The Lighthouse Stevensons - Bella Bathurst [68]
If Robert thought he could relax his vigilance after David and Alan joined the family business, he was mistaken. Thomas, it seemed, was proving to be as intransigent as Alan and Bob had been in their time. As the youngest child of the family, he had spent his youth being alternately indulged and ignored by parents exhausted by years of child-rearing. He was boisterous, full of tricks and eager spirits, victimised and adored by his older brothers. He, unlike Alan, had not had to bear the full weight of Robert’s expectations, and had therefore been allowed much greater freedom to develop as he pleased. True, he too had gone through the same long pupilage of lighthouse tours and paternal sermons, but it was his brothers who had taken the brunt of Robert’s zeal for education, discipline and industry. As a result, he lacked both Alan’s intensity and David’s pedantry. He was, and remained, a more spontaneous character than his brothers. His letters to Robert could be chattily informal in a way that Alan’s had never been, and his habits had an exuberance to them that even Bob had lacked. As he grew older, he became a more complex character. On the one hand, he was more outwardly demonstrative than his elder brothers, on the other, he was prone to bouts of debilitating melancholia and self-doubt.
As his son Louis later gleefully pointed out, Thomas’s school years were not his finest moment. In fact, his experience seemed to consist mainly of being strapped for various crimes and inadequacies. Tom was also at the High School when it finally moved from Infirmary Street to its grand new position on Regent Road, though his attitude to this sudden raise in status was soured by his lifelong loathing for school and schooling. Instead, he developed a desultory interest in books, natural history and literature. Louis later recalled,
He had a collection of curiosities. He had a printing press and printed some sort of dismal paper on the Spectator plan, which did not, I think, ever get over the first page. He had a chest of chemicals, and made all manner of experiments, more or less abortive, as boys’ experiments will be. But there was always a remarkable inconsequence, an unconscious spice of the true Satanic rebel nature in the boy. Whatever he played with was the reverse of what he was formally supposed to be engaged in learning. As soon as he went, for instance, to a class of chemistry, there were no more experiments made by him. The thing then ceased to be a pleasure and became an irking drudgery.
Once out of school, Tom seemed unenthusiastic about settling into any profession. Robert, as usual, wrote formally to him, demanding that he decide his business. Tom vacillated and then replied listlessly, saying that he had no particular career in mind just yet. Robert, exasperated, hauled him into the Baxter Street office to help with dogsbody duties. Once there, it was evident that Tom showed no more excitement about engineering than he had for anything else. Robert took him off on surveying expeditions and got him to work on planning and drawing, at which Tom proved more a hindrance than a help. At one point, he announced an interest in becoming a publisher. Robert helped him set up a working printing press and watched as Tom grew frustrated and then abandoned it. Then he said he would like to become a bookseller, so Robert took him to London to pick up tips from the local traders. That, too, came to nothing. Robert sent Tom back to Edinburgh to work for his old friend Patrick Neill, who had published Robert’s Bell Rock book a few years back. He also wrote to Tom, hoping still to deal with him by force of persuasion. What Robert said in that letter was as revealing about his own philosophy as it was about Tom’s behaviour. He wrote in August 1835,
You were anxious to know the nature of the Bill Charges, and if it will have any tendency to stamp upon your mind