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Abstract

In 1879, an impoverished Stevenson travelled from Scotland to California in conditions almost identical to those of working-class and poverty-stricken emigrants. His account, The Amateur Emigrant, shocked the class sensitivities of his family and friends, and was not published in full in his lifetime. The experience had a profound effect on Stevenson’s personal sensibilities; his consciousness of his ambivalent position as a middle-class writer in the midst of his working-class contemporaries renders The Amateur Emigrant a remarkable revelation of the intermingled complexities of class, race and gender in late Victorian England.

Keywords

colonialism gender middle class steerage travel writing Victorian

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In the first full edition edited by James D. Hart and published in 1966, together with the Silverado Squatters, by the Belknap Press of Harvard University Press under the title From Scotland to Silverado. Subsequent references are to this edition, indicated by page numbers in parentheses.

As Frank McLynn observes in his biography of Stevenson: ‘Most of all, RLS disliked the so-called “novels of the seamy side” like L’Assommoir and La Bête Humaine. It was here that he and Henry James decisively parted company for although they were at one in detesting Hardy’s Tess, generally Louis was prepared to defend Hardy against the fastidious snobbery of “the master” (“the good little Thomas Hardy”), while James accepted Zola as a towering genius’, Robert Louis Stevenson: a biography (London, Hutchinson, 1993), p. 97.

Mary Louise Pratt , Imperial Eyes: travel writing and transculturation ( London and New York, Routledge , 1992), p. 7.

Robert Miles , Racism ( London, Routledge , 1989), p. 105.

See, for example, Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes (1879).

Pratt , Imperial Eyes, p.6.

Margaret Mackay , The Violent Friend: the story of Mrs Robert Louis Stevenson, 1840—1914 ( London, J. M. Dent , 1968), p. 16.

Hart, ‘Introduction’, op. cit., p. xiii.

Richard Phillips , Mapping Men and Empire: a geography of adventure ( London and New York, Routledge , 1997), p. 12.

10.

John Ruskin , Sesame and Lilies: two lectures , delivered at Manchester in 1864 (London, 1865), p. 146 .

11.

Loomba, op. cit., p. 161.

12.

Karen R. Lawrence , Penelope’s Voyages: women and travel in the British literary tradition ( Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press , 1994), p. 2.

13.

Frantz Fanon , The Wretched of the Earth, trans. C. Farrington ( Harmondsworth, Penguin , 1963), p. 170.

14.

Thomas Babington Macaulay , ‘Minute on Indian education’ (2 February 1835), cited in Barbara Harlow and Mia Carter (eds) Imperialism and Orientalism: a documentary sourcebook ( Oxford, Blackwell , 1999), p. 61.

Robert Louis Stevenson: class and ‘race’ in The Amateur Emigrant

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