Kidnapped. Robert Louis Stevenson
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contemporaries of his linguistic originality. Shortly after the publication of Travels with a Donkey Stevenson received a letter from his good friend and traveling companion for An Inland Voyage, Walter Grindlay Simpson: “As for your language it is perfect. Critics say it is pedantic. Away with them. You merely use dictionary words when they are necessary and what the critics resent is that your vocabulary is larger than that of a ploughman or a merchant.”17
If Stevenson prided himself on anything it was his precision as a writer, chastising Edmund Gosse for using the wrong word (“never again write ‘noticeable’; I have but to remind you that ‘notable’ is the word”)18 and complaining about the nineteenth century’s “slovenly” literary habits. “I have only one feather in my cap, and that is I am not a sloven.” He credited that to his study of the classics:
Although I am in the position of Shakespeare—I have little Latin and less Greek—yet the benefit which I owe to my little Latin is inconceivable. It not only helps one to arrive at the value of words, but you must remember that we are only the decayed fragments of the Roman Empire from which we have all that we value ourselves upon, and I always believe we can never be so well employed as in endeavouring to understand as well as we can the original meaning of that system of things in whose ruins we live.19
Stevenson begins with Shakespeare and Jonson and ends with a presentiment of T. S. Eliot. Since he was living under the falling shadow of the fin de siècle he felt nothing more pressing than the need for exactitude in language. These remarks were made to a journalist in New Zealand just eighteen months before his death in Samoa. He had begun to see his work outside the frame of his century’s experience and within the larger context of Western history. He highlighted the linguistic nature of his writing as a wedge into its deeper structure, for meaning and intention were embedded in history, and history was nothing if not constituted of words. Thus to know the origins of our language was to know something of ourselves.
On 14 February 1886, Stevenson wrote to Charles Baxter about his new book:
What’s mair, Sir, it’s Scōtch: no strong, for the sake o’ they pock-puddens, but jist a kitchen o’t, to leeven the wersh, sapless, fushionless, stotty, stytering South-Scotch they think sae muckle o’. Its name is Kidnaaapped; or Memo- yers of the Adventyers of Darvid Balfour in the year seventeen hunner and fifty wan. There’s nae sculduddery aboot that, as ye can see for yoursel. And if you hae no objection, I would like very much to put your name to it.20
From the beginning Stevenson took pains to ensure that each book of his had a dedication, and in the early years he even tried to fit the text to the person. New Arabian Nights was for his cousin Bob, in memory of their salad days, while Treasure Island went to his enthusiastic and energetic stepson, Lloyd Osbourne. No one could have been a better match for Kidnapped than Charles Baxter. Their friendship dated from their college days and was maintained without interruption through their adult years. If Baxter became in the end Stevenson’s most trusted financial adviser and business agent, it was not that role that made the dedication so just: the two men were deeply nationalistic about Scotland (Baxter lived his entire life in Edinburgh) and they enjoyed nothing more than sporting with each other in their native tongue. Stevenson’s letters were often a rollicking tumble of Scots words and phrases, and were implicated with a shared set of nationalistic attitudes. If Stevenson recalls for Baxter (in the dedication) the old clubs of their youth, or the intellectual giants whose legacy they cherished and whose achievements they were just beginning to emulate, he also reminds him (and himself) of his own distance from “those places that have now become … a part of the scenery of dreams.”
Henry James’s markings on the advertising pages of his copy of Kidnapped. These notes were used for the essay on Stevenson that James first published in the Century Magazine in April 1888.
But the dedication was a broad public statement, written at Bournemouth, in another land and largely for another people, and with all the constraints of a public discourse. In the confines of a private letter, on the other hand, Stevenson could leave England and reenter the land of his birth. And he could freely express himself. Of course, he had been doing that all through the composition of Kidnapped, painstakingly legitimating the Scots language, but in his letter the point is made with crystal clarity. After assuring Baxter that he does not have to worry about any damage to his professional reputation because the text is neither “indecent” nor “irreligious,” Stevenson then identifies the salient feature of a book dedicated to a habitué of the Parliament close—“it’s Scotch.” What follows is a brilliant minidiatribe against the English. Stevenson employs a succession of words that go far to characterize his prospective audience’s ability to understand or even tolerate the “strong” Scots that he and Baxter are comfortable with. The fault, of course, lies with the “pock-puddens,” a contemptuous term for the English that is often defined as a jocular expression but in Stevenson’s use conveys all the contempt and none of the jocularity.21
So (he implicitly argues) he has used just enough “Scotch” to “kitchen” or spice—and now follows a string of adjectives that intensify the derision in pock-puddens—the dull, tasteless, insipid, uninspired, stammering, and halting kind of Scots they think so much of. “South-Scotch” is Stevenson’s term for “English- Scotch,” some hybrid creation of English speakers who want to ornament the language, which the great Cockburn protested against in 1844: “Railways and steamers, carrying the southern [i.e., English] into every recess, will leave no asylum for our native classical tongue” (SND). Southern was a term almost as contemptuous as pock-puddens, and was used thus by Sir Walter Scott: “A sturdy Scotsman, with all sort of prejudices against the southern, and the spawn of the southern” (1818; OED). Stevenson is protesting with all the force of his native tongue what passes for the English understanding of “Scotch” in literature. He is in fact railing against the taming of the Scottish language for the sake of a tepid English taste for local color. If anyone wonders where Stevenson gathered the rhetoric years later to denounce the Reverend Dr. Hyde in his famous defense of Father Damien, one need look no further than this wonderful sentence (which is quoted on three separate occasions in the SND). The power and vigor of the expression, the intensity of feeling, are directed not simply against the false “South-Scotch” that Stevenson decries but against the attitudes and conditions that compel an artist to acquiesce in that kind of writing: it can even be seen as the visceral reaction of a “colonized” subject to a form of “imperial” oppression.
Stevenson chafed all his life at the array of social, sexual, and political mentalities that controlled and censored literature, yet there is no question but that he conformed to them. This does not mean that he did not at times break out in anger, although the outbursts were confined almost exclusively to the privacy of his correspondence. The irony, and truly the brilliance of his achievement in Kidnapped, is that he was able to accomplish his genuine objectives in spite of these enormous obstacles. Far from being softened, the language of the novel is bold and hardy throughout. Finally, as the writer mock-jests with Baxter, his book has no “sculduddery”; it is not, in other words, obscene or smutty. By deliberately using such a coarse word (which also means fornication) Stevenson affirms his right to speak openly and freely in his own language. And yet even here the long process of planing the edges of this deeply recalcitrant writer never ceases. In DeLancey Ferguson and Marshall Waingrow’s 1956 edition of the letters to Baxter they gloss “sculduddery” as “bawdy,” while Ernest Mehew, in the latest edition, avoids any definition altogether.
From early on Stevenson proclaimed the virtue of Scots as a literary language, using it sparingly in “The Pavilion on the Links,”