Category Archives: Britain

by | 26 November 2025 · 1:25 am

Treasure Island is Born at Braemar

From Storyteller: The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson, by Leo Damrosch (Yale University Press, 2025), Kindle pp. 357-358:

To amuse themselves during the endless rain, Louis and Lloyd drew a map of an imaginary island and made up stories about it. As Louis remembered, “It was elaborately and (I thought) beautifully coloured; the shape of it took my fancy beyond expression; it contained harbours that pleased me like sonnets; and with the unconsciousness of the predestined, I ticketed my performance Treasure Island.” The tale may have been predestined, but its title wasn’t. Originally he called his story The Sea Cook after Long John Silver, the former pirate who joins the treasure-seeking voyage disguised as a cook. The Sea Cook is almost as unpromising a title as Trimalchio at West Egg, which Fitzgerald originally wanted for his masterpiece The Great Gatsby. It was a publisher who told Louis that Treasure Island would be more effective.

Louis added that the story “seemed to me as original as sin.” There were plenty of melodramatic sea stories in existence, as well as histories of eighteenth-century piracy that he had devoured, but those are forgotten today while Treasure Island is a world classic, translated into scores of languages and reissued in countless editions. It was especially gratifying that the project brought out the adventure-loving romantic in Thomas Stevenson.

I had counted on one boy, I found I had two in my audience. My father caught fire at once with all the romance and childishness of his original nature. His own stories, that every night of his life he put himself to sleep with, dealt perpetually with ships, roadside inns, robbers, old sailors, and commercial travelers before the era of steam. He never finished one of these romances; the lucky man did not require to! But in Treasure Island he recognised something kindred to his own imagination; it was his kind of picturesque; and he not only heard with delight the daily chapter, but set himself actively to collaborate.

Treasure Island is constructed with consummate art, but the best art conceals art. The story is told by Jim Hawkins, recalling his boyhood in a seaside inn kept by his parents in the west of England.

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by | 21 November 2025 · 10:41 pm

RLS in the “Long Depression”

From Storyteller: The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson, by Leo Damrosch (Yale University Press, 2025), Kindle pp. 276-277:

This was the time of a “Long Depression” that lasted for six years throughout Europe and the United States. Britain was hardest hit of all. Louis was now confronted with a reality he had been insulated from, and as Furnas says, “There rubbed against him the direct knowledge that to be penniless was more miserable than picturesque; that economic disaster was cruel to individuals as well as abstractly depressing to masses; that alcoholism was incapacitating, not jolly.”

In many ways The Amateur Emigrant anticipates Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London half a century later.

Those around me were for the most part quiet, orderly, obedient citizens, family men broken by adversity, elderly youths who had failed to place themselves in life, and people who had seen better days. . . . Labouring mankind had in the last years, and throughout Great Britain, sustained a prolonged and crushing series of defeats. I had heard vaguely of these reverses; of whole streets of houses standing deserted by the Tyne, the cellar doors broken and removed for firewood; of homeless men loitering at the street-corners of Glasgow with their chests beside them; of closed factories, useless strikes, and starving girls. But I had never taken them home to me, or represented these distresses livingly to my imagination.

In a real sense Louis was escaping from defeats of his own. “We were a company of the rejected. The drunken, the incompetent, the weak, the prodigal, all who had been unable to prevail against circumstances in the one land were now fleeing pitifully to another, and though one or two might still succeed, all had already failed. We were a shipful of failures, the broken men of England.” Of Scotland too, of course. “Skilled mechanics, engineers, millwrights, and carpenters were fleeing as from the native country of starvation.” What skills was he himself bringing?

Yet a surprising optimism prevailed. “It must not be supposed that these people exhibited depression. The scene, on the contrary, was cheerful. Not a tear was shed on board the vessel. All were full of hope for the future, and showed an inclination to innocent gaiety. Some were heard to sing, and all began to scrape acquaintance with small jests and ready laughter.” Louis always enjoyed children, and noted with amusement that they were attracted to each other “like dogs” and went around “all in a band, as thick as thieves at a fair,” while the adults were still “ceremoniously maneuvering on the outskirts of acquaintance.”

