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Dreams of Exile

Robert Louis Stevenson: A Biography

Henry Holt and Company

Stevensons and Balfours

The name of my native land is not North Britain whatever may be the name of yours.

Letter to S. R. Crockett

To look at, the house is much as it was. Its tall windows watch the narrow valley of a private park thick with trees and shrubs, in a street accounted, now as then, one of the finest in a city of fine streets. In sunlight its plain, three-storeyed facade is sand coloured; in the squalls that pass for climate through much of Edinburgh's year, when the rain slants and the wind climbs uphill from the Firth of Forth, it takes on the hue of lead.

It was built as the Napoleonic Wars were ending, to accommodate the desire of the better sort to put distance between themselves and the teeming Old Town. Read as a statement in stone, 17 Heriot Row, with its ornamental balconies, its astragals, high ceilings, fine staircase, and protective gardens, was part of the argument — a matter of class, culture, and anglicisation — that was rupturing the life of Scotland's capital. Where once on the spinal ridge above the old Nor' loch quality had been piled upon commonality in the tottering lands along the Royal Mile, or mixed with them in its pestilential wynds, pends, and closes, there were now two Edinburghs, each aware but wary of the other. "Spatial segregation of the social classes" was civic policy. Indeed, when in the seventeenth century the city council was first offered land beyond its boundaries by James VII, the grand scheme had been to build a complete new capital and abandon the Old Town entirely. The proposal failed but its spirit survived.

The city was one of the first of the dualities to preoccupy the writer. Though in later years Stevenson came to believe that Edinburgh's New Town was the perfect antithesis to its Old, as sugar is to salt, the medieval precinct was never his home territory. The youth and young adult would escape to it — lose himself in it — to be fascinated by its malodorous variety; but he was never truly part of it. Its chaos, social and architectural, was an antidote to the clean lines and rectitude of the New Town, but the people there were not his people. He understood them better than most, but not as a native — even if he, like his mother, retained a strong Edinburgh accent throughout his life. To the restless, responsive, middle-class boy, the Old Town was the first of the destinations he found irresistible. In such journeys he defined himself.

The city held perhaps 140,000 people. Spared most of the upheavals of the industrial revolution and already dwarfed by Glasgow, it remained the shadow capital of a spectral nation at a time when life was "competitive, unprotected, brutal and, for many, vile." Elsewhere, two thirds of Scotland's three million population could be accounted country dwellers, and the myth of the "Scotch peasant" — devout, proud, poor, self-reliant — remained, as one historian has noted, a dominant force in social policy.

The nation was not homogeneous. Town pulled against country, region against region. The question of what it meant to be a Scot could not be answered with nationalistic formulae. In The Silverado Squatters, Stevenson indulged his nostalgia with more than usual insight:

Scotland is indefinable; it has no unity except upon the map. Two languages, many dialects, innumerable forms of piety, and countless local patriotisms and prejudices, part us among ourselves more widely than the extreme east and west of that great continent of America. When I am at home, I feel a man from Glasgow to be something like a rival, a man from Barra to be more than half a foreigner. Yet let us meet in some far country, and, whether we hail from the braes of Manor or the braes of Mar, some ready-made affection joins us on the instant. It is not race. Look at us. One is Norse, one Celtic, and another Saxon. It is not community of tongue. We have it not among ourselves; and we have it, almost to perfection, with English, or Irish, or American. It is no tie of faith, for we detest each other's errors. And yet somewhere, deep down in the heart of each one of us, something yearns for the old land and the old kindly people.

The decade before Louis's birth was one in which Queen Victoria began her love affair with mist-sodden mountains and cartoon Highlanders, the decade in which a tartan shroud was laid without grace over the old Scotland. In 1846 potato blight destroyed the economy of the West Highlands and launched their population on its long decline. Two years later, in 1848, Scottish Chartists were tried on charges of sedition, and an audience in Edinburgh's Waterloo Rooms was hearing of "a struggle against capital." Sedan chairs could still be seen on the streets.

For much of the urban working class, life was routinely abject. Prostitution, drink, and disease went unchecked. Scots had an average life expectancy barely into their forties. In 1842 the Reports on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Scotland recorded that in Edinburgh the houses "... of the lowest grade often consist only of one small apartment, always ill-ventilated, both from the nature of its construction and from the densely peopled and confined locality in which it is situated. Many of them, besides, are damp and partly underground ... A few of the lowest poor have a bedstead, but by far the larger portion have none; these make up a kind of bed on the floor with straw, on which a whole family are huddled together ..." Such was the Auld Reekie — "there are no stars so lovely as Edinburgh street-lamps" — that enthralled the young Lewis Stevenson.

