Robert Louis Stevenson: Writer of Boundaries

Stevenson and Popular Entertainment

Stevenson and Popular Entertainment               Like our own, the late-Victorian public was fixated with popular entertainment . As the Scottish lawyer and man of letters Alexander Innes Shand explained in Blackwood’s Magazine in August : “[T]he ferment of thought, the restless craving for intellectual excitement of some kind, have been stimulated; till now, in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, we are being driven along at high-pressure pace; and it is impossible for any one who is recalcitrant to stop himself” (Shand : –). Shand’s hyperbole was not unwarranted. These years saw the rise of the music-hall, of organized leisure travel, of mass sports and royal spectacles, of a capitalized newspaper and magazine press, as well as revolutionary innovations in visual and audio technology (Bailey ). “Like us,” notes Matthew Sweet, “the Victorians loved staring at things with their mouths open” (Sweet : ). For literary historians, the late nineteenth century marks the definitive transition to an era of mass sales and new audiences, of periodical serialization and syndication, of celebrity authors and agents, and of modern marketing methods. In the vanguard of its popular new genres were the imperial romance, the detective story, and the sci-fi fantasy. Stevensonians need little reminding of the importance of these factors for Stevenson’s own literary project and its reception. In this I reconsider how Stevenson treats this subject in the context of contemporary views of popular entertainment as a cultural and social problem. In particular, I reconstruct the case (or cases) that Stevenson, it seems to me, is implicitly making for popular entertainment as a meaningful and valuable activity.  Although my primary concern is not be the direct impact of various forms of popular entertainment on Stevenson’s writing, their influence is clearly discernible throughout his work as a rich source of analogies, settings, and experiences. Consider photography, for example: in “The Manse,” he describes how “memories, like undeveloped negatives, lay dormant in [my grandfather’s] mind” (Stevenson : ); and in “Talk and Talkers,” he compares his cousin Bob to a “shaken kaleidoscope” (Stevenson a, ). Stevenson’s literary identity, as a substantial body of secondary literature now attests, was constituted by very different impulses and contradictory experiences, and the reception of his work, in turn, was tied to the shifting tastes of a markedly heterogeneous readership. In his treatment of popular entertainment, I propose, his status as a writer of boundaries appears most clearly, ranging as it does across the fields of imagination and commodi fication, childhood and maturity, as well as the class and national politics of popular and mass culture. Stevenson’s status as a popular writer has always been fraught with tension . In his own lifetime, the tension drew its force, at least in part, from the steady growth of various forms of popular entertainment, a growth that paralleled the extension of the franchise in Britain and a rise in real earnings and leisure time, as well as a series of flashpoints of social unrest and high-profile investigations into the problems attendant upon rapid urbanization. Rightly or wrongly, popular entertainment and popular culture appeared to many observers as not merely objects of capitalist modernization but also catalysts of sudden convulsions in the body politic, the motive force of an ongoing transformation of the social landscape. Thus in an essay titled “On a Possible Popular Culture” that appeared in the Contemporary Review in July ,Thomas Wright (“The Journeyman Engineer”) portrayed Britain as facing an historic challenge to invent for the working class a wholesome and integrated culture capable of withstanding the evils of the pub and debased titillation of organs such as the Police Gazette. In his concluding words Wright laid a weighty cultural imperative upon the nation’s authors, calling on them to forge a “higher, healthier, simpler culture . . . the culture to be wrought by bringing the masses of the people to a knowledge of the boundless treasures that lie open to them in the glorious literature of their own country . . . . [to] make men more valuable to themselves and to society; better men, better citizens, ay, and even better workmen” (Wright : –). Sentiments of this kind characterize numerous other contributions to the debate during these years. Walter Montague Gattie lamented the baneful Donovan: Stevenson and Popular Entertainment  effect on women of ephemeral literature and popular sport, and urged pragmatism : “[W]e have extended the literary franchise, and those who would succeed must learn to...