reader, your soul upraise to see’.6 Osbourne goes on to describe how Stevenson began to apply himself to this task of cutting blocks from which to write supporting poems, which then formed the first collection of Moral Emblems. He would continue this

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project once he returned to Scotland, cutting blocks and writing poems from Kingussie in the summer of 1882, and writing the final poem, which eventually went unillustrated, as late as 1884. In fact, Moral Emblems remains not only his single effort at self-illustration, but also a very important experiment for Stevenson in establishing theories of the potential of marrying image and text within a single work of art. To read Stevenson’s tale of the genesis of Treasure Island through the drawing of a map and the subsequent novel in his retrospective essay “My First Book”, published the year he died in 1894, we can see that Treasure Island came into being in a similar manner to Moral Emblems, both of which began not with story but with image. Stevenson writes: He [Lloyd] had no thought of literature; it was the art of Raphael that received his fleeting suffrages, and with aid of pen and ink and shilling box of water-colours, he had soon turned one of the rooms into a picture gallery. My more immediate duty towards the gallery was to be showman; but I would sometimes unbend a little, join the artist (so to speak) at the easel, and pass the afternoon with him in a generous emulation, making coloured drawings. On one of these occasions I made the map of an island; it was elaborately and (I thought) beautifully coloured; the shape of it took my fancy beyond expression; it contained harbours that pleased me like sonnets; and with the unconsciousness of the predestined, I ticketed my performance Treasure Island. […] [A]s I poured upon my map of Treasure Island, the future characters of the book began to appear there visibly among imaginary woods… The next thing I knew, I had some paper before me and was writing out a list of chapters.7 The writing of Treasure Island is stimulated through the visual medium of a map: the creation of a map through childish play led to a visual framework upon which Stevenson’s imagination could begin to mould character and incident, eventually leading to a narrative structure and the final novel. There has been much written on this prescient moment in Stevenson’s life, but the point I wish to highlight is how similar this moment is to others in his life, particularly before he left Britain in 1887. Building on the discussion of the influence of maps on Stevenson’s imagination, a close analysis of Moral Emblems will demonstrate Stevenson’s genius was often sparked as much by what he was looking at as what he read; whether it was maps, landscapes of his native Scotland, or illustrations in a pirate history, imagery impressed itself on Stevenson’s imagination, informing the consequent literature for which he then sought illustration. Moral Emblems In February 1880, while staying in San Francisco, Osbourne received a miniature printing-press, which, according to Booth and Mayhew, allowed

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him to print off, in “a very crude fashion, a small newspaper, The Daily Surprise, of which three issues survive. This gave way to The Surprise, ‘A  Journel published Semi-monthly by S.L. Osbourne & Co. at Locust Grove, Sonoma’”.8 The first poem that would later appear in Moral Emblems, “Not I!”, was published in its first issue, on 6 March 1880. This press was taken with the family back across the U.S. and over to Europe, where it ended up supporting them in Davos. Osbourne established a business for himself, the “Davos Printing Press”, printing letterhead paper on which much of Stevenson’s correspondence was written during this period. This letterhead first appeared in a letter of late October 1881, while Stevenson was still drafting Treasure Island for its first appearance in Young Folks Paper. Stevenson was well underway with the story by this point, writing to Young Folks’ editor James Henderson on 11 November with chapters 19 to 21, and promising that the story would soon be complete; according to Roger Swearingen, the story was finished that November in Davos.9 Young Folks published Treasure Island in 17 weekly instalments from 1  October 1881 to 28 January 1882 with only one illustration, published in the first episode. However, even in writing for the serialized magazine publication, he envisaged publishing the story later in the form of an illustrated book, as revealed in another letter to Henley of late November 1881: “[i]n five weeks, six at the latest, I should have a complete proof of Treasure Island. It will be from 75 to 80,000 words; and with anything like half good pictures, it should sell. I suppose I may at least hope for eight pic’s? I aspire after ten or twelve”.10 This would not come to pass: Cassell and Co.’s 1883 book publication was unillustrated. However, his comment here does suggest that the story was conceived as an illustrated boy’s adventure. In February 1882, Stevenson wrote to Henley that “I’ve agreed to rewrite Treasure Island—dam folly, I believe, but so it is”, a task that was undertaken and completed by 8 April 1882.11 The purpose of rewriting the story was to reconstruct the narrative for the novel form, so that Henley, who, at the time, was working in the educational department of Cassell and Company, could negotiate with his employers for a contract on Stevenson’s behalf.12 These dates, therefore, are important in establishing that five of the woodcuts and poems for the original series of Moral Emblems were produced while he was re-writing Treasure Island, which he hoped would be illustrated. Therefore, at a time in which Stevenson was writing about the art of illustration for the Magazine of Art, and was writing what he hoped would be an illustrated adventure story, he was working on his own illustrated project, Moral Emblems. The full collection that today constitutes Moral Emblems was in fact written and partially published over a four-year period, and posthumously published as a collection in 1921 by Charles Scribner’s Sons. “Not I!” was first written in February of 1880 for Osbourne’s newspaper; this poem was then collected and published in shorter form with four other poems by the Davos Press as Not I, and Other Poems. These poems included “Some like drink”,

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“Here, perfect to a wish”, “As seamen on the seas” and “The pamphlet here presented”. This was published in October 1881, as Booth and Mayhew have discerned from a strange and obviously playful letter sent by Stevenson to Edmund Gosse, which referred to “our last publication as per contract”. Booth and Mayhew discuss this letter, stating that “[t]his must be RLS’s Not I, and Other Poems, one of the Davos booklets published by Lloyd. On the last page this is described as ‘Begun FEB ended OCT 1881’”.13 This last observation – that the poems were written between February and October 1881 – place the production of Not I, and Other Poems during the writing of Treasure Island. These poems, however, were not illustrated. It was not until March of 1882 that Stevenson actually took up a block of “fretwood” (which, in Osbourne’s words, was “an extremely thin piece of board with which one was supposed to make works of art with the help of pasted-on patterns, an aggravating little saw, and the patience of Job”),14 and began making a very rudimentary carving for the first “emblem”, “See how the children in the print”. The first series of Moral Emblems: A Collection of Cuts and Verses included this poem, as well as “Reader, your soul upraise to see”, “A peak in Darien—Broad gazing on untrodden lands”, “See in the print how, moved by whim” and “Mark, printed on the opposing page”. According to Osbourne, when these cuts and poems were sent to friends and family in England, including Henley, Charles Baxter, Stevenson’s parents and Sidney Colvin, they wrote asking for more, which resulted in a second suite, Moral Emblems II, again produced on Osbourne’s press. These poems included “With storms a-weather, rocks a-lee”, “The careful angler chose his nook”, “The Abbot for a walk went out”, “The frozen peaks he once explored” and “Industrious pirate! see him sweep”. According to Osbourne, and indeed also to Stevenson’s own admission to his mother quoted above, wood-engraving was a wonderful distraction for the author when all else became overwhelming. Osbourne writes that “[h]e worked like a beaver, saying that it was the best relaxation he had ever found. The little boy [Osbourne] once overheard him confiding to a visitor: ‘I cannot tell you what a Godsend these silly blocks have been to me. When I can write no more, and read no more, and think no more I can pass whole hours engraving these blocks in blissful contentment.’ These may not have been the actual words, but such at least was their sense”.15 In corroboration of this distantly remembered paraphrase (Osbourne was writing in 1921 of a memory of 1882), Stevenson wrote to his cousin Bob on 16 April 1882 in a tone that is both proud and self-deprecatory in its irony: I inclose [sic] all my artistic works; they are wood cuts – I cut them with a knife out of blocks of wood; I am a wood-engraver; I aaaam a wooooood engraaaaver’. Sam then prints ’em: are they not fun? I doat on them; in my next venture, I am going to have colour printing; it will be very laborious six blocks to cut for each picter, but the result should be pyramidal.16

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Stevenson’s “next venture”, would be completed back in Scotland in the summer of 1882. While staying in Kingussie, a period during which Stevenson was researching a historical highland tale that would later become Kidnapped, he was not only working away at more blocks, but improving his technique and developing his own style. Here, between July and October of 1882, he engraved blocks and wrote supporting poems for a collection called The Graver and the Pen: or, Scenes from Nature, with Appropriate Verses, including six poems, five of which were illustrated: “Proem” (not illustrated), “The Precarious Mill”, “The Disputatious Pines”, “The Tramps”, “The Foolhardy Geographer” and “The Angler and the Clown”. Osbourne notes in his 1921 introduction how much Stevenson had improved his engraving, remarking that by the time he returned home to his mother, “[t]he stepfather, who had made much more progress with engraving than the boy had with Latin, had the blocks and poems all ready for The Graver and the Pen”.17 As will be demonstrated, these cuts not only reveal an improved engraving technique, but also play with a different type of literary illustration, in which the cut and the poem create tension rather than harmony. Osbourne notes that The Graver and the Pen was “the last enterprise of Osbourne and Co. The Pirate and the Apothecary was projected; three superb illustrations were engraved for it; yet it never saw more light then the typewriter afforded. The Builder’s Doom … remained in manuscript… No illustrations were either drawn nor engraved for it.”18 These two poems complete Moral Emblems, which was posthumously published with Osbourne’s help by Charles Scribners’s Sons in 1921 as Moral Emblems and Other Poems. I will argue that, with Robin and Ben: or, the Pirate and the Apothecary, which was written in November 1882 in St. Marcel, Stevenson produced his most accomplished engravings for the only narrative poem in the collection. As this discussion will demonstrate, Stevenson was developing an understanding of how illustration in a picture book could work for narrative, inviting curious readers into a story that illustration cannot tell by itself. This is a technique he identifies in his unpublished review of the Treasure Island illustrations by the French artist George Roux three years later in 1885.

Experiments in wood and words It is important to note an obvious fact about Moral Emblems: it is a visual text, in which the text, and not the image, serves as illustration. In this sense, it is still an “illustrated text”, but not in the typically received sense of the phrase. The word “emblem” connotes imagery; an emblem is an allegorical image, which is usually accompanied or inscribed with a verse or moral lesson. It is visual in nature, combining text and image but in the inverse relationship to a typical nineteenth-century illustrated text, in that it privileges image over text. As Stevenson knew well, any child picking up

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a picture book begins with the pictures. However, the pictures need explanations, which the poems provide. Image and text work in conjunction to produce the emblems. The first thing any reader – not just connoisseurs of Victorian illustrated texts – would notice on browsing Moral Emblems, is the rudimentary, amateur fashion of the cuts. Stevenson was not deluded about their pictorial qualities, but he was nevertheless proud of his efforts. He sent a copy to his friend Edmund Gosse on 28 March 1882, with the following comments: I now send (for Mrs Gosse) BLACK CANYON [by Lloyd] Also an advertisement of my new appearance as poet (bard, rather) and hartis [sic] on wood. The cut represents the Hero and the Eagle, and is emblematic of Cortez first viewing the Pacific Ocean, which (according to the bard, Keats) it took place in Darien. The cut is much admired for the sentiment of discovery, the manly proportions of the voyager and the fine impression of tropical scenes and the Untrodden Waste, so aptly rendered by the hartis.19 The “Black Canyon” was one of Lloyd’s pre-cut blocks, and not Stevenson’s creation. However, it seems that Stevenson had also sent Gosse the cut of “A Peak in Darien”. The irony of this lofty description is clear when juxtaposed with the picture itself (Figure 3.1). Stevenson’s introduction to the image is amusing in its ironically high rhetoric, a self-deprecatory tone that half conceals a real pride behind his

Figure 3.1 R. L. Stevenson, for ‘A Peak in Darien’ in Moral Emblems I.

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efforts. The illustration is minimalism itself. To the seasoned illustrator it is almost childish in execution, and by itself is meaningless without its corresponding poem. Stevenson’s letter provides context – “the Hero and the Eagle…emblematic of Cortez first viewing the Pacific Ocean” – which is both entertaining due to its pretence to heroic subject matter, and telling in that without it, it appears to show a man waving at a bird. The image, therefore, requires its poem for comprehension: Broad-gazing on untrodden lands, See where adventurous Cortez stands; While in the heavens above his head The Eagle seeks its daily bread. How aptly fact to fact replies: Heroes and eagles, hills and skies. Ye who contemn the fatted slave Look on this emblem, and be brave. We learn first from this that the figure represents Hernán Cortés (who, according to legend, discovered the Pacific Ocean after his conquest of the Aztecs), and the bird represents an eagle; this knowledge lends the image symbolic meaning and a visual language, Cortez reaching up to and identifying with the eagle, which represents freedom, courage and strength. In the final couplet, Stevenson finally provides the “moral” of the emblem, referring to Cortez as a liberator of the victims of human sacrifice (the “fatted slave”) of the Aztec capital, Tenochtitlan, which Cortez sacked in 1521. This poem takes its lead from Keats’s historically inaccurate poem “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer”, which closes with the lines: Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes He star’d at the Pacific—and all his men Look’d at each other with a wild surmise— Silent, upon a peak in Darien.20 We see here the direct literary influence on the cut and the poem. A question remains unanswered, however: did Stevenson cut the plate with this reference and the visual language in mind, or is the emblem the result of a random image upon which Stevenson later imposes meaning? In other words, is the emblem (cut and poem) a preconceived work of art, or an organically created production in which an arbitrary image, like the map of Treasure Island, is subsequently lent meaning, context, and symbolism by Stevenson’s text? We can deduce in many instances that the cuts were completed first because the poem references the cut: “See where adventurous Cortez stands”. The viewer/reader is being directed to the image, and being instructed how to view the image, meaning firstly that the image must have pre-existed the poem, and secondly that the image requires interpretation.

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This technique is used in all the first series of poems. The first gives away its debt to the cut in its title, “See how the children in the print”. The poem is in fact a brief meditation on the power of image to engage children in the reading process: See how the children in the print Bound on the book to see what’s in ‘t! O, like these pretty babes, may you Seize and apply this volume too! And while your eye upon the cuts With harmless ardour opes and shuts, Reader, may your immortal mind To their sage lessons not be blind.21 The image, as with “A Peak in Darien”, relies on the poem for comprehension, because the crudely depicted figures relay no meaningful information, and the adult figure holds an oblong item which could be anything; the poem tells us it’s an illustrated book, and that children enjoy illustrated literature, which can become a means through which lessons can be imparted to them (Figure 3.2). This, of course, is the purpose of Moral Emblems. The next poem references the author himself, which he does several times throughout the series: here Stevenson writes “Reader, your soul upraise to see/In yon fair cut designed by me,/The pauper by the highwayside/Vainly soliciting from pride”. The image again is crudely cut with two figures, one

Figure 3.2 RLS, “Reader, your soul upraise to see”.

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sitting and one walking, with no way for the viewer to extract an explicit meaning without its appended poem. Then, following “A Peak in Darien”, there is an image that seems out of place in the series, as it depicts what appears to be an elephant and a bird with the figure of a man. This image is out of step with the series in its depiction of exotic animals, and the even poorer execution than its counterparts’. The reason for this is that it was cut by Stevenson’s wife, Fanny. Correspondence reveals that Fanny had tried her hand at woodcutting, but hurt herself in the process. In a letter of 19 April 1882 to R. D. Blackmore, Stevenson writes that “Missus did the elephant and began a caricature of Master but cut her hand so badly that she gave up wood engraving forever; all the rest are done by Master”.22 The accompanying poem ties the unusual collection of figures together: See in the print how, moved by whim, Trumpeting Jumbo, great and grim, Adjusts his trunk, like a cravat, To noose that individual’s hat. The sacred Ibis in the distance Joys to observe his bold resistance.23 Unlike every other poem in Moral Emblems, this poem does not present a “moral”. It is a comic poem that attempts to tie together three indiscriminate and unrelated figures. Therefore, Fanny’s cut supports the hypothesis that of the images that Stevenson cut himself, he did have a pre-conceived notion of what his image represented and what moral his poem might offer; when an “outside” image is introduced, he has to make the best of the situation and react to what is in front of him. The final cut, “Mark, printed on the opposing page” (Figure 3.3), is more immediately engaging as an image, depicting one man having apparently been punched and falling off a cliff. This image denotes a slight shift from the previous four, in that it depicts dramatic action. It’s a subtle difference, but significant because it marks a realisation of a theory of illustration he was developing regarding the illustration of narrative. The illustration gives the reader a glimpse of a curious, exciting, comic moment that generates reader engagement: what is this picture depicting? Why is this man punching the other? Why are they on a cliff? The image works in a manner that is best described by Roland Barthes’s hermeneutic code, which, although it discusses rhetorical technique, can be usefully applied to narrative illustration.24 The image sets up an enigma, a small mystery that must be explained by further reading. Stevenson then provides meaning to the image with the following poem: Mark, printed on the opposing page, The unfortunate effects of rage. A man (who might be you or me)

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Figure 3.3 RLS, “Mark, printed on the opposing page”.

Hurls another into the sea. Poor soul, his unreflecting act His future joys will much contract, And he will spoil his evening toddy By dwelling on that mangled body.25 Again, as with the rest of the series, the image is imbued with pedagogical and metaphorical meaning for a young reader, who is asked to consider the consequences of rage and violence. Of significance here, however, is the technique, in which the cut, in its crude but effective fashion, invites the reader into the poem: we see the cut first, it raises questions due to the drama of the action, and we then read the commentary that explains it before providing a moral. The next series of cuts, Moral Emblems II, develops this technique. We can see immediately on turning to the first cut for “With storms a-weather, rocks–lee” that Stevenson has improved technically as a wood-block engraver. Stevenson has, with this set of cuts, become more adept at depicting line and depth through simple designs, which frees him up to communicate more complex visual signs and symbols. In their simplicity and economy of design, these cuts are reminiscent of the Japanese style of visual representation he praises in “Byways of Book Illustration: Two Japanese Romances”. This can be discerned in Figure 3.4. The cut for “With storms a-weather, rocks a-lee” bears a strong compositional similarity to a Japanese

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print by Utagawa Hiroshige entitled “The Sea at Satta in Suruga Province” (1858), particularly in its positioning of the boat, the churning seas and the cliffs. The design of the character on the shore is much more clearly and subtly delineated than the figures in Stevenson’s previous cuts. The floundering ship is also depicted in foreshortened perspective and in the distance, giving the image depth of plain. Finally, the black clouds lend the image a symbolism of impending doom, while also serving to balance the composition by filling blank space between the character and the ship. Most significantly, however, the image again depicts a moment of curiosity or drama, both through composition and symbolism. The illustrative poem is more suggestive of narrative than any previous image in the collection: With storms a-weather, rocks a-lee, The dancing skiff puts forth to sea. The lone dissenter in the blast Recoils before the sight aghast. But she, although the heavens be black, Holds on upon the starboard tack, For why? although to-day she sink, Still safe she sails in printer’s ink, And though to-day the seamen drown, My cut shall hand their memory down.26 Remembering that these poems are written for children, Stevenson lines his tragic tale of the sinking ship with the commemorative power of imagery and poetry. The cut and the poem perform the function of preserving memory, both teaching the child-reader about death while offering a way to cope with it through memorialisation.

Figure 3.4 RLS, “With storms a-weather, rocks a-lee”.

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The rest of the poems in Moral Emblems II, with the exception of a pastoral image of the angler in the second poem, continue these darker themes of violence and death, albeit in slightly comic terms. “The Abbot for a walk went out” depicts an abbot being murdered by a man throwing a spear into his back, the darkly comic moral being that “Hence we may learn that Abbots should/ Never go walking in a wood”, offering the reader little comfort about the randomness of violence (a theme Stevenson revisits many times in his fiction, but from this period most famously with Long John Silver’s murder of Tom in front of a shocked Jim Hawkins).27 “The frozen peaks he once explored” then depicts a traveller who comes across the body of a dead man by the side of the road, who, according to the poem, is an explorer who has died while exploring! The moral here is similarly down-beat: “So, if you would be spared to friends,/ Do nothing but for business ends”, a “moral” that discourages boys from frivolous or purposeless exploration. Moral Emblems II finishes with a more upbeat, romantic tone, however. The cut depicts a pirate scanning the shore with a telescope. It seems, like Treasure Island, to romanticize the idea of the freedom of the pirate life: “You also scan your life’s horizon/For all that you can clap your eyes on”.28 With the exception, therefore, of “The careful angler chose his nook”, these cuts foreground drama and narrative, inviting curiosity from the reader who must then read the poem for meaning. The cuts for The Graver and the Pen, completed later in 1882, take a different direction. Again, Stevenson’s technique has improved, to the point where the viewer can recognize a distinct style that is reminiscent of Van Gogh’s use of line and composition (although it is highly unlikely Stevenson came across Van Gogh’s work). Before discussing the cuts, however, it is worth quoting in full the “Proem”, which is unillustrated, but constitutes a meditation on the art of illustration: Unlike the common run of men, I wield a double power to please, And use the GRAVER and the PEN With equal aptitude and ease. I move with that illustrious crew, The ambidextrous Kings of Art; And every mortal thing I do Brings ringing money in the mart. Hence, in the morning hour, the mead, The forest and the stream perceive Me wandering as the muses lead— Or back returning in the eve. Two muses like two maiden aunts, The engraving and the singing muse, Follow, through all my favourite haunts, My devious traces in the dews.

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Although heavily ironic, as Stevenson was under no illusion that he did not have the “aptitude and ease” with the graver that he did with the pen, we can detect a real pleasure in the work he was undertaking, and a certain appreciation, even perhaps jealousy, of the rare breed, or “illustrious crew”, who were masters of both, such as Randolph Caldecott, Kate Greenaway and Howard Pyle. We get the sense from this poem that Stevenson would have liked to have been able to illustrate his own work aptly, but ultimately had to defer to the greater skill of others. It may be that Moral Emblems was an exercise in discovering his own limits as an artist. In any case, Stevenson views the illustrated text as the marriage of two very different artistic endeavours that should work together in a mutually enriching way, which, as discussed below, is a sentiment he raises with the illustrations to Treasure Island. The last point to be made here, however, is that Stevenson identifies the market power of the illustrated text; an appropriately illustrated book “Brings ringing money in the mart”, a fact that he was concerned with in rewriting Treasure Island. Fame and fortune would not really come to Stevenson for another four years, with the publication in 1886 of Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, and therefore he was always conscious of the aesthetic value of his books in the market place. For this reason, he was always pushing his reluctant English publishers to have his works, such as New Arabian Nights, Treasure Island and The Black Arrow, illustrated, because this would increase their market value as commodities, recalling to mind his comment to Henley that “with anything like half good pictures, [Treasure Island] should sell”.30 The cuts that follow the “Proem” no longer depict scenes of intrigue or action, but rather still-life vistas, quiet scenes that, according to the “Proem”, have been observed “through all my favourite haunts”. There is more of an emphasis on style and technique than narrative to these cuts, relying even more on the poems to provide them with meaning. This collection of emblems plays a different game with its readers: the seemingly peaceful scenes are undermined by the tone of the poems that illustrate them. For example, the first is a simple depiction of a water mill, with no figures or action, peaceful by all appearances; in the poem, however, we are taken inside the mill, in which the hard-living miller bemoans his dilapidated dwelling and poverty. The next poem, “The Disputatious Pines”, requires an even more imaginative jump, turning a peaceful landscape into a “disputatious” conversation between the two trees that dominate it, undermining the seeming harmony of the scene. By undermining the harmony of the landscape, the cut creates a tension with its poem. With these cuts, we see Stevenson playing with a different kind of image, pictures that present a serene surface reality, illustrated by poems which go beneath surface to reveal a more disturbing truth.

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Appearances, in these cuts, are not necessarily what they seem. For example, in “The Tramps”, a pastoral sunset scene with three characters at rest is transformed by its poem into an observation of exhausted tramps resting wearily by the road: Now long enough had day endured, Or King Apollo Palinured, Seaward he steers his panting team, And casts on earth his latest gleam. But see! the Tramps with jaded eye Their destined provinces espy. Long through the hills their way they took, Long camped beside the mountain brook; ’Tis over; now with rising hope They pause upon the downward slope, And as their aching bones they rest, Their anxious captain scans the west. So paused Alaric on the Alps And ciphered up the Roman scalps.31 A pastoral scene here becomes a springboard for symbolic interpretation; the simple image becomes an allegory of poverty, perseverance and conquest, complete with classical allusion. Imagery here is an inspiration to unexpected and creative interpretation, and the poem changes the visual language of the picture rather than explaining it. Similarly, in “The Foolhardy Geographer” a figure enjoying a picnic becomes a warning of falling asleep in the wild in case of hungry predators; and “The Angler and the Clown” becomes a commentary on the foolishness of the city-dweller fishing in empty waters. The cuts by themselves offer the reader aesthetic pleasures of landscapes in more formal compositions, but they lull the reader into a false reality. Unlike the other emblems in the series, these emblems create a tension between text and image: their purpose is to unsettle the reader rather than to explicate each other. The moral for children here is that pleasant surfaces often conceal troubled realities beneath. “Robin and Ben: or, the Pirate and the Apothecary” is the final illustrated poem in the full series of Moral Emblems. The three cuts for this poem were completed in November of 1882 from St. Marcel, and constitute his most accomplished work as an engraver. These cuts illustrate the only long narrative poem in the collection, and demonstrate all the varying aspects of textual illustration with which he had been experimenting in the series. It is worth reproducing all of these illustrations here (Figures 3.5, 3.6 and 3.7) to exhibit the clear improvements in all aspects of his engraving, from the depiction of line and texture, to composition and character, that he had made in this short period (especially when compared against his first efforts such as “A Peak in Darien”, Figure 3.1).

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Figure 3.5 RLS, “The Pirate and the Apothecary: Scene the First”.

Figure 3.6 RLS, “The Pirate and the Apothecary: Scene the Second”.

Stevenson’s confidence with the medium is clear first of all from the larger sized blocks he was cutting. He is also filling all of the blank space available to him to balance his compositions, in “Scene the first” by filling the sky behind Ben with more ominous looking birds which foreshadow his ultimate demise in the last cut. In “Scene the second”, he even creates a nightscene by cutting subtle lines of mountains into the dark sky and casting

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Figure 3.7 RLS, “The Pirate and the Apothecary: Scene the Third”.

long shadows of the beer bottles on the table between the characters. In the final scene, the rising sun portentously fills the space between Robin and the now dead Ben. Like the cuts for Moral Emblems II, these illustrations are narrative, raising questions that the text must answer, especially when the reader views the whole sequence of images. However, they are also a sequential series, suggesting narrative movement from one image to the next, and in this way raise questions in the reader’s mind. Who are these characters? Why do they dress so differently? Why is one of them dead in the final cut? The images sequentially construct a rudimentary narrative, which the text fleshes out with detail and context. Stevenson would later identify this technique as a major role of narrative illustration, with the provision that the pictures do not give away too much of the mystery: illustration should engage curiosity rather than satisfy it. The reader must turn to the poem for answers, and the poem provides a valuable moral lesson to the young reader. However, like the cuts for The Graver and the Pen, these images are also aesthetically satisfying, incorporating all Stevenson had learned about compositional balance, the use of line and hatching to create different effects and depth, and the incorporation of visual symbolism, such as the prophetic birds, the dark mountains and the rising sun. I am not suggesting that Stevenson was a great visual artist; the best of these cuts are simplistic, if not clumsy, by the standards of contemporary publishing and professional wood-engraving. However, it is important to reconsider the importance of this very experimental series of cuts and textual illustration as an effort to discover his limitations as a visual artist, and to put some of the theories of illustration he was writing about into

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practice. When we look more closely at Moral Emblems, we must see that Stevenson had formed tastes and theories that would define his responses to illustration of his work by other artists. They represent different styles and genres of illustration, from narrative to decorative, and they constitute a trial of discovery for Stevenson. Clearly, he could not illustrate his own work for a popular market that expected high-quality illustration in its fiction; however, following his efforts, Stevenson was in a position to give valid critical responses to illustration, in part due to his own experiments with the form. This is confirmed by a letter of 14 March 1886 to Charles Scribner’s Sons in New York, who had sent him a copy of their recent number of the Book Buyer with a portrait of the author by the artist T. Johnson. In grateful response, Stevenson writes the following: I am myself a wood engraver; and if he [Johnson] has a taste for Rabelaisian mirth, a proof of one of my blocks might be the means of his undoing. But however I engrave myself, my absurd experience has given me enough knowledge to appreciate so elegant a piece of work; in which (I hope he and you will excuse the sincerity of my opinions) I see nothing of what I so much detest in American (so-called) engraving, where the tool cannot be followed and all intellectual pleasure is denied.32 Here, Stevenson asserts that despite his own technical shortcomings as an engraver, his “absurd experience” has sharpened his critical appreciation of the form.33 Stevenson’s experiments were being keenly undertaken during the re-writing of Treasure Island as a novel, and just after he had critiqued a very similar style of illustration for The Magazine of Art in “Byways of Book Illustration: Bagster’s Pilgrim’s Progress”. These images and their poems were cut and printed on a private press for private consumption, but his pride in his work is clear in his correspondence to friends and family. They were arguably never meant to see the light of day, but they have become useful to Stevenson scholarship and enthusiasts because they represent the only published visual manifestations of an author who has been so heavily illustrated by other artists; these are not an illustrator’s interpretations of an author’s works, these are Stevenson’s actual visions. However, Moral Emblems represents Stevenson at play, rather than Stevenson at work. The intention here is to emphasize the fact that while he was developing theories about the illustration of texts, and while he was rewriting Treasure Island for what he hoped would be an illustrated novel, he was practising those theories through these rudimentary woodcuts.

Treasure Island’s foreign treatments Stevenson’s pride in his cuts for Moral Emblems may in part be due to the fact that he alone was responsible for them; regardless of their quality, they

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were his pictures. It would not be long before he became familiar with how illustrators could rob an author of his visions in very powerful ways. On 5 May 1883, he wrote to his parents in apparent joy at the fact that Henley had sold Treasure Island to Cassell and Co.34 Unfortunately, contrary to his expressed desire to see “ten or twelve” pictures, the first English edition of 1883 did not contain illustrations. The novel, in fact, was first illustrated in America (a fact that was not an isolated incident, as will be discussed in Chapter 4), in the 1884 Roberts Brothers’ edition. The artist in this case was F. T. Merrill. Early the following year, Jules Hetzel, the French publisher of Jules Verne’s novels, published an edition with 24 illustrations by the French illustrator Georges Roux. Cassell and Co. subsequently published the first English illustrated edition, using both Roux’s and Merrill’s illustrations. It seems at first that Stevenson was in thrall to Roux’s interpretations, writing to his father in a letter of 28 October 1885, just before the release of the first illustrated edition: An illustrated Treasure Island will be out next month. I have had an early copy, and the French pictures are admirable. The artist has got his types up in Hogarth; he is full of fire and spirit, can draw and can compose, and has understood the book as I meant it, all but one or two little accidents, such as making the Hispaniola a brig. I would send you my copy, but I cannot; it is my new toy, and I cannot divorce myself from this enjoyment.35 This, it must be emphasized, was Stevenson’s first impression. There is very little evidence in his correspondence providing further critical insight into these illustrations, apart from a letter he wrote two years later, on 20 October 1887 from Saranac Lake, to Charles Scribner, regarding a new American edition of the novel. He writes, “Should you get Treasure Island, remember to sack the disgusting American illustrations; and get from Hetzel, Roux’s very spirited pictures—the very best of which Cassell omitted to reproduce! Roux is really very spirited, though I wish I had known of Pyle, for the French faces jar”.36 Merrill’s illustrations are condemned out-of-hand, but Roux’s retain his admiration, for the most part. The closing comment here is unusual, and difficult to decode: does he mean that the faces in the illustrations are too “French”, and if so, what constitutes a French as opposed to an English face? Does he mean that the faces are done in the French style of illustration? Either way, it is an unusual and seemingly pedantic criticism from an author who actually gives his illustrator very little information from which to draw. Relatively little critical attention has been paid to these images. John Scally has written of these pictures, and another helpful commentary is Laura Eidam’s recent article “Reexamining Illustration’s Role in Treasure Island: Do Images Pirate Texts?”37 Eidam pays close attention to the transformative role of Roux’s and subsequent illustrations on Stevenson’s

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text. She also makes some important observations regarding what we, and Stevenson, understand by the term “illustration”. Eidam points out that, contrary to received opinion, the original Young Folks publication was in fact illustrated, but not in the terms that we might consider traditional illustration: “In addition to the woodcut of pirates Billy Bones and Black Dog, the first chapter of each instalment begins with a decorative font for the first capital letter or with an initial pictorial, a small illustration that rounds this letter”.38 This fact does, as Eidam suggests, make the original Young Folks publication the first illustrated edition of the novel. Stevenson, however, does not seem to have considered this “illustration”, presumably because these capitals are decorative in nature, rather than narrative plates which complement his story. He makes no comment about the only narrative picture to be produced for Young Folks by the anonymous house illustrator, and in a curious comment to Henley in September 1881, while drafting the story, he claims with apparent relief that “I have my copyright safe. I don’t get illustrated—a blessing; that’s the price I have to pay for my copyright”.39 If Stevenson had been so keen on illustration for his novel version (“I aspire after ten or twelve”), why would he not wish Young Folks to illustrate Treasure Island too? I interpret the comment “I don’t get illustrated—a blessing” to mean that Stevenson did not admire Young Folks’ illustration, and, as an author who was not yet famous enough to question Henderson’s editorial policies or illustrators, was at their mercy regarding illustration. It appears as if his not being illustrated was a consequence of retaining his copyright, and that this fact was a relief to him. The only comments we have in his correspondence regarding Young Folks, although they don’t reference the illustrations, support the view that Stevenson did not care for Young Folks’ format. Alexander Japp, the man who famously carried the first chapters of Treasure Island personally to Henderson, sent Stevenson a copy of the paper so that he could visualize how his story would look on the page. Stevenson replied on 6 September 1881 stating: Paper arrived: a cruel page. It will plainly swallow four of my little chapters a number. But I guess they won’t begin to publish instanter [sic], all their stories seeming under way. What bosh the stories are—I mean the two I have looked at! cré nom! Surely mine should do in such company. Can I see proofs? I feel inclined to stipulate that.40 The “cruelty” referred to here references the size of the page of Young Folks. The large page and relatively small font swallowed up a lot of words, although space was taken up by the numerous illustrations per page (see Chapter 4 for examples from Kidnapped). However, Stevenson was not to be illustrated, meaning that illustrations would not help flesh out his page visually, and his first chapters would be “swallowed” up by the large page. No mention is made here or anywhere else of the illustration or woodcut capitals discussed by Eidam.

