Transcribed from the 1912 Chatto & Windus edition by David Price,
email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk Additional proofing by Peter Barnes.
RECORDS OF A FAMILY OF ENGINEERS
INTRODUCTION: THE SURNAME OF STEVENSON
From the thirteenth century onwards, the name, under the various
disguises of Stevinstoun, Stevensoun, Stevensonne, Stenesone, and
Stewinsoune, spread across Scotland from the mouth of the Firth of
Forth to the mouth of the Firth of Clyde. Four times at least it
occurs as a place-name. There is a parish of Stevenston in
Cunningham; a second place of the name in the Barony of Bothwell in
Lanark; a third on Lyne, above Drochil Castle; the fourth on the
Tyne, near Traprain Law. Stevenson of Stevenson (co. Lanark) swore
fealty to Edward I in 1296, and the last of that family died after
the Restoration. Stevensons of Hirdmanshiels, in Midlothian, rode
in the Bishops' Raid of Aberlady, served as jurors, stood bail for
neighbours--Hunter of Polwood, for instance--and became extinct
about the same period, or possibly earlier. A Stevenson of Luthrie
and another of Pitroddie make their bows, give their names, and
vanish. And by the year 1700 it does not appear that any acre of
Scots land was vested in any Stevenson. {2a}
Here is, so far, a melancholy picture of backward progress, and a
family posting towards extinction. But the law (however
administered, and I am bound to aver that, in Scotland, 'it couldna
weel be waur') acts as a kind of dredge, and with dispassionate
impartiality brings up into the light of day, and shows us for a
moment, in the jury-box or on the gallows, the creeping things of
the past. By these broken glimpses we are able to trace the
existence of many other and more inglorious Stevensons, picking a
private way through the brawl that makes Scots history. They were
members of Parliament for Peebles, Stirling, Pittenweem, Kilrenny,
and Inverurie. We find them burgesses of Edinburgh; indwellers in
Biggar, Perth, and Dalkeith. Thomas was the forester of Newbattle
Park, Gavin was a baker, John a maltman, Francis a chirurgeon, and
'Schir William' a priest. In the feuds of Humes and Heatleys,
Cunninghams, Montgomeries, Mures, Ogilvies, and Turnbulls, we find
them inconspicuously involved, and apparently getting rather better
than they gave. Schir William (reverend gentleman) was cruellie
slaughtered on the Links of Kincraig in 1582; James ('in the mill-
town of Roberton'), murdered in 1590; Archibald ('in
Gallowfarren'), killed with shots of pistols and hagbuts in 1608.
Three violent deaths in about seventy years, against which we can
only put the case of Thomas, servant to Hume of Cowden Knowes, who
was arraigned with his two young masters for the death of the
Bastard of Mellerstanes in 1569. John ('in Dalkeith') stood sentry
without Holyrood while the banded lords were despatching Rizzio
within. William, at the ringing of Perth bell, ran before Gowrie
House 'with ane sword, and, entering to the yearde, saw George
Craiggingilt with ane twa-handit sword and utheris nychtbouris; at
quilk time James Boig cryit ower ane wynds, "Awa hame! ye will all
be hangit"'--a piece of advice which William took, and immediately
'depairtit.' John got a maid with child to him in Biggar, and
seemingly deserted her; she was hanged on the Castle Hill for
infanticide, June 1614; and Martin, elder in Dalkeith, eternally
disgraced the name by signing witness in a witch trial, 1661.
These are two of our black sheep. {3a} Under the Restoration, one
Stevenson was a bailie in Edinburgh, and another the lessee of the
Canonmills. There were at the same period two physicians of the
name in Edinburgh, one of whom, Dr. Archibald, appears to have been
a famous man in his day and generation. The Court had continual
need of him; it was he who reported, for instance, on the state of
Rumbold; and he was for some time in the enjoyment of a pension of
a thousand pounds Scots (about eighty pounds sterling) at a time
when five hundred pounds is described as 'an opulent future.' I do
not know if I should be glad or sorry that he failed to keep
favour; but on 6th January 1682 (rather a cheerless New Year's
present) his pension was expunged. {4a} There need be no doubt, at
least, of my exultation at the fact that he was knighted and
recorded arms. Not quite so genteel, but still in public life,
Hugh was Under-Clerk to the Privy Council, and liked being so
extremely. I gather this from his conduct in September 1681, when,
with all the lords and their servants, he took the woful and soul-
destroying Test, swearing it 'word by word upon his knees.' And,
behold! it was in vain, for Hugh was turned out of his small post
in 1684. {4b} Sir Archibald and Hugh were both plainly inclined to
be trimmers; but there was one witness of the name of Stevenson who
held high the banner of the Covenant--John, 'Land-Labourer, {4c} in
the parish of Daily, in Carrick,' that 'eminently pious man.' He
seems to have been a poor sickly soul, and shows himself disabled
with scrofula, and prostrate and groaning aloud with fever; but the
enthusiasm of the martyr burned high within him.
