Stevenson and the Historical Romance

Abstract

Frank Swinnerton’s critical study of Robert Louis Stevenson, published in the autumn of 1914, just after the Great War began, alarmed lovers of Stevenson (who had died only twenty years before). Swinnerton had noted that Stevenson’s ‘charm’, made manifest in the ease with which he made and kept friends who acted as counsellors and agents (‘No man was ever richer in well-wishers’),¹ interfered with the development of an objective view of the merits of his fiction. That in itself was a disturbing observation. But what Stevenson’s ‘extraordinarily good friends’ did not want was precisely the kind of ‘objective’ view of Stevenson’s creative accomplishments that led Swinnerton to complain of the ‘lack of central or unifying idea’ and the ‘poverty of imagined character’ in the romances, and to conclude that, ‘although their literary quality is much higher, the romances — with the possible exception of Kidnapped — are inferior to the work of Captain Marryat.’²