The Double in Decline

Abstract

The representative figure in the history of the literary double in the last two decades of the nineteenth century is Robert Louis Stevenson. A writer of romances par excellence, he was, as Edwin M. Eigner has fascinatingly demonstrated, deeply imbued with the traditions of both the principal lines of Romantic fiction, that of the entertainment and the sensational romance, and that of the visionary or idealistic novel (though these are not, it must be said, always so clearly distinguishable from one another as Eigner seems sometimes to suggest).¹ No aspect of Romantic fiction attracted Stevenson so much, or was so germane to the concerns natural to his temperament, as the pervasive duality that was common to both traditions.