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Roux’s illustrations, therefore, are the only illustrations that Stevenson reviewed regarding Treasure Island. Kevin Carpenter has unearthed an unpublished, undated review that Stevenson had written critiquing Roux’s illustrations.41 Carpenter posits that it was probably written in “late October or early November 1885”, very soon after he received his copy from Cassell and Company. Carpenter also suggests, probably correctly, that it was being written for consideration in The Magazine of Art, which, given his concurrent projects for Henley, is likely. We can, therefore, ascertain precisely what Stevenson thought of these images, and bring to the forefront what he valued in narrative illustration. His initial comments to his father that Roux is “full of fire and spirit, can draw and can compose, and has understood the book as I meant it” become tempered with much closer critical analysis in this review. This critique is introduced by broader comments on the art of narrative illustration, and help to distil his understanding of what constitutes successful illustration. He opens with a reference to a famous article by William Makepeace Thackeray on the illustrations to W. H. Ainsworth’s Jack Sheppard by the comic illustrator George Cruikshank. Thackeray made the argument here, somewhat cuttingly for Ainsworth that Cruikshank’s pictures brought the story to life and assumed an authority over the text they were illustrating. In the 1840 article for the Westminster Review, Thackeray writes, With regard to the modern romance of “Jack Sheppard,” in which the latter personage makes a second appearance, it seems to us that Mr. Cruikshank really created the tale, and that Mr. Ainsworth, as it were, only put words to it. Let any reader of the novel think over it for a while, now that it is some months since he has perused and laid it down—let him think, and tell us what he remembers of the tale? George Cruikshank’s pictures—always George Cruikshank’s pictures.42 These observations cut to the heart of the concerns for every illustrated author: that their stories will be remembered for another person’s interpretations of them. Thackeray’s essay is a comment in part on the power of image to define a story due to the viewer’s powers of memory. It is much easier for readers, generally, to retain imagery over words, and a good illustration can not only condition a reader’s response to what he or she is reading, but they can also subvert the text by becoming the focal point of the reader’s memory of that story. Commenting on Halbot Browne’s (or Phiz’s) illustrations of Dickens, Thackeray writes that, “Once seen, these figures remain impressed on the memory, which otherwise would have had no hold upon them, and the heroes and heroines of Boz become personal acquaintances with each of us”.43 This is a harsh criticism of the creator, Dickens, but a pertinent danger for such authors. Imagery can rob narrative of its authority in the public consciousness. Stevenson identifies this danger in his review. Invoking

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Thackeray, he writes that “Cruikshank was the man of imagination, it was he who lent a body and face to [Ainsworth’s] inventions; and it is in the role of his braggadocio etchings, not in the words of the author, that we summon them up again before the eye of memory” (my italics).44 This highlighted phrase echoes Thackeray’s sentiment that in recalling Ainsworth’s novel, “we only have before the mind’s eye the fine plates of Cruikshank”;45 both authors emphasize how easily a strong picture can be retained by readers. This can be of great benefit to authors: if a good illustrator pays due deference and truth to the narrative source, an image can be a way for a reader to remember the story, which is, after all, the author’s invention. However, the inherent danger is that an illustrator as gifted and subversive as Cruikshank might alter the memory of that story, which then becomes dominated by pictures rather than narrative. Stevenson explains this point: There is nothing more delightful than the first skimming of a storybook with pictures: the faces, the costumes, the strange incidents, the clearness and mystery, the story told and still remaining unknown. It is hard indeed upon the author; he can never come up to the expectations raised; but no more can the artist if we have read the book before we see the pictures. The first blow on the fancy is decisive; all subsequent glosses miss the mark. … The first skimming of the pictures was the true perusal; the tale gave up its marrow at a glance …46 It is the first impression, then, that is the definitive one. If we buy an illustrated text (particularly in Victorian Britain), we skim the story by looking first at the images; in doing so, we are usually being made aware of the high points of drama, action, comedy or passion that the story has to offer: the “marrow” of the story. In this sense, the text then fills in the detail. This is acceptable, as long as the illustrations draw the reader into the narrative out of curiosity for context or explanation, and do not give up too many of the secrets it contains. Conversely, if we have read the book first, any subsequent illustrations might not live up to the reader’s (or the author’s) imaginative projections of the text. Imagery, in this case, subverts the reader’s imaginative projection. In either case, the author’s intentions suffer at the hands of an illustrator, who has a power of creation and subversion over the author; an illustrator lends “a body and face” to the text. No matter how detailed a description of a character, landscape, building or scene may be, there will always be blanks that an illustrator has to fill, and he or she has to do so using his or her own imagination. In this sense, therefore, illustration is always a creative as well as an interpretive act. Stevenson comments drily that in this way, Roux has introduced Stevenson “to his own puppets…to him [Stevenson] M. Roux is the inventor”.47 Dressed as a compliment to Roux, this comment reveals an anxiety of proprietorship over his characters and scenes, and the manner in which an illustration can plant the definitive or lasting image of those characters or scenes in the public consciousness.

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Long John Silver demonstrates this point clearly. Very few novels have been more visualized since their publication than Treasure Island, thanks in part to the dawning of cinema in the twentieth century; by 1950, there had been nine film productions or adaptations, including the 1934 Victor Fleming Treasure Island staring a young Jackie Cooper as Jim and Wallace Beery as Long John Silver, and Disney’s 1950 adaptation, which was the company’s first colour live-action film, with Robert Newton as Long John.48 So powerful are these film adaptations in stamping visual character on the novel that Newton’s role as Long John has come to define not only Stevenson’s character, but the generic stereotype of the pirate figure in popular entertainment, including most recently Johnny Depp’s role as Jack Sparrow in the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise. The key question is whether Stevenson himself would have recognized Beery or Newton as his Long John Silver? This is the prime example of a character evolving away from an author’s control and taking on a life of his own. As with Scott and Dickens before him, this process began with illustration; it is therefore important to understand his critical responses to the first illustrations to appear in his lifetime.49 Stevenson certainly did have his own notions of how his character looked, although on close examination of the text, the reader is in fact provided with very scant physical description of the captain. The first description of the sea cook is the most detailed: As I was waiting, a man came out of a side room, and, at a glance, I was sure he must be Long John. His left leg was cut off close by the hip, and under the left shoulder he carried a crutch, which he managed with wonderful dexterity, hopping about upon it like a bird. He was very tall and strong, with a face as big as a ham—plain and pale, but intelligent and smiling. Indeed, he seemed in the most cheerful spirits, whistling as he moved about among the tables, with a merry word or a slap on the shoulder for the more favoured of his guests. Now, to tell you the truth, from the very first mention of Long John in Squire Trelawney’s letter, I had taken a fear in my mind that he might prove to be the very one-legged sailor whom I had watched for so long at the old “Benbow.” But one look at the man before me was enough. I had seen the captain, and Black Dog, and the blind man, Pew, and I thought I knew what a buccaneer was like—a very different creature, according to me, from this clean and pleasant-tempered landlord.50 What impresses here on close reading is the relative lack of close description; of course, we identify the missing leg and the wooden crutch, his large size, his friendly demeanour and the fact that he is “clean and pleasant tempered”. For an illustrator, however, there are so many questions left unanswered: what colour is his hair? Is his hair long or short? Does “clean” mean

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he is clean shaven? Does he have any distinguishing facial features? What is he wearing? This last question is particularly significant when discussing Victorian illustration of popular fiction, especially when reading authors like Scott or Dickens. Scott, in particular, uses costume as a means of characterization, particularly when delineating a historical type of character, such as a Highlander, a Lowlander, a Covenanter, a late sixteenth-century English noble or a Saxon lord. Take, for example, his description of the Highlander Evan Dhu Maccombich from Waverley (1814): The individual Gael was a stout dark man of low stature, the ample folds of whose plaid added to the appearance of strength which his person exhibited. The short kilt, or petticoat, showed his sinewy and clean-made limbs; the goat-skin purse, flanked by the usual defences, a dirk and steel-wrought pistol, hung before him; his bonnet had a short feather, which indicated his claim to be treated as a Duinhé-Wassel, or sort of gentleman; a broad sword dangled by his side, a target hung upon his shoulder, and a long Spanish fowling-piece occupied one of his hands.51 Such close description leaves little room for adaptation or artistic license in interpreting the Highlander’s specific appearance, and Scott was highly critical of illustrators who strayed from his textual authority, particularly regarding clothing.52 However, Silver’s description quoted above leaves large descriptive holes for illustrators to fill. We are not told what Silver is wearing when we first meet him. In fact, description of his costume is not given until chapter 20, and his conference with Captain Smollett: Silver had terrible hard work getting up the knoll. What with the steepness of the incline, the thick tree stumps, and the soft sand, he and his crutch were as helpless as a ship in stays. But he stuck to it like a man in silence, and at last arrived before the captain, whom he saluted in the handsomest style. He was tricked out in his best; an immense blue coat, thick with brass buttons, hung as low as to his knees, and a fine laced hat was set on the back of his head.53 The costume here is important in its symbolic role for the situation (Silver is delineating himself as a captain on equal terms with Smollett), and the reader finally has a fix on his physical presentation other than his one leg and crutch. Following the subsequent battle, we get another description of his clothing and presentation: The parrot sat, preening her plumage, on Long John’s shoulder. He himself, I thought, looked somewhat paler and more stern than I was used to. He still wore the fine broadcloth suit in which he had fulfilled his mission, but it was bitterly the worse for wear, daubed with clay and torn with the sharp briers of the wood.54

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This description is given when Jim inadvertently walks back into the pirates’ camp and is taken prisoner, and before the last hunt for the treasure, during which, we imagine, Silver’s clothing would become even “worse for wear”. Perhaps it is for this reason, then, that Stevenson takes such umbrage with Roux’s depiction of Silver. Roux depicts Silver close-up only twice: once during his conference with Smollett, and once at the gruesome “pointer”. Of these, Stevenson writes, “Silver is not quite successful once, at Flint’s pointer, but there he is all that a father’s heart could wish him; sitting at the door with the captain he is not the man he should be”.55 In the first image mentioned here, Silver is depicted in his uniform, but he is very clean, does not look “bitterly the worse for wear”, and does not present a piratical demeanour to the reader; he could be mistaken for Captain Smollett or Doctor Livesey in appearance. In the second image, however, seen in Figure 3.8, it is less clear why Stevenson might not be impressed with Silver. Roux seems to have paid due deference to the text: the captain is decked out in his lace coat with his hat resting on the back of his head. Stevenson’s complaint seems less justified in this case. His opinion must, to an extent, be subjective, but whatever the reason, Roux’s Silver clearly doesn’t match up to the author’s vision of him when he was writing the character. This can be confirmed firstly from “My First Book”, in which he writes of the influence on Silver’s character of a close friend: And then I had an idea for John Silver from which I promised myself funds of entertainment: to take an admired friend of mine (whom the reader very likely knows and admires as much as I do), to deprive him of all his finer qualities and higher graces of temperament, to leave him with nothing but his strength, his courage, his quickness and his magnificent geniality, and to try to express these in terms of the culture of a raw tarpaulin56 The friend in question was Henley. Writing to Henley regarding the proofs of the novel version of Treasure Island in late May 1883, Stevenson states, “I will now make a confession. It was the sight of your maimed strength and masterfulness that begot John Silver in Treasure Island. Of course, he is not in any other quality or feature the least like you; but the idea of the maimed man, ruling and dreaded by the sound, was entirely taken from you”.57 Henley, the bullish editor of The Magazine of Art, and Stevenson’s champion in Cassell and Co., contracted tuberculosis as a child, which led to the amputation of his left leg (below the knee, not the hip, as with Silver) at the age of twelve. Capable of extraordinary kindness and friendship, he was also capable of manipulation and cruelty; these are all qualities we see in Silver, albeit in more sinister manifestations. Of interest here, however, is Henley’s physical appearance. Henley was tall, powerful, one-legged and bearded; put a parrot on his shoulder, fit him with “blue coat, thick with brass buttons, hung as low as to his knees, and a fine laced hat”, and we are presented with a character who the reader

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Figure 3.8 George Roux, “The two men sat silently smoking for quite a while”.

could imagine to be an eighteenth-century pirate. In fact, this image would be much closer to the illustrations of actual pirates that Stevenson came across in one of his sources for Treasure Island, Captain Charles Johnson’s A General History of the Pyrates (1724). Often attributed to Daniel Defoe, this biography of some of the most notorious pirates in history was illustrated with depictions of its protagonists, including Edward Teach (Blackbeard). One image in particular, a depiction of Captain Avery conning his counterpart pirates out of their treasure in “The Life of Captain Avery”, bears striking similarity in costume and stance to Stevenson’s depiction of Robin in “Scene the First”.58 The point here is that while Stevenson avoids

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detailed physical description of Long John Silver, he had visual types as models for the character, and the illustrator clearly deviates from these models. Henley, Blackbeard and all the literary and historical forebears of Long John Silver shared certain physical attributes that are clearly not recognizable in Roux’s illustrations. However, is Roux to blame for the facial qualities of the characters, having been faithful to the text in other ways? Roux’s Silver is difficult to critique on this level of detail, but when we have read the novel and discerned the duplicitous, sometimes cruel, but ultimately enjoyable character that Silver presents, it is difficult to reconcile Stevenson’s creation with the character that Roux presents in the illustrations. By contrast, Stevenson seems genuinely impressed with two other characters Roux portrays: Captain Smollett (“M. Roux knows more about the captain than I did”), and Jim, who is “admirable throughout; a tenfold better Jim than the rather doughy and irritating youth of the text”.59 His admiration of Jim, however, is tempered with criticism of the final plate illustration. Stevenson writes, “I do not care for him in the cave scene which is besides badly engraved, but is yet endeared to me by the pleasant art of pictorial narrative displayed”.60 This comment is interesting in its complexity: he does not “care for” Jim’s depiction as a character in the cave; he identifies the lack of technical quality of the engraving; but he admires the “pictorial narrative”, or the way in which Roux brings elements of the story together into one image to suggest action and entice the reader into the story. Stevenson’s comment here betrays the many functions and responsibilities that narrative illustration bears. Characterisation alone requires considerations of facial qualities, physical build and clothing, much of which, in the case of Treasure Island, is not provided. This means an artist like Roux must balance truth to the text with the creative aspects of “filling in the blanks”. In addition to this, Stevenson raises the importance of the technical qualities of engraving and the responsibilities of the engraver in the illustration process, because poor engraving can undermine both the illustrator and the author. Finally, Stevenson points out the compositional qualities required in narrative illustration, bringing together details, figures, moments and symbols into one image that simultaneously tell a story without giving up the “marrow” of the author’s tale. However, it again seems unjust to criticize Roux for depicting a first-person narrator, Jim, about whom no textual description is given. In the last picture Stevenson mentions, he accuses Roux of having failed in both characterisation and narrative construction. Referring to one of the first images in the book, in which Dr Livesey confronts Billy Bones in the Admiral Benbow (Figure 3.9), Stevenson writes that it is “equally lacking in construction, accuracy and dramatic fitness. Had the doctor so stood, he would never have lived to swim in the Hispaniola or dispense quinine to Mr Merry”.61 Again, the text gives up very little information about how the doctor should look: “I remember observing the contrast the neat, bright doctor, with his powder as white as snow and his bright, black eyes and

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pleasant manners, made with the coltish country folk, and above all, with that filthy, heavy, bleared scarecrow of a pirate of ours, sitting far gone in rum, with his arms on the table”.62 Stevenson’s comments, therefore, seem to rely on a lack of understanding of the text on Roux’s part, as if he is accusing Roux of not considering Livesey’s physical capabilities and achievements in the rest of the story and constructing a figure that could not have done these things: Roux’s Livesey appears, by contrast, as an older dandified gentleman. Stevenson accuses the illustrator of presenting a character who does not match his own image of a man of physically imposing presence. As with his criticism of Silver, this seems pedantic because Roux does do justice to the high drama of the moment; however, drama by itself is not paying due deference to the text if it abandons its responsibilities of characterisation. The danger, again, is that the picture of Livesey will usurp the author’s ability to conjure an image of a much stronger physical presence in the mind of the reader. Finally, Stevenson makes a retrospective correction to the illustrator. In his quest for authenticity, Roux had corrected Stevenson’s “mistake” of making the Hispaniola a schooner, a type of ship that did not exist at the end of the eighteenth century when the novel is set. This was a presumption that went too far, and Stevenson addresses his own deliberate anachronism. Writing in “My First Book” in 1894, he writes that the schooner was a wilful error, because a boy of Jim’s age would not have had the physical strength to manoeuvre a brig. In his 1885 review, he writes the following: It was a blow to me of the same nature to find the Hispaniola figured as a full-rigged brig. Here again this very annoying artist is quite right; for in the days of John Silver, there was no such vessel as a schooner known upon the seas. But how could Jim manouever a brig round the island? And how could the author have superintended him? A schooner it had to be, for it was in a schooner that this very fresh-water nautical novelist acquired his shallow knowledge.63 The illustrator has superseded his role and edited the author. This is precarious, because the result is confusion for the reader and a lack of artistic cohesion or continuity between text and image. Most significantly, however, this comment reveals a common thread to Stevenson’s creative imagination: the schooner was his vessel of choice because Stevenson had first-hand knowledge of it. As with the map, as with Long John Silver, as with the majority of the illustrations in Moral Emblems, Stevenson is creating literary imagery from what he has personally seen or experienced. Imagery from the real world, or from illustrated texts, portraits or personal friends are interpolated into a fictional narrative, so that when an illustrator comes to depict these images, they inevitably deviate from their original inspirations. In drawing Silver without the cooperation of Stevenson himself, Roux could not have known that Henley was his model, so it was perhaps inevitable

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Figure 3.9 George Roux, “If you do not put that knife this instant in your pocket”.

that the character deviated from the author’s vision. Regardless, deviant artistic interpretation is a problem Stevenson sought constantly to address with his illustrators, as will be discussed in the next two chapters. Stevenson’s review of Roux’s illustrations becomes important in understanding how appropriate illustration can enliven, enrich and even dramatize a text; more importantly, however, it reveals how an illustrator has the power to rob an author of narrative authority. As the first novel illustrations of Treasure Island, Roux’s pictures are significant in understanding the

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process by which illustration can, in a sense, usurp authorial authority, and Stevenson is clearly aware of this danger. The review can therefore be seen as an act of authorial re-appropriation, or re-asserting authorial authority over the story. If, as Eidam has suggested, “My First Book” is a retrospective act of appropriation of authorial control, then this review can be seen as a similar act of re-establishing the author’s intentions over the illustrator’s interpretations. He gives blessings to certain images and characters, such as Captain Smollet and Jim at the tiller of the Hispaniola; he condemns others, such as “the rattle-snake, who might answer better to a boa constrictor” or “the battle scene which is ‘one hurly-burly of non-sense’”.64 He also points to wilful errors on the part of both the illustrator and the engravers, such as the changing of the schooner to a brig. However, despite seemingly heavy criticism of Roux’s illustrations, Stevenson retained a general admiration for them, because, as quoted above, in 1887 he encouraged Scribner to obtain copies for an American publication. Taken together, Moral Emblems and his review of Roux’s illustrations demonstrate a complex and thoughtful understanding of the relationship between text and image. Moral Emblems sees Stevenson putting some of his theories on literary illustration into practice, playing with image and text in order to produce a single, hermetic work of art: an “emblem”. In the context of his various writings on the visual arts for the Magazine of Art, and the fact that Moral Emblems was produced on the cusp of his impending fame and fortune as a popular illustrated writer, it attains an importance to scholarship in understanding his later criticisms of his illustrations. Given that his review of Roux is written in 1885, following his experiments with textual illustration with Moral Emblems, and his essays for the Magazine of Art, Stevenson is able to articulate how Roux’s illustrations both work and fail in their representation of his narrative from experience and an empirical critical framework. This framework does change over time, once he begins to write stories about the Pacific. However, this framework will now help to define his choice of illustrators, and his critical responses to their work, in his “British” novels: The Black Arrow, Kidnapped, The Master of Ballantrae and Catriona.

Notes 1. Robert Louis Stevenson, The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson, ed. Bradford A. Booth and Ernest Mayhew, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1994, 8 vols., 3:315. 2. Robert Louis Stevenson, Letters, 8 vols., 3:298. 3. One important exception is Alan Sandison’s essay “‘Critical Woodcuts’: Stevenson, the Woodcut and Modernism”, Anglistica Pisana VIII, vol. 2 (2011): pp. 49–60, to whom the author and this chapter are indebted. In addition, John Scally has noted that Moral Emblems was produced concurrently with the re-writing of Treasure Island. See The Illustrated Robert Louis Stevenson, Edinburgh: Canongate, 1994.

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4. In a joint letter with RLS to R. D. Blackmore, Fanny writes the following: “Well, this very objectionable boy has a printing press, and Master, instead of attending to his proper business earning bones and collars and things for the family, must needs spend his time cutting out these engravings, and writing these verses for the press, and I am supposed to offer them to you as a mark of my gratitude”. Robert Louis Stevenson, Letters, 8 vols., 3:329–30. 5. Osbourne’s history is conflated here. In fact, according to Stevenson’s correspondence, “Not I!” was written for Lloyd in February of 1880 when the family was still in America, and before his mother Fanny had married Stevenson. It was later added to Moral Emblems when they were staying in Davos. See Letters, 8 vols., 3:67. 6. Samuel Lloyd Osbourne, quoted in Robert Louis Stevenson, Moral Emblems and Other Poems, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1921, pp. x–xi. 7. Robert Louis Stevenson, “My First Book”, The Lantern-Bearers and Other Essays, New York: Cooper Square Press, 1999, pp. 278–79. 8. Robert Louis Stevenson, Letters, 8 vols., 3:67n. 9. Roger Swearingen, The Prose Writings of Robert Louis Stevenson: A Guide, Connecticut: Archon Books, 1980, p. 66. 10. Robert Louis Stevenson, Letters, 8 vols., 3:253. 11. Robert Louis Stevenson, Letters, 8 vols., 3:278. 12. Roger Swearingen, The Prose Writings of Robert Louis Stevenson, p. 67. 13. Robert Louis Stevenson, Letters, 8 vols., 3:244. 14. Lloyd Osbourne, in preface to Robert Louis Stevenson, Moral Emblems, p. xi. 15. Lloyd Osbourne, in preface to Robert Louis Stevenson, Moral Emblems, pp. xiii–xiv. 16. Robert Louis Stevenson, Letters, 8 vols., 3:324. 17. Lloyd Osbourne, in preface to Robert Louis Stevenson, Moral Emblems, p. xvi. 18. Lloyd Osbourne, in preface to Robert Louis Stevenson, Moral Emblems, pp. xvii–xviii. 19. Robert Louis Stevenson, Letters, 8 vols., 3:306. 20. Keats famously got this wrong, as Cortez did not “discover” the Pacific; it was Vasco Núñez de Balboa. 21. Robert Louis Stevenson, Moral Emblems, p. 9. 22. Robert Louis Stevenson, Letters, 8 vols., 3:329. 23. Robert Louis Stevenson, Moral Emblems, p. 15. 24. Roland Barthes. S/Z. Trans. Richard Miller. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2002. 25. Robert Louis Stevenson, Moral Emblems, p. 17. 26. Robert Louis Stevenson, Moral Emblems, p. 21. 27. Robert Louis Stevenson, Moral Emblems, p. 25. 28. Robert Louis Stevenson, Moral Emblems, p. 29. 29. Robert Louis Stevenson, Moral Emblems, pp. 37–38. 30. For discussion on Stevenson’s view of the commercial value of his texts as commodities, see Glenda Norquay, “Trading Texts: Negotiations of the Professional and the Popular in the Case of Treasure Island” in Robert Louis Stevenson: Writer of Boundaries, ed. Richard Ambrosini and Richard Dury, Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006; and Oliver Buckton, Cruising with Robert Louis Stevenson, Athens: Ohio University Press, 2007. 31. Robert Louis Stevenson, Moral Emblems, p. 49. 32. Robert Louis Stevenson, Letters, 8 vols., 5:229–30.

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33. His apparent disliking of American engraving may have to do with the styles he had encountered up to this point, especially those of Merrill, but it may also have to do with the kinds of illustrations that were becoming popular, particularly “black and white” illustrations that adorned many of the periodicals in Scribner’s, Harper’s and many other periodicals (these will be discussed in Chapter 4). 34. Robert Louis Stevenson, Letters, 8 vols., 3:119–20. 35. Robert Louis Stevenson, Letters, 8 vols., 5:145. 36. Robert Louis Stevenson, Letters, 8 vols., 6:40. 37. Laura Eidam, “Reexamining Illustration’s Role in Treasure Island: Do Images Pirate Texts?”, English Literature in Transition, vol. 55:1 (2012): 45–68. 38. Laura Eidam, “Reexamining Illustration’s Role in Treasure Island”, pp. 49–50. 39. Robert Louis Stevenson, Letters, 8 vols., 3:229. 40. Robert Louis Stevenson, Letters, 8 vols., 3:228. 41. Kevin Carpenter, “R. L. Stevenson on the Treasure Island illustrations”, Notes and Queries, vol. 29:4 (1982): 322–325. 42. William Makepeace Thackeray, “George Cruikshank”, The Works of William Makepeace Thackeray, vol. XXI, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1911, pp. 468–9. The original article was published in The Westminster Review for June 1840, no. 66. 43. Ibid. 44. Kevin Carpenter, “R. L. Stevenson on the Treasure Island illustrations”, pp. 323–324. 45. William Makepeace Thackeray, “George Cruikshank”, p. 469. 46. Ibid. 47. Ibid. 48. For a list of film adaptations of Treasure Island, see Richard Dury, “The Robert Louis Stevenson Archive: Film Version of Treasure Island”, n.d., accessed 10 August 2012, http://www.robert-louis-stevenson.org/richard-dury-archive/filmsrls-treasure-island.html. 49. William B. Jones Jr has demonstrated such a process effectively regarding the illustration and adaptation of The Master of Ballantrae; see “‘Hello, Mackellar’: Classics Illustrated meets The Master of Ballantrae”, in Journal of Stevenson Studies 4 (2007): 247–269. 50. Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasure Island, London: Cassell & Company: 1889, pp. 61–62. 51. Walter Scott, Waverley, Or Tis Sixty Years Since, ed. P. D. Garside, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014, p. 79. 52. For more on Scott and illustration, see Richard J. Hill, Picturing Scotland Through the Waverley Novels: Walter Scott and the Origins of the Victorian Illustrated Novel, Farnham and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010. 53. Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasure Island, p. 160. 54. Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasure Island, p. 228. 55. Kevin Carpenter, “R. L. Stevenson on the Treasure Island illustrations”, p. 324. 56. Robert Louis Stevenson, “My First Book”, p. 279. 57. Robert Louis Stevenson, Letters, 8 vols., 4:129. 58. Captain Charles Johnson, A General History of the Robberies & Murders of the most Notorious Pirates, Guilford, CT: The Lyons Press, 2002. Johnson’s/

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59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64.

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Defoe’s work was also an inspiration for Scott’s The Pirate (1821), specifically the chapter on John Smith, alias Gow. Kevin Carpenter, “R. L. Stevenson on the Treasure Island illustrations”, p. 325. Ibid. Ibid. Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasure Island, p. 7. Kevin Carpenter, “R. L. Stevenson on the Treasure Island illustrations”, p. 325. Ibid.

4

Illustrating Stevenson’s British subjects

Illustrating Stevenson’s British subjects The illustrations of Stevenson’s fictional prose work need to be separated into those volumes that concern British subject matter – referred to here as the British novels – and those that deal with Pacific subjects. This separation is necessary when we consider Stevenson’s attitudes to authenticity within illustration, which guided all his preferences and tastes regarding the visualization of his work. For example, even if he were writing a British historical novel from the Pacific, as he did with The Master of Ballantrae which he finished in Honolulu in 1889, he demanded illustrations that were not tainted by ignorance of the details of historical costume and architecture of eighteenth-century Scotland. In other words, he did not want a syndicated American artist, for example, illustrating his historical novels if they were to be ignorant of, or indifferent to, the details of time, place and contextual detail of his stories. However, in several cases, Stevenson was forced to settle for his publishers’ choices of illustrator, regardless of their technical qualities or interpretive skills. This situation arose because of Stevenson’s geographic relocation first to America, and then to the Pacific; the distances involved in communicating with publishers, which added time pressures to the business of publishing, meant that Stevenson often had to acquiesce to publishers’ preferences and market-knowledge. As Stevenson moved gradually further from his publishing centres of London and New York, so his editorial control became increasingly fraught with obstructions and pitfalls, especially regarding illustration. He had favourite illustrators, but they were not always available, and in the case of The Black Arrow in particular, Stevenson had to settle for what was available. With the illustration of these novels, we witness a continuing friction between artistic preference and market necessity; as this chapter will demonstrate, Stevenson seemed to have found a working balance between these two demands that he found desirable, which relied on the talents of specific illustrators in America and Britain. This chapter will discuss the production and artistic merits of the illustrations that were produced for the British novels following Treasure Island: The Black Arrow (illustrated in novel form in 1888), Kidnapped, The  Master  of Ballantrae and Catriona. Each of these novels took a

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circuitous route to illustration from their initial publication, and each provides different insights into Stevenson’s diverse attitudes to illustration, from both an artistic and a commercial perspective. Most significantly for this chapter, however, it is possible, using the theoretical frameworks outlined in the previous two chapters, to analyse each group of illustrations in terms of their perceived successes as illustrations of Stevenson’s prose. Therefore, this chapter will trace the genesis of the book illustrations of these novels, before analysing their illustrations as visual renderings of their relative texts through close readings. It will examine first the publication and illustration of The Black Arrow in serial form through Young Folks Paper and then as a book published by Scribner’s in New York in 1888. It will then analyse the three illustrated Scottish novels in chronological order: Kidnapped (published in illustrated form in 1887), The Master of Ballantrae (1889) and Catriona (1893). These three novels were all illustrated by the same artist, William Brassey Hole. However, any illustration of eighteenth-century Scotland – Highland or Lowland – would invariably be shaped by the overwhelming cultural influence of the works of Walter Scott, and the intimidating Waverley industry. Scott’s Waverley novels, or more precisely the various and voluminous visual treatments of the novels (illustrations, paintings, picture-books, plays, fashion magazines and high society fashion), produced a stylistic aesthetic of the Highlands in particular; Stevenson was consciously treading on this hallowed path in writing his three Scottish novels (and of course his various short stories, poems and his unfinished masterpiece The Weir of Hermiston). Moreover, any illustrator to Stevenson’s Scottish novels was burdened with the weight of the Waverley aesthetic, as the casual nineteenth-century reader of popular fiction was steeped in Waverley imagery. How could an illustrator illustrate a Highland adventure while creating something new in the market? Hole’s illustrations provide an answer, particularly because his illustrations were so faithful to the spirit and the technique of the author he was illustrating. Hole’s illustrations will be framed within this context, in order to demonstrate, firstly, the quality of his pictures, and secondly, how a different author-artist combination could bring something new to a very dense literary-visual aesthetic.

