Robert Louis Stevenson (Image provided)

“Dear Colvin, I am in the cars between Pittsburgh and Chicago, just now bowling through Ohio … It is now about ten on Wednesday morning, so I have been already about 40 hours in the cars. It is impossible to lie down in them which must end by being very wearying.”

— RLS to Sidney Colvin, August 20, 1879

Robert Louis Stevenson’s first rail journey across America began from the New Jersey terminal of the Pennsylvania Railroad on the evening of Aug. 18. The 28-year-old invalid author from Scotland was following the sun, bent on an “enterprise of madness” according to his friends in England, a “sinful mad business,” said his parents of the plan in Edinburgh. Thomas and Margaret Stevenson’s only son, without notice, had gone tripping off to California in the New World to find the older, married American woman who had permanently caught his attention in France, three years prior. He liked to call her his “wild woman of the west,” Mrs. Fanny Vandegrift Osbourne, and she had two kids, was separated from her philandering husband, Sam Osbourne, and was staying with her sister in Monterey.

Stevenson’s plan was simple. When he found Fanny, he would persuade her to get a divorce so she could marry him. There were many huge problems attached to this plan but Louis ignored them, another example of his renowned optimism. RLS liked to immerse himself in every new experience and then memorialize them in literature in a manner inimitable by others, thus perpetuating the widely held belief that Stevenson is the most personable of writers. Now he was in America and that was his new subject so he faced head-on his Old World preconception of this mutated rebel colony, conceptions that were much the norm among his fellow subjects of Queen Victoria. To help him, he started to read his brand-new six volume “History of the United States” by George Bancroft which he had just bought in New York.

“Up to the moment of my arrival, I had connected Americans with hostility, not to me, but to my land; from that moment forward, I found that was a link which I had thought to be a barrier, and knew that I was among blood relations.” His one-day encounter with the city-dwellers of New York sounds familiar. “Wherever I went, too, the same trait struck me: the people were all surprisingly rude and surprisingly kind.”

“Westward the march of empire takes its way,” quoteth RLS from Bishop George Berkeley’s poem “On the Prospect of Planting Arts and Learning in America.” Stevenson thought hard about his identity as a citizen of an ancient culture in decay though Britannia still ruled the waves. He writes in “The Amateur Emigrant,” “England has already declined since she has lost the States; and to the States, therefore, yet undeveloped, full of dark possibilities, and grown, like another Eve, from one rib out of the side of their old land, the minds of young men in England turn naturally … men who shall have grown up in an old and rigid circle, following bygone fashions and taught to distrust their own fresh instincts, and who now suddenly hear of a family of cousins, all about their own age, who keep house together by themselves and live far from restraint and tradition; let him imagine this, and he will have some imperfect notion of the sentiment with which spirited English youths turn to the thought of the American Republic.”

Stevenson left a record of the twists and turns he took in his head trying to nail down his exact position as a British subject, subject to a form of national nostalgia. Ironically, he goes to Ben Franklin to make his case. “Were it possible for us to forget and forgive,” wrote Franklin in his letter to Lord Howe, July 30, 1776, “it is not possible for you (I mean the British nation) to forgive the people you have so heavily injured.” RLS confesses to having “all the faults of my forefathers on my stomach; I have historical remorse, I cannot see America but through the jaundiced spectacles of criminality.” But Louis goes on to surmise that maybe it boils down to jealousy, that “primeval and naked form of admiration in war paint, so to speak–then every word of my confession proves a delicate flattery like incense. Sail on, O mighty Union! …”

For all the rebel and nonconformist and tradition buster that he is reputed to be, RLS couldn’t betray an imbedded loyalty to his national heritage but he could put the subject on the shelf with one of his clever jingles:

“With half a heart I wander here

As from an age gone by,

A brother–yet, though young in years,

An elder brother, I!

You speak another tongue from mine,

Though both were English born!

I towards the night of Time decline:

You mount into the morn.

Youth shall grow great and strong and free

But age must still decay.

Tomorrow for the States — for me

England and yesterday!”