Claire Harman. Robert Louis Stevenson: A Biography. 2005. Harper Perennial. London: HarperCollins Publishers, 2006.
Captain Smollett walks with Squire Trelawney
on the leeward side, out of the wind
but the sea is a hacksaw
and its teeth wear the leg of a cook, Long John Silver.
‘He’d look remarkably well from a yard-arm, sir.'
New Zealand writer David Howard's long poem "The Wish House" was written while he was the 2013 Robert Burns fellow in Dunedin. “Swollen with details of R.L.S.’s life at Vailima from December 1889 to December 1894," as Howard describes it, "the poem is necessarily shaped by the power plays that divided Samoa then.”
The subject of power plays tends to arise when it's Robert Louis Stevenson who's being discussed. Why, for instance, does he have so uncertain a place in the British literary tradition, given the evergreen appeal of his work? Claire Harman, one of his most recent biographers, calls him "a popular author but never a canonical one."
The Strange Case of Dr Jekll and Mr Hyde, Treasure Island, Kidnapped, A Child's Garden of Verses ... have not appeared on syllabuses of nineteenth-century literature until very recently. The critical concensus up to the last twenty years or so seems to have been that Stevenson's works were not quite 'literary' enough to study. [xv]
Given she was writing in 2005, those "twenty years" would now have to be forty. And yet, as she goes on to specify:
Writers as diverse as Graham Greene, Cesare Pavese, Italo Calvino, Vladimir Nabokov and Jorge Luis Borges have revered him as a master (it is said that Borges kept his collection of Stevenson's works separate from all others on his bookshelves) ... [xix]
Bella Bathurst's earlier book
The Lighthouse Stevensons did an excellent job of filling in many details of Stevenson's background omitted from his own posthumously published
Records of a Family of Engineers, thus accounting for at least some of his residual guilt at turning into a mere scribbler rather than a sturdy engineer like his forebears.
Claire Harman, in her turn, has attempted to place him in contemporary context, emphasising his youthful larrikinism but also his long and painstaking apprenticeship to his craft, "playing the sedulous ape," as he himself described it, "to Hazlitt, to Lamb, to Wordsworth, to Sir Thomas Browne, to Defoe, to Hawthorne, to Montaigne, to Baudelaire and to Obermann."
All of the writers in this list are easily recognisable - except for the last. If it weren't for Matthew Arnold's "
Stanzas In Memory Of The Author Of 'Obermann', it's doubtful the name would suggest anything at all to a modern reader:
In front the awful Alpine track
Crawls up its rocky stair;
The autumn storm-winds drive the rack,
Close o'er it, in the air.
Behind are the abandoned baths
Mute in their meadows lone;
The leaves are on the valley-paths,
The mists are on the Rhone -
The white mists rolling like a sea!
I hear the torrents roar.
- Yes, Obermann, all speaks of thee;
I feel thee near once more.
I turn thy leaves! I feel their breath
Once more upon me roll;
That air of languor, cold, and death,
Which brooded o'er thy soul.
Fly hence, poor wretch, whoe'er thou art,
Condemned to cast about,
All shipwreck in thy own weak heart,
For comfort from without!
A fever in these pages burns
Beneath the calm they feign;
A wounded human spirit turns,
Here, on its bed of pain.
Yes, though the virgin mountain-air
Fresh through these pages blows;
Though to these leaves the glaciers spare
The soul of their mute snows;
Though here a mountain-murmur swells
Of many a dark-boughed pine;
Though, as you read, you hear the bells
Of the high-pasturing kine -
Yet, through the hum of torrent lone,
And brooding mountain-bee,
There sobs I know not what ground-tone
Of human agony.
Is it for this, because the sound
Is fraught too deep with pain,
That, Obermann! the world around
So little loves thy strain?
...
Obermann (1804, revised and expanded in 1833), a novel by
Étienne Pivert de Senancour, takes the form of:
a series of letters supposed to be written by a solitary and melancholy person, whose headquarters are placed in a lonely valley of the Jura. The idiosyncrasy of the book in the large class of Wertherian-Byronic literature consists in the fact that the hero, instead of feeling the vanity of things, recognizes his own inability to be and do what he wishes.
Certainly one can see how such a work might have spoken to the despairing, misanthropic side of Stevenson.
On the other hand, he was also greatly influenced by Walt Whitman's buoyant, expansive
Leaves of Grass - which Harman rather confusingly dates to 1867:
Stevenson had discovered Leaves of Grass soon after its publication in 1867, and kept a copy hidden at the tobacconist's shop that was his equivalent of a poste restante. [73]
Whitman's book was, of course, first (self-)published in 1855, then reissued in expanded form in 1856 and 1860, before the appearance of the 1867 version, which included his Civil War poems "Drum-Taps" as well as much other new work, and which Whitman (wrongly, as it turned out) expected to be the last in this series of revisions and enlargements.
