Criminal Collaborators: Deacon Brodie and Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde

This chapter discusses Deacon Brodie (1880), one of three plays collaboratively composed with his friend W.E. Henley, along with Stevenson’s short story “The Body Snatcher” and his essay “A Chapter on Dreams.” Deacon Brodie is an early treatment of the themes more famously developed in the Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886). Thus, Jekyll and Hyde, which owes its origins to the literal dual authorship, becomes a reflection on the fragmentation of the single author, as well as a reflection on the collaborative space of the theater.

Collaboration in Theory and Practice

This chapter considers Robert Louis Stevenson’s collaborations in the context of criticism on literary collaboration. In order to define collaboration, we must consider four essential questions: is it acknowledged? is it mutual? is it equal? and is it separable? All authors receive advice from others, making all creative practice in a sense collaborative, but this chapter proposes that texts in which the collaboration is mutually undertaken and overtly acknowledged differ fundamentally from traditionally authored texts. On the other hand, criticism of collaboration has been hampered by the assumption that true collaboration must be evenly divided (all of Stevenson’s collaborations were, in one way or another, unequal ones), and that the business of the critic is to solve the “problem” of who has written what, a project which shows an a priori scepticism about the possibility of collaboration at all.

Disjecta Membra: Collaboration and the Body of the Text in The Wrong Box and The Master of Ballantrae

Stevenson’s most extensive and lengthy literary collaboration was with his stepson Lloyd Osbourne. Stevenson wrote the comic novel The Wrong Box with Osbourne in 1889. The Wrong Box is the only work for which we have extensive manuscript material showing the creative process that the partners used. While Stevenson and Osbourne were at work together on the The Wrong Box, Stevenson was simultaneously working alone on the much better received The Master of Ballantrae (1889). Thematically similar to The Wrong Box but tonally opposite, The Master of Ballantrae revisits the questions of family and morality posed by The Wrong Box and demonstrates the extent to which Stevenson’s collaborations, and his thoughts about those collaborations, inform even work purportedly not collaborative.

Collaboration and Marriage: The Dynamiter

This chapter considers Stevenson’s acknowledged collaborations with his wife, Fanny, most substantially, their co-written work, The Dynamiter, also titled More New Arabian Nights (1885). Husband and wife collaborations create subtle problems, largely because we expect a wife to assist her husband without credit. The Dynamiter structurally draws upon The Thousand and One Nights, which themselves concern issues of narrative and marriage. The Dynamiter, a novel about Irish terrorism, was well regarded in the nineteenth century, but not so in the twentieth or twenty-first, precisely because recent critics have resented Fanny’s involvement. The chapter additionally considers Fanny and Louis’ collaborative play “The Hanging Judge” and the controversy surrounding Fanny’s short story “The Nixie.”

‘A kind of partnership business’: The Wrecker and The Ebb-Tide

This chapter considers the last two, and best known, Stevenson-Osbourne literary collaborations. After The Wrong Box, the pair went on to write The Wrecker (1892) together, but privately Stevenson emphasized Lloyd Osbourne’s subordinate role and expressed his growing frustration with the creative process. Finally, they undertook The Ebb-Tide (1894), but by then the process had failed. Stevenson’s growing dissatisfaction with the collaboration forms the argument of both The Wrecker and The Ebb-Tide. In particular, The Wrecker is a novel about partnerships and the compromises they require—of ethics, art, and self-interest, written at a moment when Stevenson himself was the most challenged by his own difficult partnership with Osbourne.

Counterpoint: Fanny’s and Louis’s Pacific Diaries

This chapter the progression of several textual fragments describing Pacific islands that the Stevensons visited on the ship the Janet Nichol, from their first draft as holograph manuscript fragments, to their inclusion in Fanny Stevenson’s published diary The Cruise of the Janet Nicoll [sic], and sometimes their inclusion in Louis’s published nonfiction in In the South Seas as well as fiction such as The Beach of Falesá. Much of this material, which was originally written by Louis but later claimed by Fanny, concerns one topic--that of the sexual exploitation of young Pacific Island girls by white traders. The shared nature of the family’s diaries allowed Louis to hide in his wife’s diary material on a topic that was evidently of great interest to him, but that would have negatively affected this very famous author’s reputation as a family-friendly author.