Oceania and the Victorian Imagination

Where All Things Are Possible

Peter H. Hoffenberg, Richard D. Fulton, Richard D. Fulton

• Éditeur: Routledge
• Année: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317086192
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: Literature
• Sous-sujet: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature

Oceania, or the South Pacific, loomed large in the Victorian popular imagination. It was a world that interested the Victorians for many reasons, all of which suggested to them that everything was possible there. This collection of essays focuses on Oceania's impact on Victorian culture, most notably travel writing, photography, international exhibitions, literature, and the world of children. Each of these had significant impact. The literature discussed affected mainly the middle and upper classes, while exhibitions and photography reached down into the working classes, as did missionary presentations. The experience of children was central to the Pacific's effects, as youthful encounters at exhibitions, chapel, home, or school formed lifelong impressions and experience. It would be difficult to fully understand the Victorians as they understood themselves without considering their engagement with Oceania. While the contributions of India and Africa to the nineteenth-century imagination have been well-documented, examinations of the contributions of Oceania have remained on the periphery of Victorian studies. Oceania and the Victorian Imagination contributes significantly to our discussion of the non-peripheral place of Oceania in Victorian culture.

PART 1
Travel, Exhibitions and Photography

Chapter 1
Pacific Phantasmagorias: Robert Louis Stevenson’s Pacific Photography

Carla Manfredi

“Photography is a cut inside the referent, it cuts off a piece of it, a fragment, a part object, for a long immobile travel of no return.”¹

Robert Louis Stevenson’s departure from San Francisco on 28 June 1888 for the Marquesas, the Paumotus, Tahiti and then north to Hawaiʻi, aboard the schooner-yacht Casco, was prompted by his American agent Samuel Sidney McClure’s proposition that the famous author of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde pen a series of letters, commissioned by the New York Sun, detailing his adventures in the South Seas. A second Pacific cruise on the Equator (a working trading vessel) was begun on 24 June 1889. This voyage lasted six months, during which the Stevensons visited Buritari, Mariki, Apaiang and Apemama. Stevenson never returned from the voyage—settling permanently, in October 1890, at an estate near Apia in Western Samoa. He was accompanied by his American wife Fanny, his mother Margaret, his two adult step children Lloyd Osbourne and Isobel (Belle) Strong, her husband Joe and their son Austin. In addition to the financial benefit derived from the proposed cruise (the net earnings of the letters’ serialization for the English press amounted to US$15,000), the voyage also promised serious health improvements for the writer, who frequently suffered from bouts of ill-health. Vanessa Smith reminds us that from the outset of his travels, Stevenson envisaged his epistolary project in terms of a book, “rather than the fragmentary text of letters.”² Once aboard the trading schooner-yacht Equator, during the second more extensive cruise, Stevenson made plans for an ambitious literary project: a definitive photographically illustrated history of the South Seas: “By the time I am done with this cruise I shall have the material for a very singular book of travels: masses of strange stories and characters, cannibals, pirates, ancient legends, old Polynesian poetry; never was so generous a farrago.”³

The publication of eight monographs on R. L. Stevenson since 2001, the foundation of The Journal of Stevenson Studies, and a New Collected Edition (Edinburgh University Press) have generated a renewed critical interest in Stevenson’s travel writings. That is especially the case with the fiction and non-fiction produced in the Pacific during the last six years of his life (1888–1894). This chapter capitalizes on the upsurge in scholarly discussion by focusing on Stevenson’s Pacific photography. By aligning Stevenson’s Pacific photography with its intended textual accompaniment, In the South Seas can be re-read as a phototext.⁴ Since the photographs have yet to be published with their intended text—to this day In the South Seas remains fragmented—critics continue to misread a primacy of the text over the photographs.⁵ I suggest, rather, that Stevenson would have seen the two media as complementary. As François Brunet, Nancy Armstrong and Carol Armstrong each demonstrate, photographically illustrated books in the nineteenth century predominantly emerged from scientific or documentary projects: “the combined printed text with tipped-in photographic prints in productions usually costly, luxurious and limited; this was for the purpose of thematic illustration or encyclopedic collection.”⁶ Brunet gestures towards a rich and growing critical tradition that privileges documentary, or realist texts, over those that engage reflexively with photography. He catalogues genres of writing such as: “anatomy, physiology, psychiatry, anthropology, or criminology”; these are emphatically non-literary genres that fall under broad categories: “anthropological, geographical, or antiquarian.”⁷ Within this context, Stevenson’s documentary travel phototext presents an unusual merging of the documentary genre with photographs that call attention to their documentary unreliability. Stevenson’s photographs are, therefore, more than merely nineteenth-century documentary artifacts; they are also proto-modernist visual representations of the South Pacific.

