SEPTEMBER 1884 ­AUGUST 1887

Arriving in England at the end of July 1884, Stevenson took up his quarters first for a few weeks at Richmond.  He was compelled to abandon the hope of making his permanent home at Hyères, partly by the renewed failure there of his own health, partly by a bad outbreak of cholera which occurred in the old Provençal town about the time he left it.  After consultation with several doctors, all of whom held out hopes of ultimate recovery despite the gravity of his present symptoms, he moved to Bournemouth.  Here he found in the heaths and pinewoods some distant semblance of the landscape of his native Scotland, and in the sandy curves of the Channel coast a passable substitute for the bays and promontories of his beloved Mediterranean.  At all events, he liked the place well enough to be willing to try it for a home; and such it became for all but three years, from September 1884 to August 1887.  These, although in the matter of health the worst and most trying years of his life, were in the matter of work some of the most active and successful.  For the first two or three months the Stevensons occupied a lodging on the West Cliff called Wensleydale; for the next five, from mid-November 1884 to mid-April 1885, they were tenants of a house named Bonallie Towers, pleasantly situated amid the pinewoods of Branksome Park, and by its name recalling familiar Midlothian associations.  Lastly, about Easter 1885, they entered into occupation of a house of their own, given by the elder Mr. Stevenson as a special gift to his daughter-in-law, and renamed by its new occupants Skerryvore, in reminiscence of one of the great lighthouse works carried out by the family firm off the Scottish coast.

During all the time of Stevenson’s residence at Bournemouth he was compelled to lead the life, irksome to him above all men, but borne with invincible spirit and patience, of a chronic invalid and almost constant prisoner to the house.  A great part of his time had perforce to be spent in bed, and there almost all his literary work was produced.  Often for days, and sometimes for whole weeks together, he was forbidden to speak aloud, and compelled to carry on conversation with his family and friends in whispers or with the help of pencil and paper.  The few excursions to a distance which he attempted ­most commonly to my house at the British Museum, once to Cambridge, once to Matlock, once to Exeter, and once in 1886 as far as Paris ­these excursions generally ended in a breakdown and a hurried retreat to home and bed.  Nevertheless, he was able in intervals of comparative ease to receive and enjoy the visits of friends from a distance both old and new ­among the most welcome of the latter being Mr. Henry James, Mr. William Archer, and Mr. John S. Sargent; while among Bournemouth residents who attached themselves to him on terms of special intimacy and affection were Sir Percy and Lady Shelley and Sir Henry and Lady Taylor and their daughters.

At the same time, seizing and making the most of every week, nay, every day and hour of respite, he contrived to produce work surprising, under the circumstances, alike by quantity and quality.  During the first two months of his life at Bournemouth the two plays Admiral Guinea and Beau Austin were written in collaboration with Mr. Henley, and many other dramatic schemes were broached which health and leisure failed him to carry out.  In the course of the next few months he finished Prince Otto, The Child’s Garden of Verses, and More New Arabian Nights, all three of which had been begun, and the two first almost completed, before he left Hyères.  He at the same time attacked two new tasks ­a highway novel called The Great North Road, and a Life of Wellington for a series edited by Mr. Andrew Lang, both of which he had in the sequel to abandon; and a third, the boys’ story of Kidnapped, which in its turn had to be suspended, but on its publication next year turned out one of the most brilliant of his successes.

About midsummer of this year, 1885, he was distressed by the sudden death of his old and kind friend Professor Fleeming Jenkin, and after a while undertook the task of writing a memoir of him to be prefixed to his collected papers.  Towards the close of the same year he was busy with what proved to be the most popular of all his writings, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and with the Christmas story of Olalla. Jekyll and Hyde was published in January 1886, and after threatening for the first week or two to fall flat, in no long time caught the attention of all classes of readers, was quoted from a hundred pulpits, and made the writer’s name familiar to multitudes both in England and America whom it had never reached before.  A success scarcely inferior, though of another kind, was made a few months afterwards by Kidnapped, which Stevenson had taken up again in the early spring, and which was published about midsummer.  After completing this task in March, he was able to do little work during the remainder of the year, except in preparing materials for the Life of Fleeming Jenkin, and in writing occasional verses which helped to make up the collection published in the following year under the title Underwoods.  In the early autumn of the same year, 1886, he took a longer and more successful excursion from home than usual, staying without breakdown for two or three weeks at the Monument, as he always called my house at the British Museum, and seeing something of kindred spirits among his elders, such as Robert Browning, James Russell Lowell, the painters Burne-Jones and W. B. Richmond, and others who had hitherto delighted in his work and now learned to delight no less in his society.

