Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes/The Amateur Emigrant [antikvár]

IntroductionRobert Louis^ Stevenson is today a writer known around the world. His most famous works are household names and, thanks to their success in other media, have escaped from a purely literary context. Through countless representations on stage and screen, Treasure Island's heroic villain. Long John Silver, is now the archetype of the piratical rogue, and the phrase 'a Jekyll and Hyde character', again largely because of repeated versions of Stevenson's story in the cinema and on television, has a currency well beyond the text that spawned it. Less well known, perhaps, is the outline of Stevenson's own life: his upbringing as a sickly child in Edinburgh, his rebellion against his father's wish that he follow family tradition and become a lighthouse engineer, his determination to be a writer and traveller despite ill-health; and then his escape to the Pacific in search of a kinder climate, enjoyed for just a few years before his sudden death and his romantic interment on a mountain-top in Samoa.All this makes it difficult to imagine what Stevenson's reputation and prospects amounted to before he became world-famous. It takes a mental effort to construct the sort of writer he was before he made the trip through the Cevennes that he describes in Travels with a Donkey, and the subsequent journey across the Atlantic and America described in The Amateur Emigrant-, but to appreciate the significance of these two works it is worth thinking back to the stage in his career Stevenson had reached in 1878.In April of that year he had published his first book, An Inland Voyage, the account of a journey with a friend by canoe from Antwerp to Pontoise north-west of Paris, a short, rather precious