The Black Arrow Of all Stevenson’s works, The Black Arrow has attracted the least critical attention in relation to its popularity. As John Sutherland has recently pointed out, The Black Arrow remains one of Stevenson’s most read stories, being often reprinted since its first publication in 1883 in Young Folks Paper; however, it has not attracted the same level of academic attention, which might partly be a result of Stevenson’s own comments on the novel. He famously derided the project even before its completion as “tushery”.1 Stevenson had been courted by James Henderson, the publisher of Young Folks, following the publication of Treasure Island the year before. Although Treasure Island

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had not been commercially successful with its boy-readers, Henderson clearly identified its quality, and was keen to tie Stevenson down to a new contract in order to compete with his most popular author Alfred R. Phillips. Henderson was astute in his calculation, as the Black Arrow became immediately popular with its readership when it was published serially between 30 June and 30 October 1883. He was so successful that in a letter to his parents of 15 December 1883, he reveals that Henderson had offered him a contract for another story, and jokes that Phillips “must think this is much ado about nothing and gird at fate’s injustice. I feel real sorry for Phillips; he has been trying so hard and doing so fairly well in his new story, spurred up by the Black Arrow, I am sure, and horrid feelings of jealousy”.2 According to both Sutherland and Roger Swearingen, Stevenson wrote the story rapidly and carelessly, while fighting off another episode of debilitating illness and trying to earn money. He even admits his rushed approach in an apologetic letter to Henderson’s proof-reader, James Dow, who had noted to Stevenson that the four arrows portentously mentioned in the opening chapters had not been all accounted for, Sir Oliver seemingly having escaped his fate. In the only admission of its kind, Stevenson owned his mistake, and promised to have Sir Oliver “die the death”.3 The letter goes on to praise Young Folks’ unusually high standards of transcribing and editing his work, admitting that “[n]owhere do I send worse copy than to Young Folks, for with this sort of story, I rarely rewrite; yet nowhere am I so well used”.4 In fact, Stevenson’s attitude to his Young Folks experiences were mixed: on the one hand, as Sutherland has pointed out, Stevenson was not keen to have his distinguished lighthouse-building family name dragged through the mire of popular boys’ fiction, and maintained altogether nobler literary aspirations than Young Folks would offer him (which explains his decision to publish under the pseudonym Captain George North);5 on the other hand, Young Folks were professional and honourable in their dealings with him, and of course, provided him with not only his first major publication (Treasure Island) but his first commercial success (The Black Arrow). He understood that Young Folks’ readers and expectations would tie him down artistically to “tushery”, but as he would point out to Sidney Colvin, “[i]t’s great sport to write tushery”.6 This warmth of feeling extended apparently to Young Folks’ syndicated illustrator, William H. Boucher. Where Treasure Island had received only one illustration in its opening instalment, The Black Arrow was treated to the full-spread illustrative treatment that the broad-sheet paper had to offer. Stevenson’s admiration of Boucher is expressed in a letter to Henderson, in which he writes, “We are both (and Mrs Stevenson is herself an artist) delighted with the drawings. They are even better than the engravings had led me to suppose; and I beg you to renew my appreciation to Mr Boucher. I shall have them mounted and put round my sittingroom”.7 Given the apparent speed and carelessness with which he wrote the story, it is not surprising that he would not worry too much about how the story was to

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be illustrated; it is surprising, therefore, that he seems to have liked them, especially given his various theories on the necessary qualities of good illustration. However, one glance at the front page of the first instalment reveals why Stevenson would have appreciated how Boucher interpreted his text (Figure 4.1). On first glance, this front cover presents all that a boy-reader would desire in a tale of medieval “tushery”, including their hero on horseback, conspiratorial monks (á la Friar Tuck), soldiers with swords and Dick’s cross-bow. However, a closer reading of the text reveals Boucher’s skill as an illustrator. Take Stevenson’s description of Dick Shelton, which appears on this page beneath his portrait: “a young fellow not yet eighteen, sun-browned and grey-eyed, in a jacket of deer’s leather, with a black velvet collar, a green hood upon his head, and a steel cross-bow at his back”.8 Within this description there are details, particularly pertaining to colour (“grey-eyed”, “green hood”), that the artist cannot render through wood-engraving; however,

Figure 4.1 William H. Boucher, front cover for The Black Arrow, in Young Folks, 30 June 1883, courtesy of the National Library of Scotland.

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in all other aspects, Boucher has captured Dick’s costume and historical apparel faithfully, and even attempted to capture the appropriate age  – wavering between boyhood and manhood – in the inset portrait. Additionally, in the central scene, Boucher has depicted the cross at which Dick meets the villagers: “Hard by the bridge, there was a stone cross upon a knoll, and here the group had collected—half a dozen women and one tall fellow in a russet smock—discussing what the bell betided”.9 Boucher has depicted the “half a dozen women” and the “tall fellow” around the medieval cross. Regarding the depiction of Sir Oliver and Bennet Hatch, Boucher has again been faithful to the text. Checked against the bottom left image in Figure 4.1, Sir Oliver is described as “a tall, portly, ruddy, black-eyed man of near fifty, in a surplice and black robe”;10 Hatch is “a brown-faced, grizzled fellow, heavy of hand and grim of mien, armed with sword and spear, a steel salet on his head, a leather jack upon his body”.11 Both these characters stand up to textual scrutiny, not only in the rendering of historical costume, but also in the less tangible aspects of characterization, the older Sir Oliver looking suspicious and untrustworthy, and Hatch bearing a physical presence befitting an experienced soldier. There is one mistake Boucher makes: he depicts a separate, new character discovering the note pinned to the Tunstall church door, when in fact it is Clipsby, the “tall fellow” Dick meets at the cross, who is sent by Sir Oliver to search the area for clues left by the fugitive member of the Black Arrow.12 The character Boucher depicts in the top-left image is clearly not the same as the character Dick speaks with in the central illustration. However, given the other strengths of this series of illustrations, Boucher may be forgiven this minor oversight, as it provides clear information to the boy-reader (who would probably not notice this error in the first place); nor does it disrupt the narrative flow that the imagery provides. The narrative elements of these combined images are another of Boucher’s accomplishments here, and again they mark him out as a superior illustrator: given the highly visual nature of this publication, in which image clearly dominates text, an illustrator might be forgiven for taking liberties with the text, adding or altering detail to suit his aesthetic requirements. This, as articulated in previous chapters, was one of the many concerns Stevenson had regarding the illustration of his work: illustration might dominate and subvert the authority of his text, especially regarding the elements of the story. Boucher, however, avoids this scenario. The pictures read as a fundamental story line. Beneath the inset portrait of Dick, we see our hero on horseback who is presented as an aspirational figure for Young Folks’ young readers; the narrative moves to the church door, on which is discovered the curious note; and finally we see our hero reading the note out loud to the two conspiratorial and suspicious characters in the final scene. Mystery and a rudimentary narrative are built through the pictures, which are symbolically united through the super-imposed black arrow which overlays all three images. The reader is now hooked, the imagery lends the story romance and mystery and the

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boy-reader must read the text to discover how these separate scenes are played out through narrative. It is no wonder Stevenson admired these illustrations, as they conform to almost all his standards of excellence. Boucher’s illustrations therefore provide a template against which the subsequent book illustrations should be tested. Nothing would happen with The Black Arrow for the next five years, until, in 1887, S. S. McClure offered to publish it as an illustrated serial for the American market in the Philadelphia Press under the title “The Outlaws of Tunstall Forest” (in the hopes of avoiding the attentions of literary pirates), illustrated by Stevenson’s friend William H. Low.13 Meanwhile, according to Swearingen, Charles Scribner’s Sons was preparing an illustrated book version of the novel, but interestingly rejected McClure’s suggestion that Howard Pyle illustrate both the newspaper and the book publication of the story.14 This is noteworthy in that, given Stevenson’s recent discovery of Pyle’s work (mentioning him in a letter of 20 October 1887), it suggests that the original idea of Pyle as illustrator for The Black Arrow came not from McClure, but from Stevenson. In a letter of 17 December 1887, Stevenson writes directly to Scribner regarding the potential illustration of the novel: This Black Arrow which he [McClure] is going to handle for me in the papers, is not half so bad as I had fancied or I am the more deceived. I have no doubt Mr McClure could let you have a sight of it—I mean the part now in his hands; and if you are to take it in book form, as I hope you will, it occurs to me you might concern yourself with the pictures. First of all, because I should have more confidence in your taste; and second because there would plainly fall to be a division of expense which should (I should think) be faced at once.15 McClure subsequently communicated with Scribner on Stevenson’s behalf, and clearly mentioned Pyle’s name as illustrator. According to Booth and Mehew, however, Scribner was not prepared to share the cost of Pyle’s illustrations for either the newspaper or the book versions, which strongly suggests that Pyle was considered too expensive, even for Robert Louis Stevenson. More is the pity for literary posterity because there was no better-suited illustrator in America at the time than Pyle regarding the illustration of historical literature. Stevenson quietly accepted Scribner’s judgement, however, writing briefly “do not mention it; I only sent this thing to you on the chance and your reasons seem to me more than sufficient”.16 Instead, Scribner’s employed Alfred Brennan to produce eleven illustrations, and Will Low to produce the frontispiece. Stevenson remains unusually silent on these illustrations, as well as those produced in 1891 for the British edition by H. M. Paget for Cassell and Co. However, a close examination of some of these illustrations suggests that Stevenson’s silence was damning: a sign of indifference or resignation. Brennan’s illustrations, first of all, fail Stevenson’s criteria for suitable

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illustration on several levels. First, there is characterization. As explained regarding Treasure Island and Long John Silver, illustrators were not given much finite detail with which to work when it came to the visualization of characters; however, Stevenson’s descriptions create strong impressions of characters, which, when compared against their illustrated counterparts, make it immediately clear if the illustrator has appreciated the character or not. Take the depiction of Sir Daniel in Brennan’s very first illustration (Figure 4.2). Brennan’s Sir Daniel conforms to an acceptable preconception of a patrician knight, while “John” is presented as “unusually slender” in “bone and body”. However, a close reading of Stevenson’s description of Sir Daniel, some pages before this particular scene is described, demonstrates a loose visual interpretation: “He had taken off his visored headpiece, and sat with his bald head and thin, dark visage resting on one hand, wrapped warmly in a sanguine-coloured cloak”.17 We are also told, a few paragraphs on, that Sir Daniel “was a very merry knight, none merrier in England, [and he] took a drink of his mulled ale, and lay back, smiling”.18 Compare this (albeit impressionistic) description from the text against the upright, silverwhiskered, cloak-less, sober-seeming knightly figure in Brennan’s illustration

Figure 4.2 Alfred Brennan for Scribner’s Black Arrow, “In bone and body he was unusually slender”.

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and it is difficult to reconcile the literary image with the visual. Brennan has observed some textual detail, including the “pottle [sic] of spiced ale” at his elbow, and the fire burning in the inn, but these details do not construct character in the way that Boucher’s illustrations do. Brennan’s Sir Daniel is upright, patrician, and certainly not “merry”. In addition to this, Brennan’s depictions of characters between scenes lack continuity, especially of our hero. The comical depiction of Dick escaping by the rope, bears little to no resemblance of the same character listening to Lord Foxham, a fault compounded by the fact that they are consecutive illustrations. Brennan also fails to take into account details or context of action, thereby undermining the narrative cohesion of the text. An example of this is the depiction of the appearance of Sir Daniel dressed as a leper (Figure  4.3). Again, Brennan has simply ignored important dramatic aspects of the narrative to suit his own composition and style. This picture illustrates the following passage: Upon this path, stepping forth from the margin of the wood, a white figure now appeared. It paused a little, and seemed to look about; and then, at a slow pace, and bent almost double, it began to draw near across the heath. At every step the bell clanked. Face, it had none, white hood, not even pierced with eye-holes, veiled the head; and as the creature moved, it seemed to feel its way with the tapping of a stick […]

Figure 4.3 Alfred Brennan for The Black Arrow, “Just then the sun rose”.

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Illustrating Stevenson’s British subjects The blind leper was now about halfway towards them, and just then the sun rose and shone full on his veiled face. He had been a tall man before he was bowed by his disgusting sickness, and even now he walked with a vigorous step.19

A quick glance at this passage highlights the obvious eye-less white hood, with the bell and the stick of the leper. However, Brennan’s figure stands bolt-upright, with no sign of deformity or illness (even though Sir Daniel is the character, he is “bowed”, “bent almost double” as part of his disguise). He is also described as being “about halfway towards them” from the “margin of the wood”, but in the illustration the figure is level, if not past them (it is difficult to tell), and there is no wood to be seen. Through stylistic interpretation and a lack of close reading of the text, Brennan has contorted the chronology and the logic of the text, and undermined the author in precisely the way Stevenson hoped to avoid: it is a confusing image for a good reader. Such illustrations are often produced through cursory readings of single passages of the texts that are being illustrated; however, as this analysis has demonstrated, Stevenson’s texts need to be read and understood in their entirety for any picture to perform its appropriate functions as literary illustration. As Chapter 5 will discuss, Brennan was singled out for harsh criticism for his illustrations to The Ebb-Tide in McClure’s Magazine in 1894. Here, Stevenson gives no critical commentary. The Black Arrow was also published in illustrated form in Britain by Cassell and Co. in 1891. The illustrations produced by H. M. Paget are starkly different in style and mood to Brennan’s, and initially suggest much greater success as visual realizations of Stevenson’s prose. Paget’s style is closer to that of Stevenson’s preferred illustrator, William B. Hole: it is more painterly, impressionistic and consequently avoids the fundamental problems of poor characterization that Brennan runs into through a blurring and distancing technique. The frontispiece for the volume is the perfect example of this (Figure 4.4). This scene illustrates the following passage from the text: Dick reconnoitred his position. The sudden turn gave him a post of vantage. He could thus shoot in safety from the cover of the wall. But it was plain the light was too near him, and, running some way forward, he set down the lamp in the middle of the passage, and then returned to watch. Presently, at the far end of the passage, Bennet hove in sight. He seemed to be alone, and he carried in his hand a burning torch, which made him the better mark.20 It is immediately clear from Paget’s style that close observation of facial detail is not the artist’s concern, and that the emphasis is placed more on dramatic action and lighting. Hatch is seen vaguely in the gloaming light

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Figure 4.4 H. M. Paget frontispiece for The Black Arrow, “He carried in his hand a burning torch”.

and presented in the appropriate attire (as seen in Boucher’s original illustration), and presents a formidable physical presence. Joanna’s figure is also more coherently delineated: she is more believable here as a girl in a boy’s costume than in Brennan’s illustration, in which she looks very masculine. The picture also invites the reader into the narrative through its dramatic effects: Joanna cowering behind the wall, Dick with his longbow ready to

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fire on the intimidating figure of Hatch in the background, all of which is lit by a single flame that casts dark shadows in the foreground. However, a closer reading of the text reveals a flaw: the text clearly states that Dick, as a tactical precaution, places his own lamp on the floor some way in front of him in order to leave himself in the shadows for safety. As convincing as Paget’s image is, there is no sign of this lamp on the floor, the single light source coming from Hatch himself. It is a minor oversight to the reader-viewer, but it undermines Stevenson’s characterization of Dick as an innovative tactician. Similar liberties are taken elsewhere by Paget. For example, in the image of Dick and Hugh being thrown from the boat when his horse is struck from the shore by an arrow (Figure 4.5), Paget again produces a convincing illustration of the bowman on the shore, the horse flailing in agony and Hugh submerged in the flowing waters; it’s a dynamic image of action that is reproduced for the front cover of the book. The image illustrates the following passage: “The horse, struck by the shaft, lashed out in agony and terror; the boat capsized, and next moment all were struggling in the eddies of the river”. However, the reason that the horse was struck in the first place is because they were caught up in a willow thicket on the shore: “The boat ran into a tough thicket of willows with a crash. […] Dick, taking the horse by the bridle, sought to follow [Matcham onto the shore], but what with the animal’s bulk, and what with the closeness of the thicket, both stuck fast”.21 In other words, they are sitting targets, and trapped by the landscape. In editing out this willow bush or any reference to the shore, Paget fundamentally alters the plot, producing an image that naturally dominates the text, especially as it is reproduced on the front cover. In a sense, this kind of alteration is even more damaging to Stevenson’s textual authority, given its impressive technical qualities, and the correct inclusion of much of the text. This textual deviation is reminiscent of Anthony Henley’s illustration of the Bas-Breau discussed in Chapter 2: it’s a technically accomplished picture, which seems to illustrate the text closely, until we consider the full context of the action and the image. Read together in this manner, text and image display slightly different things, and is therefore confusing to a reader. Paget is guilty of this elsewhere, such as in his depiction of Dick stumbling across the hanged Throgmorton. The text clearly states that “[t]he bough was perhaps twenty feet above the ground, and the poor fellow had been drawn up so high by his executioners that his boots swung clear above Dick’s reach”;22 in the appended illustration, however, Throgmorton’s boots are not only within reach of Dick’s grasp, but hanging around head-level, so that Dick could conceivably cut the body to the ground. This error is compounded by the proximity of Stevenson’s description to the image itself, which is directly across the page. Any half-interested reader would immediately notice the discrepancy when glancing from one to the other.

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Figure 4.5 H. M. Paget for The Black Arrow, “The horse neighed and trampled”.

Paget’s illustrations for The Black Arrow therefore realize another of Stevenson’s concerns about the dangers of illustration. These dramatic images immediately command the reader’s attention on turning the page, as they are technically impressive to look at. The combination of dramatic effect depicting moments of heightened action, and the technical accomplishments of the artist, make them very convincing to the new reader, and therefore challenge the authority of the text in a manner that Brennan’s do not threaten to do in the same way. Paget pays attention to some textual details, but then overlooks, edits or alters others, in a manner that is ultimately very confusing for the reader: who do we believe, the artist or the

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writer? Who is right and who is wrong? Of course, Stevenson would always maintain that the text must be the guiding medium, but Paget’s illustrations here perfectly exemplify the power of visual imagery to usurp textual authority. It is naturally easier for the average reader to interpret a single image than to work through a text, a fact which gives an illustration immediacy over the text within the final illustrated story. Although we cannot know for certain, Stevenson’s silence on these pictures might point to resignation on the subject. As discussed, in 1888, when negotiating with Scribner over the publication of the novel in America, he was happy to bow to the knowledge of an experienced publisher in a market to which he himself was new; in 1891, when Cassell and Co. published their book with Paget’s illustrations, Stevenson was so far removed geographically from London that he would not have been able to object to or proof the images in a timely fashion anyway. However, this logistic challenge was a problem Stevenson did try to overcome with the illustration of his other British novels, Kidnapped (1886), The Master of Ballantrae (1889) and Catriona (1893) through the sponsorship of his favourite illustrator, William Hole.

Kidnapped, The Master of Ballantrae and Catriona: re-illustrating Scott’s Scotland When it came to the illustration of Stevenson’s Scottish-historical novels, artists were treading on ground that had been heavily worn by the Waverley industry. The challenge was to create imagery that would be judged against, but not confined by, the overwhelming amount of imagery related to Walter Scott’s Waverley novels. By writing novels dealing with eighteenth-century Scottish history, Stevenson was writing for a popular market that was deeply entrenched in a national-historical identity forged by Scott’s massively popular novels. As Ina Ferris has pointed out, Scott transformed the national tales of Lady Morgan and Maria Edgeworth into the modern historical novel, and quoting John H. Raleigh, states that “‘To have been alive and literate in the nineteenth century … was to have been affected in some way by the Waverley Novels’”.23 As these authors, as well as Richard Altick and Phillip Waller, have amply demonstrated, the Waverley novels made Scott a best-selling author of the nineteenth century. Waller writes that “Scott had been a best-seller virtually from the start. […] By the late nineteenth century the novels were extensively available […] and the ordinary person’s familiarity with Scott was widely evident. […] For a budding writer in the late 1880s, such as the failed accountant Richard Le Gallienne, the obvious ambition was to dream of becoming a second Scott”.24 One major facet of this massive popularity, and the extensive reprint editions throughout the century, was prolific illustration. As I have argued elsewhere, Scott and his publishers, Archibald Constable and Robert Cadell, initiated this trend with the first illustrated reprint editions of the 1820s and 1830s, the most important of which was Cadell’s Magnum Opus edition (1829–1833).

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This edition spawned many related picture books and copy-cat editions in subsequent years, while Cadell himself produced probably the definitive Victorian illustrated set, the Abbotsford edition, in 1847. The point here is that, while Stevenson was tackling some intimidating literary ground by writing Kidnapped, any illustrations to such novels were inevitably going to be judged and shaped by the aesthetic of national landscape and history of the Waverley illustrations of the previous sixty years. The illustration of the Waverley novels throughout the nineteenth century is far too big a subject to discuss here; however, it is instructive to make a direct comparison between Scott and Stevenson themselves, in regard to how they wanted their novels illustrated. Like Stevenson, Scott actively pursued the illustration of his creative work, from the beginning of his literary career. He wanted his first narrative poem, The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1803) illustrated (which did not happen in its first edition), and he sought illustrators throughout his life who, he felt, could illustrate his novels in the appropriate manner. However, illustration for Scott served very different artistic and aesthetic functions than they would for Stevenson. Scott sought illustration that would accentuate the historical aspects of his novels, particularly with regard to antiquarian considerations of historical costume, character-types (such as Covenanters, Lowlanders, gypsies) and architecture. Illustration for Scott should not compete with his story by dramatizing what had already been dramatized by the text, but should instead help the reader visualize the period or specific historical details within the texts. The illustrations to the collected novels that were published during his lifetime, and by his publishers in Scotland, demonstrate perfectly what Scott valued in illustration. His two primary artists of choice were William Allan (1782–1850), an historical painter who shared Scott’s antiquarian eye for costume and historical artefacts, and the Edinburgh-based landscape painter Alexander Nasmyth (1758–1840). With these two artists, Scott separated out aspects of character-delineation, particularly regarding the depiction of historical costume, through Allan on the one hand, and the depiction of topography and architecture through Nasmyth on the other. This separation can be seen by comparing Figures 4.6 and 4.7, both illustrating the same novel, Old Mortality (1816), but in very different manners: Allan’s picture is focused on characters, accentuating costume and character-type, particularly in the juxtaposition of the modern costume of Peter Pattieson (the “landlord” of Tales of My Landlord) and the worn, dated costume of Old Mortality himself at the gravestone; Nasmyth’s, by contrast, depicts Craignethan Castle, a real historical location that helped Scott create the fictional Castle of Tillietudlem in the novel, depicted at the historical moment in which the novel is set. These illustrations are both decorative of their texts (both title-page vignettes), and also pedagogical. They highlight what Scott felt was visually important within his prose: historical details. When these illustrations are compared against those produced by William Brassey Hole for Kidnapped,

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Figure 4.6 William Allan for Illustrations of the Novels and Tales of the Author of Waverley (1820), courtesy of Edinburgh University Special Collections Corson Collection.

The Master of Ballantrae and Catriona, the casual viewer might be forgiven for confusing the latter with Waverley illustrations, due to their general historical setting as depicted through the costumes of the characters, the style of the architecture and the dramatic Highland backdrops for some of the action scenes. However, closer scrutiny reveals a great deal about how each author used illustration to enhance the reader’s interpretations of their texts. Where Allan and Nasmyth were hired to separate out aspects of costume and topography respectively, Hole’s illustrations incorporate both while highlighting neither. On first glance, they look like Waverley illustrations. However, Hole’s illustrations are not purely antiquarian, despite the historical subject matter; neither are they particularly centred on topography, although they do depict dramatic landscape scenery. Rather, they depict Stevenson’s characters in closely observed settings at key moments of dramatic tension.

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Figure 4.7 Alexander Nasmyth title page for volume X of Novels and Tales of the Author of Waverley (1821).

For Stevenson, story was the driving criterion behind visualisation. As with Scott, illustration was subservient to the written word, and it also served a function. However, that function was different for Stevenson: instead of being pedagogical or antiquarian in purpose, illustration served to pique a reader’s interest in the drama of the moment being depicted. Illustration, in other words, was a way into a story. Take Hole’s illustration of David on his grandfather’s staircase (Figure 4.8). There is faithful observation of costume and setting, but all serve the function of dramatisation. It is difficult for an uninitiated reader to look at this image and not wish to discover the context of such a dramatic moment. Similarly, the depiction of David and Alan Breck in hiding in the heather (Figure 4.9) does dramatically depict Glencoe, but our eye is led over Alan’s shoulder to discover on whom he is spying. These images raise questions that the texts answer. Illustration of Stevenson’s fiction was always meant to be aesthetically pleasing, but it was also conceived as an invitation to a reader into the story. This does not mean that Stevenson was willing to sacrifice historical authenticity to highlight the drama of the moment. Hole was a trusted illustrator, an artist whom Stevenson knew personally and admired professionally. Stevenson had met Hole at Edinburgh University, and had partaken in the amateur dramatic productions of the great engineer Fleeming Jenkin, otherwise known as Jenkin’s theatricals. The friendship they formed here would last a lifetime, Stevenson demanding from Scribner’s that Hole illustrate his last complete Scottish novel, Catriona, the year before he died.25

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Figure 4.8 William Hole for Kidnapped, “And then there came a blinding flash”.

Hole is perhaps best remembered for having designed and painted the murals depicting Scotland’s greatest historical figures in processional friezes that were produced for the National Portrait Gallery of Scotland in 1889. This was a task that was ideally suited to Hole, whose interest and fastidiousness in depicting national-historical subject matter reflected Stevenson’s own. Hole was not Scottish by birth (being born in Salisbury in 1846), but did move to Edinburgh at the age of three, where he was raised and educated, and became a devotee of depicting Scottish subjects in painting and etching, including paintings such as End of the ’45 (1879), Prince Charlie’s Parliament (1882) and A Straggler of the Chevalier’s Army, Culloden (1888). Before settling down, he travelled throughout Italy, where, according to

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Figure 4.9 William Hole for Kidnapped, “We began to slip from one rock to another”.

a contemporary review of the artist, “Nothing came amiss to the happy artist—children, cattle, peasants, landscape, monks, ruins, and churches”.26 In 1878, he was elected an Associate of the Scottish Academy, and was encouraged to take up etching, at which he excelled. As another contemporary critic, James Caw, noted in 1908, what Hole lacked in creative genius was offset by his gifts in etching; discussing his interpretations of famous paintings, Caw writes that Hole’s etchings were “perhaps the most wonderful translations of colour and handling, of design and conception and spirit, into another artistic medium ever made, and entitle their author to rank with creative artists of the highest class”.27 It was this combination of

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interest in Scottish history, attention to observational aspects of depicting historical subjects, and the fact that Hole could etch all of his own designs and avoid a third-party engraver that made him an ideal illustrator of Stevenson’s Scottish novels. Any illustration for Kidnapped, The Master of Ballantrae or Catriona amply demonstrates Hole’s abilities to achieve these ends. This is probably best demonstrated in Hole’s illustrations to The Master of Ballantrae. The first illustration, Figure 4.10, might be easily mistaken for a Waverley illustration: the characters are in mid-eighteenth century dress, in a grand hall reminiscent of scenes from, perhaps, Waverley, Rob Roy or The Bride of Lammermoor. However, the characters are not minutely depicted; their clothes are authentic to the period of the novel (1745) and the social class of the characters, but they are not the focus of the illustration, particularly as they are comparatively distant from the viewer. Similarly, the hall they

Figure 4.10 William Hole for The Master of Ballantrae (1889), “Heads, I go; shield, I stay”.

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inhabit shows authentic architectural detail of an older hall of an established aristocratic family. In fact, Stevenson guided Hole to this style of interior in a letter to Edward Burlingame from Saranac Lake, New York, in January 1888: If you think of having the Master illustrated, I suggest that Hole would be very well up to the Scottish—which is the larger part. If you have it done here, tell your artist to look at the hall of Craigievar in Billings’ Baronial and Ecclesiastical Antiquities, and he will get a broad hint for the Hall at Durrisdeer; it is, I think, the chimney of Craigievar and the roof of Pinkie, and perhaps a little more of Pinkie altogether; but I should have to see the book myself to be sure. Hole would be invaluable for this.28 This letter is remarkably similar to advice Scott would give to Allan and Nasmyth, asking them to research the subjects for illustration in specific texts, so that they would produce imagery that conformed to the author’s preconceived visions.29 However, while important, architectural detail and authenticity are not central to the image. In Hole’s illustration, authentic historical detail of costume and setting help to frame a moment of high drama, namely, the tossing of the coin that decides which side of the 1745 Scottish rebellion each Durisdeer brother will take for the sake of the family’s survival. It is the precipitate moment in the novel from which the rest of the narrative takes its trajectory. Therefore, it is the moment, the narrative action that is central to this illustration, which must be supported with historical authenticity and truth to the textual source. This serves to highlight why Stevenson appreciated Hole as an illustrator: in his illustrations for the Scottish novels, Hole deftly weaves together his eye for historical detail, and his ability to render characters from Stevenson’s texts, into critical moments of action from the story. Such imagery invites reader-viewer curiosity, because the dramatic nature of the scene requires that the story be read to understand fully the moment depicted. The influence of the Waverley novels on popular preconceptions of Highland scenes and characters also helps in small part to explain Stevenson’s economy of style when it comes to visual renderings of similar Scottish scenes. This is best exemplified through a direct comparison of similar scenes from Scott’s Rob Roy (1817) and Kidnapped, both of which describe a Highland public-house. Scott’s description, narrated through the eyes of his hero Frank Osbaldistone, is typically Scottian in its exhaustive visual detail of both interior and character-type: The interior presented a view which seemed singular enough to southern eyes. The fire, fed with blazing turf and branches of dried wood, blazed merrily in the centre; but the smoke, having no means to escape but through a hole in the roof, eddied round the rafters of the cottage,

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Scott leaves the reader with a very clear picture of the interior of the inn, its atmosphere and its exotic guests, who are rendered with an antiquarian’s eye for detail of costume and equipment, differentiating between Highlander and Lowlander. It is both descriptive and educational, transporting the average erudite reader back in time and space to the grim realities of mid-eighteenth century Highland life. It is a scene, like many others, that became ingrained in the fabric of popular imagery both through its popularity and through subsequent illustration. However, compare this exhaustive description against Stevenson’s similar scene in Kidnapped: “The inn at Kinlochaline was the most beggarly, vile place that ever pigs were stied in, full of smoke, vermin and silent highlanders”.31 This is the full extent of Stevenson’s description: economical in the extreme. As Barry Menikoff states in his introduction to the novel, “description was made to serve atmosphere and emotion beyond all else; it  was

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never designed to pictorially reproduce a natural scene”, a technique which places Stevenson’s style in direct contrast to Scott’s.32 However, I argue further that lengthy description of Highland scenes was also made unnecessary because of the strong visual tradition in which they were written; Scott’s Scottish imagery was so pervasive in the nineteenth century, even in the 1880s, that Stevenson simply did not need to render a strong observational image. Highlanders did not need their costumes closely scrutinised and rendered for the uninitiated reader, because Highland costume had been so variously and exhaustively pictured through illustration, popular theatre costumes, paintings and the nineteenth-century cult of Waverley, that to describe such characters afresh would have been largely redundant.33 When Stevenson does describe costume, as he does with Alan Breck’s clothing, it is corrective of the general tropes established by the Waverley industry. Indeed, Alan’s costume seems to resist the tartanized standard of popular culture: “he showed forth mighty fine for the round-house of a merchant brig: having a hat with feathers, a red waistcoat, breeches of black plush and a blue coat with silver buttons and handsome silver lace: costly clothes, though somewhat spoiled with the fog and being slept in”.34 So different in appearance is Alan from Scott’s Highland warriors in the inn in Rob Roy that Stevenson needs to make sure the reader does not elide the two images in his imagination. Alan, although a Highlander, is not overtly so according to popular perceptions. Kidnapped’s imagery, therefore, is rendered intensely but sparsely through the evocation of an entire gallery of deeply ingrained visual tropes that Scott had established at the beginning of the century, and which were subsequently appropriated and mutated through the proliferation of popular paintings, theatre productions, illustrated texts and copy-cat novels throughout the century following Scott’s death. When popular stereotypes threaten to derail the historical authenticity of Stevenson’s text, he provides close description that resists lazy or inaccurate stereotyping. The fundamental differences between the illustrations for Scott’s and Stevenson’s Scottish novels amply demonstrates the very different ways in which authors of national-historical romance novels could interpret and accentuate aspects of their texts. Of course, these two authors were operating at opposite ends of the nineteenth century, and therefore with very different printing technologies and market expectations. However, a consideration of how Scott and Stevenson understood the artistic function of illustration reveals the visual potentialities of their works. The similarities are clear: both writers’ prose are rich in imagery and passages of high drama, set against impressive backdrops with vivid characters in important historical moments, and were therefore ripe for illustration. They both also actively sought illustration of their novels, at times when it was unfashionable to do so. Scott’s Waverley novels were illustrated in Scotland in reprint editions at the author’s request, helping to create something new and powerful in the marketplace: the illustrated novel of a contemporary author, which directly influenced the more famous illustrated works of Dickens, Thackeray and

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their competitors in the 1830s and 1840s; by contrast, Stevenson’s English publishers were resistant to the illustration of his novels, as if illustration of a certain style would diminish the “seriousness” of his art in a marketplace, which increasingly associated popular illustrated fiction with children’s literature. Nonetheless, Hole’s illustrations for Kidnapped and The Master of Ballantrae helped to create two of the finest illustrated stories of the nineteenth century, primarily because the artist’s interpretations were so much appreciated by the author himself; Stevenson’s admiration of Hole’s pictures confirm that Hole was – as far as possible – bringing Stevenson’s texts to life in the visual medium.

