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...full his lifetime. The experience had a profound effect on Stevenson's personal sensibilities; his consciousness of his ambivalent position as a middle-class writer in the midst of his working-class contemporaries renders The Amateur Emigrant a remarkable revelation of the intermingled complexities of class, race and gender in late Victorian England.
Keywords: colonialism, gender, middle class, steerage, travel writing, Victorian
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One of the most striking, and perhaps least remarked, travel narratives of the latter decades of the nineteenth century is Robert Louis Stevenson's account of his journey from Scotland to California in 1879, to all intents and purposes as a steerage passenger. The journey was far from planned. Stevenson had begun an intimate relationship with an American woman, Fanny Osbourne, who was estranged from her husband Samuel. Osbourne threatened to cease supporting his wife and children in 1878 following initiation by Fanny of divorce proceedings under the relatively liberal Californian divorce laws. Stevenson was frantically summoned to California to fill the breech. Unable to expect any financial support from his family for the pursuit of a married woman soon to be a divorcee, Stevenson was forced to undertake the journey with little money. From a journey pressed on him through necessity, Stevenson was to record this undertaking in a narrative that indicates a profound change in both his writing and his identity. Rather than respond to his propinquity with the working class by strongly reinforcing class distinctions through the narrative, Stevenson negotiates his rather confused status aboard ship with a complexity that took him some way beyond the conventional political and social sensibilities of his established readership. Indeed, an edition of the text based on the full manuscript of his journey from Scotland to California would not find its way into print until 1966, (1) 'respectable' Victorian sensibilities not being in tune with Stevenson's candid depiction of the crudities of the steerage quarters of a transatlantic steamer, still less those of an immigrant train. He recognised early that such subject matter would profoundly affect his personal sensibilities, but more importantly also his writing style, commenting that 'M. Zola would here find an inspiration for many pages' (23), even though Zola was an author whose frank subject matter and naturalistic technique in novels like L'Assommoir he abhorred at this stage in his career. (2) But it is just such a frankness and naturalism that inform The Amateur Emigrant, shocking family and literary friends.
Yet Stevenson's preoccupation with the material and social consequences of a dramatic alteration in class status would do more than influence his narrative style to the point of questioning and renegotiating his conception of self embedded in the narrative persona of the text. While, on one level, The Amateur Emigrant seems to reach out to his working-class shipmates, his social 'descent' engenders a metaphor that preserves the priority and superiority of his gaze and subjective distance. This textual strategy is comparable to that analysed by Mary Louise Pratt in the discursive strategies of colonial travel writing. Stevenson's account of his journey across class boundaries significantly shares a number of structural and ideological similarities with the travel writing discussed by Pratt, especially in the creation of a material and textual space where contact, interaction and understanding between coloniser and colonised subject can take place, while official and more formal social codes demand the maintenance of a strict division between the two. Such contact takes place against the radical imbalances of power inherent in the relation between coloniser and colonised and this in turn establishes a subject position that enables a range of 'strategies of representation whereby European bourgeois subjects seek to secure their innocence in the same moment as they assert European hegemony'. (3) Pratt's expression 'bourgeois subjects' alerts us to the fact that this is as much a class as it is a colonial stance and practice, which underlines its relevance to Stevenson's narrative strategy. Ania Loomba, drawing on the work of Robert Miles, emphasises how such a 'positional superiority' can regulate discursive relationships otherwise determined by racial and class difference:
The ideology of racial superiority translated easily into class terms. The superiority of the white races, one colonist argued, clearly implied that 'the black man must forever remain cheap labour and slaves'. Certain sections of people were thus racially identified as the natural working classes. The problem was now to organise the social world according to this belief, or force 'the population into its "natural" class position': in other words, reality had to be brought into line with that representation in order to ensure the material objective of production. (4)
This slippage between race and class is key to understanding The Amateur Emigrant.
The narrative persona that Stevenson creates for himself displays both sympathy and a willingness to intermingle with his new comrades, while preserving a subtle class distinction through a disarming self-deprecating humour over his decline in social status and a refusal to romanticise his fellow passengers:
Emigration, from a word of the most cheerful import, came to sound almost dismally in my ear. There is nothing more agreeable to picture and nothing more pathetic to behold. The abstract idea, as conceived at home, is hopeful and adventurous. A young man, you fancy, scorning restraints and helpers, issues forth into life, that great battle, to fight for his own land. The most pleasant stories of ambition, of difficulties overcome, and of ultimate success, are but as episodes to this great epic of self-help. The epic is composed of individual heroisms; it stands as the victorious war which subdued an empire stands to the personal act of bravery which spiked a single cannon and was adequately rewarded with a medal. For in emigration the young men enter direct and by the shipload on their heritage of work; empty continents swarm, as at the Bo'sun's whistle, with industrious hands, and whole new empires are domesticated to the service of man. (10-11)
The warning that begins this passage alerts the reader that the 'heroic' ideal...
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