Robert Louis Stevenson, Literary Networks and Transatlantic Publishing in the 1890s: The Author Incorporated

By Glenda Norquay

‘Robert Louis Stevenson, Literary Networks and Transatlantic Publishing in the 1890s’ focuses on an author characterised by geographical and aesthetic mobility, and on those who worked with him or wrote for him at a period of key changes in transatlantic publishing. Stevenson’s situation in the 1890s, living in Samoa, publishing in Britain and the United States, is both highly specific but also representative of a new literary mobility. Drawing on a range of resources, from archival material, correspondence, biographies, essays and fiction, the book examines the operations of transatlantic literary networks during a period of key changes in transatlantic publishing.

To investigate Stevenson and the geographies of his literary networks during the last years of his life and after his death, the book presents a series of critical case studies profiling figures who worked with Stevenson, negotiated his publications on both sides of the Atlantic, wrote for him or were inspired by him. Each chapter focuses on a figure involved in the production or afterlife of Stevenson’s late fiction. Individuals studied include Stevenson’s boyhood friend and literary negotiator, Charles Baxter; American publisher Scribner’s literary representative in London, Lemuel Bangs; Stevenson’s ‘mentor’, Sidney Colvin; Stevenson’s admirer and posthumous co-author, literary critic Arthur Quiller-Couch; and collaborators among Stevenson’s own family. Through its emphasis on these significant and fascinating figures, instrumental to or imbricated in the dissemination of Stevenson’s writing, the book offers a fresh understanding of his work in the context of transatlantic publishing.

The book deploys the concept of ‘literary prosthetics’ to frame its analysis of gatekeepers, tastemakers, agents, collaborators and authorial surrogates in the transatlantic production of Stevenson’s writing. The complexities of Stevenson’s geographical and literary situation demonstrate the ways in which the permeable bodies of ‘author’, ‘critic’, ‘editor’, ‘publisher’ and ‘agent’ were fixed and refixed during the period. The book contributes to knowledge of transatlantic publishing and literary cultures in the 1890s and to Stevenson studies but its focus on the specifics of Stevenson’s ‘case’ provides a point of entry into larger considerations of literary communities, nineteenth-century mobility drivers of literary production and the nature of the authorial function.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anthem Press
• Release date: Jan 31, 2020
• ISBN: 9781785272868

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Robert Louis Stevenson, Literary Networks and Transatlantic Publishing in the 1890s

Robert Louis Stevenson, Literary Networks and Transatlantic Publishing in the 1890s

The Author Incorporated

Glenda Norquay

Anthem Press

An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company

www.anthempress.com

This edition first published in UK and USA 2020

by ANTHEM PRESS

75–76 Blackfriars Road, London SE1 8HA, UK

or PO Box 9779, London SW19 7ZG, UK

and

244 Madison Ave #116, New York, NY 10016, USA

Copyright © Glenda Norquay 2020

The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Library of Congress Control Number:2019955626

ISBN-13: 978-1-78527-284-4 (Hbk)

ISBN-10: 1-78527-284-5 (Hbk)

This title is also available as an e-book.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

List of Abbreviations

Introduction

1Lemuel Bangs: ‘The Senator’

2A Tale of Two Texts

3‘A Gentleman Called Charles Baxter’

4Sidney Colvin: Custodian and Monument

5Family, Friends and Collaborators

6Arthur Quiller-Couch: The Quivering Needle

7Richard Le Gallienne: ‘Not While a Boy Still Whistles’

Conclusion: Robert Louis Stevenson Incorporated

References

Index

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book emerged from a larger and longer project to produce a scholarly edition of Stevenson’s last novel, St Ives. In both the book and edition, I have been fortunate to receive funding from the British Academy and from Liverpool John Moores University. A Mayers Fellowship from the Huntington Library, California; Friends of Princeton Library Grant; and Research Fellowship at the Institute of Advanced Studies in the Humanities, University of Edinburgh, all gave me further support to visit essential resources and engage with stimulating scholarly communities.

