The Lighthouse Stevensons - Bella Bathurst [24]
In common with the rest of her family, Jean Smith possessed a forceful character. As befitting her respectable position, she was a refined and rather feminine creature, who had for the most part led a life of bourgeois niceties. In her way, however, she was as single-minded as her new husband. She ran a well-disciplined household, founded on firm government and Christian virtues, but at the same time remained interested in high society. Louis, it seems, found Jean’s charms difficult to understand. ‘My grandmother,’ he wrote, ‘remained to the end devout and unambitious, occupied with her Bible, her children and her house; easily shocked and associating largely with a clique of godly parasites’. As someone who had struggled with religion for much of his life, he found Jean Stevenson’s sheeplike devotion exasperating. If she was asked to employ a cook, the cook would be taken because she was pious, not skilful. The midwife would be hired on her knowledge of the Catechism rather than her gift for obstetrics. Louis was hard pressed to understand what it was about her that Robert had found so compelling and wondered slyly about ‘the sense of disproportion between the warmth of the adoration felt and the nature of the woman’. He searched a little further, and came up with only the faintest of praise. ‘She diligently read and marked her Bible; she was a tender nurse; she had a sense of humour under strong control.’ Robert might have been allowed to play the adventurer away from home but once returned to Baxter’s Place he deferred to his wife. He did not apply the same standards to marriage as he did to work; women, he believed, were a softer, more obscure species than men, and could not be dealt with in the same blunt manner as men. In belief and habit Robert was an old-fashioned man and Jean an old-fashioned wife. Despite this, or perhaps because of it, they had an equitable marriage. Robert remained to the end devotedly loyal and prepared to respect Jean’s judgement in almost all family matters. The only household business which he took an interest in was the education of his children; the rest was her responsibility.
Jean was also marked by the deaths of her children. Between 1801 and 1818, nine children were born, of whom five survived. ‘Never,’ wrote Louis with the blithe callousness of a born survivor, ‘was there such a massacre of the innocents; teething and chin-cough and scarlet fever and small-pox ran the round; and little Lillies, and Smiths, and Stevensons fell like moths about a candle.’ By 1818, the carnage had ended and the Stevensons were left with Jane, Alan, Bob, David and Thomas. But Jean reacted to the loss of the four souls by lavishing a morbid attention on the remaining children. Alan, in particular, worried her; he was a pale, frail child whose childhood was often interrupted by illness. Jean pestered him endlessly to wrap up and to keep taking the poultices, and Alan treated her fussings with a mixture of embarrassment and dismissive gratitude. Jean’s melancholic habits may be one reason why the five surviving Stevenson children became so superstitious about illness. All of them grew up obsessively attentive to their own wellbeing; Thomas, in particular, became a full-time hypochondriac. The Stevenson domestic life, and the ritual outbreaks of Edinburgh epidemics – cholera, tuberculosis and smallpox were all, at various times, rife – made a potent mixture. The contrast between the hardiness of their lighthouse work and the dainty medical paranoia at Baxter’s Place was to become even more emphatic in later years.
Several consolatory letters from his staff reveal the extent that the deaths of