As the title of The Amateur Emigrant suggests, he belonged among these people only in a sense. It would be some years before he could support himself by writing, but his parents might resume their subsidies before then, as indeed did happen. His fellow travelers were not just emigrants but immigrants, whereas (despite what the passenger list said) he had no intention of making a home in America. In much the same way, by the time Orwell published his book he had ended his experiment of being down and out. Still, the voyage was a turning point. “Travel is of two kinds, and this voyage of mine across the ocean combined both. ‘Out of my country and myself I go,’ sings the old poet: and I was not only travelling out of my country in latitude and longitude, but out of myself in diet, associates, and consideration.”

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by | 20 November 2025 · 8:02 pm

RLS First Tries Writing Fiction

From Storyteller: The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson, by Leo Damrosch (Yale University Press, 2025), Kindle pp. 266-267:

Robert Louis Stevenson is best remembered as a novelist, but until his thirties he found the scope of a novel daunting and was reluctant to attempt one. By the end of 1879 he did have three works of nonfiction in print, the two travel narratives and Edinburgh: Picturesque Notes. In addition he had published twelve essays and fourteen short stories, many of them in Leslie Stephen’s Cornhill Magazine. A historian explains that a demand for such work had been created by a proliferation of new periodicals that needed “to fill columns of white space with agreeable reading matter.” They brought in some income, but not nearly enough to live on.

The term “short story” seems to have been used for the first time in 1884 by the American critic Brander Matthews, to describe a distinct kind of condensed and focused narrative, as opposed to a tale that merely happens to be short. Matthews emphasized the excellence of Poe and Hawthorne in this genre; Louis admired and consciously emulated them. Late in life he gave a penetrating description of the new aesthetic: “The dénouement of a long story is nothing; it is just a ‘full close,’ which you may approach and accompany as you please—it is a coda, not an essential member in the rhythm; but the body and end of a short story is bone of the bone and blood of the blood of the beginning.”

The early stories are interesting as first steps in the storyteller’s art, but are completely overshadowed by Louis’s later achievements. One collection, published later in book form as New Arabian Nights, was admired for its experimentalism. In it a prince of Bohemia seeks out adventures in London in imitation of the caliph in the original Arabian Nights, which Louis had read and enjoyed as a boy. The critic George Saintsbury praised “the fertility of extravagant incident, grim or amusing or simply bizarre, with the quiet play of the author’s humour in the construction of character, the neatness of his phrase, the skill of his description, the thoroughly literary character of his apparently childish burlesque.”

Some reviewers thought that the author must have been laughing at the reader, others that he was laughing at himself. A writer in the Century Magazine suggested that it might be both:

The stories are linked together by the adventures of one central character, who is half Monte Cristo and half Haroun al Raschid up to the last page, where in an unexpected fashion he leaves you laughing at him, laughing at yourself, and wondering how long his inventor has been laughing at you both. This is the book on the face of it. But then, in fact, you cannot speak of the book on the face of it, for under the face is a fascinating depth of subtleties, of ingenuities, of satiric deviltries, of weird and elusive forms of humour, in which the analytic mind loses itself.

Scholars have taken these efforts seriously as harbingers of modernism, but Louis didn’t. Instead he turned to a now-unfashionable narrative mode that he had always loved—romance, in the old sense of action and adventure, not love affairs. By the time New Arabian Nights came out as a single volume in 1882, he had moved far beyond it with his classic Scottish tales “Thrawn Janet” and “The Merry Men,” and with Treasure Island in its first serialized form.

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by | 19 November 2025 · 11:45 pm

RLS as Amateur Emigrant

From Storyteller: The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson, by Leo Damrosch (Yale University Press, 2025), Kindle pp. 272-273:

As Louis relates in his book about the voyage, The Amateur Emigrant, he engaged a second-class cabin for ₤8, ₤2 more than passengers in steerage paid, which meant that he was furnished with bedding and had a private room with a table to write on. Still, it was only a little enclave in the midst of steerage. Located near the machinery that powered the ship, the steerage was crowded, malodorous, and poorly ventilated.

Alfred Stieglitz’s classic photograph (fig. 38), taken on the Kaiser Wilhelm II in 1907, makes it clear that steerage passengers got up on deck whenever they could. Still higher up, the wealthy ladies and gentlemen are literally looking down on them.