Researching this book has taken me to wonderful collections and I have met many enormously helpful librarians. For access to archival sources and library resources I am particularly grateful to the staff at the National Library of Scotland – who create the friendliest of environments; to the British Library; staff at the Huntington Library, California; Curtis Small and the University of Delaware Special Collections; the superb Mark Samuels Lasner Collection, University of Delaware and to Mark himself; the Rosenbach Museum and Library in Philadelphia and Elizabeth E. Fuller, the Librarian; the Rare Book Collection at the Free Library of Philadelphia and Reference Librarian Joseph Shemtov; to the Harry Ramson Center, University of Texas; staff at the University of Aberdeen Special Collections; Clare Hopkins, archivist at Trinity College Oxford; and to Becky Howell at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery.

My research at the Rare Books and Special Collection, Princeton, was facilitated by Christine Lutz, Charles E. Greene and, most of all, by AnnaLee Pauls who made my time there a pleasure in so many ways. I am also grateful to staff at the Firestone Library, Princeton. At the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library and the Sterling Memorial Library, Yale, everyone was consistently helpful; James K. Fisher went above and beyond. The Ernest Mehew Collection, Napier University, Edinburgh, was a valuable resource; I am grateful to Linda Dryden and Duncan Milne for their assistance. It was a particular delight to work on Le Gallienne material held in Liverpool Central Library; I am grateful to archivists there and David Stoker. Thanks go to the University of Liverpool’s Special Collections and Archives. At Liverpool John Moores University Library Services, Val Stevenson and Sheena Streather were reliable sources of support. Gladstone’s Library provided an ideal working environment on a number of occasions.

My visits to the States and research on this book benefitted enormously from the inspiration, friendship, hospitality and encouragement of Margaret Stetz and Mark Samuels Lasner. The company of Virginia Gilmartin, Veronica O’Mara and Barry Menikoff enhanced my time at the Huntington; Kostas Boyiopoulos shared late-night library panics at Princeton. I was extremely fortunate to have an IASH Fellowship in Edinburgh in the spring of 2016. I could not have wished for a more collegiate, illuminating and enjoyable set of fellow Fellows. I am grateful to Professor Jo Shaw, then Director, for the opportunity and to Professor David Purdie for enabling access to the Speculative Society. Special thanks to Donald Ferguson for practical help but also the tea, cake, good humour and conversation that held the community together. Many positive things came out of my time there, including ongoing work and friendship with Dolly McKinnon. Bob Irvine, Penny Fielding and Alex Thomson brought their literary expertise and excellent company to my time in Edinburgh.

The Stevenson Community is a particularly global and generous one. Like all Stevenson scholars I benefitted enormously from the work of the late Ernest Mehew in compiling the Letters and from the research of Roger G. Swearingen, who has been an inspiration, a practical supporter and a critical friend in my thinking about Stevenson and on visits to the United States. Barry Menikoff’s early work on Stevenson and publishing, before Book History became fashionable, has influenced and stimulated me; I am deeply appreciative of his knowledge, friendship and conversation in locations across the globe. My greatest debt in thinking about the texts of Stevenson’s last years is to Gillian Hughes, expert editor and scrupulous researcher, who has also become a valued friend. Richard Dury, centre of all Stevenson networks, has generously shared his enormous expertise on many occasions. Robert-Louis Abrahamson, Stephen Arata, Jenni Calder, Ann C. Colley, Dennis Denisoff, Morgan Holmes, Liz Farr, Lesley Graham, Neil Macara Brown, Andrew Nash, Julia Reid and Saverio Tomialou all gave advice, information and friendship along the way. I am particularly indebted to Donald Mackenzie for his enthusiastic ‘St Ivesery’ and knowledge of adventure romancers. Natasha Simonova was invaluable in manuscript transcription. Lena Wånggren has shared the St Ives experience and provided stimulating conversation about Fanny Stevenson and other matters.

At LJMU I am grateful for project support from Alex Miles, Joe Yates and Andy Young. I am incredibly lucky to work in a department of great collegiality, intellectual rigour and general inspiration. Alice Ferrebe, Elspeth Graham, Colin Harrison, Brian Maidment, Joe Moran, Lucinda Thompson and Kate Walchester in particular played important parts in developing the book. Doctoral students Joseph Thorne and Samuel Saunders helped with details and discussion.

Aileen Christianson has put up with my presence, my despair, the minutiae of my work and my need for sustenance on many trips to Edinburgh: thank you for the friendship and hospitality. Christine and Allan Mackenzie have also put me up and put up with me.