'I was made to take joyfully the spoiling of my goods, and with
pleasure for His name's sake wandered in deserts and in mountains,
in dens and caves of the earth. I lay four months in the coldest
season of the year in a haystack in my father's garden, and a whole
February in the open fields not far from Camragen, and this I did
without the least prejudice from the night air; one night, when
lying in the fields near to the Carrick-Miln, I was all covered
with snow in the morning. Many nights have I lain with pleasure in
the churchyard of Old Daily, and made a grave my pillow; frequently
have I resorted to the old walls about the glen, near to Camragen,
and there sweetly rested.' The visible band of God protected and
directed him. Dragoons were turned aside from the bramble-bush
where he lay hidden. Miracles were performed for his behoof. 'I
got a horse and a woman to carry the child, and came to the same
mountain, where I wandered by the mist before; it is commonly known
by the name of Kellsrhins: when we came to go up the mountain,
there came on a great rain, which we thought was the occasion of
the child's weeping, and she wept so bitterly, that all we could do
could not divert her from it, so that she was ready to burst. When
we got to the top of the mountain, where the Lord had been formerly
kind to my soul in prayer, I looked round me for a stone, and
espying one, I went and brought it. When the woman with me saw me
set down the stone, she smiled, and asked what I was going to do
with it. I told her I was going to set it up as my Ebenezer,
because hitherto, and in that place, the Lord had formerly helped,
and I hoped would yet help. The rain still continuing, the child
weeping bitterly, I went to prayer, and no sooner did I cry to God,
but the child gave over weeping, and when we got up from prayer,
the rain was pouring down on every side, but in the way where we
were to go there fell not one drop; the place not rained on was as
big as an ordinary avenue.' And so great a saint was the natural
butt of Satan's persecutions. 'I retired to the fields for secret
prayer about mid-night. When I went to pray I was much straitened,
and could not get one request, but "Lord pity," "Lord help"; this I
came over frequently; at length the terror of Satan fell on me in a
high degree, and all I could say even then was--"Lord help." I
continued in the duty for some time, notwithstanding of this
terror. At length I got up to my feet, and the terror still
increased; then the enemy took me by the arm-pits, and seemed to
lift me up by my arms. I saw a loch just before me, and I
concluded he designed to throw me there by force; and had he got
leave to do so, it might have brought a great reproach upon
religion. {7a} But it was otherwise ordered, and the cause of
piety escaped that danger. {7b}
On the whole, the Stevensons may be described as decent, reputable
folk, following honest trades--millers, maltsters, and doctors,
playing the character parts in the Waverley Novels with propriety,
if without distinction; and to an orphan looking about him in the
world for a potential ancestry, offering a plain and quite
unadorned refuge, equally free from shame and glory. John, the
land-labourer, is the one living and memorable figure, and he,
alas! cannot possibly be more near than a collateral. It was on
August 12, 1678, that he heard Mr. John Welsh on the Craigdowhill,
and 'took the heavens, earth, and sun in the firmament that was
shining on us, as also the ambassador who made the offer, and THE
CLERK WHO RAISED THE PSALMS, to witness that I did give myself away
to the Lord in a personal and perpetual covenant never to be
forgotten'; and already, in 1675, the birth of my direct ascendant
was registered in Glasgow. So that I have been pursuing ancestors
too far down; and John the land-labourer is debarred me, and I must
relinquish from the trophies of my house his RARE SOUL-
STRENGTHENING AND COMFORTING CORDIAL. It is the same case with the
Edinburgh bailie and the miller of the Canonmills, worthy man! and
with that public character, Hugh the Under-Clerk, and, more than
all, with Sir Archibald, the physician, who recorded arms. And I
am reduced to a family of inconspicuous maltsters in what was then
the clean and handsome little city on the Clyde.
The name has a certain air of being Norse. But the story of
Scottish nomenclature is confounded by a continual process of
translation and half-translation from the Gaelic which in olden
days may have been sometimes reversed. Roy becomes Reid; Gow,
Smith. A great Highland clan uses the name of Robertson; a sept in
Appin that of Livingstone; Maclean in Glencoe answers to Johnstone
at Lockerby. And we find such hybrids as Macalexander for
Macallister. There is but one rule to be deduced: that however
uncompromisingly Saxon a name may appear, you can never be sure it
does not designate a Celt. My great-grandfather wrote the name
Stevenson but pronounced it Steenson, after the fashion of the
immortal minstrel in Redgauntlet; and this elision of a medial
consonant appears a Gaelic process; and, curiously enough, I have
come across no less than two Gaelic forms: John Macstophane
cordinerius in Crossraguel, 1573, and William M'Steen in Dunskeith
(co. Ross), 1605. Stevenson, Steenson, Macstophane, M'Steen:
which is the original? which the translation? Or were these
separate creations of the patronymic, some English, some Gaelic?
The curiously compact territory in which we find them seated--Ayr,
Lanark, Peebles, Stirling, Perth, Fife, and the Lothians--would
seem to forbid the supposition. {9a}
'STEVENSON--or according to tradition of one of the proscribed of
the clan MacGregor, who was born among the willows or in a hill-
side sheep-pen--"Son of my love," a heraldic bar sinister, but
history reveals a reason for the birth among the willows far other
than the sinister aspect of the name': these are the dark words of
Mr. Cosmo Innes; but history or tradition, being interrogated,
tells a somewhat tangled tale. The heir of Macgregor of Glenorchy,
murdered about 1858 by the Argyll Campbells, appears to have been
the original 'Son of my love'; and his more loyal clansmen took the
name to fight under. It may be supposed the story of their
resistance became popular, and the name in some sort identified
with the idea of opposition to the Campbells. Twice afterwards, on
some renewed aggression, in 1502 and 1552, we find the Macgregors
again banding themselves into a sept of 'Sons of my love'; and when
the great disaster fell on them in 1603, the whole original legend
reappears, and we have the heir of Alaster of Glenstrae born 'among
the willows' of a fugitive mother, and the more loyal clansmen
again rallying under the name of Stevenson. A story would not be
told so often unless it had some base in fact; nor (if there were
no bond at all between the Red Macgregors and the Stevensons) would
that extraneous and somewhat uncouth name be so much repeated in
the legends of the Children of the Mist.
