A Friendship in Letters

Robert Louis Stevenson & J. M. Barrie

Michael Shaw, Michael Shaw

• Publisher: Sandstone Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781913207038
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Letters
• Index: Literature

In A Friendship in Letters, Dr. Michael Shaw brings together correspondence between two of Scotland's most famous writers for the first time.
Though they never met, Robert Louis Stevenson and J. M. Barrie developed a warm friendship, revealed in these amusing and gossipy letters, with vivid commentary on each other's literary work. Until recently, Barrie's side of the correspondence was presumed lost by his biographers. This epistolary volume reunites Barrie's letters with Stevenson's and contextualises them through an engaging introduction and a series of appendices, including a delightful short story by Barrie.

The Letters

1

Vailima, Samoa

[c. 18] February 1892

Dear Mr Barrie,

This is at least the third letter I have written you, but my correspondence has a bad habit of not getting so far as the post. That which I possess of manhood turns pale before the business of the address and envelope. But I hope to be more fortunate with this: for, besides the usual and often recurrent desire to thank you for your work—you are one of four that have come to the front since I was watching and had a corner of my own to watch,1 and there is no reason, unless it be in these mysterious tides that ebb and flow, and make and mar and murder the works of poor scribblers, why you should not do work of the best order. The tides have borne away my sentence, of which I was weary at any rate, and between authors, I may allow myself so much freedom as to leave it pending. We are both Scots besides, and I suspect both rather Scotty Scots; my own Scotchness tends to intermittency, but is at times erisypelitous2—if that be rightly spelt. Lastly, I have gathered we had both made our stages in the metropolis of the winds: our Virgil’s “grey metropolis,” and I count that a lasting bond. No place so brands a man.3

Finally, I feel it a sort of duty to you to report progress. This may be an error, but I believed I detected your hand in an article—it may be an illusion, it may have been by one of those industrious insects who catch up and reproduce the handling of each emergent man—but I’ll still hope it was yours—and hope it may please you to hear that the continuation of Kidnapped is under way.4 I have not yet got to Alan, so I do not know if he is still alive, but David seems to have a kick or two in his shanks. I was pleased to see how the Anglo-Saxon theory fell into the trap: I gave my Lowlander a Gaelic name, and even commented on the fact in the text; yet almost all critics recognised in David and Alan a Saxon and a Celt. I know not about England; in Scotland at least, where Gaelic was spoken in Fife little over the century ago, and in Galloway not much earlier, I deny there exists such a thing as a pure Saxon, and I think it more than questionable if there be such a thing as a pure Celt.5

But what have you to do with this ? and what have I ? Let us continue to inscribe our little bits of tales, and let the heathen rage !—Yours, with sincere interest in your career,

Robert Louis Stevenson

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1. It is not entirely clear who the three other writers that Stevenson refers to here are, although Rudyard Kipling was most likely one of them.

2. Erysipelas is a potentially serious bacterial infection.

3. The ‘grey metropolis’ referenced here is Edinburgh. Stevenson was born, raised and educated in Edinburgh, and, like Barrie, he had been a student at Edinburgh University. Both men wrote non-fiction books on Edinburgh: Stevenson published a series of essays on Edinburgh’s geography and history, Edinburgh: Picturesque Notes (1878), and Barrie wrote An Edinburgh Eleven (1889), which provides biographical accounts of eleven contemporaries (one of which was Stevenson).

4. According to Booth and Mehew, this is a reference to Barrie’s article ‘My Favourite Magazine’, published in the British Weekly on 20 August 1891, under Barrie’s pseudonym Gavin Ogilvy [The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson, VII, p. 238]. Here, Barrie calls for a new literary magazine, one that would publish ‘The Further Remarkable Adventures of Alan Breck’ (in other words, a sequel to Kidnapped). Barrie’s wish was fulfilled: Stevenson published Catriona in 1893.

5. For more on Stevenson’s interest in Celtic and Saxon identity in Scotland, see Julia Reid’s Robert Louis Stevenson, Science, and the Fin de Siècle (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), pp. 129, 158.

2

Kirriemuir
Scotland

May 8, 18921

Dear Mr Stevenson,

I was more than very glad to have your letter. You are not aware that it is the second.2 The first is in the desk I am writing on—an eight year old letter that gave me mighty pleasure at the time, though the subject was only Messrs. Burke and Hare.3 In London later I had romantic schemes for getting inside your walls at Bournemouth—so vivid that I still feel as if they had come off.4 One, I remember, was to shoot black arrows (with couplets) at your windows, and another was to startle you in the still night by the sound of a stick that might be Pew’s coming nearer and nearer.5

Curiously enough I don’t know if I did write this article you speak of. If it appeared some time ago, I did. That is to say I have written a good many articles or the like calling for the continuation of “Kidnapped”, but have written no articles at all for the last year. That it is on the way at last is fine news to me, but don’t kill Alan or we shall all be sulky, i.e. if he is dead at the start. Meanwhile, I think the “Master of Ballantrae” the best thing you have done—I mean the Scotch part of it only. I felt when reading it that the rest of us had better go and turn ploughmen. The second half, however, seemed to me not worth your while.6 This is a quiet little place I write from, the place I call Thrums, where I live half the year and go like a clock.7 Conan Doyle, whose work you may know, was here lately (taking amateur photographs—spent most of his time developing them in the pantry) and we were making up a list of the best short stories in English.8 Very unscientific, we gave no writer more than one, but I wonder how they strike you. Here they are, not in any order of merit: Bret Harte’s “Tennessee’s Partner”, Scott’s “Wandering Willie’s Tale”, your own “Pavilion on the Links”, Kipling’s “Man Who Would be King”, Hardy’s “Three Strangers”, Lytton’s “Haunters and the Haunted”, Q’s “Old Aeson.”9 I suppose there should be a Dickens. Meredith’s “Chloe” is not quite what one means by a short story. I am at Box Hill sometimes,10 and there is a good deal of talk about you in the “chalet.” I wish I was this letter now that I might see you in the flesh. That I hope may be managed some day.

Yours very truly

J. M. Barrie

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1. Although this letter is dated 8 May 1891, it is very clearly a response made to Stevenson’s previous letter from February 1892. Barrie himself notes in Letter 8 that he sent this letter on the day he found out that James Winter, the fiancé of his sister, Margaret (‘Maggie’), had died, which was 8 May 1892. Tragically, Winter was flung from a horse that Barrie had gifted to him.

2. The whereabouts of this letter from Stevenson to Barrie from around 1884 (if it still exists) is unknown.

3. In 1884, Stevenson penned a short story on Burke and Hare, titled ‘The Body Snatcher’. It was first published in the Pall Mall Gazette ‘Christmas extra’ in December 1884.

4. Between 1884 and 1887, Stevenson lived in Bournemouth with his wife, Fanny, in a house called Skerryvore, named after the great light­house built off the west coast of Scotland by the Stevenson family firm.

5. Pew and the ‘black arrows’ are references to Stevenson novels: Blind Pew is one of the most fearsome characters in Treasure Island (1883), and Stevenson wrote a novel titled The Black Arrow in 1883.

6. Various different locations are charted in The Master of Ballantrae, including Scotland, France, India and New York. The novel’s action begins in Scotland and culminates in the wilderness of North America. In his review of Ballantrae for the British Weekly (1 November 1889), Barrie notes that the ending reduced the novel to a ‘shocker’ [(cited in), Paul Maixner ‘Introduction’, in Robert Louis Stevenson: The Critical Heri...