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“In his day,” writes Phillip Lopate in the Review’s April 4 issue, “Robert Louis Stevenson was celebrated equally for his essays.” A posthumous entry in the 1916 Cambridge History of English Literature called him “the foremost essayist since Lamb,” while contemporaries like the critic Edmund Gosse, Henry James, and Joseph Conrad all admired his prose, yet the modern reading public has “resisted relinquishing its settled idea about Stevenson as a romantic fantasist.” “What are we to make,” Lopate asks, “of his contribution to the essay form and of the popular neglect of that body of work?… His sensibility is not skeptically protomodernist, like Montaigne’s; he is solidly old-school, with a sweetness, kindness, charity, wisdom, and tact that must be appreciated for what they are.”

Below, alongside Lopate’s article, we have compiled four essays about Robert Louis Stevenson and one about Charles Lamb.

Phillip Lopate
‘Thus I Lived with Words’

The modern reading public has resisted relinquishing its settled idea about Robert Louis Stevenson as a romantic fantasist, but in his day he was considered one of the best essayists of his generation.

Claire Bucknell
‘So Whimsical a Head’

“Humor was both a compulsion for Lamb and one of his ‘primary coping mechanisms.’ He couldn’t not joke, especially when he wasn’t supposed to. His first recorded quip took place in a graveyard: ‘Mary, where do all the naughty people lie?’ In fine company he liked to sit silently and then, provoked by a chance word or thought, ‘stutter out some senseless pun’ that invariably alienated everyone around him.”

Richard Holmes
On the Enchanted Hill

“I started out writing, some thirty years ago, largely because of Stevenson. He was the man who opened the magic door. His wit, his style, his courage, his wanderlust, all enchanted me; and they still do. He made England seem small, and the world look big. He made the dreams of childhood sing with adult possibilities.”

Janet Adam Smith
The Real RLS

“The stories I had first raced through at ten or eleven years old were now reread with [Henry] James’s insights: that Treasure Island is also a subtle evocation of young feelings; that the character of Alan Breck in Kidnapped is a study of the love of glory; that in the short story ‘Thrawn Janet’ Stevenson had been able to create an atmosphere of supernatural evil—and yet tell the gruesome tale in the homely dialect of a Scottish village. It was surely an unusually versatile writer who could move confidently from the yo-ho-ho’s of the pirates to the Scots tongue of Balweary.”

Karl Miller
The Two Stevensons

“From his early days in Scotland till the last chapter of his life as enacted in Samoa, it is possible to think that there were at least two Stevensons: the respectable and the bohemian, the successful and the delinquent, the man of letters and the prototypical hippie. Travels with a donkey, adventures among the doxies of the Edinburgh underworld, did not prevent him from qualifying as a lion of the Savile Club in London, or from becoming the respected friend of leading literary figures such as Henry James, Gosse, and Henley.”

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Bernard Bergonzi
Stevenson for Grown-Ups

“Stevenson combined a quasi-symbolist belief in the self-contained separateness of art, with the conviction that ‘life’ would always be larger and more various than art, and that the novel could never, as James had suggested, hope to compete with life: ‘Life is monstrous, infinite, illogical, abrupt, and poignant; a work of art, in comparison, is neat, finite, self-contained, rational, flowing and emasculate.’”

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