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Guide to the Stevenson House
Collection, Monterey State Historic Park
483.1
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Table of contents
Title: California.
Department of Parks and
Recreation. Stevenson House Collection, Monterey State
Historic Park,
Date (inclusive): 1850 -
1996.
Collection number: 483.1
Collector:
California State
Parks
Extent:
17.62 cubic ft.
(36 boxes)
Repository:
California State
Parks
Monterey State Historic Park
Monterey State Historic Park
20 Custom House Plaza
Monterey, CA 93940
831-649-7118
Abstract: The
Stevenson House Collection consists of
primary and secondary source materials,
artifacts, and memorabilia
connected with the Scottish author Robert
Louis Stevenson and the Stevenson
House/French Hotel in Monterey,
California. In the Stevenson House,
a former rooming house, Robert
Louis Stevenson lived for four months,
September to December 1879. During
his time living in the rooming house
he worked on
The Amateur Emigrant
and waited for his future wife
Fanny's divorce to be finalized.
Physical location: For current information on the
location of these materials, please consult the Monterey District
Museum
Curator at
831-649-7118.
Language:
English.
Public
The collections are open for research by appointment
only.
Appointments may be made by calling
831-649-7110.
Property rights reside with the California Department of Parks
and
Recreation. Literary rights are retained by the creators of the
records
and their heirs. For permission to reproduce or to publish,
please
contact the California Department of Parks and Recreation, Monterey
State
Historic Park.
Preferred citation of these materials is: [Identification of item], [Record Group], Stevenson House Collection,
Monterey State Historic Park, 483.1,
California State
Parks.
Most of the
collection was accumulated over forty years, 1932-1972,
via donation from
a number of individuals including the Field and
Osbourne estates
(Stevenson's step-children from wife Fanny Osbourne) as
well as Stevenson
enthusiasts Flodden W. Heron of San Francisco and William Percival
Jefferson, of
Santa Barbara.
Between 1991 and 1993, the Stevenson House Collection in Monterey
State Historic Park had limited preservation and arrangement work done
by
an independent contractor. The work included organization and
arrangement of the collection and rehousing of most of the materials in
archival
quality containers. The project was not completed due to lack of
funding and work ceased in 1993. As a result, there was no finding aid
created for the collection and no work done toward reconciling the
present
arrangement of items to the accession and object records within
the State
Parks system.
In 2002, the State Parks designated
funding to finish the work
already begun and hired another archivist. A
Microsoft Access database was
created listing the contents of each box
in the collection, record group
and series numbers assigned to each
folder and/or item by the prior
contractor, as well as CSP-assigned
accession numbers identified with each
item. An interim container list was
printed. This container list was
reconciled with the 1960 inventory
kept with the collection in its
storage space.
A preliminary
inventory was completed and a processing plan devised.
The primary level
organization scheme from the prior contractor was
retained, with each
collection treated as a separate record group with
series and subseries
as appropriate. Certain record formats, such as
monographs and
artifacts, were removed from their record groups and housed
as a distinct
group of Separated Materials because of their unique
storage
requirements.
Some item containers were changed to more appropriate archival
housing, and all photographs were sleeved in PAT-passed polypropylene
sleeves. All metal fasteners such as staples and paper clips were
removed and
replaced where appropriate with inert plastiklips. Monographs
were
housed in custom made book
boxes.
About the Collection and the Stevenson House State Historic Monument
The Stevenson House
Collection consists of primary and secondary
source materials, artifacts,
and memorabilia connected with the Scottish
author Robert Louis
Stevenson and the Stevenson House/French Hotel
in Monterey,
California. In the Stevenson House, a former rooming house,
Robert Louis
Stevenson lived for four months, September to December
1879. During his time
living in the rooming house he worked on
The
Amateur Emigrant
and waited for his future
wife Fanny's
divorce to be finalized.
It was in Monterey that Stevenson penned the
"Old Pacific Capital."
Some say that his setting for the tale
Treasure Island came from his walks along the
Monterey Peninsula.
Today, the Stevenson House has been restored as a
period home with several
rooms devoted to 'Stevensoniana'.