But I am enabled, by my very lively and obliging correspondent, Mr.
George A. Macgregor Stevenson of New York, to give an actual
instance. His grandfather, great-grandfather, great-great-
grandfather, and great-great-great-grandfather, all used the names
of Macgregor and Stevenson as occasion served; being perhaps
Macgregor by night and Stevenson by day. The great-great-great-
grandfather was a mighty man of his hands, marched with the clan in
the 'Forty-five, and returned with spolia opima in the shape of a
sword, which he had wrested from an officer in the retreat, and
which is in the possession of my correspondent to this day. His
great-grandson (the grandfather of my correspondent), being
converted to Methodism by some wayside preacher, discarded in a
moment his name, his old nature, and his political principles, and
with the zeal of a proselyte sealed his adherence to the Protestant
Succession by baptising his next son George. This George became
the publisher and editor of the Wesleyan Times. His children were
brought up in ignorance of their Highland pedigree; and my
correspondent was puzzled to overhear his father speak of him as a
true Macgregor, and amazed to find, in rummaging about that
peaceful and pious house, the sword of the Hanoverian officer.
After he was grown up and was better informed of his descent, 'I
frequently asked my father,' he writes, 'why he did not use the
name of Macgregor; his replies were significant, and give a picture
of the man: "It isn't a good METHODIST name. You can use it, but
it will do you no GOOD." Yet the old gentleman, by way of
pleasantry, used to announce himself to friends as "Colonel
Macgregor."'
Here, then, are certain Macgregors habitually using the name of
Stevenson, and at last, under the influence of Methodism, adopting
it entirely. Doubtless a proscribed clan could not be particular;
they took a name as a man takes an umbrella against a shower; as
Rob Roy took Campbell, and his son took Drummond. But this case is
different; Stevenson was not taken and left--it was consistently
adhered to. It does not in the least follow that all Stevensons
are of the clan Alpin; but it does follow that some may be. And I
cannot conceal from myself the possibility that James Stevenson in
Glasgow, my first authentic ancestor, may have had a Highland alias
upon his conscience and a claymore in his back parlour.
To one more tradition I may allude, that we are somehow descended
from a French barber-surgeon who came to St. Andrews in the service
of one of the Cardinal Beatons. No details were added. But the
very name of France was so detested in my family for three
generations, that I am tempted to suppose there may be something in
it. {12a}
CHAPTER I: DOMESTIC ANNALS
It is believed that in 1665, James Stevenson in Nether Carsewell,
parish of Neilston, county of Renfrew, and presumably a tenant
farmer, married one Jean Keir; and in 1675, without doubt, there
was born to these two a son Robert, possibly a maltster in Glasgow.
In 1710, Robert married, for a second time, Elizabeth Cumming, and
there was born to them, in 1720, another Robert, certainly a
maltster in Glasgow. In 1742, Robert the second married Margaret
Fulton (Margret, she called herself), by whom he had ten children,
among whom were Hugh, born February 1749, and Alan, born June 1752.
With these two brothers my story begins. Their deaths were
simultaneous; their lives unusually brief and full. Tradition
whispered me in childhood they were the owners of an islet near St.
Kitts; and it is certain they had risen to be at the head of
considerable interests in the West Indies, which Hugh managed
abroad and Alan at home, at an age when others are still curveting
a clerk's stool. My kinsman, Mr. Stevenson of Stirling, has heard
his father mention that there had been 'something romantic' about
Alan's marriage: and, alas! he has forgotten what. It was early
at least. His wife was Jean, daughter of David Lillie, a builder
in Glasgow, and several times 'Deacon of the Wrights': the date of
the marriage has not reached me; but on 8th June 1772, when Robert,
the only child of the union, was born, the husband and father had
scarce passed, or had not yet attained, his twentieth year. Here
was a youth making haste to give hostages to fortune. But this
early scene of prosperity in love and business was on the point of
closing.
There hung in the house of this young family, and successively in
those of my grandfather and father, an oil painting of a ship of
many tons burthen. Doubtless the brothers had an interest in the
vessel; I was told she had belonged to them outright; and the
picture was preserved through years of hardship, and remains to
this day in the possession of the family, the only memorial of my
great-grandsire Alan. It was on this ship that he sailed on his
last adventure, summoned to the West Indies by Hugh. An agent had
proved unfaithful on a serious scale; and it used to be told me in
my childhood how the brothers pursued him from one island to
another in an open boat, were exposed to the pernicious dews of the
tropics, and simultaneously struck down. The dates and places of
their deaths (now before me) would seem to indicate a more
scattered and prolonged pursuit: Hugh, on the 16th April 1774, in
Tobago, within sight of Trinidad; Alan, so late as 26th May, and so
far away as 'Santt Kittes,' in the Leeward Islands--both, says the
family Bible, 'of a fiver'(!). The death of Hugh was probably
announced by Alan in a letter, to which we may refer the details of
the open boat and the dew. Thus, at least, in something like the
course of post, both were called away, the one twenty-five, the
other twenty-two; their brief generation became extinct, their
short-lived house fell with them; and 'in these lawless parts and
lawless times'--the words are my grandfather's--their property was
stolen or became involved. Many years later, I understand some
small recovery to have been made; but at the moment almost the
whole means of the family seem to have perished with the young
merchants. On the 27th April, eleven days after Hugh Stevenson,
twenty-nine before Alan, died David Lillie, the Deacon of the
Wrights; so that mother and son were orphaned in one month. Thus,
from a few scraps of paper bearing little beyond dates, we
construct the outlines of the tragedy that shadowed the cradle of
Robert Stevenson.