In Britain, however, Whitman first reached readers through the medium of William Michael Rossetti's 1868 selection of
Poems by Walt Whitman, as Edward Whitley explains in his useful online introduction to "
British editions of Leaves of Grass":
The "comely form" in which Leaves of Grass was presented to British readers required removing about one-half of the poems from the American 1867 edition it was based on (including "Song of Myself"), attaching explanatory footnotes to various poems, and deleting objectionable phrases from the original 1855 preface to Leaves of Grass which Rossetti included. In this twenty-seven page "Prefatory Notice," Rossetti explains, among other things, his criteria for the inclusion and exclusion of Whitman's poems: "My choice has proceeded upon two simple rules: first, to omit entirely every poem which could with any tolerable fairness be deemed offensive to the feelings of morals or propriety in this peculiarly nervous age; and, second, to include every remaining poem which appeared to me of conspicuous beauty or interest."
Whitman himself, however, later referred to the Rossetti edition as "the horrible dismemberment of my book."
So, while it's just conceivable that Stevenson may have somehow acquired a copy of the 1867 fourth edition of
Leaves of Grass, it seems far more probable that it was Rossetti's 1868 edition he had access to. Whichever version it was, though, the fact that so much of his early unpublished poetry was written in free verse gives testament to the degree to which it affected him. Some of the examples Harman quotes compare very favourably with the more conventional verse forms with which Stevenson is more commonly associated:
I walk the streets smoking my pipe
And I love the dallying shop-girl
That leans with rounded stern to look at the fashions;
And I hate the bustling citizen,
The eager and hurrying man of affairs I hate,
Because he bears his intolerance writ on his face
And every movement and word of him tells me how much he hates me. [55]
Her lapse over the dating of Whitman's
Leaves of Grass still seems a little surprising, though. It's compounded by a later comment about Stevenson's friend Jules Simoneau, a fifty-eight-year-old expatriate French restauranteur whom he met in Monterey, California.
Photographs show a white-bearded, big-nosed, well-built man in working clothes, hands lodged in his belt, with a striking resemblance (though Stevenson is unlikely to have known it [my emphasis]) to Walt Whitman. [183-84]
Why is Stevenson "unlikely to have known it"? As you can see from the picture of Rossetti's pioneering selection above, he included as his frontispiece an engraving from the famous 1854 daguerreotype which appeared in the first edition of Whitman's book, and which perfectly illlustrates the resemblance Harman mentions. Is it conceivable that Stevenson would never have seen this image (or others) of the "
good gray poet"? And why stress the point, in any case?
Though all this kerfuffle about Whitman is not in itself of great importance, it does help to explain why the generally favourable response to Harman's biography when it first appeared in 2005
was punctuated by a few significant provisos.
Ian Thomson, the biographer of Primo Levi, commented:
Though well-researched, this biography shows signs of hasty work.
He also expressed surprise that while Claire Harman's is the "first biography of Stevenson to make use of the complete Yale correspondence":
astonishingly, it adds very little to recent lives of Stevenson by Frank McLynn, Ian Bell and Brian Bevan, or indeed to personal appreciations by Nicholas Rankin (Dead Man's Chest) and Hunter Davies (In Search of RLS).
Thomson is at pains to stress the importance of this eight-volume, 1994-95 edition of Stevenson's complete surviving correspondence. After that, he explains, "it was no longer possible to banish RLS to the literary bagatelle. The letters bristle with slang ('boghouse', 'blue fits') and saucy vulgarisms ('fuckstress')" - a far cry from the expurgated texts of the "the high Tory art critic Sir Sidney Colvin."
"Nevertheless," he concludes, Harman's "is a smoothly-assembled and readable study, which confirms Stevenson as a writer of the first importance."
Guardian reviewer
Jane Stevenson is even more blunt. She may or may not have been responsible for the accompanying byline which claims that "Claire Harman's life of Robert Louis Stevenson is long on facts but short on real insight," but she certainly detects a pattern in Harman's errors of understanding: "Most damagingly, the book refuses to engage with Scotland."
At one point or another, Claire Harman indicates that she considers all the Stevensons self-dramatising, but some of the drama is national rather than individual - the combined passion, uprightness and religiosity of Stevenson's parents seems particularly to have confused her. She gives the impression that in the course of writing, she became hopelessly irritated by the lot of them and started mentally marking them out of 10.
What's more, "her desire to claim Stevenson for English literature is suggested by an egregious remark":
'The early editions of Stevenson's stories in Scots did not have accompanying glossaries, implying a wider knowledge of the dialect than anyone would assume today.' This is nonsense and patronising: Irvine Welsh isn't published with a glossary.
I suppose that I, too - as a New Zealander of Scottish descent who completed his own postgraduate studies in Edinburgh - see this characteristically English failure to engage with the complexities of Stevenson's Scottish identity as a deficiency in Harman's book. As Jane Stevenson expresses it:
The problem with this attitude is that some of the most crucial problems Stevenson faced as an artist stemmed from his cultural formation rather than from his personality or his parents.
It's certainly no accident that the most unalloyed expressions of praise for Harman's work seem to come from south of the border.
Stevenson has always been a tricky customer, though: both when he was alive and throughout his turbulent personal and literary afterlife. Read with a grain of salt and a certain suspension of blind belief - perhaps the best approach to
any biography of
anyone - Harman's account has much to offer those curious to know more about him.
