Scott, Stevenson and Popular Visual Culture: Text and Image in Romance Writing

Abstract

Recent critical interest in the life and works of Robert Louis Stevenson has led to closer analyses of Stevenson's literary debts to his country-man and forbear, Sir Walter Scott. The two writers are inevitably connected as Scotland's iconic writers of Scottish romance stories: ”Waverley”, ”Rob Roy”, ”The Heart of Midlothian and Redgauntlet” by Scott; ”Kidnapped”, ”David Balfour” and ”The Master of Ballantrae” by Stevenson. Comparisons between the two are further encouraged by Stevenson himself, who constantly referes to Scott in correspondence to friends and family, and famously in his essays ”A Gossip on Romance” and ”My First Book: Treasure Island”. However, closer analyses of their respective works by Barry Menikoff, Jenni Calder and Alison Lumsden in recent years have established that although Stevenson certainly owes debts to Scott in terms of style and subject matter, he was also at pains to differentiate his style and purposes from ''the king of the romantics. '' This paper will contribute to one aspect of this debate, the prevalence of strong imagery within their romance writing. It will attempt to draw parallels between the ways in which both authors absorbed various aspects of c culture popular visual culture within their work, and how each author subsequently became illustrated. Stevenson identifies the strength of the visual impressions that Scott leaves his readers, and this is a talent he shared. Both authors were heavily influenced by contemporary modes of popular visualization, such as painting, book-illustration, theatre, panoramas (in Scott's case) and photography (in Stevenson's). However, both channelled these influences to different effect, and for different purposes. This paper will examine how Scott and Stevenson both utilized and subsequently influenced popular visual culture through the writing process.