Jean Lillie was a young woman of strong sense, well fitted to
contend with poverty, and of a pious disposition, which it is like
that these misfortunes heated. Like so many other widowed Scots-
women, she vowed her son should wag his head in a pulpit; but her
means were inadequate to her ambition. A charity school, and some
time under a Mr. M'Intyre, 'a famous linguist,' were all she could
afford in the way of education to the would-be minister. He
learned no Greek; in one place he mentions that the Orations of
Cicero were his highest book in Latin; in another that he had
'delighted' in Virgil and Horace; but his delight could never have
been scholarly. This appears to have been the whole of his
training previous to an event which changed his own destiny and
moulded that of his descendants--the second marriage of his mother.
There was a Merchant-Burgess of Edinburgh of the name of Thomas
Smith. The Smith pedigree has been traced a little more
particularly than the Stevensons', with a similar dearth of
illustrious names. One character seems to have appeared, indeed,
for a moment at the wings of history: a skipper of Dundee who
smuggled over some Jacobite big-wig at the time of the 'Fifteen,
and was afterwards drowned in Dundee harbour while going on board
his ship. With this exception, the generations of the Smiths
present no conceivable interest even to a descendant; and Thomas,
of Edinburgh, was the first to issue from respectable obscurity.
His father, a skipper out of Broughty Ferry, was drowned at sea
while Thomas was still young. He seems to have owned a ship or
two--whalers, I suppose, or coasters--and to have been a member of
the Dundee Trinity House, whatever that implies. On his death the
widow remained in Broughty, and the son came to push his future in
Edinburgh. There is a story told of him in the family which I
repeat here because I shall have to tell later on a similar, but
more perfectly authenticated, experience of his stepson, Robert
Stevenson. Word reached Thomas that his mother was unwell, and he
prepared to leave for Broughty on the morrow. It was between two
and three in the morning, and the early northern daylight was
already clear, when he awoke and beheld the curtains at the bed-
foot drawn aside and his mother appear in the interval, smile upon
him for a moment, and then vanish. The sequel is stereo-type; he
took the time by his watch, and arrived at Broughty to learn it was
the very moment of her death. The incident is at least curious in
having happened to such a person--as the tale is being told of him.
In all else, he appears as a man ardent, passionate, practical,
designed for affairs and prospering in them far beyond the average.
He founded a solid business in lamps and oils, and was the sole
proprietor of a concern called the Greenside Company's Works--'a
multifarious concern it was,' writes my cousin, Professor Swan, 'of
tinsmiths, coppersmiths, brass-founders, blacksmiths, and
japanners.' He was also, it seems, a shipowner and underwriter.
He built himself 'a land'--Nos. 1 and 2 Baxter's Place, then no
such unfashionable neighbourhood--and died, leaving his only son in
easy circumstances, and giving to his three surviving daughters
portions of five thousand pounds and upwards. There is no standard
of success in life; but in one of its meanings, this is to succeed.
In what we know of his opinions, he makes a figure highly
characteristic of the time. A high Tory and patriot, a captain--so
I find it in my notes--of Edinburgh Spearmen, and on duty in the
Castle during the Muir and Palmer troubles, he bequeathed to his
descendants a bloodless sword and a somewhat violent tradition,
both long preserved. The judge who sat on Muir and Palmer, the
famous Braxfield, let fall from the bench the obiter dictum--'I
never liked the French all my days, but now I hate them.' If
Thomas Smith, the Edinburgh Spearman, were in court, he must have
been tempted to applaud. The people of that land were his
abhorrence; he loathed Buonaparte like Antichrist. Towards the end
he fell into a kind of dotage; his family must entertain him with
games of tin soldiers, which he took a childish pleasure to array
and overset; but those who played with him must be upon their
guard, for if his side, which was always that of the English
against the French, should chance to be defeated, there would be
trouble in Baxter's Place. For these opinions he may almost be
said to have suffered. Baptised and brought up in the Church of
Scotland, he had, upon some conscientious scruple, joined the
communion of the Baptists. Like other Nonconformists, these were
inclined to the Liberal side in politics, and, at least in the
beginning, regarded Buonaparte as a deliverer. From the time of
his joining the Spearmen, Thomas Smith became in consequence a
bugbear to his brethren in the faith. 'They that take the sword
shall perish with the sword,' they told him; they gave him 'no
rest'; 'his position became intolerable'; it was plain he must
choose between his political and his religious tenets; and in the
last years of his life, about 1812, he returned to the Church of
his fathers.
