The Complete Personal Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson
edited by Trenton B. Olsen.
Routledge, 530 pp., $160.00; $52.95 (paper)
Known today as a writer of adventure stories for youth (Treasure Island, Kidnapped) or for his horror classic The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, or even for his light-poetry collection A Child’s Garden of Verses, in his day Robert Louis Stevenson was celebrated equally for his essays. He wrote more than a hundred, of which seventy might be classified as personal. Edmund Gosse argued that these personal essays “reveal him in his best character” and that “if Stevenson is not the most exquisite of the English essayists, we know not to whom that praise is due.” Richard Le Gallienne predicted that “Stevenson’s final fame will be that of an essayist.” Once upon a time his essays were routinely offered as models in American college composition courses. Selections of them—from William Lyon Phelps’s Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson (1906) to The Lantern-Bearers and Other Essays (1988), astutely assembled by Jeremy Treglown—have sought to champion his excellence in the genre.
It has not been an easy sell. In part that may be because essays have never commanded the interest or respect that fiction has, but it may also be because the reading public has resisted relinquishing its settled idea about Stevenson as a romantic fantasist. Now Trenton B. Olsen, an associate professor of English at Brigham Young University, has pulled together the most copious selection so far, reproducing not only Stevenson’s dozen or so celebrated essays but also his uncollected published essays and his undergraduate ones. All this gives us the chance to assess the range and stature of a writer who, according to Olsen, was in his day “considered the most successful essayist of his generation.”
Stevenson was born in 1850 in Edinburgh, Scotland, into a distinguished family of lighthouse engineers. His father, Thomas Stevenson, had invented an ocular device for lighthouses and hoped that his son would go into the family business. But Robert showed little interest in engineering, cutting classes at the University of Edinburgh,
