Inscribed to his Mother
Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes.
London: C. Kegan Paul & Co, 1879.
Price: $45,000.00
About the item
First edition, first issue. Half-title; frontispiece illustration by Walter Crane; leaf of advertisements preceding half-title. 8vo. Original gilt-decorated green cloth. A little rubbing to spine ends and joints; a little wear to corners; a few bumps at edges; front hinge starting. Small adhesion damage to front free endpaper from bookplate opposite; short marginal tear on penultimate leaf of text; full morocco pull-off case. Beinecke I:36. Provenance: Margaret Stevenson (presentation inscription); Mrs. Pearce, Mrs. Stevenson's great-niece; sold Sotheby's London, 10 December 1935; Lucius Wilmerding (bookplate; his sale, Parke-Bernet, 29 November 1950, lot 687); H. Bradley Martin (bookplate, his sale, Sotheby's New York, 1 May 1990, lot 3236 $6500).
Item #369796
Inscribed to his mother on half-title: "M. I. Stevenson / from her affectionate son / the author." His mother dedicated her later life to RLS's health and his writing, but his father was still critical of the early work, calling this book and the Inland Voyage irreverent, superfluous in description, but on the whole "successful" and "unique in point of style" (letter to RLS 8 June 1879).
A travelogue written while still under the support of his parents. Stevenson was 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 America and on to the South Seas. Life revolved around Stevenson's writing. After his sudden death in 1894, Maggie returned to Edinburgh to mourn.