Kidnapped 1886 was Stevenson’s pivotal year as an author due to the publication of Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, and his historical masterpiece, Kidnapped. The former was not illustrated in Stevenson’s lifetime (at least with Stevenson’s blessing), but Kidnapped was. Its settings - Lowland Scotland to the Highlands and back to the Lowlands shortly after the 1745 Jacobite uprising - made it ideal fodder for visual representation through illustration, particularly because it was treading on ground that had been highly aestheticized by Scott’s Waverley novels. However, despite its publication in 1886, Kidnapped had gestated in Stevenson’s imagination for several years, and had done so as an illustrated tale. The first mention of the story is made in a letter to Edmund Gosse in mid-November 1881, precisely the time at which he was drafting Treasure Island for its initial appearance in Young Folks. Stevenson writes, I am just about in act to write an odd little historical bypath of a tragedy: very picturesque in its circumstances; a story of an Agrarian murder, complicated with fidelity to chiefs, clan hatreds, an unjust trial, an attempted abduction in which Rob Roy’s son figures as the foiled abductor—and you will note, it was a murderer whom he was to kidnap, which thickens the broth—all happening so late as 1752.35 The conception of Kidnapped as an illustrated text is confirmed in the same letter: It would admirably bear illustration. A cairn still marks or very recently marked, the scene of the murder hard by Ballachulish; an artist could easily find it. He might also find ‘Aucharn in Duror’ close by, where James Stewart, the accused, lived. The trial took place at Inveraray; I have never been there; but the artist could certainly find out where the trial was held; and if ‘the Highland kirk at Inveraray’ be still standing, that also would do for a picture, since it was there, by one of the abuses of the case, the witnesses were held confined during

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the trial. Ballachulish ferry, too, which the victim had just passed, might figure; and I believe these illustrations would mightily help the story. Koalisnacoan likewise, some kind of dell where most picturesque business went on, might be found and sketched.36 This paragraph reveals much about Stevenson’s creative process with Kidnapped from the very beginning: he is almost asking that the illustrations to the final story pre-exist the story itself. The pictures Stevenson has in mind form a certain narrative structure-by-location to the story before it has even been written. The artist (as yet to be chosen) is being directed very specifically to certain sites and scenes of historical and topographical significance to the narrative. The artist is required to work: to travel, research and be faithful to the period of the novel (“the Highland kirk at Inveraray”, Stevenson suggests, might not be still standing, but it should appear in the novel because it was standing in 1752). These illustrations, if they had appeared (they didn’t) would have been observationally and historically authentic, and would have helped the reader visualize the places depicted in the period of the novel. In addition, Stevenson’s comment that the illustrations “would mightily help the story” is significant in its implications. Does he mean that they would help the reader interpret the narrative; that they would help the reader visualize the story in its real locations; or that they would help the writer to write the story as visual guides? It is impossible to know for certain, but a mixture of all three of these suggestions is likely. In any case, the fact that Stevenson writes this, while simultaneously writing Treasure Island from a mixture of visual and literary stimuli, implies a writing process that is both informed by and created for illustration. It is also apparent from this letter that the story was being conceived as an illustrated novel; in other words, he expected that it would be well illustrated in its first appearance. For various reasons, the project was put aside for several years, until 1885 when Swearingen writes that he took up the story from his home in Bournemouth.37 However, despite the hiatus, it was no doubt welcome to Stevenson that Kidnapped first appeared in Young Folks illustrated again by William Boucher, in fourteen weekly instalments from 1 May to 31 July 1886. There is no written record of Stevenson’s opinion of Boucher’s illustrations for Kidnapped, but he does write to Henderson on 3 February 1886, during its composition, regarding the illustration process: I am in great hopes you may go ahead at Easter in safety; but if that is so, had I not better let Mr Boucher have some start in the story pretty soon? I shall have a word or two to send him, and some photographs of places; for he may as well be right as not, and the right thing is usually the picturesque.38 Even four years on from its original conception, Stevenson was intent on making sure that the illustrator be accurate in rendering his topographical and

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architectural settings. The process suggested here is the same that Stevenson would encourage when requesting illustration of his Pacific subjects several years later: he suggests that Boucher illustrate from photographs. Photography in Stevenson’s oeuvre will be discussed in Chapter 5, but in this instance, photography would ensure an authentic artistic rendering of historical sites and topographical scenes in which his action would take place. Such authenticity of topography and architecture was important to the historical aspects of Stevenson’s fiction, and Stevenson undertook much research into these aspects. Menikoff has recently traced the conception and production of Kidnapped and Catriona, pertaining in particular to the meticulous research Stevenson undertook in creating a historically authentic universe for their hero to negotiate. However, Stevenson’s textual research into the period also provided him with important visual aids to the creative process. As Menikoff states, “For Stevenson, originals are key to his project. If the novel is historical then every detail of its representation must be accurate. Therefore he requires first-person accounts by people who were there”.39 Menikoff analyses Stevenson’s historical, legal and cultural research into post-Culloden Highlands; I would extend this argument into the visual field. In a very similar manner in which Scott, at the beginning of the century, relied on both textual and visual sources to re-create authentic historical periods, so did Stevenson with many of the illustrated “originals” Menikoff refers to here. One such source is Letters from a Gentleman in the North of Scotland by Edmund Burt, first published in 1754, which provides a first-hand account of Burt’s experiences in General Wade’s campaigns in the Highlands of Scotland. Significantly, these texts were illustrated, providing observational detail of the people and their customs – including dress – by contemporary artists. Text and image are inseparable in this volume, as Burt directly references the copper-plate illustrations that accompany the text. For example, referring to the carts with which peat would be transported through the town of Inverness, Burt writes, “They have three several Sorts of Carts according to the enclosed Sketches, of which that Species wherein they carry their Peats”; directly across the page is a series of three illustrations visualizing the three types of cart he describes (Figure 4.11). As seen from a combination of text and image, Burt’s Letters are meant to be highly observational and ethnographical studies of a culture that was both British and other; he captures in real time the very life of those cultures whom Scott and then Stevenson attempted to do in their historical fiction. This is rich factual and visual material from which to create an historical diegesis, and as a detailed notebook in the Huntington Library, Highlands: notes for a history of the Scottish Highlands, confirms, it heavily informed Stevenson’s visual sense of the period and its people. Burt’s Letters, therefore, provides confirmation that at least some of Stevenson’s research into the historical period involved reliable, first-hand visual records of historical and regional dress.

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Figure 4.11 Illustration to volume I, p. 86 of Edmund Burt’s Letters from a Gentleman in the North of Scotland, courtesy of the Huntington Library, California.

Given that Stevenson’s research into the period was so meticulous, it stands to reason that he would require a similar level of historical authenticity in any subsequent illustrations. He must have been pleased that Boucher would again illustrate his story, having successfully done so three years earlier with The Black Arrow. Unfortunately, Stevenson is silent on Boucher’s illustrations to Young Folks’ Kidnapped, but the same criteria used for The Black Arrow can be applied to judge the success of the later pictures. An examination of the first full title-page from 1 May 1886 confirms Boucher’s talent for faithful characterization and narrative progression between the two pictures he produces (Figure 4.12).

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Figure 4.12 William Boucher’s cover illustrations for Kidnapped in Young Folks, 1 May 1886, courtesy of the National Library of Scotland.

The larger central picture is supplied with the sub-title taken from the text: “‘That is the House of Shaws!’ the woman cried. ‘Blood built it: blood stopped the building of it: blood shall bring it down. See here!’ she cried again, ‘I spit upon the ground and crack my thumb at it! Black be its fall!’” As always with Stevenson illustration, we must consider the full context of the image to appreciate its strengths and weaknesses. First, there is David, for whom there is no physical description provided in the novel, especially since the story is first-person narrated (David does not describe himself for us); Boucher has had to construct him from small clues from the text. We are told in chapter 1 that David is “a lad of sixteen years of age; the son of a poor country Dominie in the Forest of Ettrick”, therefore providing an age and a Lowlands origin for the artist.40 We are also told that he is dressed in a “country habit and that all dusty from the road”.41 Boucher has, as far as his woodcut medium has allowed him, stayed true to the source, creating a

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character who could be around the age of 16, poorly dressed in non-descript Lowland clothes, with his “bundle on my staff’s end” full of the gifts given to him by Mr Campbell.42 Next, the witch-like character of Jennet Coulston is described as merely “a stout, dark, sour looking woman”; the “malignant anger” of her face that is brought on by the mention of the House of Shaws is concealed from the viewer, but suggested in her aggressive posture. Her sinister oracle qualities are suggested by the shadows falling unnaturally over her face and her pointing arm towards the house itself. Finally, there is the setting: the text places this scene at the top of a hill: and she, when I had put my usual question, turned sharp about, accompanied me back to the summit she had just left and, in the bottom of the next valley, pointed to a great hulk of building standing very bare upon a green. The country was pleasant round about, running in low hills, pleasantly watered and wooded, and the crops, to my eyes, wonderfully good; but the house itself appeared to be a kind of ruin; no road led up to it; no smoke arose from any of the chimneys; nor was there any semblance of a garden.43 Compositionally, Boucher has again been faithful to the text, couching the house in a valley below them. David’s gaze guides us to Jennet, whose arm points towards the house in the distance below them. There is then a natural spatial and chronological shift to the illustration of David with his uncle within the house Jennet points to. The inset illustration is provided again with a textual subheading: “‘Do ye ken what’s in it?’ he asked, suddenly. ‘You see for yourself, sir,’ said David, ‘that the seal has not been broken.’” This text has been altered slightly to help the viewer: it refers to “David”, rather than using the “I” of the text. However, David is faithfully transposed in figure and dress (minus his bonnet and bag, which lies on the table behind his uncle) from the primary image, while Ebeneezer is remarkably realized from his textual description: He was a mean, stooping, narrow-shouldered, clay-faced creature; and his age might have been anything between fifty or seventy. His nightcap was of flannel, and so was the night gown that he wore, instead of coat and waistcoat, over his ragged shirt. He was long unshaved; but what most distressed and even daunted me, he would neither take his eyes away from me nor look me fairly in the face.44 Boucher has realized this character vividly, although he has been helped to an unusual degree by the close description of the text, which Stevenson so rarely provides his illustrators. It is of little surprise that a character named Ebeneezer, described and then illustrated like this, bears such a close resemblance to his famous forebear, Scrooge. The comparison is immediate, but Boucher has resisted the temptation to plagiarise John Leech’s famous

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characterization of Dickens’s character, and given Stevenson’s Ebeneezer his unshaven visage, stooped back and ambiguous age. All of Boucher’s illustrations are replete with strong characterization, dramatic actionand narrative movement. David is consistently recognisable from one image to the next, and true to the theme of growth and maturation, he becomes a young man in the final image, quite clearly more mature in posture and demeanour than in the first. The same consistency, however, cannot be applied to Boucher’s depiction of Alan Breck. Given the centrality of the character to the story, and his subsequent iconic status within literature, it is surprising to find that Boucher - normally so fastidious in his textual interpretations - betrays Stevenson’s description of his physical appearance in several of the illustrations. Stevenson provides important visual cues to his illustrator within the story: He was smallish in stature, but well set and as nimble as a goat; his face was of a good open expression, but sunburnt very dark, heavily freckled, and pitted with the small-pox; his eyes were unusually light and had a kind of dancing madness in them, that was both engaging and alarming; and when he took off his greatcoat, he laid a pair of fine, silver-mounted pistols on the table, and I saw that he was belted with a great sword. […] as soon as he had taken off the greatcoat, he showed forth mighty fine for the round-house of a merchant brig: having a hat with feathers, a red waistcoat, breeches of black plush and a blue coat with silver buttons and handsome silver lace: costly clothes, though somewhat spoiled with the fog and being slept in.45 As such close description demands, Boucher has rendered Alan’s costume in accordance with the text (Figure 4.13). We see the sword, the feathered hat, money belt in hand, breeches and silver lace displayed through the prominent central figure. However, there are a couple of inconsistencies: the first is the presence of only one silver pistol on the table rather than two. More significant, however, is that Boucher has failed to capture the “smallish”, “nimble” stature of Stevenson’s character, and the weather-beaten, disease-marked features of his face. In fact, a casual viewer might be forgiven for mistaking Hoeseason, seated at the table, for Alan, if the two characters were judged purely on physical characteristics. Part of Alan’s power as a character are his many contradictions, one of which exists in the incongruity between his warlike demeanour and the elegance of his dress. In Boucher’s illustration, Hoeseason’s face seems to capture the face of “good open expression, but sunburnt very dark, heavily freckled, and pitted with the small-pox”; by contrast, Alan is tall and elegant, and his face as clean and youthful as David’s. However, Boucher’s Alan undergoes an evolution through the series for Young Folks, to the point that the same character in the last four of

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Figure 4.13 Boucher’s illustration of Alan Breck and Hoeseason for Young Folks, 15 May 1886, courtesy of the National Library of Scotland.

the thirteen instalments are unrecognisable from his first appearance. As demonstrated in Figure 4.14, he seems to get shorter, squatter and more facially similar to Hoeseason. He becomes a figure who embodies the mixture of age, physical vigour and cunning that Stevenson creates. In this illustration, Alan is depicted centrally listening to Robin Oig (the son of Rob Roy MacGregor) playing the bagpipes: he is the central focus of the image, and when matched to its text, we see that Boucher has indeed captured not only the physical stature of the man and Robin (“they were neither of them big men”), but the good humour of the moment, as Alan leans back, open stance, in appreciation of the superior piper: It was a fine piece of music in itself, and nobly played; but it seems besides it was a piece peculiar to the Appin Stewarts and a chief favourite with Alan. The first notes were scarce out, before there came a change in his face; when the time quickened, he seemed to grow restless in his seat; and long before that piece was at an end, the last signs of his anger died from him, and he had no thought but for the music.46 Boucher has caught the mood of the scene in the open, reclined body language of Alan. He has also captured David’s “borrowed” highland costume,

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Figure 4.14 Boucher’s illustration for Young Folks, 10 July 1886, courtesy of the National Library of Scotland.

and, in the absence of any textual description of Robin, has conveniently concealed much of the character behind the bagpipes he plays. The change in appearance of Alan from the start to the end of Boucher’s series may indicate the intervention of Stevenson himself, but no correspondence survives to prove this theory. In any case, Alan in this picture looks like Hoeseason in the first (Figure 4.13). The one artist who clearly did satisfy Stevenson as an illustrator was Hole, who illustrated the 1887 edition of the novel for Cassell and Company in London, and Charles Scribner’s Sons in New York. Hole was employed to produce pictures for the first illustrated book edition of Kidnapped with Stevenson’s personal approval. Hole’s illustrations for this edition mark the realisation of Stevenson’s vision for a literary-visual aesthetic of the new romance. In Hole, Stevenson found a kindred spirit, an artist who could visualise his prose in illustration, in a manner that was both faithful to the text and creative in its interpretation, culminating in a publication that should be considered one of the great Victorian illustrated novels. It seems that, on Henley’s advice, Stevenson sought out his old friend, who produced a frontispiece for Stevenson to proof. In a letter to Fanny of 14 September 1886 from Skerryvore, Stevenson writes “Hole’s picture tell Henley is very spirited indeed”.47

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In  a note to this letter, Booth and Mehew explain that Thomas Galpin, on behalf of Cassell’s, wrote to Stevenson on 16th, stating “As you like the frontispiece we will proceed with the other illustrations”, suggesting that Hole’s first picture had been a test run for Stevenson to approve before commissioning the rest of the set.48 From the 21st, Stevenson and Hole seem to have begun direct communication over the illustrations.49 The frontispiece mentioned is the first of a series of sixteen illustrations Hole would produce for the edition. An examination of Hole’s frontispiece demonstrates a very different illustrative approach to the narrative from Boucher’s; the style is more reminiscent of Paget’s illustrations for The Black Arrow. Hole largely avoids the pitfalls of mischaracterization that blights Boucher’s pictures by employing a style that blends characters within their dramatic settings, through a style that is less focussed on character and more with incident. Hole seems to understand that landscape, architecture, setting and dramatic moment are as important to a successful illustration as the characters. The frontispiece exemplifies this approach.

Figure 4.15 William Hole for Kidnapped, “It was meant to be a main entrance, but never finished”.

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This picture illustrates the following passage: Presently [the faint path] brought me to stone uprights, with an unroofed lodge beside them, and coats of arms upon the top. A brave entrance, it was plainly meant to be; but never finished; instead of gates of wrought iron, a pair of hurdles were tied across with a straw rope; and as there were no park walls, nor any sign of avenue, the track that I was following passed on the right hand of the pillars and went wandering on toward the house.50 Importantly, this is a picture that Stevenson personally saw and approved, meaning that the viewer is looking at an illustration that the author himself deemed a worthy visual representation of his prose. A first glance immediately confirms a very different illustrative treatment from Boucher. Hole has expressed mood through the landscape and the weather, dark clouds shedding black foreboding shadows across the gates, and highlighting the House of Shaws in the distance. A casual viewer is given the appropriate sense of dread and danger presented by Stevenson’s scene, and a sense of incongruity of the well-dressed figure of David in the foreground and the run-down estate he is about to enter. Hole has brought several aspects of the text together here: it is a threshold moment in which David is about to enter the estate, and about to embark on his adventure. He has depicted David accurately enough but from a distance, meaning that we do not focus on costume or even character, but rather on the situation that the character finds himself in. Hole proved adept (possibly with Stevenson’s guidance) at picking moments in the narrative that echo Stevenson’s own criteria expressed in “A Gossip on Romance”: “threads of a story come from time to time together and make a picture in the web; the characters fall from time to time into some attitude to each other or to nature, which stamps the story home like an illustration”.51 This is why Stevenson approved of Hole as an illustrator; he captured such moments as actual illustrations, with due faith and reverence for the texts they illustrated. Other illustrations in the suite confirm this talent, such as David on the stairs narrowly avoiding his death, in which Hole provides a suitably Gothic flash of lightning and startled bats; or the moment that David must leap across a rushing waterfall, with Alan crouched waiting on the other side. In each illustration (too many to reproduce here), Hole combines the several elements of dramatic narrative that Stevenson identifies in “A Gossip on Romance”: a moment of dramatic tension or movement for the protagonists, caught within a striking or symbolic setting, with, most significantly, fidelity to the text. Unlike Paget, Hole does not add or edit narrative detail to suit composition, and he has an antiquarian’s eye for historical costume and period setting.

The Master of Ballantrae Unfortunately, Stevenson does not provide direct commentary on Hole’s illustrations for Kidnapped, but his approval is made clear when discussing

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a potential illustrator for The Master of Ballantrae a couple of years later. In a letter of 6 January 1888 from Saranac Lake, Stevenson writes to Scribner’s agent Edward Burlingame to say that, “If you think of having the Master illustrated, I suggest that Hole would be very well up to the Scottish—which is the larger part. […] Hole would be invaluable for this”.52 Hole’s illustrations for The Master of Ballantrae would surpass Stevenson’s expectations. It is ironic that the novel Stevenson considered to be the best illustrated was produced with such logistical complications. Stevenson wrote The Master of Ballantrae in bursts from various geographical locations, including Saranac Lake in New York in 1888, and Honolulu in 1889; throughout this period he communicated primarily through Edward Burlingame, Scribner’s agent in New York, regarding the publication of the novel through Scribner’s Magazine, and at Stevenson’s insistence, Burlingame engaged the services of Hole, who was working from Edinburgh. The Master, among other achievements, is a potent symbol of the technological and logistical developments of the late nineteenth century, not least the postal service. However, problems became apparent in attempting to get the serial publication in Scribner’s illustrated. Stevenson had arranged to contact Hole personally regarding the scenes to be illustrated for each instalment in Scribner’s, but it appears that he simply forgot to do so for several weeks, which put the process behind schedule. According to Booth and Mehew, Burlingame wrote to Stevenson to remind him to send Hole synopses of the forthcoming instalments in order to give him time to produce illustrations. In response, Stevenson replied on 5 February 1889 from Honolulu: Illustrations to M. I totally forgot to try to write to Hole. It was just as well, for I find it impossible to forecast with sufficient precision. You had better throw off all this and let him have it at once; (Please do: all, and at once: see further); and I should hope he would still be in time for the later numbers. The three pictures I have received are so truly good that I should bitterly regret having the volume imperfectly equipped. They are the best illustrations I have seen since I don’t know when.53 In the end, of the twelve instalments in Scribner’s Magazine, only numbers VII and XI were not illustrated, which was presumably as a result of this misunderstanding. Stevenson seems to have written the chapters, which were sent to Burlingame, who then forwarded them onto Hole to illustrate. This put time pressures on Hole to produce the pictures in time for publication, two of which did not make the final numbers in Scribner’s. The distances involved meant that Stevenson could not work to his preferred modus operandum of working closely with his illustrator during the writing phase: as he states above, this would have been difficult anyway, as he wasn’t sure how the tale would work itself out, making it difficult to provide Hole with preconceived scenes to illustrate. However, this communication breakdown likely resulted in the illustrations that Stevenson admired so much; Hole had

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finished chapters to work with, meaning he could illustrate the narrative with its intended settings, nuances of action and characterization, rather than having to guess what Stevenson would write from rough synopses. Stevenson’s enthusiasm for these illustrations is clear from the above letter, and from correspondence immediately following its publication in New York. The Master of Ballantrae is the most important of Stevenson’s illustrated novels because of his clear admiration for the pictures Hole produced, and the consequent quality of the volume that they helped to create for the reader. As Stevenson proofed images sent through Burlingame, his enthusiasm seems to have grown with each new illustration; he writes to Burlingame on 20 May 1889 that “Hole is certainly doing beyond opinion; the proof sent is highly picturesque. It will be a really well illustrated novel, and that’s something new in this world”.54 In the same dispatch of letters from Honolulu, Stevenson also writes to Will Low, stating, “Yes, I think Hole has done finely; it will be one of the most adequately illustrated books of our generation; he gets the note, he tells the story—my story: I know only one failure—the Master standing on the beach”.55 Unfortunately, Stevenson does not elaborate on this failure (Figure 4.16), so a close textual examination is required to understand its shortcomings. The illustration captures the moment in which MacKellar approaches the Master once the Master has been landed by smugglers. On first glance it is suitably situated and dramatic in tone, MacKellar approaching the master, who stands well dressed (as the text explains) in front of a turbid ocean, in which the smugglers can be seen rowing back to the ship. Hole even depicts the portmanteaus that were brought ashore. In terms of narrative incident, the illustration appears faithful to its text. Therefore, Stevenson’s criticism must pertain to the depiction of the Master himself, and a reading of the text reveals why: the baggage was all tumbled on shore, the boat on its return voyage to the lugger, and the passenger standing alone upon the point of rock, a tall, slender figure of a gentleman, habited in black, with a sword by his side and a walking cane upon his wrist. […] I was now near enough to see him, a very handsome figure and countenance, swarthy, lean, long, with a quick, alert, black look, as of one who was a fighter and accustomed to command; upon one cheek he had a mole, not unbecoming; a large diamond sparkled on his hand; his clothes, although of the one hue, were of a French and foppish design; his ruffles, which he wore longer than common, of exquisite lace; and I wondered the more to see him in such a guise, when he was but newly landed from a dirty smuggling lugger. At the same time, he had a better look at me, toised me a second time sharply, and then smiled.56 Again, the visual aspects of costume and adornments seem in order: a tall gentleman dressed in black, with long lace ruffles, diamond (although in the book reproduction of Scribner’s original image it is barely visible), sword

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Figure 4.16 William Hole for The Master of Ballantrae, “A tall, slender figure of a gentleman”.

to his side, cane in hand, standing on a point of rock with the boat in the background returning to the lugger. What, then, generates Stevenson’s criticism? We must conclude that he was dissatisfied with the characterization of James Durrisdeer himself. Stevenson’s comment on this character is reminiscent of his criticism of the depiction of Dr Livesey by Georges Roux, discussed in Chapter 3. Stevenson criticized Roux for drawing a character that was not in keeping with the doctor’s physical accomplishments, a comment that seems harsh given that so little description is provided for the illustrator within the text. Here, we must look at the impression of character Stevenson is trying to create with his description of the Master: “a very handsome figure and countenance, swarthy, lean, long, with a quick, alert, black look, as of one who was a fighter

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and accustomed to command”. Matched against this prose, Hole’s Master does not quite conform to the “black look” Stevenson conjures. In Hole’s defence, Stevenson’s description is impressionistic rather than prescriptive, as with Long John Silver, and Hole must interpret as best he can. However, Stevenson’s concern reveals the ultimate test of any illustrator of Stevenson: that they represent character appropriately. As demonstrated with Long John Silver, however, this is a taxing request, because any visualization of a fictional character, without a specific model in mind (such as W. E. Henley for Long John), is a highly subjective exercise. Stevenson’s real complaint here is that Hole, for once only, has not embodied what the author imagined when writing the character. However, Hole is being critiqued against his own high standards, because Stevenson was clearly delighted with the rest of the illustrations. As he tells Low, Hole “gets the note, he tells the story – my story”; this comment suggests a meeting of minds, of imaginative vision and an ability Hole has to visualise the intangibles of Stevenson’s imagery that perhaps only a shared Edinburgh past could produce. It was a disappointment to Stevenson that not all the instalments for the Scribner’s publication were illustrated, and he wanted to make sure that these illustrations were seen in Britain as well as America. In the same letter dated 5 February 1889 to Burlingame, but on a separate sheet (so presumably written later), Stevenson writes regarding the unillustrated instalments: I am an idiot [for not having given Hole synopses of forthcoming chapters]. I want to be clear on one point. Some of Hole’s drawings must of course be too late; and yet they seem to me so excellent I would fain have the lot complete. It is one thing for you to pay for drawings which are to appear in that soul-swallowing machine, your magazine: quite another if they are only to illustrate a volume. I wish you to take a brisk (even a fiery decision) on the point; and let Hole know. For instance, Cassell might share in the expense of those that will come too late for the Soul-Swallower? Do you see? I write to Galpin, in case you should see it from that point of view, by the same mail.57 Stevenson is suggesting that Cassell in London should share the cost of the illustrations that would not make it into Scribner’s, thereby encouraging the firm to publish the full set of illustrations in Britain. He did write to Galpin on this point two months later, on 7 April 1889: You will doubtless have heard before now from Messrs Scribner that I have made all secure as to the copyright of The Master of Ballantrae. But I agree the tale had perhaps as well make its first appearance unadorned. As to the question of an édition de luxe, it is one on which I am quite without experience; yet I own the idea (at the first sight) scarce pleases me. I believe I shall make you the judge of that, when the time comes; and at any rate, if you should think it desirable to issue the

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illustrated edition before my return, I place it in your hands unreservedly either to make the drawings down or the book up.58 Stevenson’s initial desire to have The Master of Ballantrae published with Hole’s illustrations in its first British edition would not materialize, but instead Galpin had suggested a special, larger-format edition of the novel that included Hole’s full-sized illustrations on Scribner’s original scale. As Booth and Mehew point out, this de luxe edition did not materialize, and instead, Hole’s pictures were scaled down for both the American first edition of the novel, published in 1890 by Charles Scribner’s Sons, and the second British edition by Cassell’s in 1891. Again, it is the American publishers who produce Stevenson’s work with illustrations in its first edition, the English edition having to catch up. However, in both cases, The Master of Ballantrae, illustrated by Hole, must be considered Stevenson’s favourite illustrated novel, as it was the benchmark by which he would judge all subsequent illustrated editions of his works. Where he provides no written approval of Hole’s illustrations for Kidnapped, he is effusive in his praise of those for The Master; for this reason, the modern critic must appreciate these illustrations as the embodiment of Stevenson’s theories of narrative illustration.

Catriona Hole’s images suffered through this photographic process of miniaturization, many of his details and nuances of the original engravings being lost through the blurring effect of the camera lens and the smaller scale. However, this did not seem to dampen Stevenson’s admiration for the pictures, as he was keen to employ Hole to illustrate both The Wrecker (discussed in Chapter 5) and the sequel to Kidnapped, Catriona (or David Balfour in America).59 Stevenson would not see the illustrations for Catriona, because although he personally approved Hole again to illustrate the novel, the illustrations finally appeared in 1895, a year after Stevenson died in Samoa. He had written to Sidney Colvin on 23 August 1893, writing simply “Hole essential”.60 The novel was published unillustrated in 1893, in both New York and London. This, according to Swearingen, was in part due to the issue of the title: as Fanny pointed out that English readers were getting confused by the title David Balfour (as the subtitle of Kidnapped was The Adventures of David Balfour), Cassell and Co suggested that the novel be published unillustrated in Britain under the title Catriona, and that the two novels be published together at a later date in a two-volume suite as The Adventures of David Balfour.61 Therefore, it was published in 1895 as an illustrated edition by Cassell and Company and Charles Scribner’s Sons as the second part of this two-volume edition entitled The Adventures of David Balfour. Hole’s illustrations provide aesthetic continuity between the novels, and also a level of reliability in terms of artistic integrity, given his previous work and relationship with Stevenson.

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These illustrations are certainly of a more mixed variety than those for either Kidnapped or The Master of Ballantrae, most notably because three in particular concentrate solely on characters, an area that has been proven problematic for any illustrator of Stevenson. These illustrations sit uncomfortably with the rest of the suite, precisely because they focus on character alone, rather than dramatic incident. The most obvious example of this is the frontispiece depiction of Catriona (Figure 4.17), which depicts her in the new Dutch clothes David buys her when she poses as his sister. The focus here is clearly on period costume, and the beauty of the girl and as such there is nothing inherently wrong with it as an illustration; however, as a Stevenson-illustration, it serves virtually no illustrative function

Figure 4.17 William Hole for Catriona, “She dropped me one of her curtseys”.

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to the narrative. As with previous characters, Stevenson does not provide close visual description of Catriona, so the artist is at leisure to depict her as he wishes. However, Hole appears to infantilize the character, because even though she is clearly young in the novel, she is also sexualized through David’s gaze: “She had wonderful bright eyes like stars, and I daresay the eyes had a part in it; but what I remember the most clearly was the way her lips were a trifle open as she turned”. Hole’s Catriona resists this sexualized interpretation in favour of Victorian modesty. She is also not depicted in any real moment of dramatic importance or transition, but in a trivial moment between her and David. As such, it does not invite the reader into the story like so many of his other pictures do for Kidnapped, The Master of Ballantrae or even The Wrecker. In the absence of correspondence or comment on these illustrations, we can only wonder whether illustrations such as the frontispiece for Catriona would have been approved by Stevenson, given that he died before their publication. However, regardless of the illustrations to Catriona, Hole remained Stevenson’s most trusted illustrator of his stories, and as such, must be held important when attempting to “see” what Stevenson was intending when writing some of his most famous scenes. There was clearly an affinity of creative vision between Stevenson and Hole, enhanced by their Edinburgh roots and Scottish grounding. Hole’s ultimate gift was to be able to tell Stevenson’s story (“my story”) in the visual medium, which, as this book has so far demonstrated, was an artistic mine-field. Like Boucher, Hole paid close attention to character (with one or two exceptions), but he also shared Stevenson’s adherence to historical and antiquarian authenticity, a facet of illustration that is easily overlooked in analysing such imagery. Most importantly, especially with Kidnapped and The Master of Ballantrae, the images provide a certain narrative continuity that, while they visualize certain aspects of the texts, do not give away fundamental elements of the plot and betray their texts. For example, if Hole is depicting the fight scene between the Durrisdeer brothers, as he does for volume VI of Scribner’s publication, he depicts the characters mid-contest, rather than at the climax of the fight. This leads the readers into the narrative: who is fighting, why are they fighting and who wins the fight? You must read the story to find out. Narrative illustration for Stevenson must invite the reader into the story, and not give away its conclusions. Like the woodcut Stevenson himself produced of a man punching another man off a cliff for Moral Emblems, reader curiosity is engaged, and the text is therefore essential, even dominant, in providing the answers. This, I suggest, is the primary reason Stevenson appreciated Hole as an illustrator. In conclusion, Stevenson’s British stories received a wide array of illustrative treatment during his lifetime. Given Stevenson’s refined sense of the artistic requirements and merits of literary illustration, it is interesting that many of these illustrations met with his general approval. Boucher was clearly successful in Stevenson’s eyes in illustrating The Black Arrow, although his illustrations for Kidnapped were unusually inconsistent regarding the

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characterization of Alan Breck. Walter Paget’s illustrations for The Black Arrow appear to the casual viewer to be highly competent and certainly engage reader curiosity, but on close textual examination we find that these pictures often subvert textual authority by editing or adding detail, while Alfred Brennan’s pictures fail Stevenson’s criteria on several levels. The champion of Stevenson’s illustrators, therefore, is William Hole. Hole’s personal history with Stevenson, his love of all things Scottish (despite his English birth), and his antiquarian eye and expertise, all provided him with the ideal qualifications to illustrate Stevenson’s stories, especially the British novels; however, it is his ability to tell a story, “my story”, without giving away narrative resolutions that mark Hole out as the quintessential illustrator for Stevenson. His illustrations in particular for Kidnapped and The Master of Ballantrae find the balance between characterization, dramatic moment, atmosphere and faith to the details of the text that Stevenson required of his illustrators. For these reasons, these two novels should be considered Stevenson’s most important illustrated novels, and therefore among the most significant of the nineteenth century: they are great novels, illustrated to the author’s own satisfaction and creative vision. Only Catriona, the illustrated version of which was published after Stevenson’s death, appears to fall short of these criteria. Finally, when it came to the illustration of his historical romances, Stevenson and his illustrator of choice, Hole, had a major obstacle in the form of the Waverley novels; to coin Ian Duncan’s phrase, Walter Scott cast a long shadow over the visual depiction of historical Scotland, and Stevenson’s illustrator(s) were operating within this aesthetic framework. The answer to this was, ultimately, straight-forward: Hole focussed on the dramatic action and depiction of character, rather than foregrounding historical details of costume or architecture, although these aspects were important to the rendering of the action in question. This was Stevenson’s and Hole’s contribution to the visual aesthetic of the new romance of the late nineteenth century: the narrative balance of text and image, complementing each other in action, characterisation, setting, historical detail and producing a unified vision that was defined by the author and augmented by the illustrator. However, such a discourse needed to be tweaked further once Stevenson moved away from British to Pacific subjects.

