Dr Colin McIlroy, Curator of Modern Literary Manuscripts, writes: This letter is an oft-quoted missive, revealing Stevenson’s justification for his take on Robert Burns in a recent article, and with a foreshadowing of his plans to travel extensively. It provides a rare example of two of Scotland’s most important literary figures featuring in one manuscript letter, and its acquisition is evidence of the National Library of Scotland’s continued commitment to ensuring our most important cultural figures are preserved for future generations.
The letter is Stevenson’s response to James Cunningham, having sent Cunningham his essay ‘Some Aspects of Robert Burns’, published in the Cornhill Magazine in October 1879. Stevenson thanks Cunningham ‘for a rare commodity: some intelligible criticism’. He then rails against Burns’s biographers for their ‘evasive and sentimentalised treatment’ of what he terms Burns’s ‘Don Juan business’. While the letter has been published, the significance of Stevenson discussing Burns means the capture of this manuscript for the nation will repay research scrutiny from scholars and fans alike.
Stevenson met Cunningham on August 7, 1880, on a transatlantic voyage back home from a rest cure in California with his new wife, Fanny, with the two spending the journey together followed by several visits and an exchange of letters, of which this is one. In addition to his thoughts on his Burns essay, Stevenson suggests that he is about to set out from Scotland for further travels. In search of fairer climes for the treatment of his lung ailment, he stayed first at Davos, and then the South of France, Bournemouth and America. Referring to these travels, Stevenson closes the letter with a clear outline of his future intentions and a less than flattering description of his home country: ‘I am sure, from the little experiment already made, that I must flee from Scotland. It is, for me, the mouth of the pit’. And Stevenson did leave Scotland, moving to Bournemouth in 1884, before leaving Britain for the last time in 1887 for the South Seas and Vailima, his eventual home in Samoa, where he died in 1894.
