• 1 Charles Dickens, Pickwick Papers, ed. Malcolm Andrews, London, 1998, pp. 667–8.

3An initial comparison of their Edinburgh fictions might surprise the reader who, naturally, would expect the native Stevenson to offer the more topographically detailed evocation of the city. In fact it is Dickens’s bagman’s uncle, who, replete with the hospitality of a prominent Edinburgher, takes his boozy but recognisable way on a dark night from the Canongate across North Bridge, then down Leith Walk. Along this route, character (and narrator) share in touristic raptures occasioned by the view of Calton Hill and Arthur’s Seat. Down Leith Walk, he encounters a stretch of waste ground occupied by a huddle of superannuated mail-coaches. With his customary naïve curiosity, he makes his way over the palings to get a closer look, and may—or may not—become meditative over the fate of these vehicles which once carried good and bad news to all manner of people over the years. We approach the point of hesitation so crucial to Tzvetan Todorov’s analysis of the fantastic: is what follows a supernatural occurrence, or has the bagman’s uncle fallen into that state of alcoholic hallucination traditional to the true literary native, from Burns’s Tam O’Shanter to MacDiarmid’s drunk man and his metamorphosing thistle? Dismissing his uncle’s account of his supposedly poignant thoughts at this juncture, the bagman is “decidedly of the opinion, gentlemen, that my uncle fell into the kind of doze, without having thought about anything at all. Be this, a sit may, a church bell struck two. My uncle woke, rubbed his eyes, and jumped up in astonishment.”1 “Be this, as it may” and “decidedly” somewhat undercut each other. Is this an awakening, or a deeper level of dozing?

• 3 Vernon Lee, Contemporary Review, September 1895, reprinted in part in Paul Maixner (ed.), Robert Lo (...)
• 4 I acknowledge a debt to Emma Letley’s discussion of the novel in her From Galt to Douglas Brown: Ni (...)

6This is one of the most unsettling passages ever written by Stevenson, and that is saying much. Narrator (David) and reader are at one in their apprehension of possible danger to come, but the episode works more subtly than that. Vernon Lee considered David’s encounter with the spae-wife something of a microcosm, an objective correlative as it were, of the whole novel.3 The unity of Pickwick Papers, insofar as it has any, would not suffer from the omission of “The Story of the Bagman’s Uncle”, but Robert Louis Stevenson, almost sixty years later, constructs his fictions much more tightly. Moreover, while Todorov rightly points to the use of language as a factor in the overall effect of the fantastic, he does not consider the role of non-standard dialects (or languages that have been “demoted” to dialects). Equally rightly, Todorov deems the fantastic to be potentially subversive in its predilection for taboo themes. The deployment of Scots in this passage and else-wherein Catriona gives voice to the ruled, who are liable to be not only repressed, but also silenced, by their jittery rulers.4

• 5 Robert Louis Stevenson, “A Humble Remonstrance”, Memories and Portraits, London, Tusitala ed., 1924 (...)

9The word “atmosphere” is apt for the Stevenson œuvre. Stevenson will not describe a scene in exhaustive detail. It must at least be authentic, and as a son of the Forth estuary he had grown up with the screech of the sea-birds in his ears, but for him the fictive picture must “stand or fall by its significant simplicity”5. His Edinburgh (including its hinterland such as the Bass Rock) is not evoked in the way that Dickens evokes his London. The opening several pages of Bleak House, with their unrelentingly brooding, epic, poem of the London fog: there we have, famously, Dickens’s unique power, which Stevenson neither would—nor could—achieve. The fog provides an atmosphere which, in Dickens, curiously reveals more than it conceals, for here is the earlier writer at his most imaginatively visual: “Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all around them, as if they were up in a balloon, and hanging in the misty clouds.” Stevenson’s visualisations, through determinedly half-shut eyes, are of a different order. We can read The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde equally as an explicitly London or implicitly Edinburgh story. Soho and Regent’s Park are indicated, not elaborated; certainly, the gaslit gloom is conveyed by images of some particularity, but we can envisage twisting closes and wynds off the Grassmarket and the Cowgate as much as—if not more than—points east of Piccadilly Circus. Even “The Body-Snatcher”, that microcosm of Jekyll and Hyde with a declared Edinburgh Old Town ambience, is more specific on the rural kirkyard than on the city where, for the most part, the anatomists and resurrectionists ply their trades. There is mention of the Castle Rock but not, say, the West Port which was the operational centre (so to speak) of the lugubrious Burke and Hare—the latter happening to be the ancestor of a sometime contributor to Études écossaises (the art historian Bill Hare). Dickens’s Thames-scouring body-snatchers, in Our Mutual Friend, can be more easily tracked down: it’s possible to locate precisely the pub (“of dropsical appearance”) to which they resort. Its counterpart in “The Body Snatcher” is not quite so foregrounded and celebrated.

