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St. Ives

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A Robert Louis Stevenson Companion

Part of the book series: Palgrave Macmillan Literary Companions ((LICOM))

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Abstract

When Stevenson died in December 1894 he left uncompleted two novels on which he had been working during the preceding years, St. Ives and Weir of Hermiston. St. Ives was begun in January 1898, initially as a diversion from one of his periodic attacks of illness, and was dictated to his stepdaughter Isobel Strong at intervals until September 1894 when, characteristically, he broke it off in a mood of dissatisfaction. His wife recorded later: ‘St. Ives was written entirely to dictation; not continuously, but at intervals, in conjunction with Hermiston. My husband would work on one book until he was tired or his mood changed, when he would take up the other.’60 Working in this way he completed thirty chapters of St. Ives, latterly with diminishing enthusiasm as his interest flagged. The book was completed by A. T. (later Sir Arthur) Quiller-Couch and published posthumously in 1898 under the title St. Ives: Being the Adventures of a French Prisoner in England. The story, written throughout in the first person, narrates the experiences of a French prisoner of war, Anne St. Ives. Incarcerated in Edinburgh Castle at the time of the Napoleonic wars, the prisoner succeeds in escaping from the Castle and makes his way south to his uncle in England, pursued by a variety of followers intent on his recapture. Since he is a prime suspect in a murder — an affair of honour committed inside the Castle — he is hunted by both civil and military authorities. The plot hinges on his continual attempts to elude his pursuers, to clear his name, and to win the hand of the woman he loves, Flora Gilchrist.

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Notes

  1. ‘My First Book’, Idler, August 1894. Reprinted in Essays in the Art of Writing.

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  2. Ibid.

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  3. See, for example, Robert Kiely, ‘Adventure as Boy’s Daydream’, in Robert Louis Stevenson and the Fiction of Adventure (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1964)

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  4. W. W. Robson, ‘The Sea Cook: a Study in the Art of Robert Louis Stevenson’ in On the Novel (London: J. M. Dent, 1971).

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  5. RLS to Henley, October 1884.

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  6. Great Expectations, Ch. 2: ‘I was in mortal terror of the young man who wanted my heart and liver; I was in mortal terror of my interlocutor with the iron leg.’

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  7. ‘My First Book’, op.cit.

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  8. RLS to Henley, May 1883.

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  9. ‘My First Book’, op.cit.

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  10. ‘The Sea Cook: a Study in the Art of Robert Louis Stevenson’, op.cit.

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  11. RLS to Sidney Colvin, 9 March 1884.

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  12. RLS to W. H. Low, December 1883.

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  13. Cf. Letters and reviews quoted in Maixner, Robert Louis Stevenson: The Critical Heritage, pp. 176–87.

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  14. Furnas, p. 217.

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  15. Ibid., p. 218.

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  16. RLS to J. A. Symonds, spring 1886.

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  17. The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Ch. 49.

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  18. See Robert M. Philmus, ‘The Satiric Ambivalence of The Island of Doctor Moreau’ in Science Fiction Studies, 23, vol. 8, March 1981.

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  19. RLS to his father, 25 January 1886.

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  20. Cf. ‘Memoirs of an Islet’ in Memories and Portraits.

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  21. Cf. David Lodge, ‘Tono-Bungay and the Condition of England’, in Language of Fiction (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966).

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  22. Henry James, ‘Robert Louis Stevenson’, Century Magazine, April 1888.

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  23. H. B. Baildon, Robert Louis Stevenson: A Life Study in Criticism (London: Chatto & Windus, 1901)p. 230.

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  24. Quoted in Balfour, p. 233.

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  25. September 1886. Cf. Stevenson’s essay ‘Some Gentlemen in Fiction’, Scribner’s Magazine, June 1888: ‘In one of my books, and in one only, the characters took the bit in their teeth; all at once, they became detached from the flat paper, they turned their backs on me and walked off bodily; and from that time my task was stenographic — it was they who spoke, it was they who wrote the remainder of the story.’ See also John Fowles, The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Ch. 13.

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  26. RLS to S. R. Crockett, 17 May 1893: ‘I shall never see Auld Reekie [Edinburgh]. I shall never set my foot again upon the heather. Here I am until I die, and here will I be buried.’

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  27. G. E. Brown, A Book of RLS, p. 49.

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  28. James to RLS, 21 October 1893; Vernon Lee, Contemporary Review, September 1895, pp. 404–7.

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  29. James to RLS, 21 October 1893.

