Robert Louis Stevenson: Writer of Boundaries

Tontines, Tontine Insurance, and Commercial Culture: Stevenson and Osbourne's The Wrong Box

Tontines, Tontine Insurance, and Commercial Culture Stevenson and Osbourne’s The Wrong Box              In  while they were staying at Saranac Lake in upstate New York, Robert Louis Stevenson encouraged his nineteen-year-old stepson Lloyd Osbourne to type away at the humorous book first called The Finsbury Tontine , then A Game of Bluff, and eventually The Wrong Box. In his letters Stevenson called the work-in-progress “so damned funny and absurd . . ., the merest farce, an Arabian Night on the scale of a novel” (early March ; Ltrs : ), as well as “a sort of insane police story” (ca. March , ; Ltrs : ). It is also a story about the catastrophic decline of a family business and that family’s desperate effort to recover its investment. And it is, as Stevenson noted, “a Tontine story” (Ltrs : )—a tontine being a speculative annuity based on the longevity of a designated individual . The surviving members of a tontine group are paid an annual income that increases as other members of the group die. Although popular in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, by  the tontine was pretty much a thing of the past; “tontine dividend” life insurance policies , however, had become extremely popular in the United States and Britain, and these policies embodied some of the speculative principles of the earlier tontines, including a gamble on longevity. Tontine insurance policies had become familiar emblems of many of the least desirable aspects of Victorian commercial culture: its greed, its preference for speculation over saving, its willingness to take advantage of the many and the vulnerable while enriching the few, and its substitution of a cash nexus for values of family and community. In their comic novel, Stevenson and Osbourne focus on the idea of the tontine as a counterweight to the catastrophic decline of a family business. They depict high-stakes risk and skullduggery, portray a family struggling to keep its business afloat, call attention to the replacement of family feeling by a cash nexus, and anatomize the way crimes are contemplated or committed for the sake of an inheritance. In TheWrong Box, the tontine idea evokes the suspect values of Victorian commercial culture and is even more directly relevant to this than we might suppose from the text itself, which whimsically presents the tontine at the outset as a historical curiosity (“its fine, sportsmanlike character endeared it to our grandfathers”; Stevenson and Osbourne : ). Indeed, a very real contemporary manifestation of that idea, tontine life insurance, is the specter haunting the book. In , Lorenzo Tonti developed his scheme for sponsorship by the French state of a life annuity. According to his original “tontine” scheme, a group of individuals would each subscribe a specific amount, without regard to age or gender, and each year the interest produced would be divided among the subscribers remaining alive, until the death of the last nominee , when the principal would be surrendered to the state. Tontines thus were a speculation on an individual’s longevity, producing predictable and notorious results. The last survivor of one of the French tontines, Charlotte Barbier, was the subject of much publicity; at the age of ninety-six she was enjoying—if that is the right word—an income of , livres derived from her original subscription of only  livres (O’Donnell : ). Nor was her case unusual; the last survivor of many tontines was frequently a nonagenarian with a fabulous income.1 Life insurance antedates the tontine. Early life insurance was associated with marine insurance; the lives of voyagers were insured to pay either their heirs, or, more usually, their creditors. Originally, then, life insurance involved a limited-term speculation or a hedge for creditors against a speculative loan. Until passage of the Gambling Act of , in fact, insurance could be written as a pure wager on the lives of public men like Sir Robert Walpole or George II. The act required for the first time that the person purchasing a policy have some “insurable interest” in the insured (Zelizer : ). In the eighteenth century, forms of more conventional life insurance developed as well as tontine schemes. The Amicable Society for a Perpetual Insurance Office was granted a charter in Britain in . It insured lives “perpetually” rather than only for a specific term of years, though, since actuarial statistics were not yet widely understood, it assessed the same  Pleasures of Reading, Writing, Popular Culture premium for all ages within the range it...