Robert Louis Stevenson and Joseph Conrad: Writers of Transition (review)

All of the fifteen (including the introduction) essays in this book—the result of the 2004 third biennial Stevenson conference, which was held in Edinburgh—explore the connections between Stevenson and Conrad. These connections have often been ignored, even by Conrad himself. Yet, as these pieces illustrate, Stevenson is in many ways Conrad's "secret sharer." For, as the three editors of the volume put it in their preface, besides the fact that the two writers often favored exotic locations in their work, they also had in common "a will to modernism, imperial skepticism, and even Stevenson's influence on Conrad." And in her introduction, Linda Dryden points out that although Stevenson died before he could have read any of Conrad's work, the two writers have a similar vision, which includes the double and the darkness within and the fact that they both—and not just Conrad, as is often assumed—cross over from the Victorian to the modern, a claim also made about Stevenson by Alan Sandison in his Robert Louis Stevenson and the Appearance of Modernism in 1996 (and reviewed in ELT, 40.3 [1997], 332–35).

In the first part of the book, "Writers of Transition," Richard Ambrosini, Eric Massie, Nathalie Jaëck, and Laurence Davies discuss similarities and differences in both writers. Ambrosini finds that Stevenson "pioneered an experimentation that was continued by Conrad." However, according to him, Conrad's colonial work has achieved more "resonance with future readers" than Stevenson's largely because he wrote retrospectively about other cultures and therefore was able to mythologize them to some extent, while Stevenson's South Seas works were based on eyewitness impressions registered on the spot and are therefore closer to a journalistic immediacy. But, according to Ambrosini, Stevenson's accounts are very valuable and cannot be ignored if we want to see the late-nineteenth-century colonial experience truly. Eric Massie's analysis of Stevenson's The Ebb-Tide and Conrad's Victory claims that Stevenson's decline in status around 1900 was owing to his challenging of the racial status quo. Massie sensibly states that Stevenson does not have to be put down to advance Conrad, or vice versa. Both writers' works "emphasize imperialist exploitation" of natural resources, and Conrad's characters resemble Stevenson's. Most of all, both writers are "concerned with the collapse of certainties" in the imperial project. Jaëck elegantly emphasizes the role of the sea in Stevenson's and Conrad's works and the way that the sea itself can be used as a metaphor for their own writing. She finds that their fiction, including Treasure Island, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Lord Jim, and Heart of Darkness, are indeterminate like the sea because they do not arrive at a final destination and repudiate stable identities. Davies very usefully analyzes several different types of doubles that he finds in nineteenth-century writing, including works by Poe, Dickens and Twain as well as by Conrad and Stevenson. He emphasizes the societal dimensions of "The Secret Sharer" and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, finding that social realities and the extraordinary coexist in these stories.

In the second part, "Writing the Empire," the colonial works of both writers receive special scrutiny. Andrea White claims that Hyde is like a foreign immigrant in Jekyll's body and therefore represents the other side of London's imperial grandeur, while the young captain in "The Secret Sharer" harbors a Hyde in his need for making money, which displaces his love of the sea and ports for their own sake. For White, both stories "suggest the darkness at the heart of the imperial center" at least as much or more than they do the darkness in foreign lands. Monica Bungaro defends both Stevenson and Conrad from the charge that they are colonialists. She finds that In the South Seas and Heart of Darkness reveal the similarities as much as the differences...