Thomas and Margaret’s bedroom looked out to the back of the property and had a bathroom leading off it; at the front on the same level was the elegant drawing room, with its fireplace and recesses and twelve-foot-high windows looking out on the genteel greenery of the Gardens. Down the stairs again was the ground floor, with its high-ceilinged, panelled dining room and wide entrance hall. The kitchens and sculleries were in the basement, accessible to tradesmen by the area steps. Heriot Row was a truly substantial home, exuding an aura of wealth well-spent. Nobody seeing it could have the least doubt that the only son of the house was a privileged child.
Robert Louis Stevenson’s many autobiographical essays and memoirs leave vividly contrasting impressions of his childhood. On the one hand, it contained the idyllic pleasures described in essays such as ‘The Manse’ and ‘Child’s Play’ and poems such as ‘My Kingdom’ and ‘Foreign Lands’, on the other it was a time of chronic ill-health and piquant terrors. There is a temptation, given the subject’s own obsessive recourse to images and tropes of duality, and his ‘clinching’ creation of the Jekyll-Hyde poles, to see his life in terms of strong contrasts. But Stevenson was unusual – in those last days before Freud – in recognising not just the co-existence of states of mind (in childhood particularly), but their inextricability. The author of A Child’s Garden of Verses was to say of his own earliest memories, ‘I cannot allow that those halcyon-days or that time of “angel infancy” have ever existed for me. Rather, I was born, more or less, what I am now – Robert Louis Stevenson, and not any other, or better person.’28 The ‘good’ and ‘bad’ parts of his childhood could no more be pulled apart than could the child and adult self. In its puzzling variability and dizzying plunges into dark and light, life was all of a piece.
Looking back on his childhood when he was twenty-nine, Stevenson concluded that he had been ‘lovingly, but not always wisely treated’ by his parents.29 In fact, there were aspects of his upbringing that seem not only ill-advised, but even dangerous. It is a minor mystery, for instance, how the frail little boy survived the custom of the time to seal up a nursery ‘almost hermetically’30 so that it was always draught-free (i.e. airless), or how he ever slept, given Cummy’s treatment for insomnia, which was to give the fretful child a soothing drink of strong coffee in the middle of the night. Fanny Stevenson retrospectively blamed her husband’s ‘feverish excitement’ as a child on the powerful drugs he was given during bouts of gastric fever, and the regular use of antimonial wine, which Margaret Stevenson’s doctor brother George later believed had ruined the boy’s constitution. These remedies were held to be sovereign by the parents, and if the child seemed overwrought they would sooner remove his toys or send his playmates away to calm him, than lower the doses of strong or inappropriate medicine.
Even his parents’ happy marriage was problematic, for, as Stevenson was to say memorably in his essay ‘Virginibus Puerisque’, ‘the children of lovers are orphans’. Margaret gave over much of the childcare to Cummy, not thinking any harm could come of it, the nanny being such a religious body. But the strength of Cummy’s religious views (possibly a source of mild amusement to her employers) made hers a very troubling influence. Cummy was a devout member of the Free Church, and far more stringent in her interpretation of doctrine than Lou’s Church of Scotland parents. The theatre was the mouth of hell, cards were ‘the Devil’s Books’ and novels (meaning romances) paved the road to perdition. She filled the little boy’s head with stories of the Martyrs of Religion, of the Covenanters and the Presbyters and the blood-drenched religious fundamentalists of the previous two centuries, stories that were rendered, confusingly enough, in highly dramatic style. (Stevenson later told Cummy mischievously that her declamations had sparked his own obsessive interest in the drama.) The Bible and the Shorter Catechism were to Lou what Mother Goose might have been to a luckier child, visits to the Covenanters’ graves in Greyfriars churchyard were the substitute for playing in the park, and though there was opportunity to read adventure stories, Cassell’s Family Paper and (clandestinely) bound copies of Punch downstairs, Cummy’s regime of spiritual education was based around Low Church tract-writers and theologians, ‘Brainerd, M’Cheyne, and Mrs Winslow, and a whole crowd of dismal and morbid devotees’, as Stevenson recalled about twenty years later.
Cummy had mutually respectful relations with her employers and was trusted implicitly, but her religious brainwashing of her charge clearly subverted their authority over him. She was a simple woman who undoubtedly meant no harm, but her anxieties about the religious liberalism of the household were always clear. The Stevensons gave dinner parties and were known to drink wine; Mrs Stevenson had been flagrantly evasive of the ban on Sunday recreation by sewing a little pack onto the back of Lou’s doll so that his game could pass as ‘Pilgrim’s Progress’. One of Stevenson’s early memories was of his nurse ‘comforting’ him at night by pressing him to her in a ferment of prayer for the souls of his parents, who had broken the Sabbath by playing a game of whist after dinner. The scene sounds ludicrous now, but to the child spelled eternal damnation for his mother and father. He was wound up to such a pitch that he sometimes thought none of them would be saved, for even Cummy had lapses: he remembers them both straining to make out the contents in the printer’s window of serial stories she herself had cut short on the grounds of them threatening to turn out to be ‘regular novels’.
Dread of judgement, midnight coffee and a predisposition to overheated dreaming and daydreaming made much of the sick little boy’s life a misery. He speaks of fevers that seemed to make the room swell and shrink, and ‘terrible long nights, that I lay awake, troubled continually with a hacking, exhausting cough, and praying for sleep or morning from the bottom of my shaken little body’.31 He had a recurring nightmare of standing before the Great White Throne and being asked to recite some form of words, on which salvation or damnation depended; ‘his tongue stuck, his memory was blank, hell gaped for him’,32 for the idea of eternal punishment had been ‘seared’, as he said, into his infant consciousness. When his night-horrors were particularly bad, Cummy would call for Thomas Stevenson, who would try to calm his son by sitting by the bed, or outside the bedroom door, feigning conversations with imaginary coachmen or inn-keepers. But, as the adult Louis recalled, ‘it was long, after one of these paroxysms, before I could bear to be left alone’.33
Though in time the severity of his nightmares lessened, Stevenson continued to dream vividly and with disturbing conviction of reality, so that he was unable to distinguish whether his conscious or subconscious was in control. By the time he was a student his dreams produced the impression in him, nightmarish in itself, of leading a double life, at which point he began to fear for his reason. He learned in time to control his night-terrors, more or less (partly by the use of drugs), but if he hadn’t been terrified by hellfire rantings as a child, this habit of feverish dreaming and neurotic invention, that was to prove important to his writing, might possibly never have set in.
Stevenson avoided much reference in his published works to his ‘Covenanting childhood’, but left some strong words about it in manuscript (some of which were published