Notes 1. In a letter to W. E. Henley of late May 1883, he writes, “So, as my good Red Lion Courter [a reference to James Henderson, whose Young Folks was based in Red Lion Court] begged me for another Butcher’s Boy, I turned me to—what thinkest—’ou?—to Tushery, by the mass! Ay, friend, a whole tale of tushery. And every tusher tushes me so free, that may I be tushed if the whole thing is worth a tush. The Black Arrow: A Tale of Tunstall Forest is his name: tush! a poor thing!” See Robert Louis Stevenson, The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson, ed. Bradford A. Booth and Ernest Mayhew, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1994, 8 vols., 4:128–29.

Illustrating Stevenson’s British subjects 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

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Robert Louis Stevenson, Letters, 8 vols., 4:219. Robert Louis Stevenson, Letters, 8 vols., 4:176. Ibid. See Sutherland in Robert Louis Stevenson, The Black Arrow, London: Penguin Books, 2007, p. xxxvi. Robert Louis Stevenson, Letters, 8 vols., 4:199. Robert Louis Stevenson, Letters, 8 vols., 4:187. It appears from this letter that Stevenson owned the original drawings by Boucher from which the illustrations were engraved. Robert Louis Stevenson, The Black Arrow, p. 10. Robert Louis Stevenson, The Black Arrow, p. 9. Robert Louis Stevenson, The Black Arrow, p. 16. Robert Louis Stevenson, The Black Arrow, p. 11. Robert Louis Stevenson, The Black Arrow, p. 16. “The Outlaws of Tunstall Forest” was published serially from March 1888, and illustrated by Will H. Low. I have been unable to locate a copy of this publication or Low’s illustrations. Roger Swearingen, Prose Writings of Robert Louis Stevenson: A Guide, Connecticut: Archon Books, 1980, p. 84. Robert Louis Stevenson, Letters, 8 vols., 6:82. Robert Louis Stevenson, Letters, 8 vols., 6:89 and n. Robert Louis Stevenson, The Black Arrow, p. 27. Robert Louis Stevenson, The Black Arrow, p. 29. Robert Louis Stevenson, The Black Arrow, p. 72. Robert Louis Stevenson, The Black Arrow, p. 106. Robert Louis Stevenson, The Black Arrow, p. 43. Robert Louis Stevenson, The Black Arrow, p. 111. Ina Ferris, The Achievement of Literary Authority: Gender, History, and the Waverley Novels, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991, 1. Phillip Waller, Writers, Readers, & Reputations: Literary Life in Britain 1870–1918, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008, pp. 180–81. See also Richard Altick, The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public 1800–1900, Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1963. See Robert Louis Stevenson, Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1897, for an account of their joint acting and editing experiences. “William B. Hole, A.R.S.A.”, Modern School of Art, vol. IV, ed. Wilfrid Meynell, London: W. R. Howell & Company, 1886, p. 68. James L. Caw, Scottish Painting Past and Present, 1620–1908, Edinburgh: T. C.  & E. C. Jack, 1908, p. 269. Robert Louis Stevenson, Letters, 8 vols., 6:100–101. For example, a letter in the National Library of Scotland from Scott’s publisher, Archibald Constable, to Nasmyth regarding the illustration of specific localities within the novels gives specific locations, or types of landscape or architecture that Nasmyth should use as bases for his illustrations. Concerning the illustration of Waverley, for example, Constable writes “I have just had some conversation with the great unknown on the subject of the vignettes to the novels and [&] tales he admires Holyrood house greatly [...] I think they will be arranged thus [...] Vol 1 Bradwardine castle partly Craigcrook & partly Ravelston—as much of the latter as possible” (see Richard Hill, Picturing Scotland through the

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30. 31. 32. 33.

34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59.

60. 61.

Illustrating Stevenson’s British subjects Waverley Novels, p. 201). This example foreshadows how Stevenson would also later imagine fictional architecture as a mixture of places he’d seen or visited. Walter Scott, Rob Roy, ed. Ian Duncan, Oxford: Oxford World Classics, 1998, p. 322–323. Robert Louis Stevenson, Kidnapped, or The Lad with the Silver Button, ed. Barry Menikoff, New York, NY: Modern Library 1999, p. 139. Barry Menikoff, in Robert Louis Stevenson, Kidnapped, p. xl. See the Edinburgh University website Illustrating Scott, as well as the Corson Collection image database (www.walterscott.lib.ed.ac.uk), for an extensive collection of Waverley illustrations of characters and costumes in the nineteenth century. Robert Louis Stevenson, Kidnapped, pp. 73–74. Robert Louis Stevenson, Letters, 8 vols., 3:248–49. Robert Louis Stevenson, Letters, 8 vols., 3:249. Roger Swearingen, Prose Writings of Robert Louis Stevenson, p. 103. Robert Louis Stevenson, Letters, 8 vols., 5:194–95. Barry Menikoff, Narrating Scotland: The Imagination of Robert Louis Stevenson, Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2005, p. 9. Robert Louis Stevenson, Kidnapped, p. 13. Robert Louis Stevenson, Kidnapped, p. 18. Robert Louis Stevenson, Kidnapped, p. 16. Robert Louis Stevenson, Kidnapped, p. 19. Robert Louis Stevenson, Kidnapped, pp. 24–25. Robert Louis Stevenson, Kidnapped, pp. 73–74. Robert Louis Stevenson, Kidnapped, p. 232. Robert Louis Stevenson, Letters, 8 vols., 5:319. Ibid. Stevenson writes to Hole to suggest beginning work on the illustrations to Kidnapped, although there are no further extant letters between the two; they may have been lost, or communication may have occurred face-to-face. Robert Louis Stevenson, Kidnapped, p. 21. Robert Louis Stevenson, ‘A Gossip on Romance’, The Lantern-Bearers and Other Essays, ed. Jeremy Treglown, New York: Cooper Square Press, 1999, p. 175. Robert Louis Stevenson, The Letters, 8 vols., 6:100–101. Robert Louis Stevenson, Letters, 8 vols., 6:244–245. Robert Louis Stevenson, Letters, 8 vols., 6:299. Robert Louis Stevenson, Letters, 8 vols., 6:302. Robert Louis Stevenson, “The Master of Ballantrae”, Scribner’s Magazine, vol 5, January-June 1889, p. 158. Robert Louis Stevenson, Letters, 8 vols., 6:246–7. Robert Louis Stevenson, Letters, 8 vols., 6:284–5. Roger Swearingen notes that Stevenson had always used the title David Balfour in notes, proofs and correspondence; however, when it came to the serial publication in Britain, Fanny Stevenson remarked that “‘it was found that many English people were confused … thinking that, as Kidnapped was the story of David Balfour, there must be only one book with a double title’”. Roger Swearingen, Prose Writings of Robert Louis Stevenson: A Guide, London and Basingstoke: Macmillan Press Ltd., 1980, p. 169. Robert Louis Stevenson, Letters, 8 vols., 8:158. Roger Swearingen, Prose Writings of Robert Louis Stevenson, p. 169.

5

Illustrating the Pacific

Stevenson left Britain in 1887, never to return; his father had died the previous year, and it was felt that he needed warmer climes for the sake of his ever-frail health. With Fanny and his mother, he would set sail for America, travel across the continent and head into the Pacific. He would arrive in Hawaii in January 1889, where he would later complete The Master of Ballantrae, then travel onto Sydney, and finally settle in Samoa, where he would construct his home of Vailima. Several scholars have written on this passage of his life and his creative work from the Pacific, including Vanessa Smith, Oliver Buckton, Ann Colley and most recently Roslyn Jolly, who has convincingly argued that 1887 was a pivotal year in Stevenson’s creative imagination. As he moved further from Britain, the European Continent and mainland America, Stevenson also moved further away from his markets and readerships, who loved him as the heir to Walter Scott’s romances and the author of Treasure Island and Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Stevenson immersed himself in the peoples and societies he encountered in the Pacific island chains, hoping to record these ancient cultures and oral traditions before they were spoiled forever by the encroaching imperial and commercial forces of Europe and America. As Jenni Calder has pointed out, Stevenson wrote some of his most potent Scottish fiction from the Pacific, including The Master of Ballantrae, Catriona and the unfinished Weir of Hermiston.1 However, he also wrote fiction set in the Pacific, and about the Pacific, subjects from which audiences in the nineteenth-century were far removed. Part of Stevenson’s Pacific project, even in his fiction, was to educate his European and American audiences about these cultures, and to overcome the many stereotypes, often crude and almost always offensive, of their peoples and their customs. Perhaps the most pertinent example of white European views of Stevenson’s Polynesia is provided by no less than Sidney Colvin in a letter to Stevenson of 21 March 1894, in which he refers to the Samoans, Hawaiians and Micronesians that Stevenson wrote to him about as “your beloved blacks—or chocolates—confound them; beloved no doubt to you; to us detested…”.2 This grating comment reveals much about European attitudes towards conquered peoples, and neatly demonstrates the ingrained nature of the stereotypes Stevenson was attempting

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to address in his fiction, essays, letters and activism of the period. The word “blacks” here folds the Polynesian into a generic Africanized type, which, apart from being intellectually lazy and deeply offensive, was wildly inaccurate. As will be demonstrated, Stevenson’s illustrators became guilty of similar – albeit less offensive – lapses in their attempts to portray the Polynesian characters.3 In opposition to precisely this type of racist discourse – visual and literary – Stevenson wanted to create a strong visual record of the Pacific to complement his writings, taking thousands of photographs, even taking sketches, for what he envisioned would be the most important documentary work of the Pacific Islands ever written. This grand project was abandoned, but Stevenson’s impulse to record and preserve Pacific cultures remained intact. As Jolly argues, Stevenson’s Pacific stories fold this desire for observational authenticity into his fiction, which inevitably moves Stevenson’s style away from the romance distancing of his British novels towards a new type of realism. This evolution came about through Stevenson’s desire to interpret the Pacific not just as a story-teller, but as an anthropologist, historiographer and journalist. As Jolly explains, “The challenges of writing about the Pacific and the European presence there […] extended Stevenson’s capacities to think and write, not only as a novelist, but also as a lawyer and historian. […] There now appeared a new Stevenson, or Stevensons, whose literary productions confounded readers at home and challenged their sense of what a ‘teller of tales’ should be and do”.4 Stevenson’s Pacific realism differed from its European counterpart in that it attempted to bring the Pacific that Stevenson found, in all its complexities and richness, into American and European middle class homes; it sought to realize the exotic. Illustrators to these stories, therefore, had new and challenging responsibilities. Illustrations of Stevenson’s Pacific subjects had to be loyal to the documentary aspects of these stories. The problem for Stevenson, as it had been for his British fiction, was the illustration of his work by other people. Artists based in Britain or New  York, who had never seen the sights Stevenson was attempting to evoke with his prose, were responsible for achieving an authenticity to subject matter that was alien to them and their audiences. Some of Stevenson’s illustrators achieved this authenticity with considerable skill, including William Hatherell and Gordon Browne for the stories of Island Nights’ Entertainments; others, like Alfred Brennan and Willard Metcalf, failed, according to Stevenson’s criteria for narrative illustration. Photography played a significant role in the illustration of Stevenson’s Pacific fiction, as Stevenson would guide potential illustrators in London and New York to photographs in published collections, or those he had taken himself, to help them achieve the authenticity Stevenson sought. This chapter, therefore, will discuss Stevenson’s use of photography, before analysing the illustrations to his Pacific fiction.

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Photography of the Pacific The role of photography in Stevenson’s life is becoming a subject of critical interest, particularly the hundreds of photographs taken in the Pacific (and many were lost in accidents during the Stevensons’ travels). Photography was always a way for Stevenson to record visual information for creative purposes, and became increasingly important when he began to travel. As previous chapters have suggested, photography could be used to guide illustrators to desired scenes using photographs; this would become even more important when his subject matter became topographically, ethnically or culturally unfamiliar to his illustrators. In other words, if he required an English artist to render a specific tropical topography, plant or Polynesian character, the easiest way to achieve authenticity was to guide him to photographs of the subjects, or of subjects similar to his characters or landscapes. For example, in attempting to recruit Gordon Browne to illustrate The EbbTide, he wrote in a letter of 25 April 1893 to Colvin, “if Gordon Browne is to get it, he should see the Brassey photographs of Papeete”.5 The photos referenced here were published in a travel narrative entitled Tahiti (1882) by Lady Brassey. This demonstrates Stevenson’s insistence on authenticity to the topography and ethnic idiosyncrasies of the subjects; it also demonstrates the fact that Stevenson was conscious of directing illustrators towards visual material he felt offered reliable depictions of Pacific subjects. Most importantly, though, it establishes a thoroughly modern approach to illustration: in the search for authenticity, photography was informing illustration. Stevenson’s engagement with photography is a striking case-study in the breadth of potential relationships between image and the written word in Victorian literature, especially concerning his photographs of the Pacific (“his” meaning photographs taken by or for him and his travelling party, as Lloyd Osbourne and even Fanny took many of them, often under Stevenson’s instruction).6 Critical work on photography and fiction by Nancy Armstrong has revealed the multifarious ways in which photography had altered how Victorians understood not only their own environments, but that of the subjects who existed on the peripheries of empire.7 Armstrong argues that the invention and proliferation of photography in the 1830s actually resulted in a catalogue of visual “types” from which reality (the exterior world) was then interpreted by the viewer. Such types particularly referred to the idea of the individual. Photographic imagery, Armstrong argues, helped to encode and reinforce visual signs of class, wealth, gender and most importantly for this chapter, race. Discussing ethnographical photography of African tribal types by Désiré Charnay from 1863, Armstrong points out that the dissemination of photographs that intended to provide objective imagery that defined what a particular African type looked like in fact resulted in that African individual losing any notion of individuality, and instead being subsumed into a “type” of ethnic individual.8 This effect was also famously explored by the photography of Francis Galton, the

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father of eugenics, whose composite photographs of ethnic physiognomies attempted to produce a generic ethnic or racial type.9 Richard Eves supports this theory of racial stereotyping in discussing Methodist missionary photographs of Pacific communities.10 Eves points out how these photographs sincerely attempt to humanise their native subjects, with the missionaries often appearing in friendly or paternalistic poses with them. However, these images actually reinforce the imperial relationship between colonisers and colonised, the blinding white missionary clothes and skin offsetting those of their Polynesian counterparts; these images seem to portray, unintentionally, the dominant and almost parental relationship of the missionaries to their “children”, who are dressed, posed and presented to the public as specimens of “teachable” natives. Such volumes of photographs inevitably informed American and European notions of Polynesia. Stevenson himself, as Ann Colley has argued, was versed in such imagery, and would take very similar photographs of his own in an effort to record, preserve and decipher Pacific cultures at the point that their existence was threatened by colonial forces. Jolly, in her edition of Fanny’s journal The Cruise of the Janet Nicol, includes some photographs that are in part ethnographical, while Colley also comments on others, explaining that the Stevensons would spend a lot of time orchestrating certain scenes designed to incorporate Polynesian people within their landscapes.11 However, Stevenson clearly understood that such realist imagery, which was intended to document ethnographical and topographical aspects of the Pacific Islands, grated on the narrative function of a literary illustration. He understood that the photographic medium – the warts-andall properties of the images – punctured the romance of his stories, and the impressionism of his prose style. The word “documentary” opens up difficult critical avenues of the relationship of photography and realism, which most recently has been addressed in Stevenson’s oeuvre by Colley and, in somewhat of a riposte, Carla Manfredi. Where Colley suggests that the photographs, which were to become illustrations to his South Seas project, were “a necessary complement to his writing”, Manfredi contests that such images were instead not illustrative, but central aspects of what would essentially create a picture-book.12 Anticipating Oliver Buckton’s observation that Stevenson was trying to produce the authoritative record of traditional Pacific communities, Colley writes that Stevenson, like so many others, respected the authority of the camera. Stevenson wanted to correct the inaccurate, generic photographs frequently selected from banks of images that were generally available in books about the South Seas and often had little to do with the text. He was displeased with the stereotypical images that more often than not came from what Nancy Armstrong refers to as a ‘shadow archive’ […] that, in his mind, did not properly represent the reality he wanted to present. In this respect Stevenson was in the tradition of some missionaries

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and a number of anthropologists who went about with cameras collecting shots of ‘new tribes and scenery’ […], holding on to the belief that the camera was the most accurate means by which to portray a visible object.13 Colley appropriately identifies the “authority” of the camera. However, Manfredi discusses the camera’s inability to create a definitive, documentary body of work, given the subjectivity of any photograph taken, and especially given the juxtaposition of photographs against Stevenson’s texts, which, as has been discussed, resist objective description. Manfredi argues that once photographs are contextualized by text, they produce a different kind of reality, a surreality. In doing so, photographs – as illustrations – lose their “documentary” qualities, and instead become misrepresentative of the reality they purport to represent: “The photographs, as forms of ‘narrative art,’ are also ‘alternative realisms’ that artificially recreate an air of objectivity”.14 Manfredi continues, “the seemingly realist impulse of the technology [the camera] […] is undermined by Stevenson’s intention to graft them to an unstable documentary text. In other words, the travelogue’s professed documentary aim is illustrated through an anti-realist medium”.15 As an illustrated text, this would certainly be true; text, whether subservient to the image or not, always contextualizes image, and shapes its reception in the viewer’s mind. In this sense, the “documentary” qualities of a photograph lose their authority the moment that text attempts to contextualize them. However, Stevenson and his entourage were taking photographs for many more reasons than simply the illustration of the South Seas. Stevenson’s use of photography seems to be much more complex, multifarious, and even modern in its purposes. Colley’s argument of “the particular” is helpful in defining how photography helped Stevenson formulate ideas, create characters and scenes in his fiction, and, most significantly, to inform and guide illustrators towards his visual intentions within his creative works. Photography, amongst many other functions, seems to have been used by Stevenson as we use it today: that is, as reminders of specific, or particular, landscapes, people, even moments. It is easy to overlook the comparative difficulty and limitation of Stevenson’s photographic equipment; Fanny describes how awkward, amusing and often embarrassing it could be to have her son and husband setting up the camera to capture specific scenes or people. However, Stevenson’s photographs – and those he had taken by Lloyd – are often composed with a painterly rather than a photographic eye. A good example of this is a landscape included independently by both Colley and Manfredi, of “The Needles of Ua-Pu, Nuku-Hiva”: where Manfredi includes the photograph taken by Stevenson, Colley presents the drawing Stevenson did of exactly the same scene. These two images raise questions: why would Stevenson want to record such a scene as both photograph and drawing? Isn’t one enough? Then there is the obvious question: which came first, the photograph or the drawing? Is the drawing taken from the photograph? Did

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Stevenson decide that his drawing skills were not sufficient to record with “authority” a sight that clearly had a momentous hold on his memory and imagination? Stevenson’s approach to this scene in the visual medium is typical of a modern artistic approach to landscape painting. The artist quite often takes on-the-spot sketches, or even complete canvases, which are then worked up at home or in the studio using photographs taken on the scene, particularly with regard to close detail. The photograph acts as an aide memoire to the lived experience of the moment that the artist is attempting to capture, and not as a substitute for the moment. That Stevenson took photographs and sketches of such scenes (he also drew the prison on the south shore of Nuku Hiva at Taiohe) suggests that he is using the different media to preserve his memory of the moment, through writing, drawing and photography. All these media combine with each other to inscribe a memory into the author’s imagination from different cognitive disciplines. Photography, in this instance, is a supplement to other modes of recording an experience in his memory. All these media helped Stevenson to re-create the scene in his fiction. The Needles of Ua-Pu demonstrate this process perfectly. In addition to the sketch and photograph, Stevenson records his first sighting of NukuHiva and the Needles in In the South Seas (a moment made more significant to him because this was the island of Melville’s Taipivai Valley, brought to life in Typee): almost abeam arose our destination, Nuka-hiva, whelmed in cloud; and betwixt and to the southward, the first rays of the sun displayed the needles of Ua-pu. These pricked about the line of the horizon; like the pinnacles of some ornate and monstrous church, they stood there, in the sparkling brightness of the morning, the fit signboard of a world of wonders.16 The Needles subsequently find their way into his creative work: in the frame of The Wrecker, we find Loudon Dodd in his ship under the same mountains: His eyes were open, staring down the bay. He saw the mountains droop, as they approached the entrance, and break down in cliffs; the surf boil white round the two sentinel islets; and between, on the narrow bight of blue horizon, Ua-pu upraise the ghost of her pinnacled mountain tops.17 Here we see how Stevenson’s personal experience, and his multi-media efforts to record this experience, become a source of creative inspiration and ultimately find their way into his fiction. It is a significant example of experience, mediated through different means of remembering that experience, becoming fiction. Taking photographs and drawings stimulates Stevenson’s memory of the experience, which in turn feeds his creative imagination.

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Figure 5.1 Pencil sketch of Hatiheu, Nukahiva, courtesy of the Huntington Library.

It is also possible, in a more practical sense, that Stevenson simply did not trust his own graphic skills (as demonstrated in previous chapters), and wanted his drawing supplemented by photographic imagery; however, compare the photograph to the drawing, and we quickly see how accurate Stevenson’s drawing of the Needles is, suggesting that he may well have used the photograph to make the drawing. We cannot know for certain, but the complement of photograph, drawing and descriptive passage is intriguing. The photograph of the Needles of Ua-Pu in this case is used to capture what Colley refers to as “the instant”. One obvious aspect of photography that makes it advantageous to the pencil is its instantaneous ability to capture the scene or person before it. Even given the protracted and often conceited nature of nineteenth-century photography, the photograph captures an immediate moment in a manner the pencil or pen cannot. Colley argues that rather than try to capture a Polynesian “type” in the manner of Galton, “Stevenson’s images were snapshots of the instant”.18 This fact again lends credence to the theory that Stevenson’s photographs, among its other functions, were often means of capturing a specific scene that caught his attention and that he either wanted to remember, or write about, or send to others for reference. There are plenty of examples of all of this, some of which are included in Jolly’s edition of Fanny’s diary and photographs in The Cruise of the Janet Nichol. Amongst images of highly posed, obviously contrived images of people and places, and people in places, there are photographs of moments of action or transition, as if Stevenson were recording an experience with a nineteenth-century equivalent of a camera-phone. Such examples include Fanny being carried

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ashore by an islander, a snapshot of “King Tembenoka and suite leaving” the Janet Nichol in the Marshall Islands, or some of the crew in the rigging of the Janet Nichol.19 Such images contain unique moments of interest and movement, the subjects clearly unconscious of the camera, often in flux from one state to another, and in this sense become much more “documentary” than the posed photographs that dominate the collection. These photographs document experience, moments and memories unmediated by posed subjects or self-conscious framing of scenes, and as such become possibly more valuable to the modern viewer in seeing the world through Stevenson’s (or Osbourne’s) eyes as he was experiencing new places and peoples. There is a truth to these images that is conspicuously absent from other highly choreographed or stylized pictures in the collections.

Ethnographic photography and characterisation Ethnographic photography of the Pacific Islands created a common problem of illustrating the exotic, particularly regarding the depictions of specific ethnicities in literature and illustration. Referring to an illustration by Gordon Browne for “The Beach of Falesá” of Case addressing Tarleton with a cheap trick (Figure 5.2), Stevenson picks on the generic depiction of what are meant to be Samoans, but appear, to Stevenson, more like “Africans”.20

Figure 5.2 Gordon Browne for “The Beach of Falesá”, “Will you know what is in his heart?”.

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This, on close examination, is true, especially to those familiar with the islands; Browne was not, and should not be harshly judged for this depiction. Nonetheless, Stevenson needed to voice this observation in an effort to resist the homogenizing effects of popular visual culture. These people did not look like Samoans to Stevenson, instead conforming to an African “type”. This is all the more problematic for this story because of the presence of an actual African character, Black Jack. The criticism echoes another more forceful one he made in private to Colvin regarding the illustration of his central character, Uma. In a letter to Colvin regarding the illustrations that appeared in the original publication in the Illustrated London News, he writes, “In the picture, Uma is rot; so is the old man and the negro; but Wiltshire is splendid, and Case will do. It seems badly illuminated, but this may be printing”.21 This comment refers to the first illustration for the first number (Figure 5.3).

Figure 5.3 Gordon Browne for “The Beach of Falesá”, “Uma showed the best bearing”.

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The artist is required to depict different ethnicities, including African, and therefore needs to be able to delineate Polynesian characters in contrast to Jack. This was crucial to the visual language of Stevenson’s story: Jack is as much out of place in Polynesia as Wiltshire or Case (if not more so). This comment was Stevenson’s first impression of the illustrations, which he later modified having seen the whole series (discussed below). However, he is as proprietorial as ever over one of his most important literary characters, the true hero of the story, Uma. On seeing the illustration, it is difficult at first to understand Stevenson’s complaint: she is authentic as a young, alluring Polynesian girl who might tempt Wiltshire into his unholy union. Indeed, Browne seems to obey the text closely: She was dressed and scented; her kilt was of fine tapa, looking richer in the folds than any silk; her bust, which was of the colour of dark honey, she wore bare only for some half a dozen necklaces of seeds and flowers; and behind her ears and in her hair she had the scarlet flowers of the hibiscus. She showed the best bearing for a bride conceivable, serious and still …22 However, in this instance, Browne has not heeded an earlier description of Uma, when Wiltshire first encounters her: “She had been fishing; all she wore was a chemise, and it was wetted through…. She was young and very slender for an island maid, with a long face, a high forehead, and a shy, strange, blindish look, between a cat’s and a baby’s. She had a wide mouth, the lips and the chin cut like any statue’s; and the smile came out for a moment and was gone”.23 Browne has not reconciled these two images, and has not heeded Stevenson’s description of Uma’s “high forehead” and “long face”. Instead, he has produced a relatively generic island maid, a visual type that would have been familiar to many of Stevenson’s male readers at the end of the nineteenth century. Returning to Armstrong’s discussion of visual types, Browne’s Uma subscribes to such a construction. Affordable photographic reproductions in popular media through the 1860s, 70s and 80s, including tourist imagery and cartes-de-visite, were largely responsible for the construction of a stereotype that still survives: the available, sexualized island maid. Legends of the sexual exploits of explorers from the earliest contact with Pacific island cultures fed into this stereotype (inaccurately), and informed some of the imagery that pervaded almost pornographic photographs of Pacific women. Figure 5.4 shows such an image of a Hawaiian hula dancer.24 A collection of photographs contained in the Bishop Museum in Honolulu displays an interesting bifurcation of photographs of Hawaiian women during the 1880s. King Kalākaua, who befriended Stevenson when the author arrived in Hawaii on 24 January 1889 and hoped he would settle in Hawaii, re-instituted and encouraged the ancient customs of the Hawaiian culture, including the hula, and traditional Hawaiian dress and song, which

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Figure 5.4 James J. Williams, “Studio portrait – hula dancers,” in Hawaiian Historical Society Historical Photograph Collection.25

had been suppressed under Christian influence since the arrival of the missionaries in the 1820s. Kalākaua brought these traditions out into the public eye in the Merrie Monarch festivities, inaugurated in 1886. Photographs from this period demonstrate the tension between Kalākaua’s Hawaii, and the Hawaii of the colonial gaze. Photographs from this period range from ethnographical portraits of Pacific islanders, to portraits of significant or famous individuals in the Hawaiian Kingdom, to lewd photographs. Photographs commissioned by Kalākaua’s court, especially for the inaugural Merrie Monarch festival, display Hawaiian dancers and hula troupes with close attention to traditional costume, instruments and famous or royal dancers, such as the hula kumu (or teacher) Pauahi, and the troupe of Iaone. In some of these images, young girls and women appear nude or nearly nude, but they are still clearly portrayed within the limits of traditional costume, and the purpose of the photographs are clearly objective; the women are not sexualized. These Hawaiian photographs are in stark contrast to the previous Figure 5.4, in which the hula dancer has become exoticised and sexualized, an object of the male gaze, often dressed in generic “hula” attire such as the famous grass skirt. By the 1920s, typical images of “hula dancers”

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conformed to this generic, almost pornographic stereotype, many examples of which can be found in the Hawaii State Archives of the Hawaiian Historical Society Photograph Collection. For the average Victorian viewer in England or America, it would be difficult, often impossible, to tell ethnographical subjects apart from their more salacious counterparts. In such a manner, the stereotype, or Armstrong’s “type”, is born; in Uma’s case, this is what appears to have happened. We can ascertain this from the fact that in all the images Browne produces of Uma, she is topless, except from the last image in which she is shot. Again, Browne may be forgiven for this oversight: Uma is clearly described as seminude at the sham-wedding, and Browne is not provided with another physical description of the character from which to illustrate following this scene (although the “chemise” in her introductory scene should have been a clue to her daily attire). In this sense, therefore, Browne is maintaining a continuity of character depiction from one image to the next. However, such imagery only compounds Browne’s original error of producing a generic image of a Pacific island girl; given she is such an important character to the story, Stevenson’s disappointment is understandable. As with the stereotyped, sexualized hula dancer-types, Uma is denied the individuality, or idiosyncrasies, of character that Stevenson clearly gives her in the text. Browne’s interpretation of Uma presents us with the perfect example of how Victorian photography could undermine Stevenson’s desire to lend Pacific characters idiosyncrasies of facial features and physical characteristics: repositories of ethnographical (and in some cases pornographic) photographs of Pacific women produced a very stereotyped version of Uma. Unfortunately, Stevenson does not seem to have had a specific person in mind as the model for Uma, and did not send any photographs of Samoan people to illustrators to keep them honest.

The Wrecker The Stevensons’ Pacific photographs, among other purposes, sometimes served as visual stimuli or aides-memoire for Louis, and sometimes, as discussed with Kidnapped, were used to inform illustrators, and to keep illustration authentic to the exotic source material. Colley raises one example, stating that Stevenson’s correspondence to Burlingame was full of photographs and instructions either for publication as illustrations, or for illustrators to use as visual guides to certain aspects of their narrative illustrations, such as characters, flora, fauna and landscapes. Colley points out that he even sent Burlingame “a snapshot of [the Rev. W. E. Clarke] along with his manuscript of The Beach of Falesá so that the likeness between Tarleton (the missionary in the story) and Clarke ‘might be correct’”.26 In this instance, Stevenson has a specific friend in mind as a model for a character in a fictional story. Clarke was a missionary who helped Stevenson translate some of his stories, including “The Bottle Imp”, into Samoan for his local readers,

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and he clearly had his face in mind when writing the character of Tarleton. This was not an isolated incident, as demonstrated with Long John Silver’s model in W. E. Henley, and also a similarity between a close friend and another leading character: the protagonist of The Wrecker, Loudon Dodd, was an amalgam of Stevenson himself, and his friend Will H. Low. We know this from a letter Stevenson sent directing Burlingame to advise William Hole, whom he hoped would illustrate the entire novel, concerning the physical appearance of Dodd. In a letter of 11 March 1890, from Sydney, Stevenson writes, Much of the experience of Loudon Dodd is drawn from my own life; and I have chosen Low to be the character. I own I would half like Hole to see a photograph of Low; he could easily conceal the likeness, and it would give him a cue; what do you think? Of course, if we do so, Low himself must be consulted.27 Photographs of Low are difficult to find; however, thanks to a self-portrait he produced of himself as a young man, which was used as a frontispiece of Chronicles of Friendship, we can not only see what Low looked like, but also what the fictional Dodd was meant to look like (Figure 5.5). This is helpful to Stevenson scholarship because Stevenson provides almost no description of Dodd other than in the prologue: “[Dodd]drew  on  his

Figure 5.5 Will H. Low self-portrait for A Chronicle of Friendship (1908), “Painted in the ‘vine-trellised arbour’ at Montigny, 1876”.

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white coat, not without a trifling difficulty, for he was a man of middle age, and well-to-do; arranged his beard and moustaches at one of the Venetian mirrors; and, taking a broad felt hat, led the way through the trade-room into the ship’s waist”.28 This is the only description we are given. Because the remainder of the novel is first-person narration from Dodd’s perspective; we are given no other hint as to his appearance. An illustration of Dodd, predicated on Will Low’s appearance, might therefore have been very helpful to the reader. However, later in the same letter to Burlingame Stevenson relents on this strategy, writing that “I have come round to thinking we had better trust Hole to himself in the matter of Loudon Dodd”.29 Nonetheless, with all these instances, photography is being used to guide illustrators, and to anchor the creative interpretations of Stevenson’s characters to actual faces. Stevenson intended his photographic material to be sent to Hole, who did produce five illustrations for the novel for Scribner’s original publication; however, for reasons unknown, but quite probably due to the logistical demands of the project, they were completed by another artist, Willard Leroy Metcalf (1858–1925). Metcalf was an American born artist and illustrator, who trained in Europe for a few years, and returned to America in 1890, just in time to pick up the commission to complete the illustrations for The Wrecker. This pedigree, combined with his new close proximity to Stevenson’s publishers, no doubt made him an ideal choice to illustrate the novel, both logistically and artistically (Metcalf’s journey echoing that of Dodd’s fictional travels from America to Paris and London and back). Metcalf would even go on to become a distinguished American artist in his own right as one of the founding members of the American impressionism movement in the first decade of the twentieth century.30 However, despite this talent, Stevenson was far from impressed with Metcalf as an illustrator of his fiction. The Wrecker was first published and illustrated in Scribner’s Magazine in twelve monthly instalments between August 1891 and July 1892; it was concurrently published as a novel in American by Charles Scribner’s Sons, and then in London by Cassell and Company in June of 1892. Following on from his unprecedented success in illustrating The Master of Ballantrae, Stevenson wrote to Burlingame 11 March 1890 to insist Hole illustrate The Wrecker: “I shall write to Hole by the same post; I have never seen such good illustrations as those to The Master, and they were reproduced in splendid style. I wish you would put aside for me a bound volume of the magazine with The Master”.31 Hole, therefore, was meant to illustrate The Wrecker, given his success with his previous work. However, a close examination of Hole’s five pictures for Scribner’s reveals weaknesses in these illustrations that were almost certainly a result of Stevenson sending outlines of chapters rather than the completed chapters. The only comment Stevenson makes on Hole’s illustrations was made regarding the very first, Figure 5.6, for the first of Scribner’s instalments: “I see the first No. of The Wrecker; I thought it went lively enough; and by a singular accident, the picture is not unlike Tai-o-hae! Thus we see the age of miracles etc.”.32

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Figure 5.6 William Hole for The Wrecker, “‘Yes, it’s a queer yarn’”.

