Stale, flat, unprofitable: these seem familiar words from a young man intrigued by his own existential dilemmas, and there is more than a touch of speech-making about them, from the expository first sentence to the anticipation of a listener’s responses – ‘Do not suppose I am exaggerating when I talk …’, ‘Yes, I have a more subtle opium …’ For a diary entry it is wonderfully oratorical. Perhaps Stevenson was right to fear losing touch with his imaginative powers, but not through lack of ideas so much as from a surfeit of style.
Stevenson later served up accounts of his youth (in his autobiographical essays) in a manner so inherently witty and objectified that the real pain of it is diluted, but there is a passage in his ‘Chapter on Dreams’ which is revealing about how divided a life he was living at this time. The dream examples in the essay are written in the third person (with the revelation at the end that all the examples are in fact from the writer’s own experience), but the trick seems, if anything, to make the piece more confessional. While ‘the dreamer’ was a student, Stevenson explains, he began to dream in sequence, ‘and thus to live a double life – one of the day, one of the night – one that he had every reason to believe was the true one, another that he had no means of proving to be false’:
[ … ] In his dream-life, he passed a long day in the surgical theatre, his heart in his mouth, his teeth on edge, seeing monstrous malformations and the abhorred dexterity of surgeons. In a heavy, rainy, foggy evening he came forth into the South Bridge, turned up the High Street, and entered the door of a tall land, at the top of which he supposed himself to lodge. All night long, in his wet clothes, he climbed the stairs, stair after stair in endless series, and at every second flight a flaring lamp with a reflector. All night long, he brushed by single persons passing downward – beggarly women of the street, great, weary, muddy labourers, poor scarecrows of men, pale parodies of women – but all drowsy and weary like himself, and all single, and all brushing against him as they passed. In the end, out of a northern window, he would see day beginning to whiten over the Firth, give up the ascent, turn to descend, and in a breath be back again upon the streets, in his wet clothes, in the wet, haggard dawn, trudging to another day of monstrosities and operations.56
Two things are immediately striking about this vivid account: one, that it anticipates so much of Stevenson’s most famous story, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde – from the medical context, with its ‘monstrous malformations’ to the dismal cityscapes and degrading double-life; the other is the reappearance on every second flight of that endless upward staircase of a flaring ‘lamp with a reflector’, presumably stamped with the maker’s mark, ‘Stevenson and Sons’.
Stevenson implies that these nightmares ‘came true’ in as much as they hung so heavily on him during the day that he never seemed able to recover before it was time to resubmit to them. The account ends bathetically with the information that everything cleared up once he consulted ‘a certain doctor’ and was given ‘a simple draught’ (shades of Jekyll again), but what hangs in the reader’s mind, like the nightmare itself, is what Stevenson admits just before this, that the experience left ‘a great black blot upon his memory’ and eventually made him begin to doubt his own sanity.
In June 1869, Thomas Stevenson took his son with him on the annual tour of inspection aboard the lighthouse steamer Pharos, calling at Orkney, Lewis and Skye. There was plenty to fascinate Louis, but of a romantic, not a technical, nature. At Lerwick he heard all about tobacco and brandy smuggling, and at Fair Isle saw the inlet in which the flagship of the Armada had been wrecked: ‘strange to think of the great old ship, with its gilded castle of a stern, its scroll-work and emblazoning and with a Duke of Spain on board, beating her brains out on the iron bound coast’.57 Not much survives apart from lists of his projected writings from this date, but they show another novel, sketches, stories and rough plans for at least eleven plays (listed in the notebook he took to P.G. Tait’s natural philosophy lectures, the only course he attended with any regularity). But the impression that his engineering experiences (or rather, the long observation of the sea and the Scottish coast they afforded) made on him fuelled his lifetime’s writing. It lies behind many of the autobiographical essays (‘The Coast of Fife’, ‘Rosa Quo Locorum’, ‘Memoirs of an Islet’, ‘On the Enjoyment of Unpleasant Places’, ‘The Education of an Engineer’), short stories such as ‘The Merry Men’, ‘Thrawn Janet’, ‘The Pavilion on the Links’, and the novels Treasure Island, Kidnapped and The Master of Ballantrae.
By the summer of 1870, when Louis was sent on his third consecutive engineering placement, he had begun to enjoy the trips much more. For one thing, there was plenty of sea travel, which he loved, and public steamers allowed him to charm and flirt with new acquaintances in a holiday manner. On the way to the tiny islet of Earraid, which the firm was using as a base for the construction of Dhu Heartach lighthouse, he met the Cumbrian artist Sam Bough, a lawyer from Sheffield, and a pretty and spirited baronet’s daughter called Amy Sinclair: ‘My social successes of the last few days [ … ] are enough to turn anyone’s head,’ he wrote home to his mother.58 The party stopped at Skye and boarded the Clansman returning from Lewis, where their high spirits and monopolisation of the captain’s table were observed by a shy young tourist called Edmund Gosse, son of the naturalist P.H. Gosse, whose struggles to square fundamentalist religious views with the emerging ‘new science’ mirrored very closely those of Thomas Stevenson. Years afterwards, Gosse recorded his initial impressions of the young man who ‘for some mysterious reason’ arrested his attention: ‘tall, preternaturally lean, with longish hair, and as restless and questing as a spaniel’.59 Gosse watched the youth on deck as the sun set, ‘the advance with hand on hip, the sidewise bending of the head to listen’. When the boat stopped unexpectedly a little while later, Gosse saw that they had come up an inlet and that there were lanterns glinting on the shore:
As I leaned over the bulwarks, Stevenson was at my side, and he explained to me that we had come up this loch to take away to Glasgow a large party of emigrants driven from their homes in the interests of a deer-forest. As he spoke, a black mass became visible entering the vessel. Then, as we slipped off shore, the fact of their hopeless exile came home to these poor fugitives, and suddenly, through the absolute silence, there rose from them a wild keening and wailing, reverberated by the cliffs of the loch, and at that strange place and hour infinitely poignant. When I came on deck next morning, my unnamed friend was gone. He had put off with the engineers to visit some remote lighthouse of the Hebrides.60
What they were witnessing in the half-darkness was a latter-day form of Highland ‘clearance’, strongly similar to the notorious forced evictions of the eighteenth century. Stevenson does not mention Gosse at all or this incident in his letters home (which were too taken up with Miss Amy Sinclair), but it must surely be the inspiration for the scene in Chapter 16 of Kidnapped – written sixteen years later – when David Balfour sees an emigrant ship setting off from Loch Aline:
the exiles leaned over the bulwarks, weeping and reaching out their hands to my fellow-passengers, among whom they counted some near friends. [ … ] the chief singer in our boat struck into a melancholy air, which was presently taken up both by the emigrants and their friends upon the beach, so that it sounded on all sides like a lament for the dying. I saw the tears run down the cheeks of the men and women in the boat, even as they bent at the oars.61
Earraid itself, where Stevenson