I am grateful to the team at Anthem Press for taking on this project and for their efficiency in its progression. I owe particular thanks to Professor David Carter for his initial encouragement and to the anonymous readers for their positive and constructive comments.

I am especially grateful to Mari Mahr for granting permission to use Graham Percy’s wonderful image of Stevenson, which has been gifted to the National Galleries of Scotland. I thank the following for permission to cite from their resources:

The University of Aberdeen; the President and Fellows of Trinity College, Oxford, for material from Trinity College, Oxford, Archive, Papers of Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch.

Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked, the publishers will be pleased to make the necessary acknowledgement at the first opportunity.

I am fortunate in having an extremely kind, patient and supportive family. As matriarch Jessie Norquay sets the style. I can’t fully calculate the many ways in which I am indebted to Roger Webster – though I suspect he may have a list. Duncan Norquay Webster, a key player in the first American adventure, has consistently kept me in good spirits. Over the years, Annie Webster has grown from supportive enthusiast to a true critical friend and perceptive reader. What more could I want?

ABBREVIATIONS

Aberdeen: University of Aberdeen

Special Collections: MS 3518/1/1/15; Alt Ref No: Box 10 MS 3518/10/7.

Letters received and notes (1899–1913): 1 bundle – William Robertson Nicoll: letters received and notes (mainly typed copies); Letters from A. T. Quiller-Couch: one original letter (15 November 1899) and typescript copies of four further letters (2 copies of each) dated from April 1900 to December 1901, on his Oxford Book of Verse and other matters.

Typed list headed ‘Bits of Journal dictated to Miss Coe’; items (by William Robertson Nicoll) dated between 1910 and 1913; one of these items attached ‘The First Time I Met Lloyd George’, typescript 1910. Typed extracts from a letter by William Robertson Nicoll to Dr James Downey [Denney?] on the latter’s book ‘Jesus and the Gospel’, 4 December 1908, Downey’s reply of 8 December 1908, and Nicoll’s response of 12 December 1908; and also an extract from a letter from Nicoll to Professor H. R. Mackintosh, 11 December 1908.

Beinecke: Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. References, unless otherwise stated, are to GEN MSS 664 (Edwin J. Beinecke Collection of Robert Louis Stevenson), citing box and folder number.

BL: The British Library.

Brotherton: Edmund Gosse Archive, Brotherton Collection, Leeds University Library Special Collections: Robert Louis Stevenson, Correspondence and Library Manuscripts, BC MS 19c Stevenson (Gosse).

C. S.: Charles Scribner.

Delaware: University of Delaware, Special collections: McClure Publishing Company Archives, Manuscript Collection Number 174.

Holt: Archives of Henry Holt and Company, C0100, Manuscripts Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library.

Letters: The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson, ed. Bradford A. Booth and Ernest Mehew (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994–95) volumes 1–8. Volume number is given each time, followed by page reference.

LRO: Liverpool Record Office: Central Library Liverpool

Richard Thomas Le Gallienne: corresp., literary MSS and misc. papers 920 LEG.

Parrish: S1: M. L. Parrish Collection of Victorian Novelists, Manuscripts Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library Series 1: Artwork and Manuscripts; Subseries 1B: Quiller-Couch, Arthur Thomas, Sir.

Parrish: M. L. Parrish Collection of Victorian Novelists, Manuscripts Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library Series 2: Author Files; M. L. Parrish Collection of Victorian Novelists, C0171.

Scribner’s: Archives of Charles Scribner’s Sons, C0101.

Princeton University Library. Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Firestone Library.

Scribner’s S3: Series 3: Author Files; Archives of Charles Scribner’s Sons, C0101, Manuscripts Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library.

Scribner’s S15: Series 1: Letterbooks; Archives of Charles Scribner’s Sons, C0101, Manuscripts Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library.

Scribner’s S15A: Subseries 15A: W. C. Brownell

Scribner’s S15B: Subseries 15B: E. L. Burlingame

Scribner’s S15D: Subseries 15D: Arthur H. Scribner

Scribner’s S15F: Subseries 15F: Charles Scribner

Scribner’s S16: Series 16: London/New York Office Correspondence ; Archives of Charles Scribner’s Sons, C0101, Manuscripts Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library.

TCA: Trinity College, Oxford, Archive, Papers of Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, DD36.

Tusitala: Stevenson, Robert Louis. The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson . Tusitala Edition. 35 Volumes. London: Heinemann, 1923–24.