I certainly learned a huge amount from it. In particular, although Harman doesn't consider the question directly, her book helped to illustrate what is (for me, at least) a very interesting aspect of Stevenson and his contemporaries.
Why is it that so many major writers of this era - the late nineteenth century, encompassing the fin-de-siècle and Edwardian era, all the way up to the First World War - seem to have been equally comfortable writing in both prose
and verse?
This ambidexterity was certainly not characteristic of the High Victorians. Carlyle, Dickens, Thackeray, and George Eliot all wrote - and in some cases published - verse, but there was never any suggestion that this could be regarded as on a level with their work as prose-writers.
Poetry was considered the province of such titanic figures as Arnold, Browning, and Tennyson, none of whom wrote any fiction to speak of - though all of them wrote a certain amount of critical and expository prose. Only the Brontës might be seen as an exception to his rule, and - given their general isolation from the cultural norms of their time - they could hardly be regarded as typical.
Again, with the advent of the High Modernists, poetry became increasingly the preserve of specialists such as T. S. Eliot, Marianne Moore, Ezra Pound, and the Imagists, Vorticists, Objectivists who flocked around them. Fiction, too - after Joyce's
Ulysses (1922) - was for experts, not belletristic dilettantes.
Though there remained a few figures such as William Carlos Williams, who published both poetry and prose with equal facility, the orthodoxy arose that only the rarest of writers could excel in both forms.
The Peacock Dinner (1914):
[l-to-r: Victor Plarr, Thomas Sturge Moore, W. B. Yeats, Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, Ezra Pound, Richard Aldington & F. S. Flint]
In between these two eras, though, we have Thomas Hardy, Rudyard Kipling, D. H. Lawrence, John Masefield, George Meredith, Robert Louis Stevenson, Edward Thomas, Oscar Wilde, and W. B. Yeats - all publishing happily in verse and prose with (it would appear) minimal unease and anxiety.
No doubt many reasons could be found for this - a shift of sensibility in the spirit of the age, I'm guessing - but the fact remains. And I can't help feeling that that's one reason why I find the authors of this era so perennially fascinating. The twilight of British hegemony produced some of its most brilliant and insightful writers.
While others apparently long to sit at a table in the Mermaid Tavern, or lounge around in the Club with Reynolds, Boswell, and Dr. Johnson, my own predilection would probably be for a tea party with Henry James and some of his younger, more unruly neighbours - sometime around 1900, perhaps. Conrad and Hueffer would be there, discussing their latest collaboration, as well as the coughing, already deathly-ill Stephen Crane. H. G. Wells might look in, George Bernard Shaw - even (perhaps) a few poets from the Cheshire Cheese.
Some of the talk might be of Oscar's latest troubles; perhaps his exile on the continent might recall for a few of them Stevenson's flight to the South Seas a few years earlier, but for the most part there would be an air of busy anticipation of the century to come - the as yet untapped possibilities of mass education and mass literacy, so that no home need be without a copy of
Dracula or
The Turn of the Screw or, for that matter,
The Portrait of Dorian Gray, Wilde's own almost equally disturbing exploration - or exploitation - of the themes behind
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
Books I own are marked in bold:
Novels:
- The Hair Trunk or The Ideal Commonwealth (1877)
- The Hair Trunk or The Ideal Commonwealth: An Extravaganza. Ed. Roger G. Swearingen. Kilkerran: Humming Earth, 2014.
- Treasure Island [aka "The Sea Cook, or Treasure Island: a Story for Boys"] (1883)
- Treasure Island. Tusitala Edition, 2. 35 vols. London: William Heinemann et al., [1923].
- Prince Otto (1885)
- Prince Otto: A Romance. Tusitala Edition, 4. 1924. 35 vols. London: William Heinemann et al., 1924.
- The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886)
- Included in: The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde; Fables; Other Stories & Fragments. Tusitala Edition, 5. 1924. 35 vols. London: William Heinemann et al., 1926.
- Included in: Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Other Stories. With an Introduction by Compton Mackenzie. llustrated by W. Stein. Macdonald Illustrated Classics, 17. London: Macdonald & Co. (Publishers ) Ltd., 1950.
- Included in: The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Other Stories. Ed. Jenni Calder. Penguin English Library. 1979. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981.
- The Essential Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde: Including the Complete Novel by Robert Louis Stevenson. Ed. Leonard Wolf. Illustrations by Michael Lark. 1995. New York: ibooks, 2005.
- Kidnapped (1886)
- Kidnapped. Tusitala Edition, 6. 35 vols. London: William Heinemann et al., 1923.
- The Black Arrow (1888)
- The Black Arrow: A Tale of the Two Roses. Tusitala Edition, 9. 35 vols. London: William Heinemann et al., [1924].
- The Master of Ballantrae (1889)
- The Master of Ballantrae: A Winter’s Tale. Tusitala Edition, 10. 1924. 35 vols. London: William Heinemann et al., 1927.
- [with Lloyd Osbourne] The Wrong Box (1889)
- Included in: The Wrong Box; The Body-Snatcher. Tusitala Edition, 11. 1923. 35 vols. London: William Heinemann et al., 1928.