This
two-story adobe has sheltered families, government officials,
artists,
writers and fishermen, beginning in the Mexican era. First
owned by
Don Rafael Gonzalez, and reportedly built in the 1830s, the
two-story
adobe originally comprised the sala and one large room upstairs. A
Swiss businessman, Girardin, purchased it and added on the Houston
Street
section. Over the years it served many business purposes, and for a
time was known as The French Hotel. Stevenson lived in the building
during this period.
In 1937 the historic adobe was purchased by the
late Edith C. van
Antwerp and Mrs. C. Tobin Clark to save it from
destruction. They in turn
presented it to the State of California as a
memorial, and it is now a
unit of Monterey State Historic Park.
Robert Lewis (later: Louis) Balfour
Stevenson was born in Edinburgh
on 13 November 1850. His father Thomas
belonged to a family of
engineers who had built many of the deep-sea
lighthouses around the rocky coast
of Scotland. His mother, Margaret
Isabella Balfour, came from a family
of lawyers and church ministers. In
1857 the family moved to 17 Heriot
Row, a solid respectable house in
Edinburgh's New Town.
At the age of seventeen he enrolled at
Edinburgh University to study
engineering, with the aim - his father hoped
- of following him in the
family firm. However, he abandoned this
course of studies and made the
compromise of studying law. He 'passed
advocate' in 1875 but did not
practice since by now he knew he wanted to
be a writer. In the
university's summer vacations he went to France to
be in the company of other
young artists, both writers and painters.
His first published work was an
essay called "Roads", and his first
published volumes were works of
travel writing.
EARLY PUBLISHED
WORKS:
His first published volume,
An
Inland
Voyage
(1878), is an account of the journey he made by
canoe from
Antwerp to northern France, in which prominence is given to
the author
and his thoughts. A companion work,
Travels
with a Donkey in the Cevennes
(1879), gives us more
of his
thoughts on life and human society and continues in
consolidating the image
of the debonair narrator also found in his essays and
letters (classed
among his best works).
MEETING WITH FANNY,
JOURNEY TO CALIFORNIA, MARRIAGE:
His meeting with his future wife,
Fanny, was to change the rest of
his life. They met immediately after
his 'inland voyage', in September
1876 at Grez, a riverside village
south-east of Paris; he was
twenty-five, and she was thirty-six, an
independent American 'new woman',
separated from her husband and with two
children. Two years later she decided
to obtain a divorce and Stevenson
set out for California. His own
experiences continue to be the subject
of his next large-scale work
The Amateur
Emigrant
(written 1879-80,
published 1894), an account of this
journey to California, which Noble (1985:
14) considers his finest work.
In this work of perceptive reportage and
open-minded and humane
observation the voice is less buoyant and does
not avoid observation of
hardship and suffering. The light-hearted
paradoxes and confidential
address to the reader of the essays written a few
years before (1876-77)
and then published as
Virginibus
Puerisque
(1881) continue in the creation of his
original debonair authorial
persona.
Concluding this first period of writing based closely
on his own
direct experiences is
The
Silverado
Squatters
(1883), an account of his three week honeymoon at
an abandoned
silver mine in California.
SHORT
STORIES:
Stevenson's first published fictional narrative was "A Lodging for
the
Night" (1877), a short story originally published in a magazine,
like
other early narrative works, such as "The Sire De Maletroit's Door"
(1877), "Providence and the Guitar" (1878), and "The Pavilion on the
Links" (1880, considered by Conan Doyle in 1890 as 'the high-water mark
of [Stevenson's] genius' and 'the first short story in the world,' qu.