Thence he went with Mr. Henley for a short trip to Paris, chiefly in order to see the sculptor Rodin and his old friends Mr. and Mrs. W. H. Low.  From this trip he returned none the worse, but during all the later autumn and winter at Bournemouth was again hampered in his work by renewed and prolonged attacks of illness.  A further cause of trouble was the distressing failure of his father’s health and spirits, attended by symptoms which plainly indicated the beginning of the end.

For some weeks of April, 1887, he was much taken up with a scheme which had nothing to do with literature, and which the few friends to whom he confided it regarded as wildly Quixotic and unwise.  In these years he had, as we have seen, taken deeply to heart both what he thought the guilty remissness of Government action in the matter of the Soudan garrisons and of Gordon, and the tameness of acquiescence with which the national conscience appeared to take the result.  He had been not less disturbed at the failure, hitherto, of successive administrations to assert the reign of law in Ireland.  He was no blind partisan of the English cause in that country, and had even written of the hereditary hatred of Irish for English as a sentiment justified by the facts of history.  But he held strongly that private warfare, the use of dynamite and the knife, with the whole system of agrarian vengeances and the persecution of the weak, were means which no end could justify; and that redress of grievances, whatever form it might ultimately take, must be preceded by the re-establishment of law.  In More New Arabian Nights, published the year before, he had endeavoured “to make dynamite ridiculous if he could not make it horrible,” and to the old elements of fantastic invention, and humorously solemn realism in the unreal, had added the new element of a witty and scornful criminal psychology.  A case that now appealed to him with especial force was that of the cruel persecution kept up against the widow and daughters of the murdered man Curtin.  He determined that if no one else would take up the duty of resisting such persecution without regard to consequences, he would take it up himself, in the hope of more effectually rousing the public conscience to the evils of the time.  His plan was to go with his family, occupy and live upon the derelict farm, and let happen what would.  This, as the letters referring to the matter plainly show, was no irresponsible dream or whim, but a purpose conceived in absolute and sober earnest.  His wife and household were prepared to follow, though under protest, had he persisted; as it seemed for some weeks that he certainly would, until at last the arguments of his friends, and still more the unmistakable evidence that his father’s end was near, persuaded him to give up his purpose.  But to the last, I think he was never well satisfied that in giving way he had not been a coward, preferring fireside ease and comfort to the call of a public duty.

After spending a part of the winter at Bournemouth and a part at Torquay, both Stevenson’s parents returned to Edinburgh in April 1887; and within a few weeks after their arrival he was summoned north to his father’s death-bed.  He stayed at Edinburgh the short time necessary for the dispatch of business, and returned to his own sick-room life at Skerryvore.

During the two years and nine months of Stevenson’s residence at Bournemouth, preceding the date of his father’s death, he had made no apparent progress towards recovery.  Every period of respite had been quickly followed by a relapse, and all his work, brilliant and varied as it was, had been done under conditions which would have reduced almost any other man to inactivity.  The close and frequently recurring struggles against the danger of death from hemorrhage and exhaustion, which he had been used, when they first occurred, to find exciting, grew in the long run merely irksome; and even his persistent high courage and gaiety, sustained as they were by the devoted affection of his wife and many friends, began occasionally, for the first time, to fail him.  Accordingly, when in May 1887 the death of his father severed the strongest of the ties which bound him to the old country, he was very ready to listen to the advice of his physicians, who were unanimous in thinking his case not hopeless, but urged him to try some complete change of climate, surroundings, and mode of life.  His wife’s connections pointing to the West, he thought of the mountain health-resorts of Colorado, and of their growing reputation for the cure of lung patients.  Having let his house at Bournemouth, he accordingly took passage on board the S.S. Ludgate Hill, sailing for New York from London on August 21st, 1887, with his whole party, consisting of his wife, his widowed mother, whom they had persuaded to join them, his young stepson, and a trusted servant, Valentine Roch.  The concluding letters of the present section tell of the preparations for this departure.