- [with Lloyd Osbourne] The Wrecker (1892)
- The Wrecker. Tusitala Edition, 12. 1924. 35 vols. London: William Heinemann et al., 1928.
- Catriona [aka "David Balfour"] (1893)
- Catriona: A Sequel to “Kidnapped.” Tusitala Edition, 7. 1924. 35 vols. London: William Heinemann et al., 1924.
- [with Lloyd Osbourne] The Ebb-Tide (1894)
- Included in: The Ebb-Tide: A Trio and Quartette; The Story of a Lie. Tusitala Edition, 14. 1923. 35 vols. London: William Heinemann et al., 1926.
- Included in: The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Other Stories. Ed. Jenni Calder. Penguin English Library. 1979. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981.
- Included in: South Sea Tales. Ed. Roslyn Jolly. The World's Classics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.
- Weir of Hermiston (1896)
- Included in: Weir of Hermiston; Some Unfinished Stories. Tusitala Edition, 16. 1924. 35 vols. London: William Heinemann et al., 1925.
- Included in: Weir of Hermiston and Other Stories. Ed. Paul Binding. Penguin English Library. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979.
- [with Arthur Quiller-Couch] St Ives (1897)
- St. Ives: being The Adventures of a French Prisoner in England. Tusitala Edition, 15. 1923. 35 vols. London: William Heinemann et al., 1924.
Short Story Collections:
- New Arabian Nights (1882) [Arabian]
- The Suicide Club (1878)
- Story of the Young Man with the Cream Tarts
- Story of the Physician and the Saratoga Trunk
- The Adventure of the Hansom Cab
- The Rajah's Diamond (1878)
- Story of the Bandbox
- Story of the Young Man in Holy Orders
- Story of the House with the Green Blinds
- The Adventure of Prince Florizel and a Detective
- The Pavilion on the Links (1880)
- A Lodging for the Night (1877)
- The Sire De Malétroits Door (1877)
- Providence and the Guitar (1878)
- New Arabian Nights. Tusitala Edition, 1. 1923. 35 vols. London: William Heinemann, Ltd.: In association with Chatto & Windus: Cassell & Company, Ltd.: and Longmans, Green & Company, 1924.
- [with Fanny Stevenson] More New Arabian Nights: The Dynamiter (1885) [Dynamiter]
- Prologue of the Cigar Divan
- Challoner's adventure: The Squire of Dames
- Story of the Destroying Angel
- The Squire of Dames (Concluded)
- Somerset's adventure: The Superfluous Mansion
- Narrative of the Spirited Old Lady
- The Superfluous Mansion (Continued)
- Zero's Tale of the Explosive Bomb
- The Superfluous Mansion (Continued)
- Desborough's Adventure: The Brown Box
- Story of the Fair Cuban
- The Brown Box (Concluded)
- The Superfluous Mansion (Concluded)
- Epilogue of the Cigar Divan
- More New Arabian Nights: The Dynamiter. Tusitala Edition, 3. 1923. 35 vols. London: William Heinemann et al., 1927.
- The Merry Men and Other Tales and Fables (1887) [Merry]
- The Merry Men (1882)
- Will o' the Mill (1877)
- Markheim (1884)
- Thrawn Janet (1881)
- Olalla (1885)
- The Treasure of Franchard (1883)
- The Merry Men & Other Tales. Tusitala Edition, 8. 35 vols. London: William Heinemann et al., 1924.
- Island Nights' Entertainments (1893) [Island]
- The Beach of Falesá (1892)
- The Bottle Imp (1891)
- The Isle of Voices (1892)
- Included in: Island Nights’ Entertainments; The Misadventures of John Nicholson. Tusitala Edition, 13. 1924. 35 vols. London: William Heinemann et al., 1924.
- Dylan Thomas. The Beach of Falesá: Based on a Story by Robert Louis Stevenson. 1964. London: Panther, 1966.
- Fables (1896) [Fables]
- The Persons of the Tale
- The Sinking Ship
- The Two Matches
- The Sick Man and the Fireman
- The Devil and the Innkeeper
- The Penitent
- The Yellow Paint
- The House of Eld
- The Four Reformers
- The Man and His Friend
- The Reader
- The Citizen and the Traveller
- The Distinguished Stranger
- The Carthorses and the Saddlehorse
- The Tadpole and the Frog
- Something in It
- Faith, Half Faith and No Faith at All
- The Touchstone
- The Poor Thing
- The Song of the Morrow
- Included in: The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde; Fables; Other Stories & Fragments. Tusitala Edition, 5. 1924. 35 vols. London: William Heinemann et al., 1926.
- Tales and Fantasies (1905) [Fantasies]
- The Misadventures of John Nicholson: A Christmas Story (1885–87)
- Included in: Island Nights’ Entertainments; The Misadventures of John Nicholson. Tusitala Edition, 13. 1924. 35 vols. London: William Heinemann et al., 1924.
- The Body-Snatcher (1881)
- Included in: The Wrong Box; The Body-Snatcher. Tusitala Edition, 11. 1923. 35 vols. London: William Heinemann et al., 1928.