August 1786 was the date of his chief advancement, when, having
designed a system of oil lights to take the place of the primitive
coal fires before in use, he was dubbed engineer to the newly-
formed Board of Northern Lighthouses. Not only were his fortunes
bettered by the appointment, but he was introduced to a new and
wider field for the exercise of his abilities, and a new way of
life highly agreeable to his active constitution. He seems to have
rejoiced in the long journeys, and to have combined them with the
practice of field sports. 'A tall, stout man coming ashore with
his gun over his arm'--so he was described to my father--the only
description that has come down to me by a light-keeper old in the
service. Nor did this change come alone. On the 9th July of the
same year, Thomas Smith had been left for the second time a
widower. As he was still but thirty-three years old, prospering in
his affairs, newly advanced in the world, and encumbered at the
time with a family of children, five in number, it was natural that
he should entertain the notion of another wife. Expeditious in
business, he was no less so in his choice; and it was not later
than June 1787--for my grandfather is described as still in his
fifteenth year--that he married the widow of Alan Stevenson.
The perilous experiment of bringing together two families for once
succeeded. Mr. Smith's two eldest daughters, Jean and Janet,
fervent in piety, unwearied in kind deeds, were well qualified both
to appreciate and to attract the stepmother; and her son, on the
other hand, seems to have found immediate favour in the eyes of Mr.
Smith. It is, perhaps, easy to exaggerate the ready-made
resemblances; the tired woman must have done much to fashion girls
who were under ten; the man, lusty and opinionated, must have
stamped a strong impression on the boy of fifteen. But the
cleavage of the family was too marked, the identity of character
and interest produced between the two men on the one hand, and the
three women on the other, was too complete to have been the result
of influence alone. Particular bonds of union must have pre-
existed on each side. And there is no doubt that the man and the
boy met with common ambitions, and a common bent, to the practice
of that which had not so long before acquired the name of civil
engineering.
For the profession which is now so thronged, famous, and
influential, was then a thing of yesterday. My grandfather had an
anecdote of Smeaton, probably learned from John Clerk of Eldin,
their common friend. Smeaton was asked by the Duke of Argyll to
visit the West Highland coast for a professional purpose. He
refused, appalled, it seems, by the rough travelling. 'You can
recommend some other fit person?' asked the Duke. 'No,' said
Smeaton, 'I'm sorry I can't.' 'What!' cried the Duke, 'a
profession with only one man in it! Pray, who taught you?' 'Why,'
said Smeaton, 'I believe I may say I was self-taught, an't please
your grace.' Smeaton, at the date of Thomas Smith's third
marriage, was yet living; and as the one had grown to the new
profession from his place at the instrument-maker's, the other was
beginning to enter it by the way of his trade. The engineer of to-
day is confronted with a library of acquired results; tables and
formulae to the value of folios full have been calculated and
recorded; and the student finds everywhere in front of him the
footprints of the pioneers. In the eighteenth century the field
was largely unexplored; the engineer must read with his own eyes
the face of nature; he arose a volunteer, from the workshop or the
mill, to undertake works which were at once inventions and
adventures. It was not a science then--it was a living art; and it
visibly grew under the eyes and between the hands of its
practitioners.
The charm of such an occupation was strongly felt by stepfather and
stepson. It chanced that Thomas Smith was a reformer; the
superiority of his proposed lamp and reflectors over open fires of
coal secured his appointment; and no sooner had he set his hand to
the task than the interest of that employment mastered him. The
vacant stage on which he was to act, and where all had yet to be
created--the greatness of the difficulties, the smallness of the
means intrusted him--would rouse a man of his disposition like a
call to battle. The lad introduced by marriage under his roof was
of a character to sympathise; the public usefulness of the service
would appeal to his judgment, the perpetual need for fresh
expedients stimulate his ingenuity. And there was another
attraction which, in the younger man at least, appealed to, and
perhaps first aroused, a profound and enduring sentiment of
romance: I mean the attraction of the life. The seas into which
his labours carried the new engineer were still scarce charted, the
coasts still dark; his way on shore was often far beyond the
convenience of any road; the isles in which he must sojourn were
still partly savage. He must toss much in boats; he must often
adventure on horseback by the dubious bridle-track through
unfrequented wildernesses; he must sometimes plant his lighthouse
in the very camp of wreckers; and he was continually enforced to
the vicissitudes of outdoor life. The joy of my grandfather in
this career was strong as the love of woman. It lasted him through
youth and manhood, it burned strong in age, and at the approach of
death his last yearning was to renew these loved experiences. What
he felt himself he continued to attribute to all around him. And
to this supposed sentiment in others I find him continually, almost
pathetically, appealing; often in vain.
Snared by these interests, the boy seems to have become almost at
once the eager confidant and adviser of his new connection; the
Church, if he had ever entertained the prospect very warmly, faded
from his view; and at the age of nineteen I find him already in a
post of some authority, superintending the construction of the
lighthouse on the isle of Little Cumbrae, in the Firth of Clyde.
The change of aim seems to have caused or been accompanied by a
change of character. It sounds absurd to couple the name of my
grandfather with the word indolence; but the lad who had been
destined from the cradle to the Church, and who had attained the
age of fifteen without acquiring more than a moderate knowledge of
Latin, was at least no unusual student. And from the day of his
charge at Little Cumbrae he steps before us what he remained until
the end, a man of the most zealous industry, greedy of occupation,
greedy of knowledge, a stern husband of time, a reader, a writer,
unflagging in his task of self-improvement. Thenceforward his
summers were spent directing works and ruling workmen, now in
uninhabited, now in half-savage islands; his winters were set
apart, first at the Andersonian Institution, then at the University
of Edinburgh to improve himself in mathematics, chemistry, natural
history, agriculture, moral philosophy, and logic; a bearded
student--although no doubt scrupulously shaved. I find one
reference to his years in class which will have a meaning for all
who have studied in Scottish Universities. He mentions a
recommendation made by the professor of logic. 'The high-school
men,' he writes, 'and BEARDED MEN LIKE MYSELF, were all attention.'