In the image, we see an older Dodd, telling his story to Mr Havens on the veranda of a colonial house overlooking a bay by moonlight. The illustration does not depict much of the landscape, as it foregrounds the characters. How, therefore, is it “not unlike Tai-o-hae”? The comment refers to the general impression that is created of the topography (which Hole had never seen) through the authentic rendering of trees and fauna, such as the palms on the shore, the mountainous terrain and the brightness of the stars (typical of the tropics). As Stevenson suggests, the authenticity of the image does suggest a “miracle” of sorts, but it also suggests that Hole has at least looked at imagery – most likely photographs – of the type of landscape that Stevenson was evoking. This is typical of Hole’s attention to detail, as demonstrated in his work for The Master of Ballantrae. However, two images in particular that follow this betray either a certain lack of attention to detail, or, more likely, the awkward logistical process that Burlingame had suggested for The Master of Ballantrae. By themselves, there are minor errors in depiction that might easily be overlooked; however, judged through Stevenson’s criteria for illustration, they do betray

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their texts. The first comes in the depiction of Captain Nares for chapter 11 of the novel, entitled “Mamie… sat, an apparent queen, among her rude surrounding and companions”; it is the evening in which Jim Pinkerton, depicted in the background, and his new wife Mamie, are on board ship with Dodd, Johnson and Nares on the evening before they depart. The focus is on Mamie, but the depiction of Nares reveals that Hole had perhaps not been able to read Stevenson’s brief description of him as “clean-shaved and lean about the jaw”: even though Nares’s back is to us, Hole has clearly depicted beard and moustache on the captain, who does not fit a character who could be “the greatest brute upon the seas”.33 This is a minor oversight of characterization, especially as we see the character from behind. However, his depiction of The Flying Scud betrays the text in a more fundamental manner (Figure 5.7). Hole’s talents as an illustrator of romance stories is immediately evident here: it is a moment of high drama, as the

Figure 5.7 William Hole for The Wrecker, “She lay head to the reef”.

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crew of the Currency Lass finally approach the wreck on Midway Island. Stevenson describes the scene as follows: The Flying Scud would have seemed small enough beside the wharves of San Francisco, but she was some thrice the size of the Norah Creina, which had been so long our continent; and as we craned up at her wallsides, she impressed us with a mountain magnitude. She lay head to the reef, where the huge blue wall of the rollers was forever ranging up and crumbling down; and to gain her starboard side, we must pass below the stern. The rudder was hard aport, and we could read the legend: FLYING SCUD HULL On the other side, about the break of the poop, some half a fathom of rope ladder trailed over the rail, and by this we made our entrance. […] She had been painted white, with tropical economy, outside and in; and we found, later on, that the stanchions of the rail, hoops of the scuttle but, etc., were picked out with green. At that time, however, when we first stepped aboard, all was hidden under the droppings of innumerable sea-birds.34 In terms of the general impression of the looming, forbidding mass of the ship, the sea birds swarming and startled by the crew’s approach, and the waves breaking on one side of the ship as the text describes, Hole has captured the moment with skill and attention. However, closer reading reveals two important omissions: the colour of the ship, even in the fading light, is clearly not white, as the text describes, and Hole has avoided depicting the “droppings of innumerable sea-birds”. This may be the result of difficulty with the medium, or the quality of engraving and reproduction, but given Hole’s talents, this is unlikely. More likely is that Hole had received outlines of the chapters from Stevenson (as had originally been planned with The Master of Ballantrae), rather than the full finished chapters, and so discrepancies between the illustration Hole produced, and the final fully detailed chapters, have led to a flawed illustration of the text. Nonetheless, Hole’s illustrations still demonstrate his knack for picking strong narrative moments: taken together, the pictures provide a grouping of images that help to tie the narrative together through key moments of dramatic importance. As with his illustrations for The Master of Ballantrae, his illustrations for The Wrecker help to drive the story as Stevenson would have desired. More is the pity, therefore, that Metcalf’s illustrations gradually erode the narrative progression of romance and high drama that Hole’s pictures establish in the first half of the novel. Strangely, Stevenson seemed to appreciate the very first illustration Metcalf produced following Hole’s

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withdrawal from the project. He wrote to Burlingame on 1 February 1892 that “I think Mr Metcalf’s picture capital. I never like to suggest to an artist, but lace before his consideration the picturesque effect of the nude captain shinning into the rigging with the spy class in Ch. XXV”.35 The illustration in question (Figure 5.8) seems to continue Hole’s trait of depicting dramatic moments with characters in key settings: Dodd and Nares crouch eagerly over the potential treasure chest, the captain’s cabin having been stripped and an axe lying on the floor. It captures the moment before the men peer into chest, only to find nothing of any real value. It conforms to most of Stevenson’s prerequisites for narrative illustration, and most importantly continues in Hole’s vein of inviting the reader into the narrative. The reasons for Stevenson’s subsequent frustration with Metcalf, however, are best explained by the author himself, who deconstructed the remaining illustrations in a scathing letter to Burlingame. Dated 1 August 1892, from Vailima, Stevenson dictated the following to his step-daughter Belle:

Figure 5.8 William Metcalf for The Wrecker, “And lo! There was disclosed but a trayful of papers”.

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let me [cleanse] my soul on the subject of W.L. Metcalf. Hole broke [down may] the devil take him. Doubtless Metcalf is an excellent black and white artist;36 but as an illustrator of my books, let me [have] no more of him. All the points in the story are missed. The series of little pictures of chance interviews in rooms might have illustrated any story (or nearly any story) that ever was written. The different appearances (all wrong) [my italics] that he has given to my Captain Wicks would make [the head] of any reader spin. The same remark applies to the unhappy Dodd. And I will take for a test case the picture you have chosen [my italics] for frontispiece. Consider the attitude of the tonsured priest who is sitting on the cabin table. If (in such a position) the Rev. gentleman shall be able to drive his knife through his hand, or even through a Swedish match-box, I will give Mr W.L. Metcalf two-andsixpence and a new umbrella. And who is the lean elderly moustachioed gentleman seated beside the priest? No Dodd that I have seen. And again, page 340, where is the ‘oldish, oratorical fellow, in the smart tropical array of the British man-o’-war’s man’? I see a lad of about eighteen perched sure enough on a table and in a costume familiar to the nautical melodrama but not to the British navy or the tropics.37 To understand the scope of Stevenson’s complaints here, his letter must be addressed point by point. First, he addresses the choices of scene that Metcalf picks to illustrate from the novel: Metcalf has illustrated fleeting, transitional moments in the text of little dramatic importance, mostly of characters who are not closely depicted, in conversation in different surroundings. Perhaps the most frustrating of these illustrates chapter 20, and the following passage: I had escaped the grounds and the cattle; I could not escape the house. A lady with silver hair, a slender silver voice, and a stream of insignificant information not to be diverted, led me through the picture gallery, the music-room, the great dining-room, the long drawing-room, the Indian room, the theatre, and every corner (as I thought) of that interminable mansion. There was but one place reserved; the garden-room, whither Lady Ann had now retired.38 Even without looking at the picture, it is clear that this moment of the narrative is purely transitional, the silver-haired lady gets no other mention and plays no other narrative role; surely the character of more interest should be Lady Ann, Carthew’s mother? This is Metcalf’s first fault as an illustrator: poor choice of narrative moment and missed opportunities for strong dramatic material to illustrate. Stevenson articulates this frustration in the next paragraph of the letter: Please excuse me my dear Burlingame. All these months I have swallowed my bitterness in silence. From the second picture, I predicted the

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This complaint does confirm the fact that like Hole, Metcalf is choosing his own narrative moments to illustrate, which in turn highlights an important skill in narrative illustration. However, where Hole identified key moments in dramatic tension or relevance to the movement of the story, Metcalf misses such illustrative opportunities: rather than depict Wicks in action climbing up the rigging, he avoids illustrating any part of the climactic scene, leaving the most dramatic of denouements un-illustrated. This must have been frustrating to Stevenson. As he writes above, “all the points in the story are missed”, and consequently the pictures of characters in undramatic or unspectacular settings could “have illustrated any story” other than this one. In addition to this, Metcalf commits another crime against Stevenson’s narrative: poor depiction of character. This criticism again should be mediated against the fact that Stevenson gives an illustrator almost nothing to work with regarding physical description, and thus places great pressure on the illustrator to depict the characters in the appropriate manner. However, Stevenson justifiably criticizes the depiction of both Wicks and Carthew, using the frontispiece as the prime example of the problems that are repeated in the remainder of the series (Figure 5.9). First, Stevenson complains of the “different appearances” of Wicks, the captain, which were “all wrong”. Metcalf demonstrates an inconsistency of the depiction of character: the same character looks different from picture to picture. This is true of both Wicks and Dodd. He then focuses on the frontispiece and the figure of Wicks as “the tonsured priest” (referring to his apparent baldness), who is about to drive a knife through his own hand as a lie that would excuse him from writing his log. Stevenson’s complaint is that the character depicted looks far from capable of such an act of gratuitous violence and self-discipline, looking more like a village priest than a hardened ship-captain and multiple murderer. Again, Metcalf is not given much to work with from the text, but Stevenson is nonetheless justified in his criticism, as the illustration does not match the general character of the captain. However, Stevenson misidentifies his own character here: Metcalf depicts not Dodd but Carthew, who is plotting the crew’s false story following the murders they have committed. This raises a different problem: Metcalf’s Carthew in fact resembles his depiction of Dodd, to the point where it is difficult to tell them apart. Therefore, there is another characterization problem: the casual viewer cannot tell characters apart from each other. It is possible Stevenson himself made this mistake in looking at the illustration. The Wrecker as an illustrated text, therefore, fails on several levels. The most fundamental of these is continuity. The lack of continuity first comes from the change in illustrators, which perhaps could not be helped. However, Metcalf fails, after his first illustration, to follow Hole’s lead in

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Figure 5.9 William Metcalf for The Wrecker, frontispiece.

choosing appropriate moments of dramatic intrigue, characterization or action. As a series of pictures, they fail to represent the spirit, energy or scenic diversity of the text. Secondly, there are narrative details that are ignored, overlooked, or misrepresented by both Hole and Metcalf, such as the colour of the Flying Scud. Thirdly, there are a series of errors or poor representations relating to characterization; Metcalf is most culpable here, but even Hole seems uncharacteristically to misrepresent Captain Nares. Stevenson’s complaint that Metcalf’s pictures could illustrate “any novel” is possibly the most damning when applied to their publication in the numbers, because they do little to bring the reader into the story, or to differentiate the texts they illustrate from competing entries. Hole’s illustrations, at least, promise excitement, intrigue, strongly drawn characters and poignant moments of the text; Metcalf’s illustrations, after his first, fail to do any of this. By contrast, the illustrations as they appear in the novel-form betray

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the text in their lack of continuity and their betrayal of the spirit of the text, both in narrative and characterization. It is no wonder, following the triumph of The Master of Ballantrae, that Stevenson was disappointed with the illustration of The Wrecker.

Island Nights’ Entertainments The stories of Island Nights’ Entertainments were also illustrated by different artists, although this was because of its unusual publishing history. Menikoff has detailed the fascinating publishing history behind this volume; it was never Stevenson’s intention to publish “The Bottle Imp”, “The Isle of Voices” and “The Beach of Falesá” in one single book.40 This book by itself is a valuable case-study in the complexities of publishing Pacific-Stevenson in the nineteenth century, especially when we examine Stevenson’s intentions for the stories contained within it. The three short stories contained were tales that examined different aspects of the colonial encounter with Pacific Islanders, specifically Samoans and Hawaiians. Island Nights’ Entertainments contained a total of 27 illustrations by two artists, Gordon Browne (1858–1932) and William Hatherell (1855–1928). Browne (the son of Halbot Browne, or Phiz, illustrator of Dickens’s works) had produced illustrations for the first appearance of “The Beach of Falesá” in six instalments in the Illustrated London News between 2 July and 6 August 1892;41 meanwhile, Hatherell had done the same for the first publication of “The Bottle Imp” in Black and White between March and April 1891, all of which were reproduced in Island Nights’ Entertainments. “The Isle of Voices” was originally published in the National Observer in February 1893 without illustrations, Hatherell then being employed to add eight illustrations for Island Nights’ Entertainments.42 The stories were published together in illustrated book form by Cassell and Co. in London and Charles Scribner’s Sons in New York in April 1893. The illustrators were British artists, based in Britain, thousands of miles and many cultural divides away from Stevenson’s subject matter, which presented a real problem for Stevenson. As for his previous works, his illustrators needed to maintain an authenticity to his subject matter, but this subject matter was exotic, other, far removed from the Waverley-drenched imagery of historic Scotland. Stevenson was very reluctant to have these stories published together, writing to Charles Baxter on 11 August 1892 that “The B. of F. is simply not to appear along with ‘The Bottle Imp’, a story of totally different scope and intention”.43 Reading these stories separately, this is certainly true; however, in a letter to Colvin of December 1892, Stevenson came round to the idea of publishing the stories together, albeit because he had little sway from such a distance: “Should you and Cassell prefer, you can call the whole volume I.N.E.—though ‘The Beach of Falesá’ is the child of a quite different inspiration. They all have a queer realism, even the most extravagant, even ‘The Isle of Voices’: the manners are exact”.44 In keeping with this observation, the

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final illustrated book, even with different artists, has an unlikely cohesion as an illustrated text, not least because of the tropical subject matter and the aesthetic qualities of the illustrations. Two stories, “The Bottle Imp” and “The Isle of Voices”, are situated in the islands of Hawaii, with Hawaiian protagonists, while “The Beach of Falesá” is located in a fictional island based on Samoa. As Stevenson points out, the stories have “totally different scope”, allowing for variety in visual interpretation between the stories: in other words, the illustrations do not have to create a continuity that one single novel should have because they are different stories. However, these illustrations do retain a sense of the exotic between stories, they are all clearly set in Pacific settings with Pacific peoples; the result is an illustrated text that contains illustrations which both differentiate the stories from each other while simultaneously all belonging in a Pacific universe. The illustrations to Island Nights’ Entertainments help transform these very different stories into an artistically cohesive single volume. “The Bottle Imp” was the first of the stories to be serialized. This story, influenced by the tale from Arabian Nights “Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp”, and the Grimm Brothers’ “The Spirit in the Bottle”, mixed with Polynesian superstitions and motifs, was one of Stevenson’s favourites. In a letter of 28 December 1892 to Sidney Colvin, Stevenson writes that “I had always meant it for the centre piece of a volume of Märchen which I was slowly to elaborate. You always had an idea that I depreciated the B.I.; I can’t think wherefore; I always particularly liked it—one of my best works, and ill to equal”.45 In this same letter, he expresses his approval of Hatherell’s illustrations for the story. “I am greatly pleased with the illustrations. It is very strange to a South Seayer to see Hawaiian women dressed like Samoans, but I guess that’s all one to you in Middlesex. It’s about the same as if London city men were shown going to the Stock Exchange as pifferari [Italian mountain musicians]; but no matter, none will sleep worse for it”.46 This observation is revealing about Stevenson’s level of attention to detail to his Polynesian subjects, and also his expectations of illustrators now he was relying on them from such distance. More significant than his mild criticism of Hatherell’s depiction of Hawaiian dress is his general approval of the rest of the illustrations. An examination of these pictures confirms that Hatherell indeed performs almost all the required tasks Stevenson would expect from narrative illustration. These illustrations first appeared in Black and White, and were larger than the reproductions for Cassell’s and Scribner’s; they are impressive in their original format, as they are embedded in the text, rather than printed on a separate page (Figure 5.10). As the first page of the story demonstrates, the image dominates the page and dictates the reader’s initial response to the story. In this function, Hatherell’s illustration performs well in generating reader curiosity: we see two very different character types, dramatically lit and posed, with the older man holding the bottle towards Keawe. Hatherell is given no description at all of the Hawaiian Keawe, and could be forgiven for producing a character

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Figure 5.10 William Hatherell for “The Bottle Imp” in Black and White, courtesy of the National Library of Scotland.

of questionable ethnic origins; Stevenson does not complain about this. The old man with the bottle is described in the text: “The man was elderly, with a bald head and a black beard; and his face was heavy with sorrow, and he bitterly sighed”.47 Hatherell has caught the appearance and general demeanour of the man, who seems to be trying to rid himself of the bottle, from which Keawe instinctively recoils. The bottle, importantly, is central to the image, faithfully visualized from the text: “a round-bellied bottle with a

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long neck; the glass of it was white like milk”, and Hatherell even manages to suggest something moving inside, “like a shadow and a fire”.48 The portentous nature of the bottle and the meeting of the characters are suggested through the large, dark shadows thrown onto the wall behind them, specifically of the bottle. Hatherell, therefore, generates dramatic tension and intrigue for the reader, who must now read the text to find out what bottle this is. The characters are depicted with as much faith to the text as the text will allow (Keawe is depicted as young, and while not particularly Hawaiian, certainly Polynesian), and he has chosen a suitable moment of dramatic tension, the moment of temptation for Keawe, to illustrate. This last point is important: like Hole, Hatherell does not betray what happens in the text, but he invites the reader into the story to find out what happens. In other words, we don’t see Keawe with the bottle, we see him as he’s being tempted, and we must read to find out what will happen. Another impressive illustration depicts the moment when the spirit in the bottle reveals itself for the briefest moment (Figure 5.11). The illustration depicts the following: “There is only one thing I am afraid of,” said Keawe. “The imp may be very ugly to view; and if you once set eyes upon him you might be very undesirous of the bottle.” “I am a man of my word,” said Lopaka. “And here is the money betwixt us.”

Figure 5.11 William Hatherell for “The Bottle Imp”, “The imp looked out of the bottle”.

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Stevenson’s use of language and image here evoke the myth of Medusa, whose hideous countenance turns the viewer to stone. What is important to the technique is the lack of description of the imp: we are not supposed to see it, our imaginations must conjure it through the suggestion of its lizard-like flickering movement. Hatherell obeys this technique by not showing the imp either. As the characters jump with horror at the apparition, Keawe’s upraised arm shields the reader from the imp, almost as if he is protecting us from its appearance. Thematically, this illustration remains loyal to the text: only those who buy the bottle are privy to its secrets and its associated horrors, so although Keawe and Lopaka see the imp (as they both buy the bottle), we are denied. Elsewhere, Hatherell is faithful to the theme of the text in his depiction of Keawe and other Hawaiian characters. In the letter quoted above, Stevenson complains, mildly, that the artist has dressed his Hawaiian women in Samoan dress (see Figure 5.12). However, he then admits that this is a redundant criticism to his British readers, who would not know the difference anyway. This insight speaks to the heart of Stevenson’s ethnographical efforts within his fiction, his photography and the problems facing his illustrators. His introductory comment at the beginning of “The Bottle Imp” states that the “tale has been designed and written for a Polynesian audience”. This comment is confirmed by the fact that he had the story translated into Samoan for his local readers. In this sense, having his Hawaiian women dressed like Samoans would have grated on Polynesian sensibilities, just “as if London city men were shown going to the Stock Exchange as pifferari”.50 Hatherell deserves a level of praise for having dressed his Hawaiian female subjects, including the real hero of the story Kokua, in traditional Polynesian dress; that this dress is distinctly Samoan rather than Hawaiian in style is a finite point that Polynesians would notice, but not a general readership. This, in fact, was acceptable to Stevenson, given that the illustrations would not be reproduced for his local translations, and would not be seen by the majority of his Pacific readerships. Regarding the dress of Keawe, Hatherell correctly identifies the Hawaiian as a man of the world: Keawe may come from the ancient traditions of Hawaii, but he is a sailor who travels between Hawaii and San Francisco, and is tempted by the riches of the modern commercialism that is corrupting Hawaiian culture. As such, Hatherell dresses Keawe in contemporary modern dress. In Figure 5.12, we see Keawe brooding on the hellish bottle which, like the dagger in Macbeth, hovers in front of him in an apparition.

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Figure 5.12 William Hatherell for “The Bottle Imp”, “Keawe of the bright house is out of spirits”.

Not only has Hatherell caught the mood of the moment, as Keawe contemplates damnation, but he contrasts the culturally conflicted character with the Native Hawaiian women behind him. He is separated from them symbolically, his back to them; he is the author of his own troubles in his desire for material wealth, and as a result he has sacrificed his ties to the old world of Hawaii, represented by the women. Again, the women are not dressed in a strictly Hawaiian fashion; however, Hatherell has caught both the mood and the theme of the moment through the composition. Theme, mood and dramatic moment are all strengths that Hatherell captures as an illustrator. In another illustration, we peer over Keawe’s shoulder into a dimly lit room where Kokua, who has secretly bought the bottle to save her husband’s soul, contemplates her fate. In the final illustration, we see the sailor, who saves Keawe and Kokua, walking away from us with a rum bottle in one hand and the spirit bottle (a deliberate pun by both Stevenson and Hatherell) in the other (Figure 5.13). Hatherell’s whimsical picture captures the dark humour of the sailor’s fatalism: “I tell you,” said Keawe, “the man who has that bottle goes to hell.” “I reckon I’m going anyway,” returned the sailor; “and this bottle’s the best thing to go with I’ve struck yet. No, sir!” he cried again, “this is my bottle now, and you can go and fish for another.” “Can this be true?” Keawe cried. “For your own sake, I beseech you, sell it me!” “I don’t value any of your talk,” replied the boatswain. “You thought I was a flat; now you see I’m not; and there’s an end. If you won’t have

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Figure 5.13 William Hatherell for “The Bottle Imp”, “So off he went down the avenue”.

a swallow of the rum, I’ll have one myself. Here’s your health, and good-night to you!” So off he went down the avenue towards town, and there goes the bottle out of the story.51 Therefore, with the exception of the specificities of Hawaiian dress, Hatherell illustrates Stevenson’s story very effectively according to Stevenson’s own criteria for narrative illustration, and he does so without close guidance or critique from the author. Another general strength of Hatherell’s illustrations for these Hawaiian stories is his depiction of topography. This does not mean that Hatherell depicts specific landscapes, such as Diamond Head or Waikiki in Honolulu, but landscape types that are aesthetically consistent with Pacific vistas, including the flora. Like Hole’s illustration of Dodd in Taiohae for The Wrecker, Hatherell’s landscapes are passable as Pacific islands. In both “The Bottle Imp” and “The Isle of Voices”, Hatherell avoids the mistake of trying to place the action in identifiable landscapes, but represents the topography with authenticity. A good example from “The Bottle Imp” is “There, under the bananas, lay Keawe, his mouth in the dust, and as he lay he moaned”; the title of the illustration demands the depiction of banana trees, which are duly and accurately rendered in the illustration and instantly recognisable to Pacific viewers. The landscape in which Hatherell depicts Keawe and Kokua meeting for the first time on the beach is also authentic to a Hawaiian setting. Stevenson does find fault with one landscape, but not because of its topographical inauthenticity; rather, it is a problem of narrative. He writes to Colvin in June 1893 that “Some of W. Hatherell’s [illustrations] are very clever; but O Lord! the lagoon! I did say it was ‘shallow’ but, O dear, not so

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shallow as that a man could stand up in it!”52 However, after a close reading of the text, Hatherell could be forgiven this mistake: A little way before him the trees stopped; there was a break in the line of the land like the mouth of a harbour; and the tide, which was then flowing, took him up and carried him through. One minute he was without, and the next within: had floated there in a wide shallow water, bright with ten thousand stars, and all about him was the ring of the land, with its string of palm trees.53 This is all the description we, and Hatherell, are given of Keola’s situation. There is little to suggest, other than the phrase “had floated”, that Keola should be swimming, and as is often the case, Stevenson is expecting his illustrator to understand the fact that Keola should be still deep enough to swim. However, this brief phrase, easily passed over in a quick reading, signals the level of scrutiny of the text that Stevenson expected of the illustrator. Despite this, Hatherell depicts the “ring of the land” and its “string of palm trees”, while suggesting the “ten thousand stars”. Stevenson does express admiration for the illustrations to “The Isle of Voices”, however. He makes his comments above on receiving his copy of Island Nights’ Entertainments, which was the first time he laid eyes on them. Unlike “The Bottle Imp”, the original publication of “The Isle of Voices” in the National Observer was unillustrated; these pictures were therefore illustrated specifically for Island Nights’ Entertainments, with the intention that they fit aesthetically with the rest of the suite. Indeed, they are “clever”, and in particular capture the gothic aesthetic of the story. “The Isle of Voices” is one of Stevenson’s most challenging stories of ghosts, giants and Polynesian superstitions. Keola’s father-in-law, Kalamake, is a warlock “wise-man” on the island of Molokai in Hawaii; Molokai is traditionally connected with dark magic, and is geographically and culturally distant from the ultra-modern metropolis of Honolulu. Hatherell captures the spectral feel of the story in the very first illustration (Figure 5.14), titled “While he was so thinking, there was his father in-law behind him, looking vexed”. Keola sits lazily (in keeping with Stevenson’s character) with a figure of Kalamake behind him, holding the leaves that will transport them both to the “Isle of Voices”. Kalamake is an ethereal character in the text, who magically transports himself to distant islands to steal their natural resources, and who mutates into a giant in abandoning Keola in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Hatherell captures this moment too, in a strikingly effective depiction of the giant Kalamake striding through the ocean in the distance (Figure 5.15). Hatherell’s style of illustration for “The Isle of Voices” differs from those for “The Bottle Imp”: they are much more impressionistic, less figurative, with blurred figures and landscapes that complement the impressionistic style of the narrative. Stevenson uses Polynesian motifs, linguistic inflections and superstitions to construct a story that, although it is set in the

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Figure 5.14 William Hatherell for “The Isle of Voices” “While he was so thinking”.

real world of modern Hawaii, is steeped in ancient mythology and recalls stories of European antiquity. The image of Kalamake strolling through the ocean is described as follows: “as often as Keola sank in the trough he could see him no longer; but as often as he was heaved upon the crest, there he was striding and dwindling, and he held the lamp high over his head, and the waves broke white about him as he went”. Hatherell has chosen to depict this moment, which could easily have spoiled the narrative, but avoids doing so by using an impressionistic style. Unlike “The Bottle Imp”, Stevenson, and consequently Hatherell, show us the magic and the monsters in “The Isle of Voices”: where the bottle imp is enticingly concealed from our sight, Kalamake grows and disappears before our eyes. “The Isle of Voices” requires that an illustrator show the magic of the story, and Hatherell does so by using an impressionistic style in which lines and forms are often blurred into their surroundings, suggesting an ethereal universe in which physical forms might conceivably disappear or metamorphose. Gordon Browne completes the illustrations for Island Nights’ Entertainments, illustrating “The Beach of Falesá” in a manner that lends an aesthetic continuity between and through the very different stories within the entire volume. Stevenson expresses qualified admiration for Browne’s illustrations

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Figure 5.15 William Hatherell for “The Isle of Voices”, “There he was striding and dwindling”.

to “The Beach of Falesá”. In fact, Stevenson published an open letter to Browne, in which he writes, To the artist who did the illustrations to ‘Uma’: Dear Sir, I only know you under the initials G.B., but you have done some exceedingly spirited and satisfactory illustrations to my story ‘The Beach of Falesá’, and I wish to write and thank you expressly for the care and talent show. Such numbers of people can do good black and whites! So few can illustrate a story, or apparently read it. You have shown that you can do both and your creation of Wiltshire is a real illumination of the text. It was exactly so that Wiltshire dressed and looked, and you have the line of his nose to a nicety. His nose is an inspiration. Nor should I forget to thank you for Case, particularly in his last appearance. It is a singular fact—which seems to point still more directly to inspiration in your case—that your missionary actually resembles the flesh and blood person from whom Mr Tarleton was drawn.54 The general effect of the islands is all that could be wished, indeed I have but one criticism to make, that in the background of Case taking the dollar from Mr Tarleton’s head—head, not hand as the fools have printed it—the natives have a little too much the look of Africans. But the great affair is that you have been to the pains to illustrate my story instead of making conscientious black and whites of people sitting talking. I doubt if you have left unrepresented a single pictorial incident. I am writing by mail to the editor in the hopes that I may buy from him the originals.55 This letter deserves close attention, not only because it helps us understand his admiration for the illustrations for “The Beach of Falesá” but also

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narrative illustration to almost all of his work. First of all, he praises Browne for “reading” his story: as demonstrated with other works, Stevenson’s illustrators had to engage fully with the texts they were illustrating to be able to create illustrations that were true to the narrative in its details, both explicit and implicit. It is this attention to textual detail that provides Browne with his power of characterization, particularly of Wiltshire, who, as a first person narrator, is not physically described in the text at all. Browne has understood from the text that, despite the fact they are clearly very different characters, Wiltshire and Case share attributes, such as ethnicity, social class, trade and status among the islands. They are, as so often in Stevenson’s narratives, almost doubles, shadow versions of each other. Browne catches this mirroring in the illustrations, such as the two men standing off against each other on the beach (Figure 5.16). Browne’s achievement here is to portray both differences and commonalities between the two men. They are both dressed as Pacific traders (similar to traders captured in the Stevenson photographic albums), with the same weapons, similar age and similar stature. However, Case is recognizable from images both before and after this in the series, which highlights another strength of Browne’s illustrations: consistency of characterization. Figure 5.16 also highlights Browne’s ability to pick moments of dramatic tension or action, which Stevenson praises in his letter: he has caught the “pictorial incident”.56 Although Stevenson was unhappy with some of Browne’s characterisations, especially of Uma, Browne’s illustrations for “The Beach of Falesá” are impressive by Stevenson’s own criteria, and translate well from their

Figure 5.16 Gordon Browne for “The Beach of Falesá”, “We stuck just the way we were”.

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original serial publication into the book of Island Nights’ Entertainments. Browne seems to have produced a separate illustration for the book edition of the story; the Illustrated London News of 6 August 1892 contains an illustration that does not appear in Island Nights’ Entertainments, but is replaced by a later moment from the text. Figure 5.17 depicts the illustration from the Illustrated London News, in which Wiltshire is discovered in the darkness by Case, who stands over him with a rifle before firing a warning shot. It is a moment of high tension, and conforms to Stevenson’s criteria of good narrative illustration; however, a close reading of the text suggests that Browne might have misunderstood this moment. The picture illustrates the following passage: The image had burned out; there were only a few coals left here and there, and the wood was main dark, but had a kind of a low glow in it like a fire on its last legs. It was by this that I made out Case’s head looking at me over a big tuft of ferns, and at the same time the brute

Figure 5.17 Gordon Browne for Illustrated London News, “I lay quite still”, courtesy of the Huntington Library of California.

