John Sutherland    • Robert Louis Stevenson: Dreams of Exile by
Ian Bell     Mainstream, 295 pp, £14.99, November 1992,
ISBN 1 85158 457 9   Stevenson had his first wish: he died as
far from Scotland as it was possible to get before the invention
of space travel (he also died before refrigeration reached Samoa
– his body received a swift tropical burial in the alien clods
of Mount Vaea). He was not, as was popularly supposed, detained
in the South Seas by tuberculosis. His disease had been arrested
some years before at Swiss and American sanatoria. Stevenson
could have returned to Scotland without risk and had the money
to do so in some style. As he said, he was there because ‘I
simply prefer Samoa.’ More particularly, he preferred the
weather. Edinburgh, he had written in an early work, when he was
still a prisoner in the city, has ‘one of the vilest climates
under heaven ... The weather is raw and boisterous in winter,
shifty and ungenial in summer, and a downright necrological
purgatory in spring.’ Five ge