Pleasure Island: RLS wanted to sex up his novels
IT is said that the Victorians prudishly covered table legs to avoid causing offence – now it has emerged that Robert Louis Stevenson was forced to rein in his desire to ‘sex up’ his novels for fear of an angry backlash.
A new biography reveals the Edinburgh-born Treasure Island author wanted to include sex scenes in his works, saying: ‘If characters have to go to bed with each other, well then I want them to go’ – but he was prevented from doing so by Victorian priggishness.
Extracts from letters penned by Stevenson around 1883 show he had to tone down certain characters because of concerns over sparking moral outrage among his readership. Describing the lead character in his novel Prince Otto as ‘weak as paper’, he added: ‘There is a risqué character. The Countess von Rosen, a jolly, elderly – how shall I say – f***stress, whom I handle so as to please this rotten public and damn myself the while for ruining good material. I could, and if I dared, make her jump.’
Strathclyde University professor Joseph Farrell believes Stevenson’s move to Samoa later in life, for health reasons, helped distance him from the rigid values of Victorian Britain, saying: ‘During his time in Samoa, he sought authorisation for a new frankness in his writing. He became convinced that, as an author, he should have the right to be able to depict sexual conduct honestly.’
But shortly before his death in 1894, the Jekyll and Hyde author wrote to his cousin Bob Stevenson, expressing regret that he had not been more chaste in his youth, adding: ‘The damned thing of our education is that Christianity does not recognise and hallow sex. It looks askance at it over its shoulder.’
Robert Louis Stevenson in Samoa, by Joseph Farrell, MacLehose Press, £20.