The Lighthouse Stevensons - Bella Bathurst [11]
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 the cause, the consequences of Alan’s death were, for Jean Lillie, terrible. While still young, she was left a widow with a small child, short of money and dependent on her mother for subsistence. But despite her sudden poverty, she