If my grandfather were throughout life a thought too studious of
the art of getting on, much must be forgiven to the bearded and
belated student who looked across, with a sense of difference, at
'the high-school men.' Here was a gulf to be crossed; but already
he could feel that he had made a beginning, and that must have been
a proud hour when he devoted his earliest earnings to the repayment
of the charitable foundation in which he had received the rudiments
of knowledge.
In yet another way he followed the example of his father-in-law,
and from 1794 to 1807, when the affairs of the Bell Rock made it
necessary for him to resign, he served in different corps of
volunteers. In the last of these he rose to a position of
distinction, no less than captain of the Grenadier Company, and his
colonel, in accepting his resignation, entreated he would do them
'the favour of continuing as an honorary member of a corps which
has been so much indebted for your zeal and exertions.'
To very pious women the men of the house are apt to appear worldly.
The wife, as she puts on her new bonnet before church, is apt to
sigh over that assiduity which enabled her husband to pay the
milliner's bill. And in the household of the Smiths and Stevensons
the women were not only extremely pious, but the men were in
reality a trifle worldly. Religious they both were; conscious,
like all Scots, of the fragility and unreality of that scene in
which we play our uncomprehended parts; like all Scots, realising
daily and hourly the sense of another will than ours and a
perpetual direction in the affairs of life. But the current of
their endeavours flowed in a more obvious channel. They had got on
so far; to get on further was their next ambition--to gather
wealth, to rise in society, to leave their descendants higher than
themselves, to be (in some sense) among the founders of families.
Scott was in the same town nourishing similar dreams. But in the
eyes of the women these dreams would be foolish and idolatrous.
I have before me some volumes of old letters addressed to Mrs.
Smith and the two girls, her favourites, which depict in a strong
light their characters and the society in which they moved.
'My very dear and much esteemed Friend,' writes one correspondent,
'this day being the anniversary of our acquaintance, I feel
inclined to address you; but where shall I find words to express
the fealings of a graitful Heart, first to the Lord who graiciously
inclined you on this day last year to notice an afflicted Strainger
providentially cast in your way far from any Earthly friend? . . .
Methinks I shall hear him say unto you, "Inasmuch as ye shewed
kindness to my afflicted handmaiden, ye did it unto me."'
This is to Jean; but the same afflicted lady wrote indifferently to
Jean, to Janet, and to Ms. Smith, whom she calls 'my Edinburgh
mother.' It is plain the three were as one person, moving to acts
of kindness, like the Graces, inarmed. Too much stress must not be
laid on the style of this correspondence; Clarinda survived, not
far away, and may have met the ladies on the Calton Hill; and many
of the writers appear, underneath the conventions of the period, to
be genuinely moved. But what unpleasantly strikes a reader is,
that these devout unfortunates found a revenue in their devotion.
It is everywhere the same tale; on the side of the soft-hearted
ladies, substantial acts of help; on the side of the
correspondents, affection, italics, texts, ecstasies, and imperfect
spelling. When a midwife is recommended, not at all for
proficiency in her important art, but because she has 'a sister
whom I [the correspondent] esteem and respect, and [who] is a
spiritual daughter of my Hond Father in the Gosple,' the mask seems
to be torn off, and the wages of godliness appear too openly.
Capacity is a secondary matter in a midwife, temper in a servant,
affection in a daughter, and the repetition of a shibboleth fulfils
the law. Common decency is at times forgot in the same page with
the most sanctified advice and aspiration. Thus I am introduced to
a correspondent who appears to have been at the time the
housekeeper at Invermay, and who writes to condole with my
grandmother in a season of distress. For nearly half a sheet she
keeps to the point with an excellent discretion in language then
suddenly breaks out:
'It was fully my intention to have left this at Martinmass, but the
Lord fixes the bounds of our habitation. I have had more need of
patience in my situation here than in any other, partly from the
very violent, unsteady, deceitful temper of the Mistress of the
Family, and also from the state of the house. It was in a train of
repair when I came here two years ago, and is still in Confusion.
There is above six Thousand Pounds' worth of Furniture come from
London to be put up when the rooms are completely finished; and
then, woe be to the Person who is Housekeeper at Invermay!'
And by the tail of the document, which is torn, I see she goes on
to ask the bereaved family to seek her a new place. It is
extraordinary that people should have been so deceived in so
careless an impostor; that a few sprinkled 'God willings' should
have blinded them to the essence of this venomous letter; and that
they should have been at the pains to bind it in with others (many
of them highly touching) in their memorial of harrowing days. But
the good ladies were without guile and without suspicion; they were
victims marked for the axe, and the religious impostors snuffed up
the wind as they drew near.
