The Lighthouse Stevensons. Bella Bathurst

       TWO Northern Lights

      For a short while, it seemed as if Robert Louis Stevenson might fulfil his parents’ ambitions. For nearly twenty years, he had been a worry to them. Now, when it came to settling down, he alarmed them even more. First there had been the sickliness, then the lack of schooling, then the whispers of midnight societies and shady liaisons. Worst of all was Louis’s terrible wandering mind. He seemed not to stick at anything, and spent most of his time aimlessly pacing the streets of Edinburgh or dabbling in books. His mother pleaded, and his father, Tom, grew neurotic with worry. Louis, guilty and cross, avoided home. Finally, in the spring of 1868, Tom persuaded his son that it was time he applied himself properly to the family business. Louis was to be enrolled at the University of Edinburgh to study civil engineering, and would spend his summer vacations serving his apprenticeship at his father’s projects around the country. First he was to go to the harbourworks at Anstruther and Wick, then on the lighthouse steamer’s journey round Orkney and Shetland and finally he would supervise the Dhu Heartach lighthouse works on the Isle of Earraid. Whether he liked it or not, he would follow in his father’s footsteps, just as Tom had followed in Robert’s. Louis capitulated and for a while his parents stopped fretting.

      It did not last long. For three long summers around the northern shores of Scotland, Louis tried to bend his mind to the disciplines of engineering. Tom received erratic reports of progress, the news of an underwater trip in a diving bell, and occasional muffled cursings at the intransigence of the weather or the incompetence of the workmen. Louis experimented with waves, fussed over the slowness of his drawing and tried without conviction to improve his mathematics. ‘My daily life,’ he told his cousin Bob gloomily, ‘is one repression from beginning to end.’ While Tom continued to receive news of the slow progress of building at Dhu Heartach, Louis spent the rest of his leisure time wistfully discussing metrical narratives and small beer in letters to friends. In the spring of 1871, back in Edinburgh, Louis presented a paper, ‘On a New Form of Intermittent Light for Lighthouses’, at the Royal Scottish Society of Arts. The essay showed the accumulated knowledge of three obedient years following the Stevenson grail: it was workmanlike, efficient, and showed no spark of initiative whatsoever.

      Tom was among the audience and watched Louis being awarded the Society’s silver medal. For him, it was a proud and vindicating moment; Louis, it seemed, had finally submitted to good sense. A week later, the two walked out to Cramond. ‘On being tightly cross-questioned,’ wrote Louis later, ‘I owned that I cared for nothing but literature. My father said that was no profession.’ Angry and desperate, Tom suggested something else instead, ‘and so, at the age of 21, I began to study law.’ It was small consolation for both of them since Louis was no more interested in advocacy than he was in engineering. Tom was left to blame his son’s fall from grace on a surfeit of imagination and too many books. Later, the two fell out even more dramatically over Louis’s agnosticism, but even then never completely separated. For years, Tom continued to send his son corrective notes on his fiction; a little more Scripture here, a little sermonising there. Sensibly, Louis ignored him. But it was a measure of Tom’s affection that he abandoned his engineering ambitions for Louis with so little resistance. As Maggie Stevenson, Louis’s mother, later noted, ‘it was a cutting-short of his own life, as he had looked forward to its being continued in his son’s career.’

      Louis, it seemed, had been quick to recognise both the benefits and drawbacks of his family’s profession. As he wrote in The Education of an Engineer,

      It takes a man into the open air; it keeps him hanging about harbour sides, which is the richest sort of idling; it carries him to wild islands, it gives him a taste of the genial dangers of the sea; it supplies him with dexterities to exercise; it makes demands upon his ingenuity; it will go far to cure him of any taste (if ever he had one) for the miserable life of cities. And when it has done so it carries him back and shuts him in an office! From the roaring skerry and the wet thwart of the tossing boat, he passes to the stool and desk; and with a memory full of ships, and seas, and perilous headlands, and the shining pharos, he must apply his long-sighted eyes to the petty niceties of drawing, or measure his inaccurate mind with several pages of consecutive figures. He is a wise youth, to be sure, who can balance one part of genuine life against two parts of drudgery between four walls and for the sake of the one, manfully accept the other.

      Later, still smitten with guilt over his exile from Scotland and his family, he wrote a revealing poem.

      Say not of me that weakly I declined The labours of my sires, and fled the sea, The towers we built and the lamps we lit, To play at home with paper like a child. But rather say: In the afternoon of time A strenuous family dusted from its hands The sand of granite, and beholding far Along the sounding coast its pyramids And tall memorials catch the dying sun, Smiled well content, and to this childish task Around the fire addressed its evening hours.

      In practice, the idea of Louis as an engineer was absurd; he was far too physically frail to have lived the working life of his father and grandfather. But he remained haunted by the notion that his writer’s life was somehow less noble or worthy than the rest of his family’s more practical achievements.

      One of Louis’s many attempts to redress the balance was in an unfinished Stevenson biography, Records of a Family of Engineers. The early Stevensons, he discovered, had supplied nothing but generation upon generation of tenant farmers, with the exception of John, a seventeenth-century ancestor and ‘eminently pious man’ who seemed determined on Protestant martyrdom. John spent ‘four months in the coldest season of the year in a haystack in my father’s garden’ and sleeping in Carrick fields under a blanket of snow. Though he did contract scrofula, he was spared persecution, to his apparent disappointment, in the religious purges of the 1680s. With the exception of John, however, Louis’s genealogy was one of stolid mediocrity. ‘On the whole,’ he wrote, ‘the Stevensons may be described as decent reputable folk, following honest trades – millers, maltsters and doctors, playing the character parts in the Waverley Novels with propriety, if without distinction, and to an orphan looking about him in the world for a potential ancestry, offering a plain and quite unadorned refuge, equally free from shame and glory.’ In the absence of glamorous fact, Louis felt himself forced to resort to speculation. He considered the possibility of a Scandinavian connection, evidence of a French alliance and, more imaginatively, the link with a Jacobite past. By the time Louis had completed his history, the family had acquired a smattering of Highland credibility and a link with that most glamorous of cattle-rustlers, Rob Roy MacGregor. Later biographers noted crushingly that none of this wishful thinking was true. The Stevensons were descended from quiet Lowland Whigs, none of whom ever had a dangerous political thought in their lives.

      Louis’s real interest in the Stevensons began with the birth of his paternal grandfather, Robert Stevenson. Robert’s father, Alan, was a Glasgow maltster who married the daughter of a builder, Jean Lillie, in 1771. On 8 June 1772, their only son was born. Alan was still a young man, barely twenty, and with his brother Hugh had become involved in the Glasgow trade with the West Indies. When Robert was two, his father and uncle sailed south to look after their business interests, leaving Jean and Robert behind in Glasgow. Once in the Caribbean, the Stevensons found themselves the victims of a swindle. One dark night, two local merchants – possibly business competitors – arrived at their house on St Kitts, and robbed them of the contents. As soon as they heard of the burglary, Hugh set sail in pursuit of the robbers, while Alan remained behind to deal with the business. ‘What with anxiety of mind,’ Robert later recorded, ‘being such very young men – and exposure to night dews of that climate, the two brothers were seized with fever and died in 1774, my uncle at Tobago on 16 April and my father at St Christopher on 26 May.’

      ‘Night dews’ was then the catch-all diagnosis for any tropical disease that British science had not yet explained or cured. Malaria, cholera and tuberculosis were rife, as was sleeping sickness and influenza. Whatever