subtitled 'A Book of Verse for Boys,' Lyra Heroica (Latin for The Heroic Lyre, or harp) is filled with poetic accounts of selfless and noble deeds that often involve dying for one's country in battle.
In Hospital
Waiting
A square, squat room (a cellar on promotion), Drab to the soul, drab to the very daylight; Plasters' astray in unnatural-looking tinware; Scissors and lint and apothecary's jars.
5 Here, on a bench a skeleton would writhe from, Angry and sore, I wait to be admitted; Wait till my heart is lead upon my stomach, While at their ease two dressers do their chores.
One has a probe?it feels to me a crowbar,
io A small boy sniffs and shudders after bluestone.2 A poor old tramp explains his poor old ulcers. Life is (I think) a blunder and a shame.
Invictus1
Out of the night that covers me, Black as the Pit from pole to pole, I thank whatever gods may be For my unconquerable soul.
1. Medicated bandages. have taken poison. 2. Hydrated copper sulfate, commonly used in 1. Unconquered (Latin), emergency wards as an emetic for patients who
.
ROBER T Loui s STEVENSO N / 164 3 5 In the felF clutch of circumstanceI have not winced nor cried aloud. Under the bludgeonings of chance My head is bloody, but unbowed. cruel 10Beyond this place of wrath and tears Looms but the Horror of the shade, And yet the menace of the years Finds, and shall find, me unafraid. isIt matters not how strait0 the gate, How charged with punishments the scroll, I am the master of my fate; I am the captain of my soul. narrow 1875 1888
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 1850-1894
Robert Louis (originally Lewis) Balfour Stevenson was born in Edinburgh on November 13, 1850, the only child of Margaret Balfour and Thomas Stevenson, a well- known marine engineer and designer of lighthouses. His family was part of the respectable Scottish middle classes, a membership that would both benefit Steven- son?although there were difficult stretches in his relationship with his father, he generally did not have to worry about money?and leave him with a restlessness for adventure and excitement. Driven at the same time by a quest for a climate that would ease his chronically diseased lungs, Stevenson traveled more broadly than any other prominent Victorian writer. And yet it could be argued that although he was constantly on the move in far-flung lands, Stevenson returned again and again in his creative fiction, explicitly or implicitly, to the tensions of his own personal and national heritage?to the pronounced conflicts of his upbringing and of Scotland's somber, religiously oppressive society.
An awkward sensitive boy, Stevenson was subjected to the disciplinary strictures of his stern Presbyterian father and to the more affectionate, although also deeply devout, care of his mother and his nurse. Plagued by night terrors and bouts of sickness, the young Stevenson seemed 'in body . . . assuredly badly set up,' as a schoolmate said in later years; 'his limbs were long, lean, and spidery, and his chest flat, so as almost to suggest some malnutrition.' This constitutional weakness was to afflict Stevenson throughout his life, and he enjoyed only short periods of reasonable health. As a student at Edinburgh University, Stevenson soon began to avoid the engineering classes that would have enabled him to follow in his father's footsteps, and embarked instead on a course of reading?'an extensive and highly rational system of truancy,' as he called it?to learn how to become a writer. In time, as a compromise to placate his father, he switched to the study of law; although he never practiced as a lawyer, he did pass the Scottish bar examination in 1875. But his interests clearly lay elsewhere: in this period Stevenson began dressing like a bohemian, reading scandalous French poetry, and hanging around brothels, where the prostitutes nicknamed him 'Velvet Jack.' By all accounts he was a witty and attentive conversationalist; his friend the folklorist and writer Andrew Lang later described him
.
1644 / ROBERT Louis STEVENSON
in verse as a 'Buffoon and lover, poet and sensualist: / A deal of Ariel, just a streak of Puck, / Much Antony, of Hamlet most of all.'
At the age of twenty-two, Stevenson further distanced himself from his father by confessing that he had turned both socialist and agnostic; he subsequently began to spend increasingly longer periods in France, partly because of respiratory troubles but also to be in the company of painters and writers. Back in Britain he developed important and useful friendships with artistic and literary figures, including Sidney Colvin, a professor of art, and the poet and editor W. E. Henley; with their support Stevenson started to publish essays and books of travel writing. As if to complete his breach with bourgeois Scottish respectability, Stevenson then fell in love with Fanny Osbourne, an American woman ten years his senior, who was estranged from her husband but not yet divorced.
In 1879 Stevenson's global wanderings began in earnest, starting with a trip to California to marry the newly divorced Fanny. Despite constant travel and recurrent illness, Stevenson found the time and energy to write. Treasure Island, begun as an amusement for his stepson, was his first popular success: serialized in 1881 and published in book form in 1883, the story of the cabin boy Jim Hawkins's adventures includes a covert portrait of Stevenson's one-legged friend Henley in the figure of the pirate Long John Silver. Soon thereafter he published another children's classic: A Child's Garden of Verses (1885), a collection of poems dedicated to his former nurse. In the years to come, Stevenson worked in numerous genres, including short fiction, swashbuckling romances, historical adventures (Kidnapped, 1886, a story set in Scotland just after the Jacobite rebellion of 1745, and its sequel, Catriona, 1893), and more gothic undertakings, such as the bleak and brooding novel The Master of Ballantrae (1889).
The work that first established Stevenson's critical reputation, however, was a horror story that prefigured The Master of Ballantrae's fascination with the darker side of human nature and reflected his long-standing interest in the idea of a double life: The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, written in 1885 and published the following year. The novella rapidly became a best seller in both Britain and America, and like Mary Shelley's Frankenstein of 1818 (to which Jekyll and Hyde pays homage at various moments) and Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897), the story has enjoyed a continuous and lively presence in popular culture up to the present day. Yet our familiarity with the outline of the tale may not prepare us for the psychological and ethical complexity of the original. Certainly the novelist's friends found Jekyll and Hyde genuinely unnerving: the writer and historian J. A. Symonds wrote to Stevenson that the story 'has left such a deeply painful impression on my heart that I do not know how I am ever to turn to it again,' while Lang commented that 'we would welcome a spectre, a ghoul, or even a vampire, rather than meet Mr. Edward Hyde.' For some, many aspects of the novella have seemed markedly Scottish in flavor: the novelist