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Uncharacteristically, Browne has misconceived this scene. The text clearly implies a certain distance between the characters, with Case’s face illuminated by the dying embers of the idol Case had constructed, and Case should be mostly concealed behind ferns. In Browne’s illustration, it is difficult to imagine Case missing Wiltshire from point-blank range and prostrate at his feet. Although there is no written evidence, it is likely that author, artist, publisher or all three decided to replace this image with one that depicts the men wrestling on the floor for their lives, with the sub-title “I had him by the ankle”. Indeed, this replacement improves the narrative progression of the images from start to end, particularly as it depicts the climactic moment of the story (without giving away the conclusion of the struggle). As a series of illustrations they provide aesthetic continuity with Hatherell’s illustrations for the other two stories because of their Pacific subject matter, and Browne’s talent for both authenticity and the choice of dramatic moment. In fact, the uninitiated reader might not notice the change in artist. This helps provide the cohesion to the stories, at least within the physical presentation of the book that Stevenson was concerned it would lack. Island Nights’ Entertainments therefore provides proof that the inclusion of different illustrators did not necessarily mean that an illustrated book needed to be artistically compromised. In contrast to The Wrecker, which suffered from its change in illustrator, Island Nights’ Entertainments is enriched by the illustrative treatment it received by its artists. The style of the illustrations helps to provide an aesthetic thread through the stories that, for British and American readers at least, made this disparate group of stories much more coherent. There is one other illustration in this volume, however, that stamps this book as a Stevenson book: a map of the beach of Falesá (Figure 5.18). I have been unable to establish for certain that Stevenson himself penned this map, or whether it was a contrivance of Cassell’s. In either case, it looks like a Stevenson production, and contains several aspects that make it likely. Stevenson’s beach in “The Beach of Falesá” is fictional, like the island itself, but it is based loosely on his home of modern Western Samoa. The shoreline of the map is very similar to a part of the shore line of Falaease`ela region in the south west of the island, particularly in its inclusion of a river mouth and beach head. What is more persuasive of Stevenson’s draughtsmanship, however, is the specificity of the topography marked out through the elevations of the mountains and the depths of the surrounding ocean, leaving the reader in no doubt of the physical environment in which the narrative plays out. The beach is concealed by the high peaks; Papa Randall’s house

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Figure 5.18 Possibly by RLS, frontispiece for Island Nights’ Entertainments, “Sketch map of the beach and neighbouring country”.

and the station sit close by but are completely cut off and hidden from the beach. The reef is clearly marked, along with the “boat passage” through which Wiltshire can make the shore, while the depth markers make it clear that the beach drops quickly into deep waters once clear of the reef. The mixture of cartographical detail that is brought to the reader’s attention is clearly meant to make the reader consider the authenticity, or believability, of the story as it plays out. As with Treasure Island, this map provides a topographical framework onto which the action can be superimposed by the author and then by the reader. Although on first glance this map appears simplistic compared to the map of Skeleton Island for Treasure Island, all the ingredients are here for the construction of narrative for the author, and then its deconstruction by the reader. It recalls to mind Stevenson’s comment that “even with imaginary places, [the author] will do well in the beginning to provide a map”.58 It would make sense that for a story like “The Beach of Falesá”, set in a fictional location and based on observed landscapes, the readers would be provided a map of the terrain. The artist demonstrates keen understanding of topographical idiosyncrasies of Pacific islands, such as black sand beaches, towering needle-like mountains, un-crossable reefs and even the depths of the surrounding waters, and it is difficult to imagine that the map would have been drawn through close reading of the story by an illustrator, rather than by the author himself, who would have “walked every foot of it and [known] every milestone” in his mind’s eye.59 However, a map also marks out this book as a Stevenson book in the marketplace; Island Nights’ Entertainments is stamped by the map as the latest of

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Stevenson’s commodity-texts, a continuation of his famous earlier works, Treasure Island and Kidnapped, and in the tradition of copycat productions like H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines (1885). There would have been a reassuring quality to a Stevenson book with a map for contemporary readers: he may have left Britain for unknowable shores and strange peoples, but he is still writing books with maps, like he used to! The map and the illustrations turn these strange, exotic stories into a commodity-text.

The Ebb-Tide Stevenson’s last story to be illustrated during his lifetime was The EbbTide, published in London in Jerome K. Jerome’s To-Day magazine between 11 November 1893 and 3 February 1894. It was also published in America in McClure’s Magazine in six monthly instalments between February and July 1894, with illustrations by Alfred Brennan, who had illustrated the American edition of The Black Arrow. Stevenson’s wish was that Browne illustrate The Ebb-Tide in the same publication as “The Beach of Falesá”, The Illustrated London News. This wish signals Stevenson’s ultimate satisfaction with the serial publication of “The Beach of Falesá”, and particularly with Browne’s illustrations. In a letter of 16 May 1893 to Sidney Colvin, he again points the illustrator to photographs: It is my great wish that this might get into the Illustrated London News for Gordon Browne to illustrate. For whom, in case he should get the job, I give you a few notes. A purao is a tree growing something like a fig with flowers. He will find some photographs of an old marine curiosity shop in my collection, which may help him. Attwater’s settlement is to be entirely overshadowed everywhere by tall palms; see photographs of Fakarava: the verandahs of the house are 12ft wide. Don’t let him forget the Figure Head, for which I have a great use in the last chapter. It stands just clear of the palms on the crest of the beach at the head of the pier: the flag-staff not far off. The pier he will understand is perhaps three feet above high water, not more at any price. The sailors on the Farallone are to be dressed like white sailors of course. For other things, I remit to this excellent artist and my photographs.60 Later in the same letter, he points Browne to “the Brassey photographs of Papeete”, and remarks “mind, the three waifs were never in the town; only on the beach and in the calaboose. By George, but it’s a good thing to illustrate for a man like that!” He closes the same letter by almost begging that Browne illustrate the story: “I believe I would in this case make even a sacrifice to get Gordon Browne and copious illustration; the d—d thing is illustrateable”.61 This letter reveals the clarity of Stevenson’s mental picture of his scenery and his characters, in contrast to the economy with

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which he renders such scenery in the text; it points to the fact that he had topographical models in mind for such scenery, and that this same scenery had been captured in his photographs; it demonstrates how the layout of the topography is crucial to the narrative (he is insistent on the placing of certain structures such as the figure head within the landscape); and it also explicitly states that he trusts Browne’s artistic talents as long as they are guided by his photographs. Most importantly, Stevenson has a clear vision of how his story should look on the page, based on Browne’s previous work and the publication it was intended for. The Ebb-Tide, therefore, like much of his previous work, was conceived as an illustrated story. It is unfortunate, therefore, that one of his most powerful stories, a story that was so “illustratable”, was illustrated so poorly. Stevenson was not pleased with the results for either edition, as the illustrations fail to satisfy many of his standards for narrative. Stevenson made his dissatisfaction with these pictures clear in a letter to Charles Baxter: “See most carefully to prevent any of Brennan’s cursed illustrations ever appearing again. The same remark applies to the unhung ruffian who made a public ass of himself in To-day, or whatever it is called. I warn you to be careful of this, in particular about Brennan, for I know how McClure pushes him”.62 Analysis of Brennan’s illustrations for McClure’s confirms why Stevenson would be so critical; they break many of his rules of narrative illustration. First is style: as with his illustrations for The Black Arrow, the style is highly impressionistic, in part due to the quickly designed and etched nature of the images. As Figure 5.19 demonstrates of Captain Tom, it is difficult for the viewer to discern either character or incident from the text.

Figure 5.19 Alfred Brennan for “The Ebb-Tide” in McClure’s, Captain Tom.

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Brennan has followed the fundamentals of textual illustration, and depicted Captain Tom in the appropriate clothing: “the three beachcombers, following his indication, saw the figure of a man in pyjama trousers and a white jumper approaching briskly from the town”.63 Again, this is all Stevenson provides for description, but the captain in the image is not clearly depicted. He wears white, and has a package under his arm as the narrative describes, but other than this there is little to distinguish him as anything other than a man carrying a parcel; we see a very sketchy suggestion of the three protagonists, Herrick, Davis and Huish, on the boat, but the style makes them unclear. The setting is similarly vague: it is clearly bright and hot (suggested by the shadows) but could be any port in the world rather than the very tropical setting of the Tahitian capital of Papeete. There are also problems of characterisation, such as in the image depicting the turning point of Herrick’s life as Davis appears at the door of the Papeete calaboose (Figure 5.20). This image illustrates the following passage: “A swift step was audible. The captain appeared upon the threshold of the cell, panting and flushed, and with a foolish face of happiness. In his arms he carried a loaf of bread and bottles of beer; the pockets of his coat were bulging with cigars”.64 The first problem here is one of continuity of characterisation. Herrick is the central character depicted, with Davis approaching the door. Herrick here is indistinguishable from Brennan’s depiction of Captain Davis in later illustrations; any casual viewer would have little idea which character was which, a fact that is compounded by the sketchy style of the etching. In addition, there is a problem of

Figure 5.20 Alfred Brennan, for “The Ebb-Tide”, “The captain appeared upon the threshold”.

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narrative movement in this illustration. The text clearly states that the captain “appeared” at the door of the prison, flushed from exertion and excitement at the arrival of the Farallone; in the image, we see Davis seemingly strolling some distance from the door, undermining the immediacy of the captain’s arrival and the change in Herrick’s fortune. The image here undermines the pace of the narrative. Elsewhere, Brennan turns from his impressionistic style to focus more on specific depictions of characters, specifically Attwater. Again, Attwater’s physical presentation is not consistent from one image to the next, although he is clearly identifiable from the fact that he is clean shaven, and physically larger (as the text describes his six foot four frame) than the other characters. Nonetheless, as previous discussion of Long John Silver has suggested, such close depiction is a dangerous game with Stevenson’s characters. Attwater is, like Silver, a towering presence in the story, and a brilliant literary creation: he is terrifying and magnetic, intelligent and unpredictable. As with Silver, the reader is given little physical or facial description beyond the suggestive, and it was probably therefore unwise of Brennan to choose the following passage to attempt to illustrate: The boat was by that time forging alongside, and they were able at last to see what manner of man they had to do with. He was a huge fellow, six feet four in height, and of a build proportionately strong, but his sinews seemed to be dissolved in a listlessness that was more than languor. It was only the eye that corrected this impression; an eye of an unusual mingled brilliancy and softness, sombre as coal and with lights that outshone the topaz; an eye of unimpaired health and virility; an eye that bid you beware of the man’s devastating anger. A complexion, naturally dark, had been tanned in the island to a hue hardly distinguishable from that of a Tahitian; only his manners and movements, and the living force that dwelt in him, like fire in flint, betrayed the European. He was dressed in white drill, exquisitely made; his scarf and tie were of tender-coloured silks; on the thwart beside him there leaned a Winchester rifle.65 Brennan is presented with a problem regarding Attwater, as Georges Roux was with Silver. The story demands that an illustrator depict the character, because he is central to the plot; however, Brennan is given almost nothing of close concrete description from which to draw. The resulting image betrays the challenges in such illustration, and also the common problems in illustrating the exotic. Attwater, as with Metcalf’s depiction of Wicks from The Wrecker, has the appearance not of Stevenson’s sinewy “huge fellow” of “unimpaired health and virility”, and certainly not of his underlying “devastating anger”, but more of a stern village priest. His Polynesian servant (more realistically a slave) also has what Stevenson above refers to as “the look of an African”.

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Figure 5.21 Alfred Brennan illustration for “The Ebb-Tide”, Attwater.

Brennan might be forgiven some of these crimes against Stevenson’s texts, particularly as McClure seems to have been pushing him. It is unclear quite what this comment refers to: is McClure “pushing” Brennan to illustrate the story? Is he “pushing” him to meet deadlines? If the latter is true, it would explain some of the more fundamental, frankly unprofessional, mistakes Brennan makes, the most obvious of which is the depiction of the figurehead. Stevenson clearly describes the gesture of the makeshift icon: “on the top of the beach and hard by the flagstaff, a woman of exorbitant stature and as white as snow was to be seen beckoning with uplifted arm. The second glance identified her as a piece of naval sculpture, the figure-head of a ship”.66 Later, we are given an even clearer picture of her, as Herrick wanders in front of her and contemplates her semi-mythical presence on the island: the figure-head confronted him with what seemed irony, her helmeted head tossed back, her formidable arm apparently hurling something, whether shell or missile, in the direction of the anchored schooner. She seemed a defiant deity from the island, coming forth to its threshold with a rush as of one about to fly, and perpetuated in that dashing attitude. Herrick looked up at her, where she towered above him head and shoulders …67 Given this level of detail and symbolism within the story, and Stevenson’s desire that Browne focus on this image in any potential illustrations, it is

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unfortunate that Brennan should depict the gesturing statue without any arms at all, wearing no helmet, and, although taller than the characters in the illustrations, certainly not of “exorbitant stature”. In a final betrayal of the text, Brennan depicts the figure-head at the moment that Attwater seems ready to murder Davis beneath it; where Stevenson clearly describes the statue as facing towards the ocean as both a welcome and a warning to potential encroachment on Attwater’s kingdom, Brennan depicts it facing inland, with the ocean behind. All these little errors add up to substantial undermining of Stevenson’s very clear vision. The mixture of inaccuracies of rendering textual detail, the sometimes very sketchy depiction of characters from distance, the inconsistencies of character depiction between illustrations and the generally cartoonish style of the imagery, severely undermine the narrative progression and the dark tone of the story. A glance back at Browne’s illustrations for “The Beach of Falesá” only serves to highlight what might have been, and help us understand Stevenson’s antipathy towards these pictures. In the end, if Brennan had been dismissed by Stevenson as inadequate following his earlier work for The Black Arrow, and if McClure was pushing him to produce images to deadlines, perhaps the ultimate blame should be placed not with Brennan but with McClure himself. The English publication of “The Ebb-Tide” received even less focused illustrative treatment than McClure’s publication. A glance at the first page of the first instalment confirms precisely why Stevenson was less than impressed with the illustrator (or “the unhung ruffian who made a public ass of himself”). The illustrator for To-Day is listed simply as W.H. (unlikely to be William Hatherell, given his success with Island Nights’ Entertainments and the obvious difference in style and quality). To-Day, edited by Jerome K. Jerome, was heavily illustrated with in-text woodcut vignettes. For “The Ebb-Tide”, there are a total of forty-seven pages, spread out over thirteen instalments. Each page has between one and four illustrations, depicting landscapes, characters and scenes from the story. In style at least the pages bear resemblance to Bagster’s Pilgrim’s Progress, of which Stevenson was so fond. However, unlike that text, these illustrations do not aid or drive narrative; they depict characters that are difficult to tell apart from each other, topographical images of locations such as Papeete, but on a scale that provides no useful or contextual information for the reader, and illustrations that present scenes out of narrative order, thereby fundamentally confusing the text for the reader. The pictures are sometimes narrative, sometimes topographical and sometimes they focus on individual characters or objects, such as the Farallone; however, in these instances they are rarely accurate, or detailed enough to provide the specificities of Stevenson’s subjects. They lack any sense of narrative progression from one to the next, and seem intent on depicting curiosities that the text suggests or evokes, like faraway shores with palm trees. Collectively they represent the exotic Pacific at its most generic, while failing to draw the reader into Stevenson’s and Osbourne’s story.

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“The Ebb-Tide” is the perfect example of the artistic pitfalls and logistical hurdles facing the illustration of Stevenson’s Pacific works. As with many of his previous great works, Stevenson had had a clear mental picture of how his texts were to be illustrated, and how he wanted them presented to the public as physical objects. For his work from the Pacific, traditional problems of literary illustration were compounded by geographical distance and isolation. If the illustration of “The Ebb-Tide” proves nothing else, it is that Stevenson had no control over whom his publishers ultimately chose to illustrate his work. He could make suggestions, and point potential illustrators to photographs to keep them honest regarding the depiction of his exotic subject matter, but ultimately it was deadlines and pragmatism that dictated publishers’ choices of illustrators. In the case of Hatherell and Browne, the publishers chose illustrators who were capable enough, and professional enough, to read Stevenson’s texts closely, and to research the available visual material to achieve authenticity to Stevenson’s subjects. Their illustrations help to cement the disparate stories of Island Nights’ Entertainments into a visually coherent volume, despite problems with certain images such as Browne’s depiction of Uma, or Hatherell’s shallow lagoon. Fundamentally these illustrations obey Stevenson’s criteria for successful narrative illustration, depicting moments of dramatic significance, in important or dramatic settings, drawing the reader into the stories without giving away plot points that belong in the text. They succeed in illustrating these stories in a manner that Metcalf fails to do for The Wrecker, and Brennan and “W.H.” fail to do for “The Ebb-Tide”. Given how important illustration was to Stevenson as both a commercial and an artistic aspect of his story-telling, and especially given that he was relying on his illustrators to transport his readers to an authentic Pacific arena, his frustrations with poor illustration are understandable. Perhaps no story encapsulates this more than “The Ebb-Tide”, whose visual presentation in both To-Day and McClure’s fatally undermine the bleakness and gravity of one of Stevenson’s darkest stories. By contrast, Island Nights’ Entertainments remains one of Stevenson’s best illustrated books, because the illustrators, despite their obvious disadvantages of location and unfamiliarity with the Pacific, produced illustrations that not only represented an authentic Pacific, but helped to tie together three very different stories into one coherent illustrated volume.

Notes 1. Jenni Calder, “Stevenson in His Place: Scotland, England, the United States, and Samoa”, Approaches to Teaching Robert Louis Stevenson, New York, NY: Modern Language Association, 2013, pp. 26–33. 2. Robert Louis Stevenson, Letters, 8 vols., 8:274n. Booth and Mehew recite Colvin’s letter in a note to Stevenson’s controlled response. My thanks to Linda Dryden for bringing my attention to this letter. 3. This Africanization of Polynesian peoples is most palpably clear in racist cartoons produced by Californian and American newspapers around the time of

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4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

10. 11. 12.

13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

21. 22. 23.

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the annexation of the Kingdom of Hawaii by the U.S., portraying Hawaii’s Queen Liliu`okalani as a stereotyped savage African queen. The visual language of the racist literature and cartoons of segregated and pre-Civil War America were applied to the queen in a political effort to drum up public support for the annexation of Hawaii before, during and after the overthrow of the queen in 1893. These cartoons are available at the University of Hawai`i’s Hawai`i Digital Newspaper Program, http://hdnp.library.manoa.hawaii.edu/. Roslyn Jolly, Robert Louis Stevenson in the Pacific: Travel, Empire, and the Author’s Profession, Farnham and Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2009, pp. 26–27. Robert Louis Stevenson, Letters, 8: 70. See Ann Colley, Robert Louis Stevenson and the Colonial Imagination, Farnham and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2004. Nancy Armstrong, Fiction in the Age of Photography: The Legacy of British Realism, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999. Nancy Armstrong, Fiction in the Age of Photography, pp. 215–217. Stevenson was a fan of Galton’s photography, and uses Galton’s composite photography as a metaphor for memory. In his essay “Pastoral”, referring to the memory of personal acquaintances, Stevenson writes, “As in those composite photographs of Mr. Galton’s, the image of each new sitter brings out but the more clearly the central features of the race”. Richard Eves, “‘Black and white, a significant contrast’: Race, humanism and missionary photography in the Pacific”, Ethnic and Racial Studies, vol. 29 no. 4 (2006), pp. 725–748. Fanny Stevenson. The Cruise of the Janet Nichol among the South Sea Islands: A Diary by Mrs Robert Louis Stevenson. Ed. Roslyn Jolly. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 2004. Ann Colley, Robert Louis Stevenson and the Colonial Imagination, p. 117. Carla Manfredi, “Pacific Phantasmagorias: Robert Louis Stevenson’s Pacific Photography”, Oceania and the Victorian Imagination: Where all Things are Possible, ed. Richard D. Fulton and Peter H. Hoffenberg, Farnham: Ashgate Publishing, 2013, pp. 11–30. Ann Colley, Robert Louis Stevenson and the Colonial Imagination, p. 117. Carla Manfredi, “Pacific Phantasmagorias”, p. 20. Carla Manfredi, “Pacific Phantasmagorias”, pp. 20–21. Robert Louis Stevenson, In the South Seas, London: Penguin Books, 1998, p. 6. Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne, The Wrecker, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1892, p. 2. Ann Colley, Robert Louis Stevenson and the Colonial Imagination p. 119. Fanny Stevenson, Cruise of the Janet Nicol, pp. 141, 179, and 193 respectively. Robert Louis Stevenson, Letters, 8 vols., 7:375; the letter is quoted in full below, but briefly Stevenson complains that “the natives have a little too much the look of Africans”. This recalls Colvin’s comment about Stevenson’s “beloved blacks”, which folds many very different ethnicities and races together into the same Africanized stereotype. Robert Louis Stevenson, Letters, 8 vols., 7:364. Robert Louis Stevenson, “The Beach of Falesá”, Island Nights Entertainments, London: Cassell & Company, 1893, p. 17. Robert Louis Stevenson, “The Beach of Falesá”, p. 8.

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24. Although I have not been able to ascertain the precise date of this photograph, it is from the studio of J. J. Williams (1853–1926), a court appointed Honolulu photographer who took pictures of King Kalākaua and Robert Louis Stevenson, among other notable Hawaiian royals and visiting dignitaries. Williams was commissioned by the king to promote the islands through photographic enterprise; he published the Tourist Guide in 1882, and established the monthly magazine Paradise of the Pacific in 1888 (the year of Stevenson’s first visit to Honolulu). This magazine continues today as the Honolulu magazine. 25. James J. Williams, “Studio portrait – hula dancers,” in Hawaiian Historical Society Historical Photograph Collection, Item #6790, http://www.huapala.net/ items/show/6790 (accessed May 28, 2011). The Hawaiian Historical Society states, “Williams was active as a photographer in Hawai’i from 1879 to 1926. He was one of many photographers who opened a studio or gallery in Honolulu. By 1890, approximately sixty photographers worked in the Islands, twenty in Honolulu”. 26. Ann Colley, Robert Louis Stevenson and the Colonial Imagination, p. 118. 27. Robert Louis Stevenson, Letters, 8 vols., 6:375. 28. Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne, The Wrecker, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, p. 8. 29. Robert Louis Stevenson, Letters, 8 vols., 6:377. 30. For discussion of Metcalf’s work and career, see Bruce W. Chambers, May Night: Willard Metcalf at Old Lyme, Connecticut: Florence Griswold Museum, 2005; and Ulrich W. Hiesinger, Impressionism in America: The Ten American Painters, Munich and New York: Prestel-Verlag, 1991. 31. Robert Louis Stevenson, Letters, 8 vols., 6:377. 32. Robert Louis Stevenson, Letters, 8 vols., 7:151. 33. Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne, The Wrecker, p. 249. Interestingly, there was also a real life model for Captain Nares: the captain of the ship Casco that carried the Stevensons from San Francisco into the Pacific, Captain Albert H. Otis (Booth and Mehew in Letters, 8 vols., 6:204). 34. Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne, The Wrecker, 268–69. 35. Robert Louis Stevenson, Letters, 8 vols., 7:235. 36. It is not completely clear what Stevenson means here by “black and white artist”, but it seems to refer to a style of illustration more suited to the works of novelists like Henry James, of contemporary stories of high society, with well-dressed characters in picturesque scenery. These images, while valuable in themselves, are resistant to the traditional romance illustrations of action and drama that Stevenson sought for his novels. See Amy Tucker, Illustration of the Master: Henry James and the Magazine Revolution, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010, for an excellent discussion of such illustrations. There is also a letter from Stevenson’s literary friend, J. M. Barrie, dated 28 July 1893, in the National Library of Scotland, which appears to mock such style of illustration, particularly alluding to the typical choice of moment to illustrate: “What a merry jest illustrations to a book nearly always are. The subjects the sagacious artist chooses ‘He lifted his hat politely’ ‘She was sitting on a garden chairdrawing figures with here parasol on the sand.’ ‘The butcher’s boy had come to the door for orders’ ‘“Allow me” he said’ ‘In her walks she was always accompanied by a [??] of the St Bernard [??].’ ‘She rose on his entry’ ‘He sat down on her departure’ Worse than the artist is my experience with American

Illustrating the Pacific

37. 38. 39. 40. 41.

42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67.

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publishers.’” This last comment suggests that this is a particular phenomenon within American illustration. My gratitude to the National Library of Scotland for permission to publish this letter. See NLS MS 9891, f. 1–3. Robert Louis Stevenson, Letters, 8 vols., 7:340–41. Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne, The Wrecker, p. 413. Robert Louis Stevenson, Letters, 8 vols., 7:341. See Barry Menikoff, Robert Louis Stevenson and ‘The Beach of Falesá’: A Study in Victorian Publishing with the Original Text, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1984. Roger Swearingen, The Prose Writings of Robert Louis Stevenson: A Guide, Connecticut: Archon Books, 1980, p. 153. For a detailed bibliographic study of the genesis and publication of “The Beach of Falesá”, see Barry Menikoff, Robert Louis Stevenson and ‘The Beach of Falesá’. Roger Swearingen, The Prose Writings, p. 179. Robert Louis Stevenson, Letters, 8 vols., 7:351. Robert Louis Stevenson, Letters, 8 vols., 7:436. Robert Louis Stevenson, Letters, 8 vols., 7:461. Robert Louis Stevenson, Letters, 8 vols., 7:460. Robert Louis Stevenson, “The Bottle Imp”, Black and White, March 28, 1891, p. 240. Ibid. Robert Louis Stevenson, “The Bottle Imp”, p. 242. Robert Louis Stevenson, Letters, 7:460. Robert Louis Stevenson, “The Bottle Imp”, p. 243. Robert Louis Stevenson 8 vols., Letters, 8: 89. Robert Louis Stevenson, “The Isle of Voices”, Island Nights’ Entertainments, p. 253. It is unclear if Browne had seen the photographs of Reverend Clark or not. Robert Louis Stevenson, Letters, 8 vols., 7:375–76. Stevenson’s criticism of “black and white” artists seems like a veiled reference to Metcalf. Browne illustrates dramatic high moments of importance, rather than transitional moments of little dramatic note. Robert Louis Stevenson, “The Beach of Falesá”, Island Nights’ Entertainments, p. 138. Robert Louis Stevenson, “My First Book”, The Lantern-Bearers and Other Essays, ed. Jeremy Trelgown, New York: Cooper Square Press, 1999, p. 284. Ibid. Robert Louis Stevenson, Letters, 8 vols., 8:67–68. Robert Louis Stevenson, Letters, 8 vols., 8:70. Robert Louis Stevenson, Letters, 8 vols., 8:266. Robert Louis Stevenson, “The Ebb-Tide”, McClure’s Magazine, vol. 2 no. 3, February 1894, p. 251. Robert Louis Stevenson, “The Ebb-Tide”, McClure’s Magazine, vol. 2 no. 3, February 1894, pp. 255–256. Robert Louis Stevenson, “The Ebb-Tide”, McClure’s Magazine, vol. 2, December 1893 to May 1894, New York & London: S. S. McClure, 1894, p. 491. Ibid. Robert Louis Stevenson, “The Ebb-Tide”, McClure’s Magazine, vol. 2, December 1893 to May 1894, New York & London: S. S. McClure, 1894, p. 496.

Conclusion

An examination of Stevenson’s opinions of illustration highlights a stark contradiction between his prose style and subsequent illustration of his stories: where Stevenson’s style eschews unnecessary detail or verbiage, illustration, by necessity, had to flesh out detail that is either only hinted at, or omitted completely, from his prose. This book has provided many examples of illustrators having to intuit, even invent, detail that Stevenson’s texts demand. This contradiction was compounded by Stevenson’s very clear mental picture of his scenes, as The Ebb-Tide demonstrates, and his frustration when illustrators failed the spirit or the technical demands of his textual prompts. Returning to John Scally’s comment that Stevenson was a very “visual” writer, we can refine this notion; Stevenson’s texts are almost always visual, but the visual was always rendered through stylistic suggestion and impression, and not by exhaustive description. One of Stevenson’s great accomplishments as a writer is to produce indelible imagery in the reader’s imagination through suggestion. The perfect example of this is the murder of the dealer in the short story Markheim. The murder is rendered with a typical economy of style: “as he began to re-arise, Markheim bounded from behind upon his victim. The long, skewerlike dagger flashed and fell. The dealer struggled like a hen, striking his temple on the shelf, and then tumbled on the floor in a heap”.1 Few writers have written murder as viscerally as Stevenson with such economy; this description uses the briefest image of the dagger and the simile of the struggling hen to invoke an image in the reader’s mind. Now consider the illustrator’s position: there is almost nothing here from which to illustrate. How, for example, do you visualize struggling “like a hen”? Then there is characterization: what does Markheim look like? As with Treasure Island and Kidnapped, we cannot know, because the narrative does not provide a description of the protagonist, despite the recurrent motif of mirrors. The illustrator must intuit such aspects and attempt to invoke the horror of the moment using his or her own visual tools, while making sure to include details that are provided by the text. In addition to this, any illustrator must be completely familiar with the scene, which requires a close reading of the entire passage. We are, for example, given a brief description of the dealer at the beginning of the

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story: “the little, pale, round-shouldered dealer, stood almost on tip-toe, looking over the top of his gold spectacles”.2 The illustrator must also include the proliferation of the most important motifs in the story: clocks and mirrors, which remind Markheim of his guilt and the need to act from second-to-second following the crime. These are aspects the illustrator must include; however, there is a certain amount of license regarding the illustration of Markheim himself, who is not described. Even here, though, the character must not be too young or too old. He is young enough to have a “lady friend” for whom he is purportedly buying his gift, but old enough to be scarred by failure in life. He is also, we are told, wearing a greatcoat, in which he conceals his knife. All this may seem pedantic, but this is the level of attention an illustrator must pay to the text before composing an illustration. Using this information, we can now judge the first picture that illustrated the story, produced by Harold Copping for Unwin’s Christmas Annual for 1886 (Figure 6.1).3 On first glance, this is a dramatically engaging illustration, immediately inviting the viewer into the murder scene, suggesting the supernatural through the demonic figurines on the shelves. The artist has even ingeniously suggested the impending presence of the stranger by using the shadows of the two men to hint at the presence of a third behind them. There are clocks on the shelves, the dagger in Markheim’s hand is “skewer-like” as the text demands, and he wears a greatcoat. Markheim appears to be of the appropriate age and physical stature to perpetrate such a crime, and even the dealer conforms to his description of being “round-shouldered”, small of stature and wearing glasses. The illustrator has performed many of the tasks that Stevenson would require of him, therefore. However, there are narrative problems when examined closely against the text. First is Markheim’s position: from the look on the dealer’s face, Markheim has just stabbed him, yet Markheim is holding the dagger behind his back as if about to strike; this seems like an unnatural pose for the actual act of murder. Then there is candle that has fallen on the floor, which it clearly does not do in the text: “The candle stood on the counter, its flame solemnly wagging in a draught”.4 The candle on the floor in the illustration helps the illustrator to create the suggestive shadow behind them, but it is a textual inaccuracy that becomes important later in the story: as the candle sits and wavers in the draft following the murder, it throws shadows that move and shimmer on the walls, creating the impression of ghostly presences before the stranger arrives. These are problems of narrative in the picture that undermine the authority of the text. However, in this particular case Stevenson provided some detailed instructions to whichever illustrator would be employed to illustrate the story. The instructions are quoted here in full: writing to Charles Morley, November 1884, in anticipation of Markheim being published a year later in Unwin’s Christmas Annual for 1885 (actually published 1886), Stevenson gave the following advice.

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Figure 6.1 Harold Copping’s illustration for “Markheim” in Unwin’s Christmas Annual, courtesy of the Huntington Library, California.

My dear Sir, I am afraid I cannot put a skeleton into my story, but I will say nothing against one! I send you hints for illustration of my story. I had still hoped to be able at the end to offer you your choice of two; but your hurry condemns you to one. Another time, let me very earnestly counsel to get your number underway a little earlier. Yours truly R. L. Stevenson Probably ‘Markeim’ [sic] is as good a name as I shall find for the story, in case you are in haste to use it. Would not the artist’s picture on the sandwich board be enough? Over I have given notes for the artist. A curiosity shop, shuttered on Christmas Day. A candlelight.

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The dealer a small, round-shouldered, shabbily dressed [man]. He stoops to return a mirror to a low shelf. As he was rearising, Markeim leaped upon him from behind; ‘long, skewer-like dagger; dealer struggled like a hen’, falls forward and tumbles in a lump, limbs scattered, trunk doubled. The many clocks in the shop counted twenty seconds before Markeim came to himself. Shop full of shadows; wavering portraits and Chinese deities. ‘An inner door stood open on the house, and stared into the shop with a long slit of daylight; and the open door appalled him like a witness … in that strip, did there not hang a wavering shadow like a man’s?’ ‘He began to bestir himself, going to and fro with the candle, haunted by moving shadows and startled to the soul by chance reflections’—in the many rich mirrors English, Dutch, Venetian. ‘In his poor miserly habiliments, in that ungainly attitude, the dealer lay like so much bran.’ The note of the picture, unless the actual murder be chosen, is the deadly fear, strained hearkening and startled looking round of the murderer. Dress today: the shop as in a London street. The darkness is merely due to shutters, for the hour is 3 p.m5 It is important to note here that Stevenson has given detailed instructions to a potential illustrator before he has even finalised a title for the story. This would explain some of the narrative inconsistencies between text and image, and it anticipates the logistical complications Stevenson would face in lending outlines of chapters for William Hole to illustrate The Wrecker. Producing the illustration at the same time, even before, the story was completed in fact makes the illustration an impressive performance. We can deduce that the story wasn’t completed when this letter was written because some of the details outlined here are not present in the final story: there is no daylight in the final draft, all the doors are closed (which would make sense if you are about to murder someone) and even the protagonist’s name is spelt differently (Markeim becomes Markheim). Therefore, matching the illustration against both the story and Stevenson’s notes to the illustrator help us appreciate something of Stevenson’s creative process. We see the story in gestation, as details are changed, refined or omitted entirely for the final draft. The illustrator has used Stevenson’s notes rather than the final draft to produce the illustration. For the illustrator, however, this raises technical problems. If the full and final text is not available, the illustrator must illustrate to the information available, and to this extent, the Unwin’s illustration does credit to the story and the author. Ultimately, it performs its most important task: to draw the reader into the story without giving too much away.

