Edinburgh has plenty of monuments to famous Scots, but one of its finest literary memorials is surprisingly easy to miss.
Inside St Giles’ Cathedral on Edinburgh’s Royal Mile, on the west wall of the Moray Aisle, is a large bronze relief dedicated to Robert Louis Stevenson, the Edinburgh-born author of Treasure Island, Kidnapped and Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.
There is no heroic figure standing on a pedestal. Instead, Stevenson is shown reclining, wrapped in a travelling rug, manuscript pages resting across his raised knees and a pen in his hand.
It is an unusually intimate memorial to one of Scotland’s most famous writers, and that is exactly what makes it so effective.
Robert Louis Stevenson and Edinburgh
Robert Louis Stevenson was born at 8 Howard Place, Edinburgh, on 13 November 1850. He spent most of his childhood at 17 Heriot Row in the New Town.
Edinburgh strongly influenced his writing. He knew both the respectable New Town and the older, darker streets around the Old Town, and the contrast between the two fascinated him. The city’s mixture of wealth and poverty, respectability and less respectable goings-on would later find its way into many of his stories.
Stevenson was also frequently ill. His search for a climate better suited to his health eventually took him far from Scotland, through Europe and America and ultimately to Samoa in the South Pacific.
He died there on 3 December 1894, aged just 44, and was buried on the summit of Mount Vaea overlooking his Samoan home.
Within two years, plans were being made for a permanent memorial in the city of his birth.
A memorial paid for by his readers
A public meeting was held in Edinburgh in December 1896 to establish a memorial to Stevenson. The campaign was supported by prominent figures, including former Prime Minister Lord Rosebery and Stevenson’s friend and literary adviser Sidney Colvin.
The original ambitions appear to have been considerably grander. They considered an outdoor monument, but the public subscription did not raise enough money for the proposed scheme.
The committee eventually turned to St Giles’.
That change of plan may have been fortunate. Edinburgh gained something rather more interesting than another Victorian statue.
The commission went to Augustus Saint-Gaudens, one of the leading sculptors of his generation.
Stevenson and Saint-Gaudens
There was a good reason for choosing Saint-Gaudens: he actually knew Stevenson.
The two men met in America in 1887, when Saint-Gaudens began modelling a portrait of the writer. Stevenson was in poor health and posing conventionally was uncomfortable, so the sculptor depicted him much as he found him, propped up and working. The two became friends and continued corresponding until Stevenson’s death.
That earlier portrait became the basis for the enormous St Giles relief.
The finished memorial measures roughly 2.3 metres high by 2.8 metres wide, in bronze set against marble. Stevenson lies on a couch, supported by pillows, with manuscript pages scattered nearby.
The garland features Scottish heather and Samoan hibiscus, and a ship is carved into the design.
From cigarette to pen
Another small but revealing difference exists between Saint-Gaudens’ original portrait and the Edinburgh memorial.
In the earlier version, Stevenson holds a cigarette. In St Giles’, it has become a quill pen.
It is a wonderfully Victorian edit.
The relaxed, cigarette-smoking Stevenson portrayed from life had become the great man of letters being commemorated for posterity. Yet Saint-Gaudens retained enough of the original pose to prevent the memorial from becoming stiff or pompous.
Stevenson still looks like someone interrupted mid-work rather than someone posing for his monument.
“Under the wide and starry sky”
An extensive inscription around the figure commemorates Stevenson and the affection readers worldwide held for him.
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
BORN AT VIII HOWARD PLACE EDINBURGH NOVEMBER XIII MDCCCL
DIED AT VAILIMA SAMOA DECEMBER III MDCCCXCIV
THIS MEMORIAL IS ERECTED IN HIS HONOUR BY READERS IN ALL QUARTERS OF THE WORLD WHO ADMIRE HIM AS A MASTER OF ENGLISH AND SCOTTISH LETTERS AND TO WHOM HIS CONSTANT AND BRAVE SPIRIT IN ADVERSITY AND HIS BRIGHT FANCY HAVE BROUGHT PLEASURE AND INSPIRATION.
It also incorporates lines from “Requiem”, the poem Stevenson wrote years before his death and that supplied the epitaph on his grave in Samoa.
UNDER THE WIDE AND STARRY SKY
DIG THE GRAVE AND LET ME LIE
GLAD DID I LIVE AND GLADLY DIE
AND I LAID ME DOWN WITH A WILL
THIS BE THE VERSE YOU GRAVE FOR ME
HERE HE LIES WHERE HE LONGED TO BE
HOME IS THE SAILOR HOME FROM THE SEA
AND THE HUNTER HOME FROM THE HILL
Including those words brings the two memorials together: one high above the Pacific on Mount Vaea, the other back home in the heart of Edinburgh.
The St Giles memorial was finally unveiled by Lord Rosebery on 27 June 1904, almost ten years after Stevenson’s death.
An Edinburgh memorial worth seeking out
St Giles’ contains memorials to some formidable figures from Scottish history, and it’s easy to walk through the building, looking up at the architecture and stained glass, without noticing everything attached to its walls.
The Stevenson memorial deserves a closer look.
I like that Edinburgh did not end up with a conventional statue of him.
Stevenson spent much of his life travelling and much of it in poor health. He was an adventurer largely through circumstance and imagination, and Saint-Gaudens shows us neither the celebrated author nor the romantic traveller.
He shows us the writer at work.
And perhaps that is the best memorial Robert Louis Stevenson could have had.
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