In Edinburgh Louis had been accustomed to mix with working-class people in a rather touristic way, but now he was one of them, although paying for second class did qualify him as technically a gentleman. “In the steerage there are males and females; in the second cabin ladies and gentlemen. For some time after I came aboard I thought I was only a male, but in the course of a voyage of discovery between decks I came on a brass plate, and learned that I was still a gentleman. Nobody knew it, of course. I was lost in the crowd of males and females, and rigorously confined to the same quarter of the deck.”

The description “steamship” may conjure up images of a mighty vessel like the Queen Mary, but the Devonia was low-slung and modest in size, a vessel of thirty-five hundred tons (the Queen Mary was eighty-one thousand). There were just 256 passengers. Nicholas Rankin had the inspiration of tracking down the original passenger list in the New York Public Library. Fifty-one people were in the first-class saloon and identified as clerks, divines, and nil—not unemployed, but too rich to need employment. Twenty-two were in the second-class cabin: 15 Scots including Louis, 6 Scandinavians, and an Irishman. The remaining 183 were in steerage. They were Scottish, Irish, German, Scandinavian, and a Russian. Thirty occupations were listed, including brewer, carpenter, lawyer, marble cutter, and silk weaver.

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by | 15 November 2025 · 6:43 pm

Scottish vs. English Universities, 1867

From Storyteller: The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson, by Leo Damrosch (Yale University Press, 2025), Kindle pp. 102-104:

In November 1867, just as he was turning seventeen, Louis entered the University of Edinburgh as the first step toward a professional career, and his life changed dramatically. It was the same year in which the Stevensons took their lease on Swanston Cottage….

As an undergraduate Louis continued to live at home; there was no residential housing at the university, and students from out of town had to rent lodgings. All the same, he enjoyed plenty of freedom, unlike students at Oxford and Cambridge, who had compulsory chapel and lectures, wore caps and gowns, and were punished if they stayed out after curfew. It’s notable that those were the only two universities in all of England. In Scotland, in addition to Edinburgh, which was the most recently founded, there were also St Andrews, Glasgow, and Aberdeen. In an essay some years later Louis celebrated his university’s freedom and urban energy.

The English lad goes to Oxford or Cambridge; there, in an ideal world of gardens, to lead a semi-scenic life, costumed, disciplined and drilled by proctors. Nor is this to be regarded merely as a stage of education; it is a piece of privilege besides, and a step that separates him further from the bulk of his compatriots. At an earlier age the Scottish lad begins his greatly different experience of crowded class-rooms, of a gaunt quadrangle, of a bell hourly booming over the traffic of the city to recall him from the public-house where he has been lunching, or the streets where he has been wandering fancy-free. His college life has little of restraint, and nothing of necessary gentility…. Our tasks ended, we of the North go forth as freemen into the humming, lamplit city. At five o’clock you may see the last of us hiving from the college gates, in the glare of the shop windows, under the green glimmer of the winter sunset. The frost tingles in our blood; no proctor lies in wait to intercept us; till the bell sounds again we are the masters of the world.

As a master of the world, Louis declined to do much studying. He found the teaching formal and tedious, and was already accustomed to self-education. Besides, he was supposedly there to learn engineering, which he already knew he disliked. That engineering was taught at all made Edinburgh very different from the English universities, where the curriculum was heavily classical and mathematical. At Cambridge Isaac Newton, one of the greatest physicists of all time, had been a professor of mathematics, not physics.

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by | 14 November 2025 · 9:34 pm

Where RLS Learnt Lallans

From Storyteller: The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson, by Leo Damrosch (Yale University Press, 2025), Kindle pp. 82-84:

Louis picked up much of his Lallans from a shepherd named John Todd, known as “Lang John” for his height, with whom he would tramp for hours in the hills while the sheep were grazing. “My friend the shepherd,” he said later, “speaks broad Scotch of the broadest, and often enough employs words that I do not understand myself.” Louis recalled Todd in an essay entitled “Pastoral”: “He laughed not very often, and when he did, with a sudden, loud haw-haw, hearty but somehow joyless, like an echo from a rock. His face was permanently set and coloured; ruddy and stiff with weathering; more like a picture than a face.”

