Passage II

SOCIAL SCIENCE: This passage is adapted from the article “Travels with R.L.S.” by James Campbell (© 2000 by The New York Times Company).

Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894) preferred to circumnavigate civilization, with its increasing reliance on contraptions, and steer toward the rougher fringes. He self-consciously turned his back on the Victorian idol, progress. In similar spirit, he chose the past more often than the present as a setting for fiction. His most popular novels—Treasure Island, Kidnapped,The Master of Ballantrae—are set in a semimythical realm, where the fire of adventure catches on every page. Stevenson loved the sound of clashing swords; he didn’t want them getting tangled up in telephone wires overhead.

Stevenson, though, was destined to be a modern man. He was born into a Scottish family of civil engineers, esteemed for its technological genius. His grand-father, also Robert, was Britain’s greatest builder of lighthouses, and his graceful towers continue to guide sailors today. Three of Robert’s sons followed him into the profession, including Robert Louis Stevenson’s father, Thomas, who made his own mark in the field of optics—his louvre-boarded screens for the protection of thermometers are still in use today.

It was expected that Robert Louis would enter the family business in turn, and a great wringing of hands greeted his announcement to the contrary. He told his father that he wanted to be a writer, which Thomas Stevenson regarded as no profession at all. We can imagine the consternation when Stevenson’s letters arrived bearing pleas such as “Take me as I am …I must be a bit of a vagabond.” And a vagabond was precisely what he set out to be: longhaired, careless about food, walking through France or planning an epic ocean voyage, a far cry from the offices of D. & T. Stevenson, Engineers. He was forging the template for generations of college-educated adventurers to come. “I travel not to go anywhere, but to go,” he wrote in Travels With a Donkey (1879). “I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move.”

Stevenson would not be an engineer, but he left his own lights, in Scotland and across the world, by which it is possible to trace his unceasing movement. No other writer, surely, is as much memorialized by the words “lived here” as he is. There are five houses with Stevenson associations in Edinburgh alone, not to mention the little schoolhouse he attended as a child and the lavish gardens opposite the family home in Heriot Row, where he played and, the fanciful will have you believe, first acted out the quest for Treasure Island. I have shadowed Stevenson up to the northeast of Scotland, where he tried his hand at being an apprentice engineer, back down to the Hawes Inn at South Queensferry, where David Balfour is tricked into going to sea in Kidnapped. There are landmarks in Switzerland, France and on the Pacific Islands where the adventure of his final years took place.

Recently, I stumbled across Abernethy House where Stevenson lived briefly in London when he was 23. It stands in a secluded comer of Hampstead, high up on a hill, and separated from foggy London by farms and heath. It was while standing on Hampstead Hill one night that he gazed down on London and imagined a technological miracle of the future, “when in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, the design of the monstrous city flashes into vision—a glittering hieroglyph.” He is anticipating the effects of electricity and a time when the streetlamps would be lighted “not one by one” by the faithful old lamplighter, but all at once, by the touch of a button. Not for him improvements in optics; give him the flickering gas lamp and the “skirts of civilization” any day.

Lamps occur frequently in Stevenson’s writing. There are the essays “A Plea for Gas Lamps” and “The Lantern Bearers,” and his poem for children, “The Lamplighter,’’ which celebrates an old custom: “For we are very lucky, with a lamp before the door, / And Leerie stops to light it as he lights so many more.” Then there is his memoir in which he describes how, when a child and sick, his nurse would take him to the window, “whence I might look forth into the blue night starred with street lamps, and see where the gas still burned behind the windows of other sickrooms.” And the lights shine again, with a subdued glow, in the obituary he wrote of his father. Thomas Stevenson’s name may not have been widely known, yet “all the time, his lights were in every part of the world, guiding the mariner.”

A year later, Stevenson chartered a schooner and became a mariner himself, sailing circuitously through the South Seas. He had, in a sense, entered the family business at last.