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  • Narrating Scotland: The Imagination of Robert Louis Stevenson
  • Ian Campbell
Narrating Scotland: The Imagination of Robert Louis Stevenson. By Barry Menikoff. Pp. xii, 233. ISBN 1 57003 568 7. Columbia, SC, University of South Carolina Press, 2005. $39.95.

It is not easy to find something both new and convincing to say about an author like Stevenson who has had so much attention in his lifetime and above all since his early death, but Dr Menikoff has found a genuinely new approach to the historical fiction and the complex attitudes RLS had to the early years in which he formed vivid memories which were to sustain him when writing, often from a distance, about the country he described as 'blessed, beastly'. Many of the details of Stevenson's Scottish youth are all too familiar – the childhood in oppressive New Town Edinburgh, the sickly boy and his nursemaid filling his [End Page 352] imagination with tales of Hell and horror, the enormous appetite for life contained in a body which scarcely could muster the energy to enjoy it. With the marvellous editing of the Letters by Henry Mehew the details of that life are sharper than ever and we can see more clearly the double existence in his mind, above all out of Scotland. Writing from Cuckfield, 'I cannot get over my astonishment—indeed, it increases every day—at the hopeless gulf that there is between England and Scotland, and English and the Scotch. Nothing is the same; and I feel as strange and outlandish here as I do in France or Germany'. This sense of doubleness, of distancing from the everyday, is a good key to Barry Menikoff's reading of Stevenson and his imagination.

Dr Menikoff starts from the stance Stevenson took to historical fact: "If the novel is historical then every detail of its representation must be accurate. Therefore he requires first-person accounts by people who were there...He clearly distinguishes between firsthand reports and secondhand narratives, and his preference is always to work with primary materials". A man who derided secondary sources as "picturesque vulgarization" needed the best of sources for his imagination, and Dr Menikoff contrasts the result with Scott's deliberate announcement to the reader of the historical setting, the differentness, the detail: for in Stevenson's work there are no introductions and explanatory notes (though he did consider adding them after the event). 'Comfortable with documents and skilled in adapting them to fiction', RLS used the materials he came across – in the University courses which are explored and described in this book, in his manuscript books (which in the Huntington Library in San Marino have been a lifetime study for Dr Menikoff) and in the Scottish historians he read and researched through correspondence with friends and colleagues. The Highlands area particular focus of interest: the country of the poor (Stevenson was sensitive to the absolute destitution which lay behind much of the picturesque scenery), the country of the brave (and often those trapped in historical circumstances over which they had no control), the clan Gregor, criminal law, Robert Macgregor, the Appin Murder, the trial of James Stewart, the topography and history of the Bass Rock. This is a book about specifics, and the originality lies in the way in which it takes novels (Kidnapped above all) which have cast a general glamour over Scottish history, and applies the discipline of the historical particular to Stevenson's treatment. The novelist comes out of it very well: a rigorous writer, with a sensitivity to period and detail, and at the same time a need for ready cash and a realisation that he was writing successful fiction, not specific Scottish history.

Good illustration, a wealth of annotation and very readable discussion make this a book to take the reader back to Stevenson and find someone quite unexpected, an author who had done more homework than many realise, and from it made great fiction.

Ian Campbell
University of Edinburgh
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