The New Town, in deliberate contrast, was a comfortable nest for the commercial class, which was bending the economy, architecture, and religious life of the city to its will. This exercise in tyrannical perspective had been constructed as a residential area — effectively as a splendid housing estate — but business soon intruded. With their greater purchasing power, businesses overrode the objections of disgruntled residents. Money talked: by 1850 shops occupied most of the ground floors along Princes Street.

It was, too, a city in which architecture, people, and climate coexisted in a kind of mutual antagonism. Settled on its hills, with their valleys and buildings making fine funnels for the wind, Edinburgh required all its habitual stoicism. Today, if the weather is kind, the air becomes soft and the stones come alive. When the day is less forgiving, outdoor life can be brutal, akin to living with a northern mistral, and indoor life barely more appealing. Edinburgh folk, with their vestigial Victorian faith in fresh air and a no-nonsense attitude to building design, seem reluctant to admit how far north (55° 57' 23?) they are. The wind, rattling the roofs and chasing red-nosed children to school, reminds them.

The sickly R.L.S. needed no reminder. For him, later, the Edinburgh weather acquired layers of significance to do with home, childhood, character, dreams, and even comedy. In his growing years the northern climate was simply an enemy. If it took a turn for the worse, he knew that his precarious health was about to do the same. The early Edinburgh: Picturesque Notes said it best.

... Edinburgh pays cruelly for her high seat in one of the vilest climates under heaven. She is liable to be beaten upon all the winds that blow, to be drenched with rain, to be buried in cold sea fogs out of the east, and powdered with snow as it comes flying southward from the Highland hills. The weather is raw and boisterous in winter, shifty and ungenial in summer, and a downright meteorological purgatory in the spring ...

Stevenson could not imagine "a more unhomely and harassing place of residence" and recorded, doubtless picturing himself, that

Many ... aspire angrily after that Somewhere-else of the imagination, where all troubles are supposed to end. They lean over the great bridge which joins the New Town with the Old — that windiest spot, or high altar, in this northern temple of the winds — and watch the trains smoking out from under them and vanishing into the tunnel on a voyage to brighter skies. Happy the passengers who shake off the dust of Edinburgh, and have heard for the last time the cry of the east wind among her chimney-tops!

In "Ordered South," his first convincing attempt at prose, he admitted that even a slight fall in the Mediterranean temperature would put "a doleful vignette of the grim wintry streets of home" into his head.

The hopeless, huddled attitude of tramps in doorways; the flinching gait of barefoot children on the icy pavement; the sheen of the rainy streets towards afternoon; the meagre anatomy of the poor defined by the clinging of wet garments; the high canorous note of the North-easter on days when the very houses seem to stiffen with cold ...

For all that, Number 17 was as desirable a residence in the spring of 1857 — when Thomas Stevenson moved his household, of which the six-year-old Robert Lewis was the cherished, worrying centre — as it is now. It signified, advertised, and announced; it meant what it seemed to say about the success of its owner. In the middle of the century men like Thomas luxuriated in their certainties and their property, the one an assurance of the other.

The intellectual lustre of the Scottish Enlightenment had faded with the nation's sense of itself. Scotland had retreated to the fringes of European culture. Religion and commerce, moral abacuses and the instruments of an empire in which the Scots bourgeoisie had become enthusiastic shareholders, were dominant. For Thomas Stevenson the study of God's Word, and the millions of words contingent upon the Word which were shaping the Scottish publishing industry, was the highest pursuit. It was an age of tracts, commentaries, and concordances, and Thomas was a fan. His library of religious works was extensive, and he studied it at his ease in Heriot Row with the same quirky originality he brought to the profession of civil engineering.

The family firm, in which his brothers, father, and maternal grandfather had worked, was consultant to the Commissioners of Northern Lights, contracted to design and construct lighthouses and harbours around Scotland's hostile coast. As a thirty-year-old R.L.S. put it: "Whenever I smell salt water, I know I am not far from one of the works of my ancestors. The Bell Rock stands monument for my grandfather; the Skerry Vhor for my Uncle Alan; and when the lights come out at sundown along the shores of Scotland, I am proud to think they burn more brightly for the genius of my father."

There were, ultimately, five generations of "Lighthouse Stevensons." Together they built every lighthouse in Scotland and many more overseas. Thomas, though younger than his brother David, was the dominant partner in his day.