- The Story of a Lie (1879)
- Included in: The Ebb-Tide: A Trio and Quartette; The Story of a Lie. Tusitala Edition, 14. 1923. 35 vols. London: William Heinemann et al., 1926.
- Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde; Fables; Other Stories & Fragments (1924) [Tusitala 5]
- The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1885)
- Fables (1896)
- The Sinking Ship
- The Two Matches
- The Sick Man and the Fireman
- The Devil and the Innkeeper
- The Penitent
- The Yellow Paint
- The House of Eld
- The Four Reformers
- The Man and His Friend
- The Reader
- The Citizen and the Traveller
- The Distinguished Stranger
- The Cart-horses and the Saddle-horse
- The Tadpole and the Frog
- Something in It
- Faith, Half Faith and No Faith at All
- The Touchstone
- The Poor Thing
- The Song of the Morrow
- When the Devil Was Well (1875)
- The Waif Woman [unfinished] (1892)
- The Charity Bazaar (1868)
- Diogenes (1882)
- Diogenes in London
- Diogenes at the Savile Club
- Stevenson's Companion to the Cook Book: Adorned with a Century of Authentic Anecdotes (1923)
- The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde; Fables; Other Stories & Fragments. Tusitala Edition, 5. 1924. 35 vols. London: William Heinemann et al., 1926.
- Weir of Hermiston; Some Unfinished Stories (1924) [Tusitala 16]
- Weir of Hermiston (1896)
- Heathercat [unfinished] (1894)
- The Young Chevalier [unfinished] (1893)
- The Great North Road [unfinished] (1885)
- The Story of a Recluse [unfinished] (1885)
- Adventures of Henry Shovel [unfinished] (1891)
- The Owl (1891)
- Canonmills (1891)
- Mr Baskerville and His Ward (1891)
- Weir of Hermiston; Some Unfinished Stories. Tusitala Edition, 16. 1924. 35 vols. London: William Heinemann et al., 1925.
- Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Other Stories (1950) [Stories]
- A Lodging for the Night (1877)
- The Sire De Malétroit's Door (1877)
- Will o' the Mill (1877)
- The Pavilion on the Links (1880)
- The Body Snatcher (1881)
- The Merry Men (1882)
- The Treasure of Franchard (1883)
- Thrawn Janet (1881)
- Olalla (1885)
- Markheim (1884)
- The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1885)
- The Bottle Imp (1891)
- The Beach of Falesá (1892)
- The Isle of Voices (1892)
- Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Other Stories. With an Introduction by Compton Mackenzie. llustrated by W. Stein. Macdonald Illustrated Classics, 17. London: Macdonald & Co. (Publishers) Ltd., 1950.
- The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Other Stories (1979) [Strange]
- The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1885)
- The Beach of Falesá (1892)
- [with Lloyd Osbourne] The Ebb-Tide (1894)
- The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Other Stories. Ed. Jenni Calder. Penguin English Library. 1979. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981.
- Weir of Hermiston and Other Stories (1979) [Weir]
- Weir of Hermiston (1896)
- Will o' the Mill (1877)
- Thrawn Janet (1881)
- The Misadventures of John Nicholson (1887)
- The House of Eld (1887-88)
- Weir of Hermiston and Other Stories. Ed. Paul Binding. Penguin English Library. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979.
- South Sea Tales (1996) [South]
- The Beach of Falesá (1892)
- The Bottle Imp (1891)
- The Isle of Voices (1892)
- [with Lloyd Osbourne] The Ebb-Tide: A Trio and Quartette (1894)
- The Cart-Horses and the Saddle-Horse (1887-88)
- Something in It (1887-88)
- South Sea Tales. Ed. Roslyn Jolly. The World's Classics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.