But it was Todd’s eloquence that captivated Louis. “He spoke in the richest dialect of Scotch I ever heard, and this vocabulary he would handle like a master. I might count him with the best talkers, only that talking Scotch and talking English seem incomparable acts. He touched on nothing, at least, but he adorned it; when he narrated, the scene was before you.” Many of Louis’s original readers would have recognized a famous phrase that Samuel Johnson composed in Latin for his friend Oliver Goldsmith, Nihil tetegit quod non ornavit: “He touched nothing that he did not adorn.” The allusion is a beautiful tribute to the old shepherd, ranking his skill in language on a level with a writer of great distinction.

It was Todd, Louis said, who taught him to appreciate the spirit of the hills.

He it was that made it live for me, as the artist can make all things live. It was through him the simple strategy of massing sheep upon a snowy evening, with its attendant scampering of earnest, shaggy aides-de-camp, was an affair that I never wearied of seeing, and that I never weary of recalling to mind: the shadow of the night darkening on the hills, inscrutable black blots of snow shower moving here and there like night already come, huddles of yellow sheep and dartings of black dogs upon the snow, a bitter air that took you by the throat, unearthly harpings of the wind along the moors; and for centerpiece to all these features and influences, John winding up the brae [slope], keeping his captain’s eye upon all sides, and breaking, ever and again, into a spasm of bellowing that seemed to make the evening bleaker. It is thus that I still see him in my mind’s eye, perched on a hump of the declivity not far from Halkerside, his staff in airy flourish, his great voice taking hold upon the hills and echoing terror to the lowlands; I, meanwhile, standing somewhat back, until the fit should be over, and, with a pinch of snuff, my friend relapse into his easy, even conversation.

Though the shepherd’s casual talk might be “easy,” it was direct and to the point. In another essay Louis contrasted it with the conversational style in England, where “the contact of mind with mind [is] evaded as with terror. A Scottish peasant will talk more liberally out of his own experience. He will not put you by with conversational counters and small jests; he will give you the best of himself, like one interested in life and man’s chief end.”

Swanston people remembered that Todd used to say of Louis, “He is an awfu’ laddie for speirin’ questions about a’ thing, an’ whenever you turn your back, awa’ he gangs an’ writes it a’ doon.” A “speirin” questioner is prying and inquisitive. Years later some old-timers told a visitor the same thing. “Stevenson would dae naething but lie aboot the dykes. He wouldna wark. He was aye rinnin’ aboot wi’ lang Todd, amang the hills, getting him to tell a’ the stories he kent.” “Lang Todd” prompts one to wonder if John passed his nickname on to Long John Silver in Treasure Island.

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by | 7 October 2025 · 7:41 pm

Germans at Loos, September 1915

From The Other Trench: The WW1 Diary and Photos of a German Officer, by Alexander Pfeifer and Philipp Cross (True Perspective Press, 2024), Kindle pp. 100-101:

Those were once again some bad days, and there is still no end in sight yet. We were horribly barraged for four days and nights, and our entire position was destroyed. Then came the most horrifying — an English gas attack yesterday morning. The entire area was covered for kilometres with a thick, white mist of gas. We would have suffocated if we hadn’t had gas masks. Then came the English assault which was brilliantly repelled. This was followed by another artillery bombardment with heavy 15cm guns, and then another assault which was nevertheless repelled also. The Scottish, the ‘King’s Own Scottish Borderers’, had a terrifying number of casualties. 400 to 500 lie dead and wounded in front of my company section alone. We captured roughly 40 Scots and looted one machine gun and one bagpipe. The Scots, who emerged in thick heaps from the gas mist in front of us, were greeted by an insane hail of bullets from rifles and machine guns.

In response to our red flares, our artillery then released a rapid fire, and it sounded very frightening how the shells of the field guns swept in layers close over our heads and into the assaulting columns; and how the shells of our heavy artillery rushed high above us, to then explode at the back in the trenches stuffed with English reserves. What we can see ahead of us in terms of the dead is only a small part of the English losses. Just what might it look like in their assault starting positions? Our men did brilliantly. I am unwounded, but Lieutenant von Baumbach was killed early yesterday morning, meaning I am now the commander of this sector that was most heavily attacked. It is relatively calm today. The Scottish have probably had enough.

Note: The Germans during this war often refer to the British as ‘English’, regardless of their background….