INTRODUCTION

Robert Louis Stevenson produced powerful personal, literary and professional attachments among those who knew him. ‘Stevenson’, wrote American publisher, Samuel S. McClure, ‘was the sort of man who commanded every kind of affection; admiration for his gifts, delight in his personal charm, and respect for his uncompromising principles’.¹ His stepdaughter, Isobel Field, recalled in later life, ‘A stranger had only to associate with Louis for a few weeks and ever after he would unconsciously imitate his odd twists of the English language and many of his mannerisms.’² Andrew Lang famously noted that Stevenson ‘possessed, more than any man I ever met, the power of making other men fall in love with him’. This meant, Lang continued, that people ‘warmed their hands at that centre of light and heat’.³ Stevenson was desired, imitated and adopted on more than a personal level. His style inspired other writers; he was imagined as the desired reader by aspiring novelists; and, although challenging conventional constructions of creativity in his writing habits, he epitomized the romantic author in the public imagination. In his career, the work, person and idea of ‘RLS’ were subject to complicated transatlantic transactions as business representatives, mentors, publishers, imitators and admirers all took on parts of that frail yet international Stevensonian body. After his early death, these networks reshaped themselves in response to economic exigencies, shifting reading publics and challenges to authorial reputation. The afterlife of Stevenson’s writing and literary identity was again shaped by geographical, technological and aesthetic contexts in transition.

The unusual degree to which Stevenson was ‘incorporated’ – taken on as a business by those around him, situated within national cultures and literary genres, represented by competing interests in different parts of his authorial identity, and invested with personal emotion – makes him a particularly illuminating instance of the volatile literary field of the 1890s. Publishers were seeking new markets across the Atlantic, facing the challenges of copyright legislation and learning to work with authorial representatives or agents. The complexities of Robert Louis Stevenson’s geographical, financial and literary situation demonstrate, in sharp detail, the ways in which the permeable bodies of ‘author’, ‘critic’, ‘editor’, ‘publisher’, ‘agent’, ‘reader’ and ‘celebrity’ were being fixed and re-fixed. The lens of literary modernism has focused on these increasingly complex bifurcations of cultural commodities.⁴ This study concentrates on a writer who appealed to a popular middlebrow audience on both sides of the Atlantic but enjoyed a considerable literary reputation in his lifetime and afterwards. The plurality of Stevenson’s cultural status and the variety of his international identities create a particularly rich field in which to untangle literary processes. The specific dynamics of transatlantic publishing in the 1890s frame the authors, publishers, readers and agents competing in this arena.

By the 1890s, at the height of a success achieved through Treasure Island, Kidnapped and Jekyll and Hyde Stevenson was an attractive proposition to publishers on both sides of the Atlantic and had been much pirated in cheap wood pulp editions in the United States until the Chace Act of 1891 tightened copyright law.⁵ His decision to live in Samoa, absenting himself from the literary world and its business practices, added to his romantic appeal while his fiction spoke to constituencies in Britain and the United States. As American critic Brander Matthews claimed in 1896: ‘Being a Scotsman, Stevenson was nearer to an American than an Englishman can be and he had a quicker willingness to understand the American character.’⁶ Stevenson’s distance from either of the main Atlantic publishing centres inevitably generated a network of individuals to support his publishing endeavours. By the 1890s he had acquired a range of friends who spoke on his behalf in literary and commercial negotiations, partly anticipating the emergent figure of the literary agent but also driven by personal desires to represent the authorial body. Such deep investments often led to conflict between friends and family. Stevenson was also fought over by publishers who felt they owned his loyalty and argued they had his best literary and commercial interests at heart. At a time of new copyright legislation, his international publications often produced practical anxieties and uncertainty. As a ‘global’ and successful author he was situated within intricate literary and professional networks. He was also caught in a web of familial relations with a wife, stepson and stepdaughter who saw themselves, in different ways, as part of his literary business and wanted to retain possession of his authorial body. As a result of their dependency Stevenson was frequently under significant financial pressure: from 1888 onwards his income was dependent entirely on his writing.⁷ And before his death Stevenson had become a figure of considerable literary influence, a writer who invited emulation, fascination and adoration. As such, he was incorporated into the work and literary identity of various writers publishing in the 1890s, who saw themselves as carrying on his project or speaking back to his fiction.

