The Unfinished Robert Louis Stevenson.

Not unusual that the Scottish writer Robert Louis Stevenson had ideas for novels that were either dropped or that he couldn’t implement them. I did look into his letters, in which he tells about conceptions and read pieces of that this man wrote.

The Great North Road

That was the year 1881. After Treasure Island, he had a wacky idea, as Stevenson considered as a “boys’ book”, of writing a romanticized novel about the real highwayman Jerry Abershawe. It was called Jerry Abershaw: A Tale of Putney Heath. The writer characterized his hero as akin to Robin Hood, who makes a gallant stealing on Putney Heath. The Scot had more ideas that seemed to be other books for young audience, which almost all of them had titles: The Leading Light: A Tale of the Coast, The Squaw Man: or the Wild West and one more unnamed, but all these ideas didn’t realized into books. His knowledge about highway robbery, Stevenson used for The Great North Road three or four years later, to which he could write eight chapters.

I couldn’t pass after the first one. The surrealistic and unnatural behaviors of characters, whose moods in switching. It was possible to accept as a comedy if it hadn’t been presented serious. A lord, who was robbed on the road, says in an inn that has no wealth due to that, and from anger moves to calmness, uttering to his servant that he is alike to son for him. The following his wish is to play cards, but after getting informed there haven’t been robberies in five years, he leaves the inn. The writing is inhabited on well. Stevenson does not show his magnificence level in it.

The Shovels of Newton French: including Memoirs of Henry Shovel, a Private in the Peninsular War.

The Scottish author was living in Samoa. In the first half of 1891, he corresponds about his planned novel Henry Shovel that would become The Shovels of Newton French: including Memoirs of Henry Shovel, a Private in the Peninsular War. That experimental idea doesn’t stand out to be a special, as can see in simplicity in this genre and a tedium of doing it into saga:

“…work is to begin in 1664 with the marriage of Skipper, afterwards Alderman Shovel of Bristol, Henry’s great-great-grandfather, and end about 1832 with his own second marriage to the daughter of his runaway aunt. Will the public ever stand such an opus? Gude kens, but it tickles me. Two or three historical personages will just appear: Judge Jeffreys, Wellington, Colquhoun, Grant, and I think Townsend the runner. I know the public won’t like it; let ’em lump it then; I mean to make it good; it will be more like a saga.”

“I have a strange kind of novel under construction; it begins about 1660 and ends 1830, or perhaps I may continue it to 1875 or so, with another life. One, two, three, four, five, six generations, perhaps seven, figure therein; two of my old stories, “Delafield” and “Shovel,” are incorporated; it is to be told in the third person, with 56 some of the brevity of history, some of the detail of romance. The Shovels of Newton French will be the name.”

Sophia Scarlett

Robert Louis Stevenson came up with a conception of the novel Sophia Scarlett after The Wrecker and before he began to write Catriona. It looked powerful conception of showing a South Sea plantation at those present times. But the author wanted to print another ordinary romance instead of the research of the topic, as it usually occurs.

He wrote to his friend and editor of his many books Sydney Colvin in January 31, 1892: “As I know you are always interested in novels, I must tell you that a new one is now entirely planned. It is to be called Sophia Scarlet, and is in two parts. Part I. The Vanilla Planter. Part II. The Overseers. No chapters, I think; just two dense blocks of narrative, the first of which is purely sentimental, but the second has some rows and quarrels, and winds up with an explosion, if you please! I am just burning to get at Sophia, but I must do this Samoan journalism—that’s a cursed duty. The first part of Sophia, bar the first twenty or thirty pages, writes itself; the second is more difficult, involving a good many characters—about ten, I think—who have to be kept all moving, and give the effect of a society. I have three women to handle, out and well-away! but only Sophia is in full tone. Sophia and two men, Windermere, the Vanilla Planter, who dies at the end of Part I., and Rainsforth, who only appears in the beginning of Part II. The fact is, I blush to own it, but Sophia is a regular novel; heroine and hero, and false accusation, and love, and marriage, and all the rest of it—all planted in a big South Sea plantation run by ex-English officers—à la Stewart’s plantation in Tahiti. There is a strong undercurrent of labour trade which gives it a kind of Uncle Tom flavour, absit omen!”, and Stevenson also mentioned this detail in this writing: “I think by beginning with the arrival of the three Miss Scarlets hot from school and society in England…”

The next letter to Colvin was in May 1, 1892: “It petered out thus: the chief of the short stories got sucked into Sophia Scarlet—and Sophia is a book I am much taken with, and mean to get to, as soon as—but not before—I have done David Balfour and The Young Chevalier. So you see you are like to hear no more of the Pacific or the nineteenth century for a while. The Young Chevalier is a story of sentiment and passion, which I mean to write a little differently from what I have been doing—if I can hit the key; rather more of a sentimental tremolo to it. It may thus help to prepare me for Sophia, which is to contain three ladies, 188 and a kind of a love affair between the heroine and a dying planter who is a poet!”

Sophia Scarlett was left as a rough draft of one or two chapters and it exists. While I didn’t bother myself to find and read it.

The Young Chevalier

Stevenson was enchanted about The Young Chevalier from 1892 to 1893. It changed titles, which were Blair of Balmyle, The Tail of the Race and Dyce of Ythan. That novel was set either in 1749 or 1750–several years after 1745 Jacobite Rising–and took places in France and Scotland. This probable book could become a return of Master of Ballantrae and Alan Breck Stewart from the author’s other books. On the one hand, it is magnetizing to have something else about the first and meet the lovable the second again. But on the other hand, this writing was one more to the overcrowded and overwhelmed bunch of romantic novels. Besides, was he going to use an idea that the Young Pretender becomes a person who saves a lady from a fire in an inn? It wouldn’t be serious to make any involvement of this real personality here.