Stories:
- The Charity Bazaar (1868) [Tusitala 5]
- An Old Song (1875)
- When the Devil Was Well (1875) [Tusitala 5]
- Edifying Letters of the Rutherford Family (1877)
- Will o' the Mill (1877) [Merry] [Stories] [Weir]
- A Lodging for the Night (1877) [Arabian] [Stories]
- The Sire De Malétroit's Door (1877) [Arabian] [Stories]
- The Suicide Club (1878) [Arabian]
- Story of the Young Man with the Cream Tarts
- Story of the Physician and the Saratoga Trunk
- The Adventure of the Hansom Cab
- The Rajah's Diamond (1878) [Arabian]
- Story of the Bandbox
- Story of the Young Man in Holy Orders
- Story of the House with the Green Blinds
- The Adventure of Prince Florizel and a Detective
- Providence and the Guitar (1878) [Arabian]
- The Story of a Lie (1879) [Fantasies]
- The Pavilion on the Links (1880) [Arabian] [Stories]
- Thrawn Janet (1881) [Merry] [Stories] [Weir]
- The Body Snatcher (1881) [Fantasies] [Stories]
- The Merry Men (1882) [Merry] [Stories]
- Diogenes (1882) [Tusitala 5]
- Diogenes in London
- Diogenes at the Savile Club
- The Treasure of Franchard (1883) [Merry] [Stories]
- Markheim (1884) [Merry] [Stories]
- Olalla (1885) [Merry] [Stories]
- The Great North Road [unfinished] (1885) [Tusitala 16]
- The Story of a Recluse [unfinished; completed by Alasdair Gray] (1885) [Tusitala 16]
- [with Fanny Stevenson] The Cigar Divan (1885) [Dynamiter]
- [with Fanny Stevenson] Challoner's adventure: The Squire of Dames (1885) [Dynamiter]
- [with Fanny Stevenson] Story of the Destroying Angel (1885) [Dynamiter]
- [with Fanny Stevenson] Somerset's adventure: The Superfluous Mansion (1885) [Dynamiter]
- [with Fanny Stevenson] Narrative of the Spirited Old Lady (1885) [Dynamiter]
- [with Fanny Stevenson] Zero's Tale of the Explosive Bomb (1885) [Dynamiter]
- [with Fanny Stevenson] Desborough's Adventure: The Brown Box (1885) [Dynamiter]
- [with Fanny Stevenson] Story of the Fair Cuban (1885) [Dynamiter]
- The Misadventures of John Nicholson: A Christmas Story (1887) [Fantasies] [Weir]
- Fables (1887-88) [Fables]
- The Persons of the Tale [Tusitala 2]
- The Sinking Ship [Tusitala 5]
- The Two Matches [Tusitala 5]
- The Sick Man and the Fireman [Tusitala 5]
- The Devil and the Innkeeper [Tusitala 5]
- The Penitent [Tusitala 5]
- The Yellow Paint [Tusitala 5]
- The House of Eld [Tusitala 5] [Weir]
- The Four Reformers [Tusitala 5]
- The Man and His Friend [Tusitala 5]
- The Reader [Tusitala 5]
- The Citizen and the Traveller [Tusitala 5]
- The Distinguished Stranger [Tusitala 5]
- The Cart-horses and the Saddle-horse [Tusitala 5] [South]
- The Tadpole and the Frog [Tusitala 5]
- Something in It [Tusitala 5] [South]
- Faith, Half Faith and No Faith at All [Tusitala 5]
- The Touchstone [Tusitala 5]
- The Poor Thing [Tusitala 5]
- The Song of the Morrow [Tusitala 5]
- The Clockmaker (1887-88)
- The Scientific Ape (1887-88)
- The Enchantress (1889)
- Adventures of Henry Shovel [unfinished] (1891) [Tusitala 16]
- The Owl (1891) [Tusitala 16]
- Canonmills (1891) [Tusitala 16]
- Mr Baskerville and His Ward (1891) [Tusitala 16]
- The Bottle Imp (1891) [Island] [Stories] [South]
- The Beach of Falesá (1892) [Island] [Stories] [Strange] [South]
- The Isle of Voices (1892) [Island] [Stories] [South]
- The Waif Woman [unfinished] (1892) [Tusitala 5]
- The Young Chevalier [unfinished] (1893) [Tusitala 16]
- Heathercat [unfinished] (1894) [Tusitala 16]
Non-fiction:
- "The New Lighthouse on the Dhu Heartach Rock, Argyllshire" (1872)
- The New Lighthouse on the Dhu Heartach Rock, Argyllshire: Based on an 1872 Manuscript. Ed. R. G. Swearingen. California. Silverado Museum, 1995.
- "Béranger, Pierre Jean de." Encyclopædia Britannica. 9th ed. (1875–1889)
- Virginibus Puerisque, and Other Papers (1881)
- Virginibus Puerisque i (1876)
- Virginibus Puerisque ii (1881)
- Virginibus Puerisque iii
- On Falling in Love (1877)
- Virginibus Puerisque iv: The Truth of Intercourse (1879)
- Crabbed Age and Youth (1878)
- An Apology for Idlers (1877)
- Ordered South (1874)
- Aes Triplex (1878)
- El Dorado (1878)
- The English Admirals (1878)
- Some Portraits by Raeburn (1881)
- Child's Play (1878)
- Walking Tours (1876)
- Pan's Pipes (1878)
- A Plea for Gas Lamps (1878)
- Virginibus Puerisque and Other Essays in Belles Lettres. Tusitala Edition, 25. 1924. 35 vols. London: William Heinemann et al., 1925.
- Familiar Studies of Men and Books (1882)
- Preface, by Way of Criticism (1882)
- Victor Hugo's Romances (1874)
- Some Aspects of Robert Burns (1879)
- The Gospel According to Walt Whitman (1878)
- Henry David Thoreau: His Character and Opinions (1880)
- Yoshida-Torajiro (1880)
- François Villon, Student, Poet, Housebreaker (1877)
- Charles of Orleans (1876)
- Samuel Pepys (1881)
- John Knox and his Relations to Women (1875)
- Familiar Studies of Men and Books. Tusitala Edition, 27. 1923. 35 vols. London: William Heinemann et al., 1924.
- Memories and Portraits (1887)
- Included in: Memories and Portraits; Memoirs of Himself; Selections from his Notebook. Tusitala Edition, 29. 35 vols. London: William Heinemann et al., 1924.
