RLS & the Colonial Imagination

ELT 49 : 2 2006 in all his work"—namely, "drink, noises, dialect and railways," categories whose element of arbitrariness Gatrell acknowledges by indicating that "[o]ther topics might also have been chosen: fate, work, class, town and country." Discussion of these other categories overflows into an accompanying website (www.english.uga.edu/wessex/) containing material too extensive for incorporation into the published text. Web-based documentation of textual variants and allied notes are accompanied by a caveat that indicates their status as work in progress: "These notes come with a health-warning. They are raw unsorted, un-proof-read data, with occasional commentary which may or may not be illuminating. They are offered here because a proportion of them presents evidence concerning Hardy's changing ideas about Wessex unavailable elsewhere. In the future they may be vacuumed free of error and suspect opinion." There is a tacit invitation here to collaboration—in fact Gatrell indicates in his preface to the book his welcoming of corrections to website errors—giving to the whole composite project a tone of energetic and generous-spirited engagement with material for which Gatrell's passion is palpable, and to whose source, Thomas Hardy, he pays moving tribute in a final paragraph that identifies the extent to which Hardy's "Vision of Wessex" provides the lens through which a modern onlooker still reads the actual Dorset landscape. Given this emphasis on sight, it is a pity that Palgrave Macmillan seemed unable to match Gatrell's own Hardy-inspired visual acuity. Essential illustrations are cramped and muddy, place-names on maps illegible, the production quality giving the overall impression that work calling for sophisticated editorial and design skills may have been done on the cheap. When one thinks of what Thomas Hardy and the scholars who work on him have given to Macmillan over the years, one would have thought more of the authorial insight and élan that distinguish this important and challenging study might have rubbed off on its publisher. KEITH WILSON University of Ottawa RLS & the Colonial Imagination Ann C. Colley. Robert Louis Stevenson and the Colonial Imagination. Burlington: Ashgate, 2004. viii + 217 pp. $79.95 ANN COLLEYS Robert Louis Stevenson and the Colonial Imagination is a valuable addition to our knowledge of Stevenson's last years in the South Seas. Using new documentation that she has found in 218 BOOK REVIEWS the London Missionary Society Archives at the University of London's School of Oriental and African Studies, as well as documents and photos in several other libraries and museums, she is able to add a wealth of detail and nuance to what we know about his relationship to the islands and to the colonial enterprise. To her credit, she avoids the simplistic and prosecutorial language of most studies of colonialism written in the past thirty years, and insists that such language is completely inaccurate when applied to a writer as complex as Stevenson. She disputes the claim that Stevenson completely rejected missionary activity and colonialism, commenting that his admiration for the missionaries , despite his occasional criticism of them, is an "uncomfortable endorsement for those who prefer to think of Stevenson as consistently exempting himself from the paternalism of his colonial surroundings and in the South Seas writing fiction that subverted the tenets of colonialism . Like all of us, Stevenson was partially the product of his class, time, and circumstances." He saw both the advantages and disadvantages of Western involvement in the islands. In essence, then, Colley has given us a revisionary view of Stevenson's life and work that allows us to see him in all of his complexity. She is able to document his nuanced attitude toward missionaries, native dress, the collection of native artifacts, the use of photography and the magic lantern, and colonial politics in Samoa. To all of these topics, she brings new, often illuminating, information, as when she discusses his intervention on behalf of native chieftains, or clarifies his ideas about the authenticity of artifacts or souvenirs. Even his precise use of the magic lantern during shows is detailed. (From one of the many asides in this book, I learned that magic lanterns used lime to produce light, thus undoubtedly...