I have referred above to my grandmother; it was no slip of the pen:
for by an extraordinary arrangement, in which it is hard not to
suspect the managing hand of a mother, Jean Smith became the wife
of Robert Stevenson. Mrs. Smith had failed in her design to make
her son a minister, and she saw him daily more immersed in business
and worldly ambition. One thing remained that she might do: she
might secure for him a godly wife, that great means of
sanctification; and she had two under her hand, trained by herself,
her dear friends and daughters both in law and love--Jean and
Janet. Jean's complexion was extremely pale, Janet's was florid;
my grandmother's nose was straight, my great-aunt's aquiline; but
by the sound of the voice, not even a son was able to distinguish
one from other. The marriage of a man of twenty-seven and a girl
of twenty who have lived for twelve years as brother and sister, is
difficult to conceive. It took place, however, and thus in 1799
the family was still further cemented by the union of a
representative of the male or worldly element with one of the
female and devout.
This essential difference remained unbridged, yet never diminished
the strength of their relation. My grandfather pursued his design
of advancing in the world with some measure of success; rose to
distinction in his calling, grew to be the familiar of members of
Parliament, judges of the Court of Session, and 'landed gentlemen';
learned a ready address, had a flow of interesting conversation,
and when he was referred to as 'a highly respectable bourgeois,'
resented the description. My grandmother remained to the end
devout and unambitious, occupied with her Bible, her children, and
her house; easily shocked, and associating largely with a clique of
godly parasites. I do not know if she called in the midwife
already referred to; but the principle on which that lady was
recommended, she accepted fully. The cook was a godly woman, the
butcher a Christian man, and the table suffered. The scene has
been often described to me of my grandfather sawing with darkened
countenance at some indissoluble joint--'Preserve me, my dear, what
kind of a reedy, stringy beast is this?'--of the joint removed, the
pudding substituted and uncovered; and of my grandmother's anxious
glance and hasty, deprecatory comment, 'Just mismanaged!' Yet with
the invincible obstinacy of soft natures, she would adhere to the
godly woman and the Christian man, or find others of the same
kidney to replace them. One of her confidants had once a narrow
escape; an unwieldy old woman, she had fallen from an outside stair
in a close of the Old Town; and my grandmother rejoiced to
communicate the providential circumstance that a baker had been
passing underneath with his bread upon his head. 'I would like to
know what kind of providence the baker thought it!' cried my
grandfather.
But the sally must have been unique. In all else that I have heard
or read of him, so far from criticising, he was doing his utmost to
honour and even to emulate his wife's pronounced opinions. In the
only letter which has come to my hand of Thomas Smith's, I find him
informing his wife that he was 'in time for afternoon church';
similar assurances or cognate excuses abound in the correspondence
of Robert Stevenson; and it is comical and pretty to see the two
generations paying the same court to a female piety more highly
strung: Thomas Smith to the mother of Robert Stevenson--Robert
Stevenson to the daughter of Thomas Smith. And if for once my
grandfather suffered himself to be hurried, by his sense of humour
and justice, into that remark about the case of Providence and the
Baker, I should be sorry for any of his children who should have
stumbled into the same attitude of criticism. In the apocalyptic
style of the housekeeper of Invermay, woe be to that person! But
there was no fear; husband and sons all entertained for the pious,
tender soul the same chivalrous and moved affection. I have spoken
with one who remembered her, and who had been the intimate and
equal of her sons, and I found this witness had been struck, as I
had been, with a sense of disproportion between the warmth of the
adoration felt and the nature of the woman, whether as described or
observed. She diligently read and marked her Bible; she was a
tender nurse; she had a sense of humour under strong control; she
talked and found some amusement at her (or rather at her husband's)
dinner-parties. It is conceivable that even my grandmother was
amenable to the seductions of dress; at least, I find her husband
inquiring anxiously about 'the gowns from Glasgow,' and very
careful to describe the toilet of the Princess Charlotte, whom he
had seen in church 'in a Pelisse and Bonnet of the same colour of
cloth as the Boys' Dress jackets, trimmed with blue satin ribbons;
the hat or Bonnet, Mr. Spittal said, was a Parisian slouch, and had
a plume of three white feathers.' But all this leaves a blank
impression, and it is rather by reading backward in these old musty
letters, which have moved me now to laughter and now to impatience,
that I glean occasional glimpses of how she seemed to her
contemporaries, and trace (at work in her queer world of godly and
grateful parasites) a mobile and responsive nature. Fashion moulds
us, and particularly women, deeper than we sometimes think; but a
little while ago, and, in some circles, women stood or fell by the
degree of their appreciation of old pictures; in the early years of
the century (and surely with more reason) a character like that of
my grandmother warmed, charmed, and subdued, like a strain of
music, the hearts of the men of her own household. And there is
little doubt that Mrs. Smith, as she looked on at the domestic life
of her son and her stepdaughter, and numbered the heads in their
increasing nursery, must have breathed fervent thanks to her
Creator.
Yet this was to be a family unusually tried; it was not for nothing
that one of the godly women saluted Miss Janet Smith as 'a veteran
in affliction'; and they were all before middle life experienced in
that form of service. By the 1st of January 1808, besides a pair
of still-born twins, children had been born and still survived to
the young couple. By the 11th two were gone; by the 28th a third
had followed, and the two others were still in danger. In the
letters of a former nurserymaid--I give her name, Jean Mitchell,
honoris causa--we are enabled to feel, even at this distance of
time, some of the bitterness of that month of bereavement.
