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By Root 687 0

silent years, the Commissioners asked him to explain the delay. Robert wrote back, promising them that the book would be ready soon. He then contacted his old friend Patrick Neill, now a bookseller and publisher, who he hoped might goad him into action. Neill suggested that Robert should apply a little pressure to himself. ‘Advertise it in the press,’ he wrote, ‘sell 300 to a bookseller – put the drawings in the hands of the engravers that they may draw on your purse – promise 50 copies to the Board, etc, etc. In short, commit yourself in every possible way – spurred in this way by the necessity of the case, you will get on excellently.’ Robert did as he suggested, and then found himself using Neill’s suggestions as a further excuse to prevaricate.

Finally, the Commissioners, who had long ago advanced Robert the money to research the book, demanded a finished copy immediately. Robert, impatient at his own inefficiency, babbled out reams of dictation to Jane. In 1824, thirteen years after he had begun, the book was finished. A proof copy, kept by Robert, still shows his scribbled corrections, dense and fastidious as a Dickens manuscript. The finished result evidently pleased him, since he fired off a letter immediately to the London publishers John Murray, demanding that each copy should be sold at ‘not less than four guineas’. His estimation of his own significance, it seemed, had remained undamaged by the delay. ‘I wish to free my hands of trouble in this respect,’ he wrote. ‘I would at the same time be understood as being impressed with a sense of the labour which the work has cost me – and with a desire as far as possible of being reimbursed. Considering the interest which the Eddystone Lighthouse has excited – though perhaps a less difficult work than the Bell Rock – and from the rising importance of the general subject of lighthouses – in proportion as the Naval and Mercantile Marine advances – it is not thought that so small an edition as 250 copies will be long in the hands of the Booksellers.’ At the end of the letter, he added a postscript, pointing out, somewhat pompously, his list of professional appointments. ‘I may further mention that if thought necessary or proper it might be noticed that I am a Member of the Antiquarian and Mercantile Societies of Edinburgh and Geological of London &c. and Engineer to the Commissioners of Northern Lights and Royal Burghs of Scotland &c. I will affix the only copy I have got of the dedication. Sir William Rae, Lord Advocate, took a copy of it the other day with him to London to get it presented in due form to the King.’ The King, unfortunately, refused the dedication. Nevertheless, as Robert had predicted, the book sold well, becoming in its turn a gospel for all future lighthouse engineers.

Aside from the book, Robert had plenty to occupy himself with. While continuing his work for the Commissioners, who now gave him an assured annual salary of £400, he had resumed his private business as head of the Stevenson firm. His appointment as Engineer to the Convention of Scottish Burghs in 1813 gave him a steady income and allowed him to experiment with far more than dovetails and ocean gales. The position meant that he was now responsible for the supervision of almost all public engineering work for Scotland’s towns and cities, for roads, bridges, canals, harbours and quarries, for railways, tramways and grand municipal statements. As with the lighthouses, he taught himself by working. Railways, for instance, were still in the most youthful stage of development, and Robert was responsible both for promoting their use and developing their technology. He was also credited with having anticipated John Macadam’s work on roads by several years, devising a system of iron or stone track-lines laid on smooth sand and surrounded with cobbles. Until his efforts, and the work of Thomas Telford, almost all British roads, including city streets, were little better than rutted cart tracks. Robert, of course, considered their state a disgrace to Scotland, and did what he could to improve them.