This chapter is based on my ongoing research of the Stevenson’s South Sea family albums.⁸ The Writers’ Museum (Edinburgh Museum & Galleries) is in possession of the four South Sea albums which contain a total of 696 photographs depicting the Stevenson’s three South Pacific cruises and their settlement at Vailima.⁹ There are several practical issues that accompany a study of these family albums: the relatively unknown origins of the albums (including their exact dates of acquisition by the Writers’ Museum), the difficulty in attributing specific authors to certain photographs (although a significant number have been carefully attributed to Lloyd Osbourne and professional photographers working in Samoa and Tahiti during the period of Stevenson’s travels and settlement), the identity of the hands responsible for writing the captions that accompany the photographs, the poor quality and deterioration of many of the photographs, and last but not least, the significant fact that Stevenson himself is not the attributed photographer of any of these images. The range and complexity of these questions, need not, however, deter us from attempting to situate the albums within Stevenson’s Pacific oeuvre since, by the time these albums were being created, Stevenson had a clear project in mind: a definitive photographically illustrated book of the South Seas. These albums are directly linked to The South Seas (1890) through the photographs’ descriptive captions (these include the subjects’ names and locations) and marginal notes: arrows, large “Xs,” and page numbers indicate which photographs were being considered for illustration in Stevenson’s writing.

The first two albums were compiled by Lloyd Osbourne, the third album by Miss Jane Whyte Balfour (Stevenson’s aunt), and the compiler of the fourth album remains unknown. Roslyn Jolly’s supposition that most of the photographs were taken by Osbourne since he “photographed all three of the Stevenson’s Pacific voyages, intending to provide illustrations for Robert Louis Stevenson’s Pacific travel book, In the South Sea” and that “Stevenson worked closely with Osbourne in selecting the subjects of the pictures, although he may not have operated the camera” echoes Fanny Stevenson’s reference to her husband and son as “the photographers.”¹⁰ Stevenson’s strong fascination with, and his intention to use, photographs to supplement his travelogue In the South Seas has been well documented by Jolly and Ann C. Colley.¹¹ Alanna Knight asserts that although Osbourne is often referred to as “taking pictures,” a letter by Stevenson “suggests that using the camera was an entire family activity: ‘We are all pretty gay on board, and have been photographing and draught-playing and skylarking like anything’”;¹² Stevenson also records that during his trip alone to Molokai’s leper colony he took his camera. Photography was undeniably a key occupation of both Stevenson and Osbourne, who lugged the heavy equipment wherever they went, and mourned the loss of photographic materials when they fell overboard from the Casco, “a terrible loss!,”¹³ and when months later an explosion aboard the Janet Nicoll destroyed “a great part” of the photographs.¹⁴ Stevenson’s disparaging remarks about his own negatives as “a province of chaos and old night in which you might dimly perceive fleecy spots of twilight, representing nothing”¹⁵ provide a likely reason as to why Osbourne was responsible for the taking of photographs.¹⁶ Colley notes that during the second trip (June–December, 1889) on the Equator photographic activity increased and became substantially “more extensive, ambitious, and professional, for Stevenson had decided to include his son-in-law, Joe Strong (a professional painter and photographer).”¹⁷

These tantalizing scenes of the Stevenson family grafted to cumbersome photographic apparatus (the first time the Reverend Clarke saw Stevenson he had a cigarette dangling from his lips and a “photographic camera in his hand”¹⁸) raise the question: What are viewers to make of these photographs, in both their published and their unpublished (archival) state? The recent body of criticism by major Stevenson scholars, such as Richard Ambrosini, Oliver Buckton, Colley, Richard Dury, Jolly and Barry Menikoff¹⁹—regardless of all the references to the photographic project in the letters and diaries, which undoubtedly signify something more than naive amateurism—conveys the misleading impression that Stevenson’s interest in photography was either that of a hobbyist playing with a “machine-toy,”²⁰ or as Colley understands it, as a means of expressing a “fascination with lighting up the darkness.”²¹ This critical stance is hardly surprising considering that although many mid- to late nineteenth-century authors were avid amateur photographers, their photographic bodies of work have remained ignored by literary scholars until quite recently; this is a result of what photography critic Geoffrey Batchen observes: “[that amateurs] muck up the familiar story of great masters and transcendent artistic achievements.”²² In other words, the fact that the work of Victorian amateurs rarely displays any obvious high-artistic ambition and technical innovation means that their photographic practices resist straightforward art-historical classification. Colley’s reductive vision of Stevenson’s photography (all the more surprising in light of all the recent works which address nineteenth century intersections between Realist writing, photography and visual culture) dismisses the recorded earnestness with which Stevenson treated his photographic project, as well as the considerable amount of extant photographic material.²³

Stevenson’s Photo-fiction

Historically, the most common use of photographic illustrations was found in documentary (or realist) works. The genre of photographically illustrated books often consisted of a collaboration between a professional writer and a professional photographer who worked together to reveal social conditions and historical events. In such cases the photograph played the role of witness and was not, in Brunet’s words, “in the position to express authorial concerns.”²⁴ Thus, the Victorian craze for the photographic image resulted in the use of photography as a tool for documentation, due to its uncontestable authority. Colley adopts this interpretation and treats the Stevenson photographs as realist pendants to the written text. Although recognizing t...