Robert Louis Stevenson – Page 3

Buccaneers #1

“For all the world I was led like a dancing bear” by NC Wyeth (1911).

This year’s reading began with a desire to explore some of the Robert Louis Stevenson volumes in my collection which I’ve so far neglected. At the moment I’m thinking of maybe reading everything I have by RLS, having begun with a return journey to Treasure Island, a book which seems to improve every time I revisit it. Setting out with Stevenson’s pirate tale was partly a result of having watched all three Pirates of the Caribbean films over Christmas, a series I’m probably in the minority in enjoying wholeheartedly, flaws, preposterousness and all. Much as I’d like to see a fourth film (there’s a hint of a sequel at the end), I’d prefer the makers to leave things be. The three films taken together can be watched as a single nine-hour ramble across the high seas and the tidy conclusion would be better left as it is.

My pocket-sized copy of Treasure Island from the Tusitala edition of Stevenson’s collected works is fine apart from the very small and poorly-printed map, something to which the reader is compelled to refer as we follow Jim Hawkins on his journey around the island. Happily the web provides many examples which can be printed out for viewing while reading. The web is also a resource for some of the numerous illustrated editions of the novel. The version by American illustrator NC Wyeth is one of the more well-known and more successful and his Long John Silver is a suitably powerful figure. Wyeth’s depiction of Billy Bones waiting on the cliff top was featured in a set of US stamps in 2001. The Internet Archive has scans of the Wyeth book (and a version with illustrations by Louis Rhead) although one of these, with better scans of Wyeth’s paintings, has some of the plates missing.

Long John Silver by Mervyn Peake (1949).

Far stranger—weirder, even—is Mervyn Peake’s Long John Silver, seen here on the cover of a more recent edition. Peake’s illustrations are probably my favourites but then I’m biased towards Peake as an author and illustrator so the preference is unavoidable. Even so, his depiction of Israel Hands brings to the fore the malevolent duplicity of that character in a way I’ve not seen any other illustrator attempt. It’s a shame the Peake site doesn’t have another of the artist’s renderings of Silver showing the sea cook posed on his single leg in an attitude more like a ballet dancer than a pirate. That drawing and his ogre-like Blind Pew show how original Peake could be as an illustrator. And lets not forget his own pirate creation, also his first book, Captain Slaughterboard.

It’s asking too much but it’s a shame that Walt Disney couldn’t have taken a look at Peake’s drawings instead of diluting Stevenson’s cunning buccaneer into the gurning caricature portrayed by Robert Newton in 1950. The less said about Byron Haskin’s film (and its sequels), the better. It has its moments visually but Newton’s portrayal has blighted all those that follow (Geoffrey Rush tips the hat in the Pirates films) and is single-handedly responsible for all subsequent pirate clichés.

Davy Jones from Pirates of the Caribbean, on the other hand, could almost have been designed specifically to please me alone, looking like the offspring of some unwholesome ménage between Long John Silver and the Great God Cthulhu. For the time being Davy Jones is probably my favourite screen villain, his tentacled face—and the fishy caste of his crew—is a wonder to behold. God knows what Stevenson would have made of this transfiguring of his creation but it suits me fine.

More buccaneers tomorrow.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Mervyn Peake in Lilliput
• Stevenson and the dynamiters
• Howard Pyle’s pirates
• Druillet meets Hodgson
• Rogue’s Gallery: Pirate Ballads, Sea Songs, and Chanteys
• Davy Jones

The art of Charles Robinson, 1870–1937

‘Fair and False’, Songs and Sonnets by William Shakespeare (1915).

More illustrated gems from the collection of books at the Internet Archive. Charles Robinson, as mentioned earlier, was the older brother of illustrator William Heath (there was also a third illustrator brother in the family, Thomas). Charles was so prolific it’s difficult to choose one work over the many examples available in the Internet Archive, so here’s a brief selection from different books. If you only look at one of these, his oft-reprinted edition of A Child’s Garden of Verses by Robert Louis Stevenson is especially fine. There’s a distinct Art Nouveau flavour to much of Charles Robinson’s work and he also devoted more attention to page layout than his younger brother, many of his drawings being presented within sinuous frames and augmented by some very elegant lettering. If they haven’t been digitised already at Fontcraft’s Scriptorium, some of these type designs would make great fonts.

A Child’s Garden of Verses by Robert Louis Stevenson (1895).

Lullaby-land : Songs of Childhood by Eugene Field (1897).

Fairy tales from Hans Christian Andersen (1899).

‘The Red Shoes’, Fairy tales from Hans Christian Andersen (1899).

The Story of the Weathercock by Evelyn Sharp (1907).

The Happy Prince and Other Tales by Oscar Wilde (1913).

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive

Stevenson and the dynamiters

The Dynamiter: More New Arabian Nights (Longmans, London; 1914).