Menikoff 1990: 342). These four tales were collected in a volume
entitled
New Arabian Nights in 1882,
preceded by the seven linked stories originally called "Latter-Day Arabian
Nights" when published in a magazine in 1878. This collection is seen
as
the starting point for the history of the English short story by
Barry
Menikoff (1987: 126). The Arabian stories were described by
critics of
the time as 'fantastic stories of adventure,' 'grotesque
romances' 'in
which the analytic mind loses itself' (Maixner 1981: 117, 120),
and are
seen by Chesterton (1927: 169) as 'unequalled' and 'the most
unique of
his works'. They have an affinity with
The
Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
in their setting
in the
labyrinthine modern city, and the subject matter of crimes and
guilty
secrets involving respectable members of society. Stevenson
continued to
write short stories all his life, and notable titles
include: "Thrawn
Janet" (1881), "The Merry Men" (1882), "The Treasure of
Franchard" (1883),
"Markheim" (1885), which, being a narrative of the
Double, has certain
affinities with Jekyll and Hyde, "Olalla" (1885),
which like Jekyll and
Hyde originated in a dream and also deals with the
possibility of
degeneration. The above short narratives were all
collected in
The Merry Men and Other Tales and
Fables
in
1887.
"Olalla" was written in a period of just
over two years (1885-7)
when Stevenson and Fanny were living in the
cottage Skerryvore in
Bournemouth. Despite problems of health and
finances, this was a period of
meetings with Henry James, W.E. Henley and
other literary figures, and when
he wrote the long short-story (published
as a single volume), his
'breakthrough book',
The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll
and Mr Hyde
(1886). Another
collection
Island Nights'
Entertainments
, tales with a South Sea
setting, was published in 1893, including
"The Bottle Imp" (1891), "The Beach
of Falesa" (1892, a long short
story of the same length as Dr Jekyll
and Mr Hyde), and "The Isle of
Voices" (1893).
TREASURE ISLAND AND "CHILDREN'S
LITERATURE":
Another fortuitous turning-point in Stevenson's life had occurred
when
on holiday in Scotland in the summer of 1881. The cold rainy weather
forced the family to amuse themselves indoors, and one day Stevenson
and his twelve-year-old stepson, Lloyd (Fanny's son by her first
marriage), drew, colored and annotated the map of an imaginary "Treasure
Island". The map stimulated Stevenson's imagination and, 'On a chill
September morning, by the cheek of a brisk fire' he began to write a story
based on it as an entertainment for the rest of the family.
Treasure Island (published in book form in 1883)
marks the beginning of his popularity and his career as a profitable
writer; it was his first volume-length fictional narrative, and the
first of
his writings 'for children' (or rather, the first of writings
manipulating the genres associated with children). Later works that fit
into
this category are
A Child's Garden of
Verses
(1885),
The Black
Arrow
(1883),
Kidnapped (1886) and its
continuation
Catriona (1893). The
four narrative
works mentioned in this paragraph, though they all have
youthful
protagonists and were all first published in magazines for
young people, are
also clearly intended for adult readers. The last three,
based on
careful documentary research, are fictions exploring history
and culture; and
the last two are interesting studies of Scottish
culture.
NOVELS AND ROMANCES:
Prince Otto (1885), his second
full-length narrative, is defined by
Andrew Lang as 'a
philosophical-humouristical-psychological fantasy'
(qu. Maixner 1981: 181). The action is
provocatively set in the
imaginary state of Grunewald, an unusual
choice for Stevenson, and it was
to historical Scotland (which had already
provided the setting for
Kidnapped
and
Catriona) that he turned for his
next full-length 'adult'
story,
The Master of
Ballantrae
(1889).
This is a Doubles narrative in which the
brothers James and Henry have
similarities with Jekyll and Hyde, not only
in their initials, but
also because of the mixed personality of the
'good' character, the
constant return of the persecuting Double, and the
simultaneous death of the
two antagonists. Both Calvino and Brecht
consider it to be the best of
his works, and it is highly praised by writers
as diverse as Henry
James, Walter Benjamin and Andre Gide. The novel
that he was working
on when he died,
Weir of
Hermiston
(published incomplete and posthumously in 1896), is
also set in Scotland
in the not-too-distant past and is often praised as
Stevenson's
masterpiece. The centre of the story is the difficult
relationship of an
authoritarian father and a son who has to assert his own
identity (a
theme present in many of Stevenson's works - and clearly a
way he used of
exploring and coming to terms with his difficult
relationship with his
own father).
