Robert Louis Stevenson

From the old ATU site:

LINK EXPIRED

^ cache now defunct

Never mind, felix. Hope springs eternal...



Wiki:

Robert Louis Balfour Stevenson (13 November 1850 – 3 December 1894) was a Scottish novelist, poet, essayist and travel writer. His best-known books include Treasure Island, Kidnapped, and Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.

A literary celebrity during his lifetime, Stevenson now ranks among the 30 most translated authors in the world, just below Charles Dickens. He has been greatly admired by many authors, including Jorge Luis Borges, Ernest Hemingway, Rudyard Kipling, Marcel Schwob, Vladimir Nabokov, J. M. Barrie, and G. K. Chesterton, who said of him that he "seemed to pick the right word up on the point of his pen, like a man playing spillikins."

RLS's tomb on Mt Vaea, Samoa, c. 1909.

Stevenson has one of the coolest (self-penned) epitaphs in all literature:

Under the wide and starry sky,
Dig the grave and let me lie.
Glad did I live and gladly die,
And I laid me down with a will.
This be the verse you grave for me:
Here he lies where he longed to be;
Home is the sailor, home from sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.

Cover illustration from 1911.

RLS's hand-drawn map of Treasure Island.

Jim Hawkins sitting in the apple barrel listening to the pirates.

One More Step, Mr. Hands by N. C. Wyeth, 1911, for Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson.

From a Railway Carriage

by Robert Louis Stevenson


FASTER than fairies, faster than witches,
Bridges and houses, hedges and ditches;
And charging along like troops in a battle,
All through the meadows the horses and cattle:
All of the sights of the hill and the plain
Fly as thick as driving rain;
And ever again, in the wink of an eye,
Painted stations whistle by.

Here is a child who clambers and scrambles,
All by himself and gathering brambles;
Here is a tramp who stands and gazes;
And there is the green for stringing the daisies!
Here is a cart run away in the road
Lumping along with man and load;
And here is a mill and there is a river:
Each a glimpse and gone for ever

Robert Louis Stevenson's now famous tale might have been closer to the new spirit of the times than even the author himself was aware.

In the autumn of 1888, an adaptation of Stevenson's story was being performed at a London West End theatre. At least one member of the audience was so shaken by the performance of the leading actor in the dual lead roles that he contacted the police, insisting that the poor thesp in question be interviewed in connection with the Jack the Ripper slayings then gripping the city in a vice of terror.

Andrew Motion: 'The day I stopped being laureate, the poems that had been very few and far between came back to me'

Andrew Motion on his sequel to Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island and life after being poet laureate

William Skidelsky

guardian.co.uk, Friday 16 March 2012 11.35 GMT


Andrew Motion: 'Nobody ever came round with a silver salver and told me to write a poem about such and such.' Photograph: David Levene

Your new novel, Silver, is a sequel to Treasure Island, describing a return expedition 40 years on by the son of the original narrator, Jim Hawkins. Where did the idea come from?


Silver: Return to Treasure Island
by Andrew Motion

I read Treasure Island for the first time at university. And I started to notice then how unresolved some things were. Later, I realised that Stevenson was interested in sequels, and I wondered whether he would have gone back to it had he lived longer.


There are a lot of sequels around. Is this a good thing?

Like a lot of people, for a long time I thought that the road to hell is paved with bad sequels. What many do is take the original on at its own game too precisely, and if you do that you're likely to lose, unless you're a genius. The more interesting thing is either to move sideways, like Jean Rhys [in Wide Sargasso Sea]. Or you move it on a big step in time. I felt that I was getting away from trouble by doing that.


In your book, the heroes of the original - Jim Hawkins and Long John Silver - are old and decrepit. Were you making a point about generational change?

The secret engine of Stevenson's books is the complex relationship he had with his father. My father died a short time before I started writing this. It was quickly obvious to me that this was my secret engine. Jim has to betray his father to get the map, thinking it will allow him to prove to his father that he's as much as a man as he is.


Did you aim to imitate the language of the original?