To understand Stevenson as ‘incorporated’ in these various senses means locating him within the rapidly changing publishing contexts of his time: new technologies, specific shifts in legislation and marketing practices which responded to both. These practices in turn reacted to, and produced, different embodiments of literary authorship. With increasing mobility, readerly understanding of time and space shifted, as did expectations of speed and geographical spread in accessing literature. The amount of fiction about writers in the period demonstrates the febrile interest in both the conditions of literary production and the nature of authorship.⁸ These material drivers were played out across the body of this peripatetic writer. Stevenson is, in this respect, a highly illuminating example of the late nineteenth-century literary marketplace. Travelling through Europe, the United States and, in the last years of his life, living in Samoa, his relationships with publishers, readers and the literary milieu were determined by geography. The increasingly diverse locations of his fiction intersected with his own voyaging but also with the expansion of a broader, and increasingly diverse, market for fiction.

Stevenson’s incorporation was also inflected by more personal investments: his qualities as a writer, combined with an engaging personality, a romantic life-story and an erratic understanding of business, drew people to him and encouraged them to act on his behalf – for a variety of reasons. Some functioned to incorporate Stevenson into their own enterprises; others were incorporated into the representation of his authorial body; some made Stevenson their ‘business’ and fought to keep possession of him. After his death ‘RLS’ continued to be part of a kinetic affective economy, as both work and person produced strong attachments.⁹ This study tells the story of those who came to speak on behalf of, work with, write towards and create an afterlife for the figure of Robert Louis Stevenson. Its cast of characters, emerging from archival research of professional and personal correspondence, represents the web of mentors, gatekeepers, literary agents, collaborators and co-authors around Stevenson, particularly in the last decade of his life. Through them this book investigates transatlantic publishing and the drivers of literary production in the 1890s. In its detailed analysis of a literary network and beyond, it addresses larger questions about communities of readers, imaginings of the local and historical, and new ideas of what authorship might mean.

Context

In the early 1890s Stevenson was living in the South Seas, writing for British and US markets, and, with a large household to support, under considerable economic pressure. His success on both sides of the Atlantic, not only with Jekyll and Hyde, Treasure Island and Kidnapped but also with The Master of Ballantrae – written while in the Adirondacks – had secured him a reputation with both American and British publishers: ‘Stevenson seems to be about the strongest man in his line there is now’, wrote Lemuel Bangs to his employer Charles Scribner in October 1887.¹⁰ According to the entrepreneurial Samuel S. McClure, ‘Stevenson commanded higher prices in the U.S.A. than any other British author.’¹¹ Everything by Stevenson seemed to have transatlantic commercial potential: Edmund Gosse, for example, wrote to McClure in 1890, quoting with some excitement Fanny Van de Grift Stevenson’s assurance on the strong material emerging from the South Seas travels with her husband: ‘As to the letters, I honestly believe nothing more interesting written or published for very many years.’¹² The death of Stevenson’s father had brought increased financial security, but the number of dependents acquired by marriage to Fanny had also expanded. Although Stevenson continued to express anxieties about the burdens of popularity, the ‘business’ of literary fiction was pressing.¹³ Meanwhile he was busy with political affairs in Samoa and not always well. At this point in his life, as if in defiance of William Dean Howells’s observation of the same year that the ‘Man of Letters’ increasingly also had to be a ‘Man of Business’, Stevenson decided to abrogate both business and editorial responsibilities.¹⁴

Stevenson had responded to Walter Besant’s call for greater authorial involvement in the production of a writer’s work by saying, ‘There is no likelihood that authors (who had something else to do) would manage this branch of the business better, or even so well as, a publisher.’¹⁵ In Samoa, there was indeed ‘much else to do’. Functioning as a representative voice for and from the South Pacific (much to the dismay of his friends in London), his interests had changed, his writing was increasingly diverse and his energy for negotiation had diminished.¹⁶ As he confessed in an 1893 letter to Mark Twain, he had become ‘weary of publishers’ and was trying to ‘reorganise the whole terms of my business’.¹⁷ His strategy for dealing with this ennui was to divide the commercial and literary aspects of his writing between childhood friend, life-long correspondent and Edinburgh lawyer, Charles Baxter, and Sidney Colvin (then Keeper of the Department of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum), friend and literary mentor in London. Both men became the main negotiators with US and British publishers for the placing and marketing of Stevenson’s work, in roles set out with some firmness:

It is understood that Colvin has nothing to do with the Business

---------------------------- Baxter ----------------------------- the Proofs¹⁸

Neither complied entirely with this demarcation of authorial surrogacy.

