INSCRIBED

Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin.

New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1887.

Price: $2,500.00


About the item

First American edition (preceding the first English edition by 25 years). viii, 302, [8, ads] pp. 1 vols. 8vo. INSCRIBED. Publisher's red cloth. Faintest traces of rubbing to spine, a near fine copy. Bookplates. Blue morocco-backed slipcase and cloth chemise. Prideaux 25.

Item #319959

Inscribed on the first blank,
“Given under my hand at Saranac Lake in the year eighteen hundred and eighty eight Robert Louis Stevenson”
Stevenson’s biography of Professor Henry Charles Fleeming Jenkin, the professor of engineering at the University of Edinburgh who exerted a strong influence upon the young Stevenson. Jenkin and his wife met Stevenson when he was an engineering student and aspiring poet. “It was the beginning of a friendship marked by admiration and affection on their side but something like idolatry on Louis’s … Greater even than his intellectual impact on the young Louis was his moral influence: he taught the young man not to strive for effect as a critic and instead to aim for integrity” (McLynn, pp. 37-8).

Stevenson “found the writing of the memoir difficult, doubtless because of the complex emotions involved: work proceeded slowly (McLynn, p. 249). He completed the manuscript at Bournemouth in June 1887, just after his father’s death. They left England in late August and stayed in Saranac Lake from October until April 1888. The preface to the American edition is dated October 1887 at Saranac.
Uncommon inscribed.