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Using this example, it is possible to evaluate the quality of illustrations and illustrators. Of course, we are judging these illustrations according to Stevenson’s own criteria for narrative illustration, which are so clearly worked out through his essays for The Magazine of Art, his experiments with both “graver and pen” in Moral Emblems, and his commentary on illustrations either in correspondence or through unpublished pieces, such as his review of George Roux’s illustrations for Treasure Island. The argument could be made that Stevenson’s criteria are too stringent, too pedantic, and that his impressionistic prose style leaves too little information from which an illustrator can draw. In certain cases this is true: it is hard to criticise Hole, for example, in misrepresenting Captain Wicks from The Wrecker, or William Hatherell for having Keola standing in the lagoon in “The Isle of Voices” instead of swimming. Nonetheless, Stevenson’s criteria do provide a valuable framework from which to judge narrative illustration, past or present, because Stevenson understood the illustrated story as a single, hermetic, coherent work of art. The illustration of a story must be loyal and deferential to its text, taking in its details of imagery and narrative progression, depicting moments of heightened drama from the text, while not giving away the outcome of the drama: the reader must be invited into the text through the illustration. Stevenson also understood the dynamic of the illustrated text to the consumer of stories in the market for popular fiction: the image is seen and “read” first, before the text. The image, therefore, must act as the hook to the consumer, advertising the text while also illuminating it. The image has immediacy over text to the casual glance, but is ultimately subservient to the text. In the case of the novel, the illustrations must also demonstrate aesthetic and narrative continuity between pictures. For example, characters must look the same from one illustration to the next, and the aesthetic qualities, such as depiction of dramatic scenes and settings, must be consistent. A primary reason for the artistic failure of the illustrations for The Wrecker is a lack of such continuity, in which Hole’s dramatic scenes are in stark contrast to the “black and white” style illustrations of Metcalf who depicts moments of narrative insignificance. In comparison, Hole’s suite of illustrations for The Master of Ballantrae delighted Stevenson, making this work one of the great illustrated novels of the nineteenth century. We can state this with conviction, because Stevenson’s vision, by his own admission, is so clearly and authentically rendered by Hole: a great novel is effectively illustrated according to the author’s own criteria. In this instance, the vision of the author and its realisation by the artist are in perfect harmony, producing a single, unified work of art. Most important, however, is that this marriage of image and text in Stevenson’s work produced a powerful literary-visual discourse that predates, and in certain instances influences, twentieth century popular media such as cinema, comics and graphic novels. In a neat irony, Thomas Edison recorded the first copyrighted “motion picture”, The Sneeze, in 1894, the same year of Stevenson’s death, following the inventions of Edison’s assistant William K. L. Dickson in Edison’s workshop.

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As Richard Dury’s filmography of Stevenson-inspired motion pictures reveals, early modern cinema was full of Stevenson titles, which is understandable given the mix of strong imagery and taut narratology within Stevenson’s stories: they lend themselves perfectly to the movies, particularly given their pre-existing popularity. The earliest examples include a sixteen-minute version of Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde from 1908, The Suicide Club from 1909 and Edison’s own Treasure Island from 1912.6 It is also clear that Stevenson, as we have seen through several examples throughout this book, had a very clear picture in his mind of how his scene looked. Perhaps this is not surprising, given that he is the creator of the scene; however, it does give a new meaning to Stevenson as a “visual” writer, as a writer who pictured his scenes clearly, logically and methodically in his mind’s eye before and during the act of writing. Nothing in his descriptions is left to chance, every aspect is necessary either to the plot or the theme of the story; an illustrator must also pay such attention to detail. As the Markheim example demonstrates, Stevenson often conceived his stories visually: the image in the author’s mind becomes narrative, which must then be re-visualised by the illustrator. This is a scenario we see with many authors of the nineteenth century, especially with Walter Scott, who, like Stevenson, did not possess the technical skills to produce his own illustrations for a professional market. Like Scott, Stevenson had to rely on the talents of others, and both authors had favourite artists whom they trusted as reliable illustrators. As a little known author before the success of The Black Arrow in 1883, Stevenson was lucky to have the talents of Walter Crane for An Inland Voyage and Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes, and William H. Boucher for Young Folks, and hankered after the talents of Randolph Caldecott and Howard Pyle. Having established himself in the market for popular fiction, his preferred artists were William Hole, Will H. Low and from the Pacific, Gordon Browne. However, as a consequence of moving away from his centres of publishing, London and New York, he increasingly had to rely on the good will, judgement and deadlines of his publishers, resulting, in the case of The Ebb-Tide, in a poorly illustrated and conceived publication. In the highly competitive market for popular fiction, therefore, even Stevenson had to bow to the exigencies of publishing practices. Of course, given the requisite talents, Stevenson would gladly have illustrated his own works. Moral Emblems perfectly encapsulates both Stevenson’s complex understanding of the different potential relationships of text and image, and also his technical limitations. This is not to suggest that Stevenson was a poor artist – his wood-block illustrations demonstrate aesthetic and technical qualities that could have been further improved, and his sketches of the Pacific are technically accomplished – but that, for a highly competitive popular market, with illustrations of the highest professional calibre, Stevenson’s images would not suffice. He had, therefore, to rely on others. Stevenson was admiring of writer-artists who could work

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with both “the graver and the pen”, with comparable technical abilities in both disciplines, such as Howard Pyle or Caldecott. Stevenson had the critical eye to understand and appreciate great illustration and great illustrators, without the technical abilities to achieve the same results. However, some of his efforts with the pencil, especially his maps, fired his literary imagination, as demonstrated with Treasure Island and even The Wrecker. In addition, Stevenson would occasionally request illustrations, or suggest subjects for illustration, during the writing process, as demonstrated with Markheim, and in the case of Kidnapped, well before the story was even begun by the author. Therefore, between making sketches, drawing maps, requesting images and photographs of subjects, and even experimenting with illustrating his own work, the image played a fundamental role before, during and after the writing process. Illustration, in this sense, was the final piece of a very visual process; it is no wonder that he would get frustrated with illustrations that did not reflect what he had so clearly pictured and attempted to conjure in his prose. Stevenson’s comment to Edward Burlingame that The Master of Ballantrae would be “one of the most adequately illustrated books of our generation” is significant; given his depth of understanding of the art of literary illustration, we should pay attention to this comment.7 Stevenson was a great writer about art. His essays for The Magazine of Art, his correspondence with his cousin Bob Stevenson as a young man, and then with William Henley in the 1880s, reveal a mind that was astute in judging painterly and graphic style, especially when it complemented his own literary philosophies. His writing about Japanese art in particular helps us to understand what he strove to achieve with his writing: the Japanese economy of style, its resistance to naturalistic representation, its skill and aesthetic design, were all theories of visual arts that helped Stevenson to consider achieving similar results with literary style. To return once more to the murder of the dealer in Markheim, the act is rendered with great economy and precision, using as few words to achieve maximum effect; this calls to mind Stevenson’s admiring comment regarding Hokusai in his essay “Byways of Book Illustration: Two Japanese Romances”, in which he describes how the Japanese artist seeks “at the same time the maximum of effect and the minimum of detail”.8 Reading Stevenson’s essays on art help elucidate Stevenson’s literary style, and establish him as a member of an avant-garde troupe of writers and artists who were incorporating Japanese influences into their own modes of expression. Finally, this book has intended to elucidate the complex relationship between the illustrated story as a saleable commodity in a competitive marketplace, and the illustrated novel as a multi-media, single, unified work of art. Scrutiny of the production of Stevenson’s illustrated texts provides valuable insight into the processes by which texts were illustrated for a popular market. One common step in this process was the periodical publication of novels before their single-volume publication: whether

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for Young Folks or for Scribner’s, there was always a tension between the author’s vision, the choice and talent of the illustrator, and publishing deadlines. As was always the case in nineteenth-century illustrated fiction, the tension existed between creative vision and the practicalities of popular publishing. Stevenson fell foul of these practicalities several times in his career, in some cases preferring no illustration rather than settling for an illustrator he didn’t know or trust. A Child’s Garden of Verses is a case in point, another volume that Stevenson fully intended as an illustrated book, but which, having failed to retain the services of Caldecott, was published without any illustration. Even Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, the story that launched Stevenson into literary superstardom, remained unillustrated, despite a suggestion to Charles Scribner that the new American edition be illustrated.9 Perhaps the greatest lesson that Stevenson’s illustrated fiction provides, however, is that Stevenson did not consider popular illustrated fiction as exclusive from great art: a wellillustrated novel, such as The Master of Ballantrae or Kidnapped, was both a saleable commodity and an artistic endeavour. For Stevenson, illustrated stories could be exciting and escapist, while achieving the highest artistic standards; they could be both popular and high-brow. This could be achieved when the author and the artist worked towards the same artistic vision, a vision that was dictated by the text, and when the illustration understood its responsibility to textual authority. An illustrator of Stevenson’s texts was forced to elaborate details of the stories that were not explicitly given in the text, and this was acceptable, as long as that elaboration stayed true to the spirit and aesthetic of the text. Stevenson’s stories have weathered modernism’s critical gaze and finally come into sharp focus through new literary scholarship; now the illustration of his stories can help this scholarship to understand Stevenson’s contribution to popular publishing and the Victorian illustrated novel towards the end of its reign in the marketplace.

Notes 1. Robert Louis Stevenson, “Markheim”, The Complete Stories of Robert Louis Stevenson: Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Nineteen Other Tales, ed. Barry Menikoff, New York: Modern Library Classics, 2002, p. 397. 2. Robert Louis Stevenson, “Markheim”, The Complete Stories, p. 395. 3. Harold Copping (1863–1932) would later become famous for biblical illustration, particularly in The Copping Bible (1910). In keeping with Stevenson’s taste in illustration, Copping illustrated an edition of Pilgrim’s Progress in 1903. 4. Robert Louis Stevenson, “Markheim”, The Complete Stories, p. 397. 5. Robert Louis Stevenson, Letters, 8 vols., 5:35–36, letter 1336. 6. Richard Dury, “The Robert Louis Stevenson Archive: Film Version (and Film Scripts) of Works by Robert Louis Stevenson”, robert-louis-stevenson.org, n.d., web, 10 August 2012. 7. Robert Louis Stevenson, Letters, 8 vols., 6:302, 20 May 1889.

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8. Robert Louis Stevenson, ‘Byways of Book Illustration: Two Japanese Romances,’ Magazine of Art, London: Cassell & Co., 1883, p. 14. 9. Robert Louis Stevenson, Letters, 8 vols., 6:40. Stevenson writes, “Have you thought any more about illustrating Jekyll? I doubt if Hole be quite the man, but that is partly because his pictures have suffered so much in the engraving; and I almost think still, he might be better than Pyle”. It is not clear why this did not come about, although plans may have been derailed due to the American copyright issue.

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Primary Sources by Robert Louis Stevenson Across the Plains, with Other Memories and Essays. London: Chatto and Windus, 1892. An Inland Voyage. London: Chatto and Windus, 1892. “The Black Arrow: A Tale of Tunstall Forest”. Young Folks Paper. London: James Henderson, 30 June 1883–20 October 1883. The Black Arrow: A Tale of the Two Roses. Ed. John Sutherland. London: Penguin Books, 2007. The Black Arrow: A Tale of the Two Roses. London: Cassell & Company, 1895. The Black Arrow: A Tale of the Two Roses. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1888. “Books and Reading. No. 2. How books have to be written”. Ed. Richard Dury. Journal of Stevenson Studies no. 9 (2012): 343–346. “The Bottle Imp.” Black and White. London: Black and White Publishing Company, 1891. “Byways of Book Illustration: Bagster’s Pilgrim’s Progress.” The Magazine of Art. London: Cassell and Co., 1882. “Byways of Book Illustration: Two Japanese Romances.” The Magazine of Art. London: Cassell and Co, 1883. Catriona, A Sequel to “Kidnapped”, Being the Memoirs of the Further Adventures of David Balfour At Home and Abroad. London: Cassell & Company, 1894. The Complete Stories of Robert Louis Stevenson: Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr.  Hyde and Nineteen Other Tales. Ed. Barry Menikoff. New York: Modern Library Classics, 2002. “The Ebb-Tide”. McClure’s Magazine. Vol. 2. New York & London: S. S. McClure, 1894. “Fontainebleau: A Village Community of Painters”. Magazine of Art. London: Cassell and Co., 1884. In the South Seas. London: Penguin Books, 1998. Island Nights’ Entertainments. London: Cassell & Co., 1893. Kidnapped, Being Memoirs of the Adventures of David Balfour in the Year 1751. London: Cassell & Company, 1894. Kidnapped, Or The Lad with the Silver Button. Ed. Barry Menikoff. New York: Modern Library Classics, 2001.“Kidnapped.” Young Folks Paper. London: James Henderson, 1 May 1886–31 July 1886. The Lantern-Bearers and Other Essays. Ed. Jeremy Treglown. New York: Cooper Square Press, 1999. Letters and Miscellanies of Robert Louis Stevenson: Sketches, Criticisms, &c, ed. Charles Scribner. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1898.

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The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson. Ed. Bradford A. Booth and Ernest Mayhew. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1994. “Markheim.” Unwin’s Christmas Annual. London: T. Fischer Unwin, 1886 The Master of Ballantrae: A Winter’s Tale. London: Cassell & Company, 1891. The Master of Balllantrae: A Winter’s Tale. New York: Modern Library Classics, 2002. “The Master of Ballantrae”. Scribner’s Magazine, vol. 3–12, January–June 1889. Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1897. “A Modern Cosmopolis”. The Magazine of Art. London: Cassell & Co., 1883. Moral Emblems and other poems. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1921. “On the Art of Literature”. Ed. Roger Swearingen. Journal of Stevenson Studies no. 7 (2010): 131–142. “A Penny Plain and Twopence Coloured”. Magazine of Art. London: Cassell & Co., 1884.“Popular Authors”. Scribner’s Magazine. No. IV (July 1888): 122–128. Robert Louis Stevenson: Letters. Ed. Sidney Colvin. 4 vols. London: Heineman, 1926. Travels in Hawaii. Ed. A Grove Day. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1973. Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes and The Amateur Emigrant. Ed. Christopher MacLachlan. London: Penguin Books, 2004. Treasure Island. London: Cassell & Company: 1889. “Treasure Island”. Young Folks Paper. London: James Henderson, 1 October 1881– 28 January 1882. Virginibus Puerisque and Other Papers. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1946. The Wrecker. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1892.

Secondary Sources Allen, Helena G. The Betrayal of Liliuokalani: Last Queen of Hawaii 1838–1917. Honolulu: Mutual Publishing, 1982. Altick, Richard D. The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public 1800–1900. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1963. The American Illustrated Book in the Nineteenth Century. Ed. Gerald W. R. Ward. Delaware: The Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum, 1987. Approaches to Teaching Robert Louis Stevenson. Ed. Caroline McCracken-Flesher. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2013. Armstrong, Nancy. Fiction in the Age of Photography: The Legacy of British Realism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999. Baedecker’s Rhine: The Rhine from Rotterdam to Constance. Leipsic: Karl Baedecker, 1886. Barthes, Roland. S/Z. Trans. Richard Miller. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2002. Bell, Ian. Dreams of Exile: Robert Louis Stevenson: A Biography. New York: Henry Holt and Company, Inc., 1992. Biltcliffe, Pippa. “Walter Crane and the Imperial Federation Map Showing the Extent of the British Empire (1886)”. Imago Mundi 57, Part 1 (2005): 63–69. Blackburn, Henry. Randolph Caldecott: A Personal Memoir of his Early Art Career. London: Sampson Low, Marston & Co., 1892. Buckton, Oliver. Cruising with Robert Louis Stevenson. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2007.

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Fielding, Penny. Writing and Orality: Nationality, Culture, and Nineteenth-Century Scottish Fiction. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996. Ferris, Ina. The Achievement of Literary Authority: Gender, History, and the Waverley Novels, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991. Flood, Alison. “Tolkien’s Map of Middle-earth Discovered Inside Copy of Lord of the Rings”. The Guardian. 23 October 2015. Web. 27 December 2015 George Cruikshank: A Revelation. Ed. Robert L. Patten. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992. “Glasgow University Special Collections Department Book of the Month: Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World by Lemuel Gulliver.” University of Glasgow Special Collections. January 2006. Web. 11 October 2015. Goldman, Paul. John Everett Millais: Illustrator and Narrator. Aldershot: Lund Humphries, 2004. Goldman, Paul. Victorian Illustration: The Pre-Raphaelites, the Idyllic School and the High Victorians. Aldershot: Lund Humphries, 2004. Grenby, M.O. Children’s Literature. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008. Harman, Claire. Myself and the Other Fellow: A Life of Robert Louis Stevenson. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2005. Hawai`i Digital Newspaper Program. University of Hawai`I at Mānoa. N.d. Web. January 2015. Henley, William Ernest. The Letters of William Ernest Henley to Robert Louis Stevenson. Ed. Damian Atkinson. High Wycombe: Rivendale Press, 2008. Hiesinger, Ulrich W. Impressionism in America: The Ten American Painters. Munich and New York: Prestel-Verlag, 1991.Hill, Richard. Picturing Scotland through the Waverley Novels: Walter Scott and the Origins of the Victorian Illustrated Novel. Farnham and Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2010. Hillis Miller, J. Illustration. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992. Illustrating Scott: A Database of Printed Illustrations to the Waverley Novels, 1814–1901. Ed. Peter Garside, Ruth McAdams. University of Edinburgh. 2009. Web. 2010. James, Henry. Picture and Text. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1893. Johnson, Captain Charles. A General History of the Robberies & Murders of the most Notorious Pirates. Guilford, CT: The Lyons Press, 2002. Johnstone, Arthur. Recollections of Robert Louis Stevenson in the Pacific. London: Chatto & Windus, 1905. Jolly, Roslyn. Robert Louis Stevenson in the Pacific: Travel, Empire, and the Author’s Profession. Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2009. Jones Jr., William B. “‘Hello, Mackellar’: Classics Illustrated meets The Master of Ballantrae”. Journal of Stevenson Studies 4 (2007): 247–269. Keating, Peter. The Haunted Study: A Social History of the English Novel, 1875–1914. London: Fontana Press, 1991.Kooistra, Lorraine Janzen. The Artist as Critic: Bitextuality in Fin-de-Sielce Illustrated Books. Aldershot: Scholar Press, 1995. Kooistra, Lorraine Janzen. Christina Rossetti and Illustration: A Publishing History. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2002. Lewis Carroll & his Illustrators: Collaborations & Correspondence, 1865–1898. Ed. Morton N. Cohen & Edward Wakeling. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003. Low, Will. H. A Chronicle of Friendships. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1908.

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Index

Ainsworth, William Harrison; Jack Sheppard 23, 97–98 Alcott, Louisa May 12 “Aladdin” 70, 72, 175 Allan, William 123–24, 129 Arabian Nights 70, 72, 175 Art Journal 27 Arts and Crafts Movement 12, 19, 20 Attwater 188, 191–93 Baedecker, Karl 38 Baedecker maps 38 Bagster, Eunice 11n 67 Bagster, Samuel 4, 11n 66 Balzac, Honoré de 53 Barbizon Art Colony 31, 54; “Forest Notes” 60–63, 65 Barrie, J. M. 14 Barthes, Roland 86 Baxter, Charles 81, 174, 189 Beardsley, Aubrey 8, 12 Beasant, Walter 52 Beery, Wallace 99 black and white illustrative style 6, 171, 183, 202 Black and White (magazine) 6, 174, 175, 176 Blackbeard (Edward Teach) 102, 103 Blackmore, R. D. 86 Book Buyer 94 Boucher, William H. 9; illustrates Black Arrow 112–15, 117, 119; illustrates Kidnapped 133–40, 141, 142, 149, 203 Brassey, Lady 155, 188 Brennan, Alfred 4, 6; illustrates Black Arrow 115–18, 119, 121, 150, 154; illustrates The Ebb-Tide 188–93, 194 Browne, Gordon 4, 6, 13, 154, 155; illustrates Uma 160–164, 174;

illustrates “The Beach of Falesá” 182–86; potential illustrator for The Ebb-Tide 188–89, 192, 193, 194, 203 Browne, Halbot (Phiz) 13, 97, 174 Bunyan, John see also “Pilgrim’s Progress” 66–67 Burlingame, Edward 129, 143, 144, 146, 164–67, 170, 171, 204 Burt, Edmund 38, 134–35; Letters from a Gentleman in the North of Scotland 38, 134–35 Cadell, Robert 122, 123 Caldecott, Randolph 4, 12, 13, 14, 23–29, 30, 31, 32, 34, 42, 90, 203, 204, 205; Death of a Mad Dog 27; Sing a Song of Sixpence 25; The Babes in the Wood 25; “The Character of Dogs” 27; The Diverting History of John Gilpin 25; The House that Jack Built 25 Carroll, Lewis 25 cartes-de-visite 162 Cassell and Co. 6, 12, 31, 80, 95, 97, 101, 115, 118, 122, 140–41, 146–47, 166, 174, 175, 186 Caw, James 127 Cezanne, Paul 54 Charles Scribner’s Sons 6, 80, 94, 115, 140, 147, 166, 174 Clarke, Rev. W. E. 164 Colvin, Sidney 15, 19, 25–27, 81, 112,147, 153, 155, 161, 174, 175, 180, 188 commodity-text 35, 38, 188, 204–5 Condor, T. 67 Constable, Archibald 122 Cooper, Jackie 99 Corot, Jean-Baptiste 54, 65 Covenanter 100, 123

216

Index

Cornhill Magazine 25, 77 Cortés, Hernán 84 Crane, Walter 4, 8, 9, 12, 13; Stevenson’s first illustrator 14–23, 24, 26, 27, 29, 31, 32, 34, 41, 203; An Artist’s Reminiscences 17 Cruikshank, George 13, 22–23, 97–98 The Daily Graphic 24 The Daily Surprise 80 “Davos Printing Press” 80 Defoe, Daniel 49, 102; Robinson Crusoe 49 Degas, Edgar 54 Depp, Johnny 99 Dickens, Charles 8, 22–23, 97, 99–100, 131, 137–38, 174; A Christmas Carol 137–38; Oliver Twist 22–23; Pickwick Papers 22; Sketches by Boz 23, 97 Dickson, William K. L. 202 Dobson, Austin 27 Dow, James 112 Edgeworth, Maria 122 Edison, Thomas 202–3; The Sneeze 202 Egan, Pierce 22; Life in London 22 English Illustrated Magazine 27–28 Evans, Edmund 14, 24 Fielding, Henry 23 fold-out maps 36–38 Galpin, Thomas 141, 146–47 Galton, Francis 155, 159 Gosse, Edmund 81, 83, 132 Greenaway, Kate 4,12, 13, 14, 23, 24, 27, 29, 30, 31 90; Mother Goose 27 Grimm Brothers 175; “The Spirit in the Bottle” 175 Haddon, Trevor 50 Haggard, H. Rider 8, 14, 41, 188; King Solomon’s Mines 41, 188 Harper’s Magazine 33 Havers, Alice 31 Hawaii see also Native Hawaiian 6, 153, 162–64; “The Bottle Imp” 175–80; “The Isle of Voices” 180–82 Hawthorn, Nathaniel 12 Henderson, James 80, 96, 111–12, 133 Henley, Anthony 6, 62–65, 67, 120 Henley, W. E. 4, 6, 18; A Child’s Garden of Verses 25–32, 34, 42, 46; Magazine of Art 56, 62, 67, 68–72,

80, 81, 90, 95, 96, 97; as model for Long John Silver 101–104, 140, 146, 165, 204 Hetzel, Jules 95 Highlander 100; in Scott’s Rob Roy and RLS’s Kidnapped 130–31 Hiroshige, Utagawa 88 Hogarth, William 13, 22, 95 Hokusai, Katsushika 56, 57, 204 Hole, William 4, 5, 35, 111, 118, 122; illustrates Kidnapped 124–32 and 140–42; illustrates Master of Ballantrae 142–47; illustrates Catriona 147–50, 162; illustrates The Wrecker 165–70, 174, 177, 180, 201, 202, 203 hula 162–64 Hunt, William Holman 20 Iaone 163 Illustrated London News 23, 161, 174, 185, 188 Irving, Washington 24; Old Christmas 24 James, Henry 1, 8, 50, 52, 73; “The Art of Fiction” 50 Japanese art 7, 47; RLS on 53–57, 73, 87, 204 Japp, Alexander 96 Jenkin, Fleeming 125 Jerome, Jerome K. 9, 188, 193 Johnson, Captain Charles 102; A General History of the Pyrates 102 Kalākaua, King 162–63 Kelmscott Press 13, 20, 41 Kipling, Rudyard 14 Lang, Andrew 8, 31 Lautrec, Toulouse 54 Leech, John 137 lithography 13 London (magazine) 15 Longman, Greens and Co. 31 Longman’s Magazine 47 Low, Will H. 4–5, 31, 32, 60, 115, 144, 146; as model for Loudon Dodd 165–66, 203; Lamia 32; Chronicles of Friendship 165 Lowlander 100, 123, 130 Magazine of Art 4, 6, 7, 29, 46, 47; “A Note on Realism” 50–52, 53; “Two Japanese Romances” 55–57;

Index “A Penny Plain” 58–59; “Fontainebleau” 62–66; “Bagster’s Pilgrim’s Progress” 62–69; “San Francisco” 70–72, 73, 77, 78, 80, 94, 97, 101, 106, 202, 204 Manet, Édouard 54 maps 9–10, 14, 35–42, 59, 67; Treasure Island 78–79, 84, 104; “The Beach of Falesá” 186–88, 204 Marryat, Captain Frederick: The Phantom Ship 33 Martin, Arthur Prachett 19 Mattos, Katherine de 69 McClure, S. S. 115, 189, 192–93 McClure’s Magazine 118, 188, 189, 194 Melville, Herman 158; Typee 158 Meredith, George 8 Merrie Monarch festival 163 Merrill, Frank T. 12, 33, 95 Metacalf, William 5, 6, 154, 166; illustrates The Wrecker 169–74, 191, 194, 202 Michelangelo 55 Millais, John Everrett 20 Millet, Jean-François 56, 65 Monet, Claude 54 Morgan, Lady 122 Morley, Charles 199 Morris, William 8, 12, 19, 20 Nasmyth, Alexander 123–25, 129 National Observer 174, 181 Native Hawaiian see also Hawaii 6, 162–64, 174, 178–79 Newton, Robert 99 North, Captain George (RLS pseudonym) 112 Osbourne, Lloyd 10, 77–78, 79–82, 155, 160, 193 Paget, H. M. 2, 5, 115: illustrates The Black Arrow 118–22, 141, 142, 150 Papeete 6, 7, 155, 188, 190, 193 Pauahi 163 Paul, Kegan 14, 19 Philadelphia Press 115 Phillips, Alfred. R. 112 photography 7, 8, 9, 13, 51, 54; for “Fontainebleau” 72–73; for Kidnapped 133–34; of the Pacific 154–64; for The Wrecker 164–67, 178, 184; for “The Ebb-Tide” 188–89, 194, 204

217

The Pictorial World 24 picture books 24–25, 58, 62, 65, 68, 82–83, 111, 123, 156 Pilgrim’s Progress 4; Bagster’s illustrations for 66–68, 69, 73, 94, 193 Pirates of the Caribbean 99 Pissarro, Camille 54 Pre-Raphaelites 13, 20, 50, 61 Pyle, Howard 5, 12, 32–35, 90, 95, 115, 203, 204; A Modern Aladdin 34; Pepper & Salt, or Seasoning for Young Folk 33; The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood 33; The Wonder Clock 33; Within the Capes 33 Raphael (Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino) 55, 79 realism 2, 8, 50–52, 61, 62, 73; Pacific 154–57 Richardson, Samuel 49; Clarissa 49 Roberts Brothers 33, 60, 95 Rossetti, Christina 20 Rossetti, Dante 20 Routledge 42 Roux, Georges 2, 7, 12, 22, 33, 60, 82, 94–106, 145, 191, 202 Royal Scottish Academy 65 Rubens, Peter Paul 55 Saintsbury, George 8 Samoa 6, 10, 147, 153, 186 Samoan 160–61, 164, 174–75, 178 Schwob, Marcel 1–2 Scott, Sir Walter see also Waverley Novels 8, 13, 40; RLS on 48–49, 53, on Scottish costume 99–100, 111; on Scottish history and culture 122–132, 134, 150, 153, 203; Guy Mannering 49; Lady of the Lake 48; Magnum Opus 122; Old Mortality 123; Rob Roy 40, 128, 129, 131, 132; Tales of My Landlord 123; The Antiquary 48; The Bride of Lammermoor 128; The Lay of the Last Minstrel 123; Waverley 100, 128; Woodstock 48 Scribner’s Magazine 6, 33, 143, 146, 147, 149, 166, 205 Scrooge, Ebeneezer: Christmas Carol 137 Seitei, Watanabe 57 Shakespeare, William 53, 54, 55; Macbeth 54, 178 Silver, Long John 2, 52, 89; illustration of 99–103, 104, 116, 146, 165, 191

218

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Simpson, Sir Walter Grindley: Cigarette 14 Skeleton Island 78–79, 187 Skelt’s Juvenile Drama 58–59, 60, 66 Smollett, Tobias 23 steel-plate engraving 13 Stephen, Sir Leslie 37 Sterne, Laurence 23 Stevenson, David (Davie) 36, 42 Stevenson, Fanny 69, 78, 86, 140, 147, 153, 155, 156, 157, 159; The Cruise of the Janet Nichol 156, 159 Stevenson, Robert (Bob) 46, 53, 54, 56, 57, 60, 81, 204 Stevenson, Robert Louis: A Child’s Garden of Verses 4, 18, 26, 29–32, 35, 42, 205; A Footnote to History 10; “A Gossip on Romance” 47–49; “A Humble Remonstrance” 47, 50, 51, 52, 53, 55, 73; “A Lodging for the Night” 25; “A Modern Cosmopolis” 70, 73; “A Note on Realism” 47, 50, 51, 57; Across the Plains 63; An Inland Voyage 9, 14–19, 57, 77, 203; “Books and Reading. No. 2. How books have to be written” 53–54; “Byways of Book Illustration: Bagster’s Pilgrim’s Progress” 4, 66–68, 69, 73, 94, 193; “Byways of Book Illustration: Two Japanese Romances” 55–57, 87, 204; Catriona also David Balfour 1, 2, 106, 110, 111, 122, 124, 125, 128, 134, 147–50, 153; “Fontainebleau: A Village Community of Painters” 6, 57–65; “History of Moses” 3; In the South Seas 158; Island Nights’ Entertainments 10, 34, 154, 174–75, 181, 182, 185–87, 193, 194; Kidnapped 7, 8, 9, 10, 35–39, 42, 82, 96, 106, 110, 111, 122–42, 147, 148, 149, 150, 164, 188, 198, 204, 205; Markheim 198–201, 203, 204; Moral Emblems 3, 7, 30, 34, 77–94, 104, 106, 149, 202, 203; “My First Book” 35–36, 40, 79, 101, 104, 106; New Arabian Nights 90; “On Some Technical Elements of Style in Literature” 46; “Pan’s Pipes” 15; “Penny Plain and Twopence Coloured” 58–59; “Popular Authors” 58, 66; “Providence and the Guitar” 25; Robin and Ben: or, the Pirate and the Apothecary 82, 91–93; “San Francisco” 70; “Sire de Malétroit’s Door”, 25; South Seas 156, 157;

Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde 1, 9, 13, 15, 34, 90, 132, 153, 203, 205; Sunbeam Magazine 3; The Adventures of David Balfour 147; “The Bottle Imp” 34, 164, 174, 175–180, 181, 182; “The Beach of Falesá” 160, 164, 174, 175, 182–188, 193; “The Character of Dogs” 27–28; The Ebb-Tide 9, 118, 155, 188–94, 198, 203; The Graver and the Pen: or, Scenes from Nature with Appropriate Verses 82, 89–91; “The Isle of Voices” 174, 175, 180, 181–83, 202; The Master of Ballantrae 5, 7, 8, 106, 110, 111, 122, 124, 128, 132, 142–47, 148, 149, 150, 153, 166, 167, 169, 174, 202, 204, 205; “The Outlaws of Tunstall Forest” 115; The Silverado Squatters 77, 78; The Weir of Hermiston 111, 153; The Wrecker 147, 149, 158, 164–174, 180, 186, 191, 194, 201, 202, 204; Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes 18; Treasure Island 1, 2, 7, 8, 9–10, 12, 13, 22, 25, 31, 33, 34, 35–37, 40, 42, 56, 57, 58, 60, 77, 78, 79–82, 84, 89, 90; Roux’s illustrations to 94–106, 110, 111–12, 116, 132, 133, 153, 187, 188, 198, 202, 203, 204; Virginibus Puerisque 15; “Will o’ the Mill” 25 Stewart, Colonel David 38–39; Sketches of the Character, Manners, and Present State of the Highlands of Scotland 38–39 Strong, Belle 170 The Surprise 80 Swift, Jonathan 40; Gulliver’s Travels 40, 41 Sydney, Australia 6, 153, 165 Tahiti 6, 7, 155, 188, 190, 193 Tahitian 191 Taiohae 158, 180 Teach, Edward Blackbeard 102 Tembenoka, King of Marshall Islands 160 Tennyson, Alfred Lord 20–22; Lady of Shallott 20–22 Thackeray, William Makepeace 8, 13, 22, 23, 34, 68, 97–98, 131 Tolkien, J. R. R. 14, 41; Lord of the Rings 41, 66 toy books 10, 14, 20, 24, 27, 35–36 Twain, Mark 12, 25

Index Uma see also “The Beach of Falesá” 161–164, 183, 184, 194 Unwin’s Christmas Annual 199, 201 Vailima 6, 153, 170 Van Gogh, Vincent 54, 89 Verne, Jules 95 Vinci, Leonardo da 55 Wade, General George 134 Waverley Novels see also Scott, Sir Walter 122; Abbotsford Edition 123;

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Magnum Opus 122; Novels and Tales of the Author of Waverley 125 Westminster Review 22, 94 wood-engraving 13, 77, 93, 94, 113 wood-block engraving,13, 77, 81, 86 Wyeth, N. C. 2, 5 Young Folks’ Paper 9, 12, 80, 96, 111; The Black Arrow 111–15, 132; Kidnapped 134–40, 203, 205 Zola, Emile 8