Baxter and Colvin were only two of the figures in the material and textual travels of Stevenson in the last years of his life. Geographical distance encouraged him to devolve responsibility; it also allowed him further opportunities for collaborative literary activities that caused concern at the time and later. The Ebb-Tide (1894) was begun with Lloyd Osbourne, Stevenson’s stepson. His stepdaughter Isobel Strong Field acted as amanuensis for Weir of Hermiston (1896) and St Ives (1897), later elaborating or over-elaborating on her role in their production. Stevenson’s wife, Fanny Van de Grift, herself an active writer while in the South Seas and co-author with Stevenson of The Dynamiter (1885), contributed to anxieties around Stevenson’s inclination to collaboration. For other writers, Stevenson’s ‘exotic’ distance enhanced their imaginative engagement with him. Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch who was invited to complete the last six chapters of Stevenson’s last novel St Ives (1897) wrote as passionate admirer and imitator of Stevenson; decadent writer Richard Le Gallienne created an unlikely alliance across oceans that intensified after Stevenson’s death.

The increasingly dramatic narratives of loyalty and betrayal around Stevenson’s relationship with publishers while in the South Seas are shaped by transatlantic transaction. From that rapturous reception of Jekyll and Hyde’s author in New York in 1887, Stevenson’s writing found an enthusiastic audience in the United States: according to Margaret Oliphant, ‘Much applause has, we fear, turned his head.’¹⁹ Two years later she reiterated this criticism, noting that with applause ‘coming back from the other side of the Atlantic, the reverberation of a great reputation is apt to have a certain idiocy in its roar’.²⁰ Oliphant’s disapproval was shared by many of Stevenson’s London circle: visiting London in 1889 McClure found ‘most of Stevenson’s set [with the exception of Henry James] very much annoyed by the attention he had received in America’. W. E. Henley, he noted, was ‘particularly emphatic’ in expressing a ‘double grievance’, both that his own influence on RLS was not recognized and that ‘a nation whom he despised as a rude and uncultivated people should presume to give Stevenson a higher place than he held in England’.²¹ Henley’s disappointment was both personal and cultural: as he later mourned, ‘For me there were two Stevensons: the Stevenson who went to America in ’87; and the Stevenson who never came back.’²² Stevenson himself, who had written in and about the United States, had good personal relationships with publishing firms there. Edward Burlingame, Editor at Scribner’s Magazine, helped him to produce some of his best literary essays by shipping books as requested to his isolated residence in the Adirondacks. S. S. McClure, likewise motivated by both business and personal liking, played a part in funding Stevenson’s expedition to the South Seas.²³ Stevenson was, in turn, highly appreciative of his American publishers. In 1886, when Jekyll and Hyde was published in America by Scribner’s, Stevenson wrote to The Academy defending them against general accusations of American veniality: ‘At a time when so many scalded authors rush into print with their complaints, I think it no more a pleasure than a duty to name Messrs Charles Scribner’s Sons. I have had but one year’s dealings with this firm; but it would be hard to express my sense of their good faith and generosity.’²⁴ By the 1890s, however, loyalty to Scribner’s was weakened by suspicions, encouraged by Charles Baxter in London, of financial exploitation. McClure’s pursuit of Stevenson offered an alternative interest. Emergent and ambitious publishers, Stone & Kimball, also represented new possibilities in America. All three firms, and the individuals who worked in them, played their part in the textual and commercial adventures of Stevenson’s last three novels.

