A Study.
Skerryvore.
THE LETTERS OF ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
Edited by Sidney Colvin
FROM BOURNEMOUTH: 1884-1885
In order of date the letters now to be quoted follow next on those from the French Riviera which were printed in the April number. When in the late spring of 1884 Stevenson was prostrated by the worst of all his many attacks of hemorrhage from the lung, he was still residing in that chalet at Hyères which he had hoped to make his permanent abode. Partly the renewed failure of his health, and partly a bad outbreak of cholera in the old Provençal town, which occurred in the ensuing summer, compelled him to abandon this hope. As soon as he recovered strength enough to be able to travel by even the easiest stages, he moved to Royat in Auvergne, and thence in the course of July to England. After consultation with several doctors, all of whom held out good hopes of ultimate recovery in spite of the gravity of his present symptoms, he moved to Bournemouth. Here he found in the heaths and pine-woods some distant semblance of the landscape of his native Scotland, and in sandy curves of the Channel coast a passable substitute for the bays and promontories of his beloved Mediterranean. At all events he liked the place well enough to be willing to try it for a home: and such it became for all but three years, from September, 1884, to August, 1887. These, although in the matter of health the worst and most trying years of his life, were in the matter of work some of the most active and successful. For the first two or three months the Stevensons occupied a lodging on the West Cliff called Wensleydale; for the next three or four, from December, 1884, to March, 1885, they were tenants of a house named Bonallie Towers, pleasantly situated amid the pine-woods of Branksome Park; and lastly, about Easter, 1885, they entered into occupation of a house of their own, given by the elder Stevenson to his son, and re-named by the latter Skerryvore, in reminiscence of one of the great lighthouse works carried out by the family firm off the Scottish coast. During all the time of Stevenson's residence at Bournemouth he was compelled to lead the life, irksome to him above all men, but borne with invincible sweetness and patience, of a chronic invalid and almost constant prisoner to the house. He was hardly ever free for more than a few weeks at a time from fits of hemorrhage, fever, and prostration, accompanied by the nervous exhaustion and general distress consequent equally upon the attacks themselves and upon the remedies which the physicians were constrained to employ against them. A great part of his time was spent in bed, and there almost all his literary work was produced. Often for days, and sometimes for weeks together, he was forbidden to speak aloud, and compelled to carry on conversation with his family and friends in whispers or with the help of pencil and paper. The few excursions to a distance which he attempted—most commonly to my house, at the British Museum, once to Matlock, once to Exeter, and once in 1886 as far as Paris—these excursions almost always ended in a break-down and a hurried retreat to home and bed. Nevertheless, seizing on and making the most of every week, nay, every day and hour of respite, he contrived to produce work surprising alike, under the circumstances, by quantity and quality. During the first two months of his life at Bournemouth the two plays Admiral Guinea and Beau Austin were written in collaboration with Mr. Henley. In 1885 he published three volumes, viz.: More New Arabian Nights, the Child's Garden of Verses, and Prince Otto (the two latter, it is true, having been for the most part written a year or two earlier, at Hyères). In 1886 appeared The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Kidnapped, the two books which, together with Treasure Island, did most to win for him the fame and honor which he ever afterward enjoyed among readers on both sides of the Atlantic. At the same time he was a fairly frequent contributor of essays to magazines and of stories to Christmas annuals and other periodical collections. The year 1887, the last of his life in the old country, was chiefly, with the exception of the Life of Fleeming Jenkin, a year of collections and re-prints; in it were published Underwoods, The Merry Men, Memories and Portraits, and the Black Arrow in volume form.