Robert Louis Stevenson and the Pictorial Text: A Case Study in the Victorian Illustrated Novel

摘要

STEVENSON'S FIRST ILLUSTRATED TEXTS WERE NOT NOVELS but his two accounts of journeyings: An Inland Voyage (1878) and Travels with a Donkey (1879), each of which had a frontispiece after a design by Walter Crane. Richard Hill introduces them to show from the start that the writer had a lifelong interest in the business of illustration which can be found in childhood drawings, in early essays, in his mingling with the artistic community at Grcz (where he would meet Fanny and Lloyd Osbourne) and in his correspondence with Sidney Colvin, W. E. Henley, and others directly on the subject of work on his own books. (There are many references throughout to the eight volumes of the Booth/Mayhew Letters.) Hill also spends time on the author's own experience as an illustrator, round about the time he was working on Treasure Island, when he wrote the comic verses to be printed as 'chapbooks' by young Lloyd Osbourne and illustrated with woodcuts which he made himself ('I cut them with a knife out of blocks of wood'). Hill rightly judges this to be an important experiment for Stevenson, 'establishing theories of the potential of marrying image and text within a single work of art'.