IN THE SOUTH
SEAS
:
This very Scottish romance was written when Stevenson was far
away
on the other side of the world. His decision to sail around the
Pacific
in 1888, living on various islands for short periods, then
setting off
again (all the time collecting material for an anthropological
and
historical work on the South Seas which was never fully
completed), was
another turning point in his life. In 1889 he and his extended
family
arrived at the port of Apia in the Samoan islands and they
decided to build
a house and settle. This choice brought him health,
distance from the
distractions of literary circles, and went towards the
creation of his
mature literary persona: the traveller, the exile, very
aware of the
harsh sides of life but also celebrating the joy in his
own skill as a
weaver of words and teller of tales. It also acted as a
new stimulus to
his imagination. He wrote about the Pacific islands in
several of his
later works:
Island Nights'
Entertainments
already referred to;
In the South
Seas
(published 1896), essays that would have gone
towards the large
work on the area that he planned; and two other
narratives with a South
Sea setting:
The
Wrecker
(1892), and
The Ebb-Tide
(1894). The former is a
mystery adventure set in various places over the
globe but centred in
the South Seas (indeed at Midway Island, Latitude
0' deg;) with some dark
tones, especially in the fruitless search for
treasure and the massacre
of a ship's crew (for quite understandable
reasons!).
The Ebb-Tide (like "The
Beach of Falesa") gives a
realistic picture of the degenerate European
traders and riffraff who
inhabited the ports of the Pacific islands.
These South Sea narratives mark
a definite move towards a more harsh and
grim realism (Stevenson
himself (qu. Maixner 1981: 452) acknowledges
affinities of
The Ebb-Tide with the
work of Zola).
DEATH:
The authorial persona had changed
from the debonair flaneur of the
early works, but retained a joy in his
craft and a consciousness in the
shaping of his own life. He died in
December 1894 and even shaped the
manner of his burial: as he had
wished, he was buried at the top of
Mount Vaea above his home on Samoa.
Appropriately it was his own short
poem, "Requiem" (from an 1887
collection), that was written on his tomb:
'Under the wide and starry sky, /
Dig the grave and let me lie...'
RECEPTION:
Stevenson
establishes a personal relationship with the reader, and
creates a sense
of wonder through his brilliant style and his adoption
and
manipulation of a variety of genres. Writing when the period of the
three-volume
novel (dominant from about 1840 to 1880) was coming to an
end, he
seems to have written everything except a traditional Victorian
novel:
plays, poems, essays, literary criticism, literary theory,
biography,
travelogue, reportage, romances, boys' adventure stories,
fantasies,
fables, and short stories. Like the other writers who were
asserting the
serious artistic nature of the novel at this time he writes in a
careful, almost poetic style - yet he provocatively combines this with
an
interest in popular genres. His popularity with critics continued to
the
First World War. He then had the misfortune to be followed by the
Modernists who needed to cut themselves off from any constraining
tradition; Stevenson was felt to be one of the most constraining of
immediately-preceding authors for his sheer ability, and one of the most
insidious for his play with popular genres and for his preference for
'romance' over the serious novel. Condemned by Virginia and especially Leonard
Woolf (1927; not unconnected, perhaps, with the fact that one of
Stevenson's great supporters had been Virginia's father), ignored by
F.R.Leavis, he was gradually excluded from the "canon" of
regularly
taught and written-about works of literature. The nadir comes
in 1973 when
Frank Kermode and John Hollander published their
Oxford Anthology of English Literature. With
over two
thousand pages at their disposal in which to exemplify and
comment on the
notable poetry and prose produced in the British Isles
from '1800 to the
Present', not one page is devoted to Stevenson - in
the whole
closely-printed two thousand pages, Stevenson is not even
mentioned once!
Critical interest has been increasing slowly since then,
in some countries
more than others (cf. Ambrosini 1991), though there
have been few
single-volume studies when compared with the large
numbers of books published
every year on his contemporaries James and
Conrad. Stevenson, some might
say, has been fortunate to escape such
attention. Reading this
Mozartian and mercurial writer remains for many as
for Borges (1979), despite
critical neglect, quite simply 'a form of
happiness'.
Copyright 1997 Richard Dury. Used by permission from the
author.
