A Letter to His Mother About the Response to Inland Voyage
Autograph Letter, Signed ("Robert Louis Stevenson"), to his mother ("My dear Mother").
Paris: "Sunday" [June 1878].
Price: $12,000.00
About the item
1 p., docketed on verso in an unidentified hand "Paris / Summer 1878 / I think.". 8vo. Old folds, tape repair to verso. Housed in cloth folding box. Fragment of the letter was published in Colvin, The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson to His Family and Friends, 1906, Vol. I, p. 127.
Item #369795
Stevenson writes to his mother about the positive critical response to An Inland Voyage: "About criticisms, I was more surprised at the time of the critics than I suppose anyone else. And the effect it has produced in me, is one of shame. If they liked that so much, I might to have given them something better, that's all. And I shall try to do so. Still, it strikes me as odd; and I don't understand the vogue. It should sell the thing. Madame Adam — not Mrs. Adams — is the widow of Monsieur Adam: who was, I don't know; but he was a political swell. Every your afft son / Robert Louis Stevenson."
An Inland Voyage recounts a canoe trip Stevenson and his friend Sir Walter Grindlay Simpson made in 1876. Setting out from Antwerp, Stevenson (in the Arethusa) and Simpson (in the Cigarette) paddled through Belgium and France along canals and the Oise River. Much of the travelogue relates adventures the two men had along the way, and describes many of the interesting people they encountered, such as members of the Royal Sport Nautique and a family that lived on a barge. The book also sheds Stevenson's thoughts on wider issues, such as the French character and politics, religion, and the artist's role in society, as well some more philosophic thoughts.
Stevenson was close to his mother. The only child of Thomas and Margaret "Maggie" Stevenson, and he inherited poor pulmonary health from his mother's side of the family. Expected to take up his father's family business of lighthouse engineering, he disappointed his parents by informing them that he would instead take up a life of letters. He also quarreled with them over his views on religion, his refusal to practice law — studied in order to appease them — and his romance with his future wife, the older, married, Fanny Osbourne, whom he met while traveling around France in 1876. Nevertheless, his wife did well do help mend the rift between the family, and after his father's death in 1887, Maggie went with Fanny and Robert to American and on to the South Seas, returning to Edingurgh only after her son's death.
His father criticized Stevenson's travel writings as irreverent, superfluous in description, but on the whole "successful" and "unique in point of style" (letter to RLS 8 June 1879). His mother must have been more sympathetic to her son's work, as he keeps her updated about its promise and its reception, which would continue to trouble him over the next decade and strain his health.
