FullReads

[Note 19: Byronism. About the time Lord Byron was publishing Childe Harold (1812-1818) a tremendous wave of romantic melancholy swept over all the countries of Europe. Innumerable poems and romances dealing with mysteriously-sad heroes were written in imitation of Byron; and young authors wore low, rolling collars, and tried to look depressed. See Gautier’s Histoire du Romantisme. Now the death of Lovelace (in a duel) in Richardson’s Clarissa, was pitched in exactly the Byronic key, though at that time Byron had not been born…. The Elizabethans were of course thoroughly romantic.]

[Note 20: Faria…Dantes. Characters in Dumas’s Monte Cristo (1841-5).]

[Note 21: Lucy and Richard Feveril. Usually spelled “Feverel.” Stevenson strangely enough, was always a bad speller. The reference here is to one of Stevenson’s favorite novels The Ordeal of Richard Feverel (1859) by George Meredith. Stevenson’s idolatrous praise of this particular scene in the novel is curious, for no greater contrast in English literary style can be found than that between Meredith’s and his own. For another reference by Stevenson to the older novelist, see our Note 47 of Chapter IV above.]

[Note 22: Robinson Crusoe is as realistic as it is romantic. Therein lies precisely the charm of this book for boyish minds; the details are given with such candour that it seems as if they must all be true. At heart, Defoe was an intense realist, as well as the first English novelist.]

[Note 23: The arrival of Haydn. For a note on George Sand’s novel Consuelo see Note 9 of Chapter IV above.]

[Note 24: A joy for ever. The first line of Keats’s poem Endymion is “A thing of beauty is a joy forever.”]

[Note 25: The Sailor’s Sweetheart. Mr. W. Clark Russell, born in New York in 1844, has written many popular tales of the sea. His first success was The Wreck of the Grosvenor (1876); The Sailor’s Sweetheart, more properly, A Sailor’s Sweetheart, was published in 1877.]

[Note 26: Swiss Family Robinson. A German story, Der schweizerische Robinson (1812) by J.D. Wyss (1743-1818). This story is not so popular as it used to be.]

[Note 27: Verne’s Mysterious Island. Jules Verne, who died at Amiens, France, in 1904, wrote an immense number of romances, which, translated into many languages, have delighted young readers all over the world. The Mysterious Island is a sequel to Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea.]

[Note 28: Eugene de Rastignac. A character in Balzac’s novel, Pere Goriot.]

[Note 29: The Lady of the Lake. This poem, published in 1810, is as Stevenson implies, not so much a poem as a rattling good story told in rime.]

[Note 30: The Pirate. A novel by Scott, published in 1821. It was the cause of Cooper’s writing The Pilot. See Cooper’s preface to the latter novel.]

[Note 31: Guy Mannering. Also by Scott. Published 1815.]

[Note 32: Miss Braddon’s idea. Mary Elizabeth Braddon (Maxwell), born in 1837, published her first novel, The Trail of the Serpent, in 1860. She has written a large number of sensational works of fiction, very popular with an uncritical class of readers. Perhaps her best-known book is Lady Audley’s Secret (1862). It would be well for the student to refer to the scenes in Guy Mannering which Stevenson calls the “Four strong notes.”]

[Note 33: Mrs. Todgers’s idea of a wooden leg. Mrs. Todgers is a character in Dickens’s novel, Martin Chuzzlewit (1843-4).]

[Note 34: Elspeth of the Craigburnfoot. A character in the Antiquary (1816).]