The records of the Stevenson House Collection encompass the
breadth
of the Scottish writer's oeuvre, from manuscript letters and
first
edition books to original serial publications and works of art,
and are
supplemented by materials from other members of his family,
including wife
Fanny, mother Margaret, and step children Isobel Osbourne
Strong Field
and Lloyd Osbourne. The bulk of the collection is dated
between 1880
and 1920. Most of the collection was accumulated over
forty years,
1932-1972, via donation from a number of individuals
including the Field and
Osbourne estates as well as Stevenson enthusiasts
Flodden W. Heron and
William Percival Jefferson, both of San Francisco.
Significant items in
the collection range from three pages of manuscript
music in
Stevenson's hand (transcriptions of popular pieces adapted
for flageolet, a
recorder-type instrument played by Stevenson), a number
of autograph
letters, and a manuscript page from Weir of Hermiston, to
six scrapbooks of
press clippings and reviews about Stevenson,
meticulously kept and
annotated by Stevenson's mother, Margaret. Additional
items of note are six
glass plate photograph negatives from Williams of
Honolulu, documenting
Stevenson's lengthy 1888 visit with King
Kalakaua and Princess
Lilioukalani of Hawaii, three volumes of Fanny
Stevenson's Vailima diaries, as
well as three volumes of journals and a
significant collection of
correspondence and photographs of Charles Warren
Stoddard, Stevenson's
acquaintance and godfather to Austin Strong
(Isobel's son), a resident of
Monterey. The collections are supplemented by
a small group of materials
documenting the establishment of the
Stevenson House State Historic
Monument and the efforts toward preservation
of the historic adobe.
The following terms have
been used to index the description of
this collection
in a library's
online public access catalog:
Library of Congress Subject
Headings
Colvin,
Sidney,
Sir, 1845-1927.
Field,
Isobel, 1858-1953.
Heron,
Flodden
W.
Osbourne,
Lloyd, 1868-1947.
Sanchez,
Nellie Van de Grift,
1856-1935.
Simoneau,
Jules, 1821-1908.
Stevenson,
Fanny Van de Grift,
1840-1914.
Stevenson,
Robert Louis, 1850-1894.
Stoddard,
Charles
Warren, 1843-1909.
Strong,
Austin, 1881-1952.
Authors, Scottish--19th
century--Biography.
California--History.
Historic
buildings--California--Monterey.
Monterey
(Calif.)--History.
Stevenson,
Robert Louis, 1850-1894--Biography.
Stevenson,
Robert Louis,
1850-1894--Criticism and interpretation.
Additional
information about Robert Louis Stevenson may be
found in the following
publications:
Online:
The Robert Louis
Stevenson Web Site, maintained by Richard Dury of
the University of Bergamo,
Italy: http://wwwesterni.unibg.it/siti_esterni/rls/rls.htm
Print:
Balfour Graham.
The Life of Robert
Louis Stevenson.
London:
Methuen and Co.,
1901.
Bell, Ian.
Robert
Louis Stevenson: Dreams of Exile.
Edinburgh/NY:
Mainstream/Henry Holt and Co.,
1992.
Calder, Jenni.
RLS: A Life Study.
London:
Hamish
Hamilton,
1980.
Calder, Jenni.
The Robert Louis
Stevenson Companion.
London:
Paul Harris Publishing,
1980.
Colvin, Sidney.
Robert Louis
Stevenson: His
Work And Personality.
London:
Hodder and Stoughton,
1924.
Daiches, David.
Robert Louis
Stevenson.
Norfolk,
CT/Glasgow:
New Directions Books/William Maclellan,
1947.
Furnas, J.C.
Voyage to
Windward: the Life
of Robert Louis Stevenson.
New
York/London:
William Sloane/Faber and Faber,
1951.
Neider, Charles (ed.).
Fanny and Robert
Stevenson: Our Samoan
Adventure.
London:
Weidenfeld and Nicholson,
1956.
Osborne, Lloyd.
An
Intimate
Portrait of R.L.S.
New York:
Charles Scribner's Sons,
1924.
Swinnerton, Frank A.
Robert Louis
Stevenson: A critical study.
London/New York:
Secker/George H. Doran,
1914.