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Updated: May 13, 2025
Here is, so far, a melancholy picture of backward progress, and a family posting towards extinction. 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.
In spite of this and other valuable inventions his name has remained little known, owing to the fact that none of his inventions were ever patented. The Stevensons believed that, holding government appointments, any original work they did belonged to the nation.
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.
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.
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.
There are certain authors concerning the desirability of whose first editions it must not be disputed. The singular readiness with which bookish treasures fell into his way astonished less fortunate buyers. Rare Stevensons dropped into his hand like ripe fruit from a tree.
As in the case of other Stevensons, the romance of the work was welcome to him, but the office stool frightened him. When the would-be author had refused to follow in his kinsmen's footsteps, he promised to study as an advocate to satisfy his father, who urged his son to follow a recognised profession.
When the time came for him to leave the Stevensons and return to his family in China, it nearly broke his heart to go. Mrs. Stevenson writes of him: "Ah Fu had as strong a sense of romance as Louis himself. He returned to China with a belt of gold around his waist, a ninety dollar breech loader given him by Louis, and a boxful of belongings.
Surely, it would not be easy to duplicate this cosmopolitan list in any other woman's notebook. Among the villages of the island there was one, Vaiee, with which the Stevensons had a special friendship, dating back to the first year of their arrival in Samoa. At that time the villagers were building a church and had saved up sixty dollars with which to buy corrugated iron for the roof.
Hence, on the one hand, the sudden vogue of the novelists of the younger countries Tolstoi and Tourgenieff, Ibsen and Bjornson, Mary Wilkins and Howells who transplanted us at once into fresh scenes, new people: hence, on the other hand, the tendency on the part of our own latest writers the Stevensons, the Hall Caines, the Marion Crawfords, the Rider Haggards to go far afield among the lower races or the later civilisations for the themes of their romances.
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