- On the Choice of a Profession (1887)
- The Day After Tomorrow (1887)
- Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin (1888)
- Included in: Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin; Records of a Family of Engineers. Tusitala Edition, 19. 35 vols. London: William Heinemann et al., 1924.
- Father Damien: An Open Letter to the Rev. Dr. Hyde of Honolulu (1890)
- Included in: Vailima Papers. Tusitala Edition, 21. 35 vols. London: William Heinemann et al., 1924.
- A Footnote to History: Eight Years of Trouble in Samoa (1892)
- Included in: Vailima Papers. Tusitala Edition, 21. 35 vols. London: William Heinemann et al., 1924.
- Sophia Scarlet (1892)
- Sophia Scarlet: Based on an 1892 Manuscript. Ed. Robert Hoskins. Auckland: AUT Media (AUT University), 2008.
- Vailima Letters (1895)
- Included in: Vailima Papers. Tusitala Edition, 21. 35 vols. London: William Heinemann et al., 1924.
- Records of a Family of Engineers (1896)
- Included in: Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin; Records of a Family of Engineers. Tusitala Edition, 19. 35 vols. London: William Heinemann et al., 1924.
- Prayers Written at Vailima (1904)
- Included in: Vailima Papers. Tusitala Edition, 21. 35 vols. London: William Heinemann et al., 1924.
- Essays in the Art of Writing (1905)
- The Essays Of Robert Louis Stevenson: A Selection. With an Introduction by Malcolm Elwin (1950)
Poetry:
- A Child's Garden of Verses (1885)
- A Child’s Garden of Verses. 1885. Illustrated by A. H. Watson. London & Glasgow: Wm. Collins Sons & Co. Ltd., 1958.
- Included in: Poems, Volume One: A Child’s Garden of Verses; Underwoods; Songs of Travel; Moral Emblems. Tusitala Edition, 22. 35 vols. London: William Heinemann et al., [1924].
- Underwoods (1887)
- Included in: Poems, Volume One: A Child’s Garden of Verses; Underwoods; Songs of Travel; Moral Emblems. Tusitala Edition, 22. 35 vols. London: William Heinemann et al., [1924].
- Ballads (1891)
- Included in: Poems, Volume Two: Ballads; New Poems. Tusitala Edition, 23. 35 vols. London: William Heinemann et al., [1924].
- Songs of Travel and Other Verses (1896)
- Included in: Poems, Volume One: A Child’s Garden of Verses; Underwoods; Songs of Travel; Moral Emblems. Tusitala Edition, 22. 35 vols. London: William Heinemann et al., [1924].
- Poems Hitherto Unpublished. 3 vols (1916-1921)
- New Poems (1921)
- Included in: Poems, Volume Two: Ballads; New Poems. Tusitala Edition, 23. 35 vols. London: William Heinemann et al., [1924].
- Collected Poems. Ed. Janet Adam Smith (1950)
- Collected Poems. Ed. Janet Adam Smith. London: Rupert Hart Davis, 1950.
- The Collected Poems of Robert Louis Stevenson: Annotated Edition. Ed. Roger C. Lewis (2003)
Plays:
- [with William Ernest Henley] Three Plays (1892)
- Deacon Brodie
- Beau Austin
- Admiral Guinea
- Included in: Plays. Tusitala Edition, 24. 35 vols. London: William Heinemann et al., 1924.
Travel Writing:
- An Inland Voyage (1878)
- Included in: An Inland Voyage; Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes. Tusitala Edition, 17. 1924. 35 vols. London: William Heinemann et al., 1927.
- Edinburgh: Picturesque Notes (1878)
- Included in: Ethical Studies; Edinburgh: Picturesque Notes. Tusitala Edition, 26. 1924. 35 vols. London: William Heinemann et al., 1925.
- Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes (1879)
- Included in: An Inland Voyage; Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes. Tusitala Edition, 17. 1924. 35 vols. London: William Heinemann et al., 1927.
- Across the Plains (1879–80)
- Included in: The Amateur Emigrant; The Old & New Pacific Capitals; The Silverado Squatters; The Silverado Diary. Tusitala Edition, 18. 1924. 35 vols. London: William Heinemann et al., 1924.
- The Amateur Emigrant (1879–80)
- Included in: The Amateur Emigrant; The Old & New Pacific Capitals; The Silverado Squatters; The Silverado Diary. Tusitala Edition, 18. 1924. 35 vols. London: William Heinemann et al., 1924.
- The Silverado Squatters (1883)
- Included in: The Amateur Emigrant; The Old & New Pacific Capitals; The Silverado Squatters; The Silverado Diary. Tusitala Edition, 18. 1924. 35 vols. London: William Heinemann et al., 1924.
- The Old and New Pacific Capitals (1882)
- Included in: The Amateur Emigrant; The Old & New Pacific Capitals; The Silverado Squatters; The Silverado Diary. Tusitala Edition, 18. 1924. 35 vols. London: William Heinemann et al., 1924.
- In the South Seas (1896)
- In the South Seas. Tusitala Edition, 20. 1924. 35 vols. London: William Heinemann et al., 1924.