'I have this day received,' she writes to Miss Janet, 'the
melancholy news of my dear babys' deaths. My heart is like to
break for my dear Mrs. Stevenson. O may she be supported on this
trying occasion! I hope her other three babys will be spared to
her. O, Miss Smith, did I think when I parted from my sweet babys
that I never was to see them more?' 'I received,' she begins her
next, 'the mournful news of my dear Jessie's death. I also
received the hair of my three sweet babys, which I will preserve as
dear to their memorys and as a token of Mr. and Mrs. Stevenson's
friendship and esteem. At my leisure hours, when the children are
in bed, they occupy all my thoughts, I dream of them. About two
weeks ago I dreamed that my sweet little Jessie came running to me
in her usual way, and I took her in my arms. O my dear babys, were
mortal eyes permitted to see them in heaven, we would not repine
nor grieve for their loss.'
By the 29th of February, the Reverend John Campbell, a man of
obvious sense and human value, but hateful to the present
biographer, because he wrote so many letters and conveyed so little
information, summed up this first period of affliction in a letter
to Miss Smith: 'Your dear sister but a little while ago had a full
nursery, and the dear blooming creatures sitting around her table
filled her breast with hope that one day they should fill active
stations in society and become an ornament in the Church below.
But ah!'
Near a hundred years ago these little creatures ceased to be, and
for not much less a period the tears have been dried. And to this
day, looking in these stitched sheaves of letters, we hear the
sound of many soft-hearted women sobbing for the lost. Never was
such a massacre of the innocents; teething and chincough and
scarlet fever and smallpox ran the round; and little Lillies, and
Smiths, and Stevensons fell like moths about a candle; and nearly
all the sympathetic correspondents deplore and recall the little
losses of their own. 'It is impossible to describe the Heavnly
looks of the Dear Babe the three last days of his life,' writes
Mrs. Laurie to Mrs. Smith. 'Never--never, my dear aunt, could I
wish to eface the rememberance of this Dear Child. Never, never,
my dear aunt!' And so soon the memory of the dead and the dust of
the survivors are buried in one grave.
There was another death in 1812; it passes almost unremarked; a
single funeral seemed but a small event to these 'veterans in
affliction'; and by 1816 the nursery was full again. Seven little
hopefuls enlivened the house; some were growing up; to the elder
girl my grandfather already wrote notes in current hand at the tail
of his letters to his wife: and to the elder boys he had begun to
print, with laborious care, sheets of childish gossip and pedantic
applications. Here, for instance, under date of 26th May 1816, is
part of a mythological account of London, with a moral for the
three gentlemen, 'Messieurs Alan, Robert, and James Stevenson,' to
whom the document is addressed:
'There are many prisons here like Bridewell, for, like other large
towns, there are many bad men here as well as many good men. The
natives of London are in general not so tall and strong as the
people of Edinburgh, because they have not so much pure air, and
instead of taking porridge they eat cakes made with sugar and
plums. Here you have thousands of carts to draw timber, thousands
of coaches to take you to all parts of the town, and thousands of
boats to sail on the river Thames. But you must have money to pay,
otherwise you can get nothing. Now the way to get money is, become
clever men and men of education, by being good scholars.'
From the same absence, he writes to his wife on a Sunday:
'It is now about eight o'clock with me, and I imagine you to be
busy with the young folks, hearing the questions [Anglice,
catechism], and indulging the boys with a chapter from the large
Bible, with their interrogations and your answers in the soundest
doctrine. I hope James is getting his verse as usual, and that
Mary is not forgetting her little hymn. While Jeannie will be
reading Wotherspoon, or some other suitable and instructive book, I
presume our friend, Aunt Mary, will have just arrived with the news
of A THRONG KIRK [a crowded church] and a great sermon. You may
mention, with my compliments to my mother, that I was at St. Paul's
to-day, and attended a very excellent service with Mr. James
Lawrie. The text was "Examine and see that ye be in the faith."'
A twinkle of humour lights up this evocation of the distant scene--
the humour of happy men and happy homes. Yet it is penned upon the
threshold of fresh sorrow. James and Mary--he of the verse and she
of the hymn--did not much more than survive to welcome their
returning father. On the 25th, one of the godly women writes to
Janet:
'My dearest beloved madam, when I last parted from you, you was so
affected with your affliction [you? or I?] could think of nothing
else. But on Saturday, when I went to inquire after your health,
how was I startled to hear that dear James was gone! Ah, what is
this? My dear benefactors, doing so much good to many, to the
Lord, suddenly to be deprived of their most valued comforts! I was
thrown into great perplexity, could do nothing but murmur, why
these things were done to such a family. I could not rest, but at
midnight, whether spoken [or not] it was presented to my mind--
"Those whom ye deplore are walking with me in white." I conclude
from this the Lord saying to sweet Mrs. Stevenson: "I gave them to
be brought up for me: well done, good and faithful! they are fully
prepared, and now I must present them to my father and your father,
to my God and your God."'
It would be hard to lay on flattery with a more sure and daring
hand. I quote it as a model of a letter of condolence; be sure it
would console. Very different, perhaps quite as welcome, is this
from a lighthouse inspector to my grandfather:
'In reading your letter the trickling tear ran down ray cheeks in
silent sorrow for your departed dear ones, my sweet little friends.
Well do I remember, and you will call to mind, their little
innocent and interesting stories. Often have they come round me
and taken me by the hand, but alas! I am no more destined to
behold them.'
The child who is taken becomes canonised, and the looks of the
homeliest babe seem in the retrospect 'heavenly the three last days
of his life.' But it appears that James and Mary had indeed been
children more than usually engaging; a record was preserved a long
while in the family of their remarks and 'little innocent and
interesting stories,' and the blow and the blank were the more
sensible.