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  30. Catriona, Ch. 20: ‘And till the end of time your folk (who are not yet used with the duplicity of life and men) will struggle as I did, and make heroical resolves, and take long risks.’

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  31. RLS to Colvin, October 1883.

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  32. Quoted in F. Masson (ed.), I Can Remember Robert Louis Stevenson (London: Chambers, 1922) pp. 206–8.

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  33. RLS to William Archer, March 1894.

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  34. See, for example, V. B. Lamb, The Betrayal of Richard III (London: Coram Publishers, 1959);

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  35. Josephine Tey, The Daughter of Time (London: Peter Davies, 1951);

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  36. Paul Murray Kendall, Richard III (London: Allen & Unwin, 1955).

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  37. The Times, 25 May 1919.

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  38. ‘The Genesis of The Master of Ballantrae’ reprinted in Essays in the Art of Writing.

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  39. RLS to Colvin, 24 December 1887.

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  40. Letters of Henry James, ed. Percy Lubbock (1920) vol. I, p. 157;

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  41. W. E. Henley: ‘A Masterpiece in Grime’, Scots Observer, 12 October 1889.

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  42. RLS to Colvin, 24 December 1887.

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  43. Quoted in Kiely, op.cit., p. 204.

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  44. RLS to Adelaide Boodle, December 1887.

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  45. Cf. H. G. Wells, The Time Machine, Ch. vii: ‘The Time Machine was gone! At once, like a lash across the face, came the possibility of losing my own age, of being left helpless in this strange new world. The bare thought of it was an actual physical sensation. I could feel it grip me at the throat and stop my breathing.’

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  46. The influence of Poe on The Master of Ballantrae is remarkable throughout. There is, for example, the antagonism between the two brothers (‘William Wilson’); the voyage of the Nonesuch in Ch. 9 (cf. The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym)’, and the melodramatic ending which hinges on the idea of burial alive (‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ and ‘The Premature Burial’).

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  47. RLS to James, March 1888.

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  48. RLS to Colvin, 14 January 1889.

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  49. David Daiches, Robert Louis Stevenson and his World, p. 7 4.

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  50. Swearingen, op.cit., p. 126.

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  51. Preface to Tusitala Edition.

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  52. Epilogue to The Wrecker.

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  53. RLS to Colvin, 24 October 1891.

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  54. G. E. Brown, A Book of RLS, p. 285.

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  55. The Wrecker, Ch. 10.

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  56. RLS to Colvin, 24 October 1891.

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  57. G. B. Stern, Preface to RLS: An Omnibus.

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  58. RLS to Colvin, 25 April 1893.

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  59. RLS to Colvin, 29 May 1893.

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  60. ‘In Defence of Ebb-Tide’, New York Critic, November 1894.

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  61. Jenni Calder, Introduction to Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Other Stories (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1979).

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  62. Cf. H. G. Wells, The Island of Doctor Moreau, Ch. 14: ‘They build themselves their dens, gather fruit, and pull herbs — marry even. But I can see through it all, see into their very souls, and see there nothing but the souls of beasts, beasts that perish — anger, and the lusts to live and gratify themselves.’ (Wells may have derived some of the details of Moreau’s island from New Island in The Ebb-Tide.)

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  63. Kiely, op.cit., p. 181.

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  64. Preface to Tusitala Edition.

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  65. RLS to R. A. M. Stevenson, 17 June 1894.

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  66. Isobel Strong and Lloyd Osbourne, Vailima Memories of R. L. Stevenson (London: Constable, 1903) pp. 69–71.

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  67. Arnold Bennett, Journals (1932) vol. i, p. 206.

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  68. RLS to R. A. M. Stevenson, June 1894. The phrase refers to Heathercat, another uncompleted novel, but could equally well be applied to Weir of Hermiston.

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  69. See Compton Mackenzie, Robert Louis Stevenson (London: Morgan-Grampian Books, 1968) appendix.

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  70. For a discussion on the relationship between Pip and Orlick see H. M. Daleski, Dickens and the Art of Analogy (London: Faber & Faber, 1970) pp. 242–4.

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  71. Balfour, op.cit., Ch. 3.

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  72. Saturday Review, 13 June 1896. Included in Parrinder and Philmus (eds), H. G. Wells’s Literary Criticism (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1980) pp. 99–103.

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Authors
  1. J. R. Hammond
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© 1984 J. R. Hammond

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Hammond, J.R. (1984). St. Ives. In: A Robert Louis Stevenson Companion. Palgrave Macmillan Literary Companions. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-06080-1_15

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