After his death, with literary celebrity at its height, transactions around Stevenson continued to be played out in a global context by authorial ‘representatives’. For a variety of reasons, figures in these networks sought to enhance his literary status: Sidney Colvin, for example, carried on with his ambitious plans for an Edinburgh Edition of Stevenson’s works, in an attempt to consolidate his status as equal to Sir Walter Scott’s.²⁵ Friends and family competed to determine his reputation, trying to control the biographical and epistolary accounts of his life, manage the sale of his manuscripts, and – in some instances at least –capitalize as much as possible from their connections with the dead author. Colvin, Baxter, Fanny, Lloyd and Stevenson’s cousin, Graham Balfour, were all involved in heated, and at times highly antagonistic, correspondence around the nature and timing of a Life and the Letters. Stevenson’s late fiction offers an extreme instance of the many participants involved in the production of a literary text. The idea of the ‘socialized text’, that influential term developed by Jerome McGann to suggest that publishers, editors, printers and others share the ‘authority’ of a text with the author, is particularly applicable to Stevenson. Authorship, McGann suggests, is a collaborative social phenomenon – comprising plural compositional processes but also cultural and commercial factors.²⁶ As Barry Menikoff has pointed out, an unusually large number of people were involved in the production of Stevenson’s later texts: ‘It […] was an enormously complicated procedure, made even more so by the extraordinary distance between Samoa and London, by the numbers of people involved (agent-friends, editors, publishers, compositors, syndicators) […] the reality is that while his creative work was going on an entirely different work was taking place in London and New York.’²⁷ In a world in which developments in print culture ‘made it possible to hurl words across great distances’, Stevenson’s writing was exceptionally socialized.²⁸

His status as international literary celebrity was, however, very much constructed on a sense of uniqueness and, geographically at least, isolation. At a time of increased commodification of the authorial persona, and a growing appetite for authorial embodiment in the physicality of live performance, fed by such literary figures as Oscar Wilde, Stevenson was a fascinating spectacle but an increasingly remote one.²⁹ Interest in his corporeal body – represented by his fragile health and bohemian appearance, much reported internationally – had to be traced through secondary sources, sightings by others. This thirst for the living authorial presence was attributed by Oliphant to the United States: ‘It is America that is the cause of it all – America which thrusts her little reputations upon us’ and she accused Stevenson of exploiting his personality for that market.³⁰ By the 1890s his fame went beyond America: when Stevenson, then in Samoa, arrived for one of his brief stays in Sydney, he was besieged by reporters: ‘His name was blazed across the front page of every newspaper. There were pictures of him, editorials about him, articles describing his personal appearance, his books, his history. And in all of them a cordial rejoicing over his arrival. […] Reporters sought interviews, photographers took pictures.’³¹ The fact that this celebratory account is by Stevenson’s stepdaughter belies the idea of solitary genius.

Stevenson, celebrity visitor, may have been imbued with the aura of great writer in Sydney, but he was surrounded, as was typical, by the family entourage he had acquired through his wife. The collaborative element of his writing, and the networked nature of his life, seep into other images of him: the isolated writer is never quite alone. The report of his death in a Kansas newspaper had as its heading, ‘He Died in Far Off Samoa’, emphasizing the romantic solitude of the artist, but the accompanying image shows him surrounded by family and Samoan servants.³² In a famous photograph taken in 1894 at Vailima, Stevenson is an eccentric and frail figure wrestling with deep thought, but his amanuensis – stepdaughter Belle Strong – lurks in a dark corner, hard at work.³³ This image echoes John Singer Sargent’s (1885) portrait of him – ‘too eccentric to be exhibited’ – in which Fanny haunts the recesses of the canvas.³⁴ Stevenson, isolated but always contextualized by those around him, simultaneously accords with the contemporary ‘branding’ of the author and gestures towards a greater collectivity in authorship.

The stance Stevenson took in relation to his writing makes him unusual – but also unusually revealing in terms of the shifting currents of authorship at the time. Handing over control to Colvin and Baxterwas an individual and highly personal response to extreme circumstances; it also anticipates the increasing need for literary agents in negotiating the commerce of publishing. Equally Stevenson’s increasing relinquishment of an editorial role was uncharacteristic of a time in which writers such as Henry James and Rudyard Kipling took more and more control of their published work, particularly in corrections to Collected Editions. In the case of Thomas Hardy, Clare Pettitt suggests, the ‘unknowable diversity of his reading public’, created through geographical expansion of the market, forced him to fall back on his own role as producer, both in what he wrote and how he wrote about it.³⁵ Stevenson in contrast became ‘a writer who absolved himself from the task of revision and allowed others to edit and collect his works’.³⁶ While ‘the cultural meaning of the book seemed less secure’ and, particularly in the United States, ‘the need to sift and select, to distinguish standard authors from those of merely ephemeral interest’ appeared urgent, Stevenson’s devolution of responsibility was an unusual case.³⁷ It