In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Robert Louis Stevenson by David Robb
  • Duncan Milne
Robert Louis Stevenson. By David Robb. Tavistock: Northcote, 2016. ISBN 9780746309575. 157pp. pbk. £14.99.

In this concise yet extensive volume, David Robb provides an overview of what is described as the ‘whole range’ of Stevenson’s bibliography in prose fiction. The book is structured chronologically rather than thematically, systematically progressing through Stevenson’s work, both major and minor. The equal attention given to both the well-trodden territory of Stevenson’s better-known fiction and to lesser-known obscurities such as ‘The Misadventures of John Nicholson’ offers a far clearer perspective on Stevenson’s writing career than is usually afforded by such studies, whose selectiveness tends to obscure the diversity and eclecticism of Stevenson’s writing.

Robb’s study can best be described as a summary of Stevenson criticism, rather than a new investigation in its own right. There is no developed central thesis beyond gesturing to Stevenson’s variety and suggesting that less distinction should be drawn between Stevenson’s ‘serious’ fiction and his lighter work and juvenile fiction. These sentiments are far from radical, and have been informing Stevenson studies for decades, reaching an apogee of sorts in the sonorous declamations of Alan Sandison’s Robert Louis Stevenson and the Appearance of Modernism. Robb, by contrast, has the wisdom to tread more lightly in his attempt to take all of Stevenson seriously, and the result is that familiar conceits are made fresh and convincing. The confidence of Robb’s tone, that is to say, makes his claims for the worth of Stevenson affirmative, rather than defensive. Likewise, the enthusiasm for his subject does much to obscure the rather directionless course the monograph takes. Robb is keen to make a virtue of this, however, describing his ‘resistance’ to ‘trying to impose too simple a pattern on the picture of [Stevenson’s] career’. This would have been a theme worth developing in detail: recognition that the model of Stevenson as maturing from a simple, indeed frivolous, writer of light fiction to a brooding progenitor of modernism is a decidedly stale one which overlooks the complexity of even his earliest work. Though Robb touches on this idea frequently in his consideration of individual works, it never quite coalesces into the sustained argument which would give coherence to the book.

However, there is much work of value here. It is in the responses to individual texts that the abundant strengths of this study are most clearly [End Page 173] apparent. Robb makes vivid the unique character of each piece and often finds a fresh approach to the well-known works. His discussion, for example, of Treasure Island is particularly strong, a hard feat for such a frequently discussed book. Equally, his discussion of ‘The Misadventures of John Nicholson’ is highly rewarding. Robb reads John Nicholson as a petted child, with the structure of the plot conforming to an infantile fantasy, whose core is in what Robb describes as ‘the hilariously juvenile effusion’ of Nicholson’s letter telling his father that he is running away from home and ‘you will never hear of me again’. Robb describes this creation ‘of an adult world through a child’s sensibility’ as an example of writing which ‘is simultaneously so solidly real and so surrealistically improbable’. This paradoxical intermingling is, Robb avers, the essence of Stevenson. This is an excellent insight which could have fruitfully been extended into a broader discussion and used in the analysis of all of Stevenson’s fiction: closing the circle between New Arabian Nights (1882) and ‘The Beach of Falesa’ (1892) by more explicitly stating that such simultaneous realism and absurdity characterise both would have been a valuable interpretation, and one which would open up a range of possible critical conversations. Instead, Robb leaves this as an inference to be made by the reader, rather than an argument expounded by the author.

That there are convincing readings present here should not, however, be overlooked. Alongside these new insights, Robb is not averse to attempting to overturn several of the received opinions which haunt Stevenson studies. The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is discussed in detail, and Robb...

pdf

Share