Idyllic peace this morning. There was ridiculous artillery fire again in the afternoon, which was followed by another gas attack at half past 6 in the evening. The gas was transparent but much sharper this time. I am still very sick from it. The expected English assault did not materialise though. They are probably still tired of us from the day before yesterday. On the other hand, they attacked Infantry-Regiment 16 to the right of us but were smoothly beaten back. To our left, terrible battles have been raging since yesterday. A sergeant from a Bavarian regiment, who fetched grenades from us, said that he has been involved right from the start of the war, including Ypres, but he has never seen so many dead English as he has here. Our entire Front from Neuve Chapelle up to Loos-Vermelles is being attacked by frightening numbers of English. They have lost at least 10,000 men in two days.

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by | 3 October 2025 · 6:32 pm

Enduring a Cannonade, May 1915

From The Other Trench: The WW1 Diary and Photos of a German Officer, by Alexander Pfeifer and Philipp Cross (True Perspective Press, 2024), Kindle pp. 70-71:

Suddenly, at 6 o’clock sharp, a great cannonade starts to our right — the guns boom continuously — the individual explosions can no longer be distinguished. The main shooting is far away from us in the north, but the 16th is also being lit up badly. It looks wonderful how it tremors over there by the heap of bricks. There are round clouds of shrapnel hanging everywhere, and thick black and yellow-green clouds rise from the shells down on the ground. Rifles and machine guns fire at the same time — three aircraft buzz in the air. It was a hell of a racket. But things were about to get better because suddenly we too were under fire. One by one, the shells crash into our trench which is soon filled in in many places. Quantities of sharp shell fragments lie around everywhere. I have everyone but the most essential guards crawl into the shelters, and like so, we endure the bombardment for three hours. To set an example, I am now and then forced to walk along the entire trench with a calm step and an outwardly indifferent expression, whistling a song, so that people cannot say that the officers had slipped away. We remarkably didn’t have one wounded person although at least 100 shells fell into my company section alone. On the contrary, the neighbouring company is said to have three dead and several wounded.

It is now half past 3 and we are not being shot at anymore, but it is still continuing uninterrupted in the north. We are informed that the English attacked again at Neuve Chapelle with great superior numbers, but were repelled. We were probably only lit up like this so that we would believe that we too were being attacked and, in this way, to prevent us from moving our reserves north. I have got a real headache from the hours of banging and roaring. Hopefully, this shooting doesn’t put a damper on our plans, as we actually have to be relieved this evening.

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by | 3 October 2025 · 8:22 am

Trench Life, Easter 1915

From The Other Trench: The WW1 Diary and Photos of a German Officer, by Alexander Pfeifer and Philipp Cross (True Perspective Press, 2024), Kindle pp. 63-64:

The trenches are flawlessly constructed. Every rifleman has a small niche of his own with steps leading up to it. Everything is reinforced with sandbags, and everyone stands behind a defensive shield of steel. Most people have tent canvases stretched over them so that they stand dry. Small boxes for bullet cartridges are built into the niche walls, and there are also waterproof boxes with hand grenades scattered throughout the trench. There are even special depots for trenchwork tools, ammunition and so on. Nice and deep shelters are plentiful. As a platoon leader, I have one for me and my orderly. Inside are two sleeping spots on top of each other like in a ship’s cabin. I even have a mattress. Of course, there is a table, wicker chair, oven, wall shelf, coat hangers, and pictures. To heat, we use hard coal which we can conveniently get from the nearest mine. Opposite us lies the French Landwehr. Only single shots are fired during the day, whereas it gets somewhat livelier at night. We are also graced with a few shells from time to time, but they haven’t caused any damage so far.

The weather was nice all day and night on the first day of the holidays, but it has been raining heavily since the morning of the second day. It is now rather filthy in the trenches as a result. We should have been replaced at 9 o’clock in the evening, but it was 1 o’clock in the night when the first replacement arrived. I then led the way through the communication trench all alone and didn’t get lost despite the many diversions. The mud reached high above the ankles, but this was an outright stroll compared to the past. The trench at Richebourg would have been impassable after such tremendous rain. The carriage I had ordered over the phone was waiting for me in Auchy, and I arrived in Billy at half past 2 in the morning where I quickly made a ration (sausage with kraut) on the spirit stove. I was suddenly woken up during the deepest sleep at half past 5 in the morning — highest alert. I thus got out of bed, got dressed, packed my suitcase and loaded the wagon. Just when I was finished, it was said that everyone could lie back down because it was just a practice alarm for the entire division. I then slept the whole day in return.