• 6 Tom Hubbard, “Ordeal by Neoballadry: Narrative Poetry by Robert Louis Stevenson and John Davidson”, (...)
• 7 Robert Louis Stevenson, “The Works of Edgar Allan Poe”, Essays Literary and Critical, London, Tusit (...)

10In an earlier issue of the present journal, I argued that his early French translator and commentator, Marcel Schwob, presents Stevenson as—in effect—a proto-Symboliste. Schwob dwells on Stevenson’s power of suggestiveness, that refusal to spell out, that blurs the distinction between the real and the unreal.6 “Suggérer, c’est le rêve”, was that famous invocation of Stéphane Mallarmé; the poet’s Belgian confrère, Georges Rodenbach, created a network of part-spoken, but even more unspoken, analogies in his Symbolist novel Bruges-La-Morte (1892). Again, though specific loci are cited, and the book could take you so far on a walking-tour of Bruges, it’s where you’d get lost that matters. The labyrinth of mediaeval lanes and canals, stagnant as the veins of a corpse; the confusion of identity through doubles and mirror images, including reflections in these same canals; the somewhat camp bizarrerie of the prose style—in all that, we have affinities (at the very least) with Robert Louis Stevenson, who shares with Rodenbach a literary pedigree going back to Edgar Poe: “There are trap-doors and spring-guns in [Poe’s fiction], there are gins and pitfalls; and the precipitate reader may stumble unawares upon some nightmare not easily to be forgotten.”7

• 8 John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice, ed. and introduced by Jan Morris, London, 1981, p. 123.

11The labyrinth: a keyword in several Stevenson texts, including Jekyll and Hyde, and the perfect image for all that Todorov has to say about the fantastic. Character and reader don’t know what’s round the next turning, what’s behind the Sire de Malétroit’s door. A promising road is in fact a cul-de-sac; the obscure vennel leads, dramatically, to an amphitheatre of horrors. Such is the nature of Gothic, in the architectural, Ruskinian sense, especially that quality of “changefulness” appropriate to fictions of metamorphosis and multiple personality. “Changefulness” sums up how Gothic can “shrink into a turret, expand into a hall, coil into a staircase, or spring into aspire”8. Such dark energies appealed to neurotic Victorians in England and Scotland as well as to their continental counterparts: remember that the Symbolists are also heirs to the mediaevalising Pre-Raphaelites. Dickens is also part of this, for all his occasionally hearty philistinism, whose flipside is his Englishly empirical artistry. Not the least of the fantastic “uncertainties” of both writers are, of course, their unfinished novels, The Mystery of Edwin Drood and Weir of Hermiston. Stevenson’s last working days, in Samoa, witnessed a return, in imagination, to the execution sites of old Edinburgh. Dickens, for his part, recalled that maze of staircases, corridors and deserted spaces that was Satis House: it was where Pip, in Great Expectations, would encounter Miss Havisham—most terrifyingly as an apparition, hanging by the neck, from a wooden beam, her face moving as if she were trying to call him. In June 1870, Dickens was seen in front of the house, gazing ahead. He died two days later.