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By Root 741 0

was, as Louis noted, an austere patriarch who believed that the best gift he could give his children was to mould them as he had moulded himself. In part, he was only conforming to the prevailing notions of childhood and youth. Like many of his contemporaries, he believed that mollycoddling one’s children when they were young only led to weakness later. But this reflected more than just the habits of the day; it was also Robert’s conviction that his children should be like him, think like him, work like him and love like him. Robert’s approval was enthusiastic but sparing, and his children remained aware that his favour was conditional on good behaviour. If he wished to compliment them, he gave them a harder, more responsible task to perform. Love, like everything else in Robert’s life, was something that must be earned. Mostly, they looked to their mother for the softer side. Their letters to her are more open, more honest, and, frequently, filled with worries that they knew Robert would not have tolerated. Louis records an early incident when Thomas escaped a dull family outing and wandered down to Portobello. Robert was more than just angry at Tom’s disappearance, he was shocked. ‘Long after,’ writes Louis, ‘my grandfather, who was off upon his tour of inspection, wrote home to Baxter’s Place in one of his emphatic, inimitable letters: “the memory of Tom’s weakness haunts me like a ghost.”’ Tom’s crime hardly merited such a profound reaction, but it shows up Robert’s terror of waywardness. His censorship was kindly meant, but it isn’t surprising that his children grew up terrified of him.

At the age of eight, each of the boys was packed off in grand New Town style to the Royal High School, then at its old location on Infirmary Street. Once there, they were given a sturdy diet of classics and natural philosophy. The High School had already earned its reputation as Edinburgh’s smartest public school; Sir Walter Scott and Henry Cockburn were both sent there in the 1790s, and it was still a source of irritation to Robert that he had not. By the 1820s, the school was moving from a diet of pure classics to a more practical curriculum. There was increasing emphasis on mathematics, science and physics, and the school now aimed to produce men of technical skill as well as intellectual learning. The determination to give the school a vocational role disturbed the old guard so much that by 1824 Henry Cockburn and Walter Scott established the Edinburgh Academy with the intention of restoring the balance back towards the classics.

For all its alleged usefulness, none of the Stevenson boys much enjoyed their time at the High School. Even Alan, by far the brightest of the children, did not shine. Bob, Robert’s second son, left as soon as he could, having maintained only a hapless inability to spell. ‘For this Journall, we are chiefly indibted to the persiverance of my Father,’ he wrote in his diary the year he left, ‘who on all convenuant ocastions aloted part of the day to sugest the proper subjects of observetion in hopes that in our future journeys or purshuts of life wi might keep up and observe the same practice.’ Horrified, Robert sent Bob off for several crash courses in literacy, and then to St Andrew’s University. Tom, the youngest child, was equally lacklustre. As Louis put it, ‘Robert took education and success at school for a thing of infinite import; to Thomas, in his young independence, it all seemed Vanity of Vanities…Indeed, there seems to have been nothing more rooted in him than his contempt for all the ends, processes and ministers of education. Tutor was ever a by-word with him; “positively tutorial,” he would say of people or manners he despised.’

From the moment Robert returned from the Bell Rock in 1814, his hopes rested mainly on Alan. His eldest son was a silent, introspective child, with an abstracted quality to him that Robert found disconcerting. His childhood had been marked by long intervals confined to bed. He, like his sickly nephew Louis later on, spent his time reading and dreaming. By the time he