There was a strong storm with rain last night. Things will look lovely in the trenches tonight. I had some duties today — rifle inspection and instructing the oberjägers. I am going back to the Front for a couple of days again this evening. Captain Beutin is now the commander of the entire combat sector, and I am the company commander during this time. This means that I no longer have to do guard duty, but there is a lot of written and telephone work.

We eat together in peace in the mess hall here, which is set up inside the manor. The price is surprisingly cheap for the good food and drink; only 30 to 40 Mark a month. Extra drinks are of course charged separately. Food and drink are also delivered forward from the mess to the trench. Our electricians have laid wires throughout the entire place so that we have electric lights everywhere. A cable has also just been laid towards the front so that we will have electricity in the shelters in the near future too. We have built shelters at the front that are four metres underground. I feel significantly more comfortable again since being back here. It is a completely different life here than in the boring hospital.

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by | 2 October 2025 · 5:41 pm

Trench Warfare, December 1914

From The Other Trench: The WW1 Diary and Photos of a German Officer, by Alexander Pfeifer and Philipp Cross (True Perspective Press, 2024), Kindle pp. 33-34:

We finally arrive at the Front safe and sound except for a few lightly wounded people, where the company commander of the 2nd Company, Prince Lippe, welcomes us with a sigh of relief. There is indescribable confusion here. It is still dark, and no one really knows what has happened and who is friend or foe, because the English, who harass us so much anyway, have put on the shakos of our dead jägers and are therefore not so easy to recognise as enemies in the semi-dark. Patrols are consequently sent forward from the communication trenches, where we finally discover that the English had not been so fortunate with their raid as they had hoped. Only half of the foremost trench ahead of the 2nd Company is in their possession — two machine guns too, unfortunately — an entire platoon is also missing. Anyone who didn’t fall was captured.

We can see the English working feverishly from just 30 metres away. With the sandbags they had brought with them, they quickly built shooting slits facing us, and now the most beautiful shootout is already in progress. It is no child’s play given the short distance. I repeatedly urge my men to be extremely careful. I just call a volunteer standing two steps next to me who holds his head out for too long after the shot. At that moment, his head jolts, the familiar and terrible dull sound of the bullet’s impact sounds, and the man slowly collapses. The bullet penetrated the forehead and tore off half the skullcap behind. Still mid-fall, he claws his hands into the wound and smears himself over and over with his own brain. It was a terrible sight. I have seen this wound in particular very often though, because in the trenches there are almost only headshots which have an explosive effect at such a short distance.

Recapturing the trench with an assault does not seem advisable considering the expected large losses. We therefore decide to advance into the communication trenches with hand grenades to try and get the English out this way. But first, the pioneers (engineers) are to work on them with mortars. However, most of the day passes when everything is ready, and the mortars first begin their task late in the afternoon. These are small mortars that hurl powerful explosive charges fitted with fuses through the air at short distances. We soon see the mortar shells swaying in the air. The explosion occurs shortly afterwards with an incredible bang — clouds of black smoke rise as high as a house. The English fire at us in the same way, only their mortars are a lot smaller and not as effective as ours. Besides this, they were poorly aimed on this day.

Our grenade throwers now also advance — Two pioneers in the trench ahead continue to throw hand grenades in front of them. As soon as one explodes, they immediately jump forward into the smoke and throw the next one. A platoon of jägers follows afterwards with fixed bayonets. The rest of us subject the enemy to heavy rifle and machine-gun fire in the meantime. The attacking column occasionally holds up a hat on a stick so that we know how far they have pushed ahead. We then adjust our fire accordingly. We slowly advance this way, and we gain back half of the lost positions in the evening. We of course spend the night in tense vigilance, as it is not impossible for us to be attacked again. Everything stays calm though, and we begin cleaning up the trench as soon as it gets light. This kind of approach must have become a bit scary for the English, as we regained our old positions in a very short time and without any casualties.

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