I’ve mentioned before that I’m a sporadic collector of the Tusitala Edition of Robert Louis Stevenson’s works, 35 small blue volumes published by Heinemann, London in 1924. I’ve found 15 of them so far and today turned up another one, volume 25, Virginibus Pueresque and Other Essays in Belles Lettres. Most of the ones I’ve collected are later reprints and this is no exception, being a sixth edition from 1928. The popularity of the series and the many reprint editions is the main reason they still appear with such frequency. Another reason is that these small pocket books, which were very common before and after the First World War, were well-made and have easily outlasted the first generation of paperbacks that eventually replaced them. I’d have no trouble ordering a complete set of the Stevensons from a book dealer but prefer to let chance find new additions. Given the dearth of good secondhand shops this is becoming increasingly difficult.

Also in today’s book haul was an earlier Stevenson, The Dynamiter: More New Arabian Nights, in a rather battered leather binding from 1914. I bought it almost solely for the Art Nouveau motif on the cover whose ship suits the author of Treasure Island but doesn’t really fit with the London setting of this particular book. I seem to recall having seen this design before which means it’s probably part of a uniform set like the Tusitala Edition, each volume of which bears a palm tree design on the spine and the signature of RLS blocked on the front board.

The only number of the Tusitala Edition I have in a leather binding is this book’s precursor, volume 1, New Arabian Nights. The Dynamiters is a collection of linked stories that Stevenson wrote with his wife, the Arabian Nights conceit being an attempt to transplant the telling of tall tales from medieval Baghdad to Victorian London. The dynamiters are a group of inept terrorists whose comic exploits were based on the real Fenian bombings that took place in London in the 1880s. A later attempted bomb attack on the Greenwich Observatory inspired the unsuccessful anarchists in Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent. Whatever some contemporary commentators might have us believe, terrorist attacks in cities are nothing new at all, only in Stevenson’s day they were labelled “dynamite outrages”. Stevenson dedicates his stories to the police officers charged with protecting the capital and apologises for making light of a serious matter. I have to wonder what he would have made of modern Baghdad being plagued by dynamite outrages on such a regular basis. And I also wonder how much real dynamite many of these Longmans’ books might have encountered, having been published just in time to be packed in the kit of soldiers going to the Western Front.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The book covers archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Chronicles of Clovis and other sarcastic delights

Howard Pyle’s pirates

The Buccaneer was a Picturesque Fellow by Howard Pyle (1905).

Seeing as how Johnny Depp and co. are sailing the Spanish Main once more (to mixed reviews, unfortunately), now is perhaps a suitable moment to note the genesis of our popular conception of buccaneers. The famous characters of the Wild West were being mythologised while many of them were still alive and some survived long enough to be consulted by filmmakers such as John Ford when the first of the silent Westerns were being made. Pirates had their exploits recounted in tabloid fashion via books like The Newgate Calendar but our romantic image of the pirate comes primarily from Robert Louis Stevenson and artist/writer Howard Pyle (1853–1911).

Keith Richards by Paul Karslake (1998).

Pyle’s articles for Harper’s Monthly Magazine in the early 1900s were later collected as the very popular Howard Pyle’s Book of Pirates, “Fiction, Fact & Fancy concerning the Buccaneers & Marooners of the Spanish Main”. The considerable gulf between fact and fiction can be see in early pirate portraits, most of which are crude woodcut renderings. Pyle ignored these for the most part, relying on imagination to exaggerate details of worn-out 18th century clothing in much the same way that Sergio Leone and others exaggerated certain qualities of 19th century garb for their Westerns, turning what would have been a rather sorry reality into something more visually thrilling. Hollywood costume designers have used Pyle’s paintings as source material for pirate characters ever since so it’s perhaps fitting that Johnny Depp’s conception of Jack Sparrow’s character also came from a painting, Paul Karslake’s portrait of Keith Richards posing as a pirate. And now Richards is in the latest film playing Sparrow’s father…

• Howard Pyle at 100 Years of Illustration
• A Pyle pirate gallery

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Coming soon: Sea Monsters and Cannibals!
• Seamen in great distress eat one another
• Druillet meets Hodgson
• Rogue’s Gallery: Pirate Ballads, Sea Songs, and Chanteys
• Davy Jones

The Chronicles of Clovis and other sarcastic delights

This week’s book purchase (yes, dear reader, it never ends, there are merely lulls between one indulgence of the vice and the next) is a small Bodley Head volume that comprises part of the collected works of Hector Hugh Munro (1870–1916), or “Saki” as he’s better known. I have Saki’s complete works already in a big fat Penguin collection but I like these small books that were the common format for portable reading prior to the invention of the paperback. Over a number of years I’ve managed to collect about half of the Tusitala Edition of Robert Louis Stevenson’s complete works which are similarly-sized blue volumes (one in a rare leather binding), simply through chance finds in secondhand shops.

This particular book is a 1929 reprint of The Chronicles of Clovis collection first published in 1911 and, like the Stevenson volumes, has the author’s signature blocked in gold on the cover. The introduction is by AA Milne and I’m taking the liberty of reproducing it in full below, partly out of laziness and partly because he does a good job of presenting the man and his work.

Continue reading “The Chronicles of Clovis and other sarcastic delights”