- Essays of Travel (1905)
- Dreams of Elsewhere: The Selected Travel Writings of Robert Louis Stevenson. Ed. June Skinner Sawyers (2002)
Collected Editions:
- The Edinburgh Edition. 28 vols (1894-1898)
- The Thistle Edition. 27 vols (Scribner's, 1912)
- The Vailima Edition. 26 vols (1921-1923)
- The Tusitala Edition. 35 vols. London: William Heinemann, Ltd.: In association with Chatto & Windus: Cassell & Company, Ltd.: and Longmans, Green & Company, 1923-1924.
- New Arabian Nights (1923)
- Treasure Island (1923)
- More New Arabian Nights: The Dynamiter (1923)
- Prince Otto: A Romance (1923)
- The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde; Fables; Other Stories & Fragments (1923)
- Kidnapped (1923)
- Catriona: A Sequel to “Kidnapped.” (1924)
- The Merry Men & Other Tales. Tusitala Edition, 8. 35 vols. London: William Heinemann et al., 1924.
- The Black Arrow: A Tale of the Two Roses (1924)
- The Master of Ballantrae: A Winter’s Tale (1924)
- The Wrong Box; The Body-Snatcher (1923)
- The Wrecker (1924)
- Island Nights’ Entertainments; The Misadventures of John Nicholson (1924)
- The Ebb-Tide: A Trio and Quartette; The Story of a Lie (1923)
- St. Ives: being The Adventures of a French Prisoner in England (1923)
- Weir of Hermiston; Some Unfinished Stories (1924)
- An Inland Voyage; Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes (1924)
- The Amateur Emigrant; The Old & New Pacific Capitals; The Silverado Squatters; The Silverado Diary (1924)
- Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin; Records of a Family of Engineers (1924)
- In the South Seas (1924)
- Vailima Papers (1924)
- Poems, Volume One: A Child’s Garden of Verses; Underwoods; Songs of Travel; Moral Emblems (1924)
- Poems, Volume Two: Ballads; New Poems (1924)
- Plays (1924)
- Virginibus Puerisque and Other Essays in Belles Lettres (1924)
- Ethical Studies; Edinburgh: Picturesque Notes (1924)
- Familiar Studies of Men and Books (1923)
- Essays Literary & Critical (1923)
- Memories and Portraits; Memoirs of Himself; Selections from his Notebook (1924)
- Further Memories (1923)
- The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson. Volume One. Ed. Sir Sidney Colvin (1924)
- The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson. Volume Two. Ed. Sir Sidney Colvin (1924)
- The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson. Volume Three. Ed. Sir Sidney Colvin (1924)
- The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson. Volume Four. Ed. Sir Sidney Colvin (1924)
- The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson. Volume Five. Ed. Sir Sidney Colvin (1924)
- The Skerryvore Edition. 30 vols (1924-1925)
- The New Edinburgh Edition (2014- )
Letters:
- Vailima Letters. Ed. Sidney Colvin. London: Methuen, 1895.
- Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson to His Family and Friends. Ed. Sidney Colvin. 4 vols. London/New York: Methuen/Scribner’s, 1899.
- The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson: A New Edition. Rearranged in Four Volumes with 150 New Letters. Ed. Sidney Colvin. 4 vols. London/New York: Methuen/Scribner’s, 1911.
- Letters. Ed. Sidney Colvin. 5 vols. Tusitala Edition, 31-35. London: Heinemann, 1924.
- Henry James and Robert Louis Stevenson: A Record of Friendship and Criticism. Ed. Janet Adam Smith. London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1948.
- RLS: Stevenson’s Letters to Charles Baxter. Ed. John De Lancey Ferguson & Marshall Waingrow. New Haven: Yale UP, 1956.
- R. L. Stevenson to J. M. Barrie: A Vailima Portrait. Introduction by Bradford A. Booth. Limited edition of 475 copies. With MS facsimile and 4 drawings by Isobel Strong. San Francisco: Book Club of California/ Grabhorn Press, 1962.
- Dear Stevenson: Letters from Andrew Lang to Robert Louis Stevenson with Five Letters from Stevenson to Lang. Ed. Marysa Demoor. Leuven: Peeters, 1990.
- M. Schwob/R.L. Stevenson: correspondences. Ed. François Escaig. Paris: Allia, 1992.
- The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson. Ed. B. A. Booth & E. Mehew. 8 vols. New Haven/London: Yale University Press, 1994-1995.
- Selected Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson. ed. Edward Mehew. New Haven/London: Yale University Press, 1997.
Secondary:
- Bathurst, Bella. The Lighthouse Stevensons: The Extraordinary Story of the Building of the Scottish Lighthouses by the Ancestors of Robert Louis Stevenson. 1999. Harper Perennial. London: HarperCollins Publishers, 2005.
- Harman, Claire. Robert Louis Stevenson: A Biography. 2005. Harper Perennial. London: HarperCollins Publishers, 2006.
- Holmes, Richard. Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1985.
- Rankin, Nicholas. Dead Man's Chest: Travels after Robert Louis Stevenson. 1987. London: Faber, 1988.
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- category - Scottish Literature: Authors
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