Volume 41, Number 5 · March 3, 1994
The Real RLS
By Janet Adam Smith
Dreams of Exile: Robert Louis Stevenson, A Biography
by Ian Bell
Holt, 296 pp., $25.00
When Robert Louis Stevenson died in Samoa in 1894, Henry James told Fanny Stevenson 'how much poorer and shabbier the whole world seems, and how one of the closest and strongest reasons for going on, for trying and doing, for planning and dreaming of the future, has dropped in an instant out of life…We are smaller fry and meaner people without him.' Other literary friends—Sidney Colvin, Edmund Gosse—lamented the delightful companion, the brilliant talker, who had perversely exiled himself to the South Seas. Polite Edinburgh—which had disapproved of the young poseur who had idled at college, refused to enter the family firm of engineers, toyed with the law, preferred the low bars of the Lothian Road to the drawing-rooms of Heriot Row, and who had even challenged his father's religion—now saw him as the charming, velvet-jacketed bohemian, who had yet lived adventures as stirring as his stories and could bring honor to his native town. There was a packed memorial meeting presided over by a former prime minister, Lord Rosebery; a relief panel of Stevenson by the American sculptor Saint-Gaudens was later unveiled in St. Giles Cathedral;[1] Stevenson societies were founded in Edinburgh and London. He was becoming the belovèd RLS.
Review, 3249 words
To read the full text of this piece, please choose one of the following options:
|
If you are already a subscriber to the Review's electronic edition, please sign in: |
To subscribe to the electronic edition, please press the button below. |
To purchase access to this article for $3, please press the button below. |