Previously, the family had bred numerous devout characters. Thomas's fascination with currents and stresses, lovingly recorded by his son, mirrored a distressed obsession with the spiritual tides besetting a soul bent on redemption. His idiosyncrasies — a low opinion of schools and schoolmasters, an independence of mind that almost matched his son's, unsung charity work on behalf of "fallen" women, a touch of individualism in his High Tory politics — render him immune from caricature. But even if he did refuse lay positions in the Kirk, Thomas took his soul seriously. Scotland being Scotland, he was from time to time at a low ebb when that black melancholia peculiar to undiluted Calvinism overcame his sunny disposition. He had, his son wrote later, a "morbid sense of his own unworthiness" that tainted his character. He had, too, said Louis, "a gift of pleasing," but he did not often please himself.

Religion was as potent as whisky in Protestant Scotland then, and imbibed as freely. It was sure as gospel that decent folk lived by the Scriptures. The Sabbath was observed with a neurotic devotion. In the cities of Scotland the (ostensibly) Calvinist middle class dominated, and their control of local councils meant that much of public life was as orderly as Sunday school.

There had been an outcry in the 1840s when it was proposed that trains be allowed to run on Sundays; there was another in the 1860s when such immorality was at last permitted (though the Sabbath service remained limited for decades). Many efforts had been made to control public houses, a campaign which resulted in restrictive legislation in 1853. Meanwhile, pious councillors strove to turn the tide of sin by reducing Sunday working. For good measure they closed their own galleries and museums on the day of rest. Even in the 1880s it could be said of Edinburgh that "One awoke on Sunday morning to a city of silence."

The "Disruption" of 1843, which saw the Evangelical party march out of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, taking perhaps forty percent of adherents with them to form the Free Church, had been a national cause célèbre, transfixing the upper and middle classes as much for its political subtext as its ecclesiastical text. It was, essentially, a conflict over the rights of patronage in the appointment of ministers which went as far as the civil courts — but the motives of the protagonists made it more than that. For example, Thomas Chalmers, prime mover of the upheaval, believed that the state should give financial support to church extension to allow a truly Christian society to be created beneath the canopy of a free-market system. His funeral in 1847 attracted tens of thousands of mourners: a uniquely Scottish phenomenon.

Charles Guthrie, the student friend of R.L.S. who rose to the bench to become Lord Guthrie long after his "old comrade" conceded that the law was nothing to his taste, caught the temper of the times in a memoir published in 1920. "In early days," Guthrie wrote, "Great Gulfs were fixed between us. Stevenson's father and mother, Tories and State Church people, lived in the New Town of Edinburgh; and Louis went to the Edinburgh Academy. Mine, Liberals and Free Church, lived in the Old Town, and I attended the more democratic High School."

There was no dispute, however, over fundamentals. The Evangelicals venerated the Covenanters, those heroic bigots of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, defenders of the Reformation and enemies of episcopacy, who had risen up when Charles I attempted to impose a new liturgy on the Church of Scotland without reference to its General Assembly or to the Scottish Parliament. They were put down after the Restoration during twenty-five years of bloody oppression, but tales of these "Killing Times" were a staple for the young R.L.S. His father, too, was preoccupied with godliness even as he laboured to build lighthouses — though like the state Kirk man he was, he could sometimes indulge in a little theological unorthodoxy, such as the belief that even dogs possessed souls. Whatever Louis's later reaction to his heritage, his antecedents supplied, from both the paternal and maternal lines, the perfect expression of middle-class Victorian Scotland. "We rose out of obscurity," he said, "in a clap."

The Balfours were churchmen; the Stevensons engineers. Those traditions of solid application and unimpeachable principle could be opposed but never ignored. Likewise the distinctiveness of a Scotland still ambivalent towards its assimilation into English culture (while exploiting the opportunities of the Union at every turn) meant the boy would ensure that the man, wherever he landed up, could never be other than a Scottish writer. The "Dedication of Catriona," written at Vailima on Samoa in 1892, put it best:

... I have come so far; and the sights and thoughts of my youth pursue me; and I see like a vision the youth of my father, and of his father, and the whole stream of lives flowing down there far in the north, with the sound of laughter and tears, to cast me out in the end, as by a sudden freshet, on these ultimate islands. And I admire and bow my head before the romance of destiny.

Thomas Stevenson's family had once been farmers in a small way, rising in due course to become millers, doctors, and West Indies traders before grandfather Robert earned grant of coat armour (a heraldic device depicting, naturally, a lighthouse), affirming the tribe's prosperity and sealing its status as pioneers of the mercantile class. Born in 1818, Thomas, like his wife, was one of thirteen children (though in his case only five of the family survived). Raised at 1 Baxter's Place in the shadow of the Calton Hill, with a caged eagle pining for a while in the long back garden, he had most of his fancy notions — including the idea that the writing of fiction could be a suitable pastime — knocked out of him at an early age.

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Excerpted from Dreams of Exile by Ian Bell. Copyright © 1992 Ian Bell. Excerpted by permission of Henry Holt and Company.
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