In the letter to Sydney Colvin, which was written in May 1, 1892:  “I am afraid my touch is a little broad in a love story; I can’t mean one thing and write another.”

Then later: “I have been forced in (since I began to write to you) to blatter to Fanny on the subject of my heroine, there being two cruces as to her life and history: how came she alone? and how far did she go with the Chevalier?  The second must answer itself when I get near enough to see.  The first is a back-breaker. Yet I know there are many reasons why a fille de famine, romantic, adventurous, ambitious, innocent of the world, might run from her home in these days; might she not have been threatened with a convent? might there not be some Huguenot business mixed in?  Here am I, far from books; if you can help me with a suggestion, I shall say God bless you.  She has to be new run away from a strict family, well-justified in her own wild but honest eyes, and meeting these three men, Charles Edward, Marischal, and Balmile, through the accident of a fire at an inn.  She must not run from a marriage, I think; it would bring her in the wrong frame of mind.  Once I can get her, sola, on the highway, all were well with my narrative.”

Stevenson wrote a prologue and an unfinished chapter one. The writer gives delight to relish the text and metaphors. If only the essence of written could be the same grandiose. He letters that Master of Ballantrae visited this wine-shop many times and an owner’s wife looked at him, but two pages later are informing that he is for a first time in this place and didn’t see her before. The prologue contains a weird dialog between a potential protagonist, the Jacobite lord Francis Blair of Balmire (I think, it would be likely him who was supposed to save that noble lady from the fire) and Master of Ballantrae about the conquest of the hostess’ heart in which the first threatens in the middle of this usual talking and considers his interlocutor a chaste man, despite it contradicts with morals about looking at a married woman. He denigrates the appearance of the owner’s wife and makes a strange pointing on that she would melt on a man’s tongue. Just having the prologue already turns The Young Chevalier into a lousy-quality romance, my apologies. Reading further of the author’s metaphoring causes regret at the waste of talent on writing this. Then a detailed depiction of the inner and mighty about changing feelings of Blair of Balmire speaks of inserting these words in a wrong place. There were still questions to the storyline. How the wine-shop owner could see a nobility in a man with a bad clothe and become ashamed of his own violence?

The unfinished chapter about Bonnie Prince Charlie is powerful in depiction of a stance of the exiled king, even it has a presence of fiction, but it doesn’t matter.

The book couldn’t have become Stevenson’s classic.

Heathercat

From the letter that was written in December 6th 1893: “The above is my story, and I wonder if any light can be thrown on it. I prefer the girl’s father dead; and the question is, How in that case could Lieutenant George Murray get his order to “apprehend” and his power to “sell” her in marriage?

Or—might Lieutenant G. be her tutor, and she fugitive to the Pringles, and on the discovery of her whereabouts hastily married?

A good legal note on these points is very ardently desired by me; it will be the corner-stone of my novel.”

Then in this epistle: “I hope may do me. Some sort of general history of the Darien affair (if there is a decent one, which I misdoubt), it would also be well to have—the one with most details, if possible. It is singular how obscure to me this decade of Scots history remains, 1690-1700—a deuce of a want of light and grouping to it! However, I believe I shall be mostly out of Scotland in my tale; first in Carolina, next in Darien. I want also—I am the daughter of the horseleech truly—“Black’s new large map of Scotland,” sheets 3, 4, and 5, a 7s. 6d. touch. I believe, if you can get the Caldwell Papers…”

The Scot writes about the implementation of Heathercat in the letter of June 17th 1894: “After that I am on Weir of Hermiston and Heathercat, two Scotch stories, which will either be something different, or I shall have failed. The first is generally designed, and is a private story of two or three characters in a very grim vein. The second—alas! the thought—is an attempt at a real historical novel, to present a whole field of time; the race—our own race—the west land and Clydesdale blue bonnets, under the influence of their last trial, when they got to a pitch of organisation in madness that no other peasantry has ever made an offer at. I was going to call it The Killing Time, but this man Crockett has forestalled me in that. Well, it’ll be a big smash if I fail in it; but a gallant attempt. All my weary reading as a boy, which you remember well enough, will come to bear on it; and if my mind will keep up to the point it was in a while back, perhaps I can pull it through.”

Heathercat has three chapters. Reading of it and previous author’s unfinished works amaze and remind about his multifaceted talent, which in the changing of writing style. If the Scottish accent of Weir of Hermiston isn’t lovable due to the storyline itself, while it is adorable in Heathercat, becoming as writing-in into a piece’s unique narrating style, which evokes a mystery, and I’m tantalized by that approach. It was a promising book. This unmade thing has a strong conversation between two men of a kirk. And it tremendously depicts a church in the–alas–last third chapter. The ideas of the involvement of Cameronians and the use of the actual fact of the disaster to install a colony in Panama are intriguing how they could have been inserted. However, I am not sure because Stevenson was still obsessed with usual, which is involvement of romance that killing it. From chapter one: “Francis killed Simon Ruthven of Drumshoreland, anno 1540; bought letters of slayers at the widow and heir, and, by a barbarous form of compounding, married (without tocher) Simon’s daughter Grizzel, which is the way the Traquairs and Ruthvens came first to an intermarriage. About the last Traquair and Ruthven marriage, it is the business of this book, among many other things, to tell.” Comparing this with one of the letters in which the author speaks about the marriage of the heroine that wouldn’t make Heathercat into better, that did a simplification.

Eventually, the writer put this story aside without any idea whether it will temporarily or constantly.

Most of the projected by Robert Louis Stevenson weren’t developed to become monumental. Nevertheless, I look with regret that he didn’t write more books.