I would not only lie awake to weep for Jesus, which I have done many a time, but I would fear to trust myself to slumber lest I was not accepted and should slip, ere I awoke, into eternal ruin. I remember repeatedly [ … ] waking from a dream of Hell, clinging to the horizontal bar of the bed, with my knees and chin together, my soul shaken, my body convulsed with agony. It is not a pleasant subject. I piped and snivelled over the Bible, with an earnestness that had been talked into me. I would say nothing without adding ‘If I am spared,’ as though to disarm fate by a show of submission; and some of this feeling still remains upon me in my thirtieth year.34
Of the ‘morbid devotees’ whose works were his constant diet, the adult Stevenson had this to say: ‘for a child, their utterances are truly poisonous. The life of Brainerd, for instance, my mother had the sense to forbid, when we [he and Cummy] were some way through it. God help the poor little hearts who are thus early plunged among the breakers of the spirit!’35
He makes it – for politeness’ sake – sound as if he was not one of those ‘poor little hearts’ himself, but the accusation of negligence against his parents and Cummy is unmistakable – especially against his mother for knowing better than Cummy, but being inattentive. Colvin’s description of Margaret Stevenson as ‘shutting her eyes to troubles’ seems pertinent here. The child’s precocious utterances, recorded faithfully in her diary notes, clearly struck the young mother as amusing and a source of pride, but to less sentimental readers they brim with complex fears. Little Lou worried constantly about the quality and quantity of his prayers, whether his family were good or bad in the Lord’s eyes, and whether he would be sufficiently adept at harp-playing during an eternity in heaven – and all this before the age of six. Adding to his discomfort was a strong rational streak and a quick intellect. His mother relates that when she told him of ‘the naughty woman pouring the ointment upon Christ’ he asked why God had made the woman so naughty,36 and, hearing it confirmed that Christ had died to save him, concluded, ‘Well, then, doesn’t that look very much as if I were saved already?’37 These exchanges, engaging so adroitly with Calvinist theology, were not intended as cute additions to the Baby Album. The child must have been puzzled why they only elicited fond smiles.
In the years following Stevenson’s death, a minor cult grew up around the figure of his old nurse, fuelled mostly by his emotional dedication to her of A Child’s Garden of Verses, and a passage in his fragmentary memoir in which Cummy is singled out for her tender care of him when he was sick:
She was more patient than I can suppose of an angel; hours together she would help console me in my paroxysms; and I remember with particular distinctness, how she would lift me out of bed, and take me, rolled in blankets, to the window, whence I might look forth into the blue night starred with street-lamps, and see where the gas still burned behind the windows of other sickrooms.38
But in all honesty, it hardly constitutes excess of attention or devotion to attend to a chronically sick child at night. ‘My second mother [ … ] angel of my infant life’; the epithets are cloyingly excessive, and one can’t help wondering if Stevenson’s retrospective praise of his nurse was a desperate attempt to accentuate the positive. His fond memories of his father soothing him with nonsense-stories are also in the context of the child on the other side of the door being too terrified to sleep. And the same Cummy who was ready to calm the child with cuddles and blankets was just as likely to wake him up and assault him with prayers. It was, to say the least, a confusing world.
The boy learned to read quite late (aged six), but was lazy about reading on his own and preferred to get Cummy to do it for him. He liked to be attended to as much as possible, especially by women. He had been composing his own stories some time before this, using his mother and aunt Jane Balfour as amanuenses, and his first recorded work was a history of Moses, which won him the prize of ‘The Happy Sunday Book of Painted Pictures’ in an informal competition among the cousins. The text is illustrated with some wonderful drawings by Lewis of the Israelites, all wearing mid-Victorian chimneypot hats, with pipes in their mouths, gathering in the manna or crossing the Red Sea.39 He was good at drawing, in a speedy, impressionistic style: one blotchy ink picture of ‘A steamer bound for Londonderry’ has written on it in Thomas Stevenson’s hand: ‘Note. This steamer may be bound for Londonderry but I fear she will never reach it.’40
Religion entered everything and dominated play; when he was aged two and a half, Lou’s favourite game was ‘making a church’, which he did by putting a chair and stool together to form a pulpit and conducting his own solitary services in the character of both minister and congregation. At ‘an astoundingly tender age’41 he voiced strong antipathy to a theological iconoclast then attending the Edinburgh Kirk assembly. His sayings, many of them parroted from his parents or nurse (such as Cummy’s constant refrain of ‘If I’m spared’), were noted and preserved by his mother with the utmost care. At home, this little ‘dictator’ strove to be the centre of attention, and he later remembered his young self unflatteringly: ‘I was as much an egotist as I have ever been; I had a feverish desire of consideration.’42 To other children he was a bit of a liability; being an only child, he didn’t know how to handle rivals and expected to dominate play. As so often with children who insist on taking the lead, he had a markedly sadistic streak too, devising a ritual involving whacks on the hand with a cane when he and his cousins were bartering items for their ‘museums’. If the ‘buyer’ flinched during the transaction, the whole procedure had to start again.43
Among the flocks of Balfour and Stevenson cousins with whom he played at Colinton Manse (his grandfather Balfour’s house), or Cramond (his uncle George Balfour’s house), or the Royal Crescent (Uncle David Stevenson’s house), or Heriot Row, Louis remained an essentially lonely figure. But school was worse, and schoolwork a great trouble. Fortunately for him, he had minimal exposure to it; the combination of his father’s views on pedagogy and his parents’ shared hypochondria ensured he was often at home, ‘too delicate to go to school’, as Margaret records.44 That was Mr Henderson’s in India Street, his first school. It didn’t last long. Perhaps Louis recited in his father’s hearing the unofficial school song:
Here we suffer grief and pain
Under Mr Hendie’s cane.
If you don’t obey his laws
He will punish with his tawse.45
At age ten, he went to the Edinburgh Academy for a while (contemporary with Andrew Lang, the future folklorist, although they had nothing to do with each other at this age). There was a brief attempt at a private tutor from England, but that didn’t work out either. In the interstices of these arrangements months at a time would be spent having informal lessons with Cummy, or simply being cosseted in bed, surrounded by picture books and toy soldiers and with a little shawl pinned round his shoulders. Indulged so thoroughly over the years, he could have become an appallingly spoilt brat.
His closest friend in childhood was his cousin Bob, three years his senior, a tall, dreamy boy ‘more unfitted for the world [ … ] than an angel fresh from heaven’.46 Bob spent the whole winter of 1856 with his relations at Inverness Terrace, possibly because of his father Alan’s mental breakdown. Louis was delighted; he had been praying for a brother or sister for years. ‘We lived together in a purely visionary state,’ he wrote in ‘Memoirs of Himself’; the two boys invented countries to rule over, with maps