I quite deliberately sent my Jim to a decent school so he could write in a fancier way than his father. And I made him interested in certain things, particularly nature. I thought that would allow the prose to become figured by close observation of nature, and that put the whole thing within my reach as a writer.


When do you do your writing?

I write between 5.30am and 9.00. That way, I hope I carry over something from my dream time.


You criticised last year's Booker judges for prioritising "readability". Yet this is a very readable book…

I wasn't having a go at being readable. I felt it was a false dichotomy that you can either be readable or be one of these supposedly dusty specimens that won the Booker in the past. It should be possible to write a bloody good story that at the same time is serious. Dickens managed it, as does Salman Rushdie.


What's post-laureate life like?

I feel less obliged. It wasn't that anyone ever came round with a silver salver and told me to write a poem about such and such, but I did have a sense of obligation to do some things that turned out to be very difficult.


Your biggest regret from that time?

I wish I'd been better able to resist the sense of obligation to write some of the poems I did. It's in the nature of commissioned work to be written too much from the side of your mind that knows what it's doing, which dries up the poetry. Pretty much the day I stopped being laureate, the poems that had been few and far between came back to me, like birds in the evening nesting in a tree.

Dr Jekyll and a not so wicked Mr Hyde: how a portrait of evil was toned down

Robert Louis Stevenson deleted "certain appetites" to make his creation Mr Hyde less sinister, an edited draft of his novella to be displayed at the British Library reveals

Dalya Alberge

The Observer, Sunday 15 April 2012


Fredric March and Miriam Hopkins in the 1931 movie version of Stevenson's novella. Photograph: Sportsphoto/Allstar

Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is one of English literature's most famous stories: the enduring classic of a man's transformation into a monster, first published in 1886. Now the manuscript for the novella is to go on show, revealing its transformation as Stevenson toned down his more explicit ideas.

The most complete draft of the novella – Stevenson burned a first draft because his wife was so alarmed by it – is covered with corrections. Reading between its chaotic lines shows how Stevenson deleted details such as the sexual connotations of Jekyll becoming "in secret the slave of certain appetites".

It is one of two historic manuscripts whose loans have been secured from the US by the British Library. The other is an instalment of Charles Dickens's Our Mutual Friend, which the author himself rescued from the wreckage of a train crash. The manuscripts will get pride of place at the library in Writing Britain: Wastelands to Wonderlands, the UK's biggest literary exhibition this summer.

Stevenson's novella explores the psychopathology of the split personality in Dr Jekyll, whose development of a potion to separate good from evil transforms him into the murderous Mr Hyde.

It was written at feverish speed after Stevenson woke from a dream. He produced a draft that he showed to his wife who, it is thought, prompted him to burn it, though he brought it back to life, rewriting it twice in six weeks.

The 1885 manuscript which will go to the British Library reflects his obsessiveness. As ideas flowed, so did his pen, ignoring occasional grammatical and spelling mistakes as he struggled to get it all down.

Jamie Andrews, the exhibition's co-curator, said: "This is an incredibly interesting active draft. There's a sense of it stemming from a dream, the depths of the self. So the idea of this primal eruption of text is certainly there in the story, but then to publish something Stevenson really had to work it through to make it into that final version." Andrews believes that explicit references to Hyde's sexual "vices" might have concerned Stevenson's wife because of his reputation as a writer of children's novels.

Andrews said of this draft: "It's a lot darker than the final version. This is the great psychological novel about a divided city and a divided self." He added that, because Stevenson was hard up, it was suggested that he should write a chilling shocker, as they called them.

Commenting on Stevenson's softening of his original ideas, Andrews said that sometimes individual words, lines or paragraphs were deleted. "There's a sense of bits being too sensitive to be published." For example, Stevenson deleted the following line: "From an early age, however, I became in secret the slave of certain appetites." He replaced it with: "And indeed the worst of my faults was a certain impatient gaiety of disposition… hard to reconcile with my imperious desire to carry my head high, and wear a more than commonly grave countenance before the public."