Robert Louis Stevenson Writing Style

Robert Louis Stevenson writes adventure and horror in the level, formal voice of a professional man filing a report. The sentences run long and correct, the words inside them are mostly short and physical, and the manners are punctiliously Victorian. Underneath, the material is grimy. A man tramples a child at a street corner and walks on. The prose that reports it does not raise its voice.

That split suits the book he is best known for, because Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is about a split man. It is told in the third person from the vantage of Gabriel Utterson, a lawyer, so the whole thing reaches you the way a case reaches a solicitor, in statements and letters and a will that refuses to make sense. Horror sits inside the correct paperwork of respectable London, exactly as Hyde sits inside the correct Jekyll.

He taught himself that control by copying other writers on purpose. In an essay called "A College Magazine", collected in Memories and Portraits, he describes working through the manner of Hazlitt, Lamb, Wordsworth, Defoe, Hawthorne and Montaigne, and he calls the practice playing "the sedulous ape". He stayed in none of those voices. He would borrow a way of building a sentence, wear it until it stopped fitting, and hand it back, which is why the finished prose sounds like one man rather than a shelf of models.

The deformity no witness can place

Enfield tells Utterson that Hyde is deformed somewhere and that he cannot say where, and that is the whole physical description of the man through most of the novella, which works better than any inventory of features would. Stevenson gives the reaction and withholds the cause. The reader then builds a face out of an impression, which means the face is exactly as bad as that particular reader can stand. State the effect on the observer and refuse the list.

The overheard scene that costs something

Jim Hawkins climbs into a barrel after an apple and hears the mutiny planned over his head. The information reaches him free and useless at the same moment, because he cannot act on it without admitting where he was hiding. Stevenson charges his characters for what they learn. Stage yours the same way, so that knowing the secret puts the character in a worse position than not knowing it did, because an overheard fact that costs the listener nothing is exposition in a hat.

The witness handover

Three chapters of Treasure Island are narrated by Dr Livesey instead of Jim, and the chapter headings say so plainly, because Stevenson needed events Jim could not see and changed witnesses rather than cheating with a narrator who suddenly knows too much. The honesty of announcing the swap is what buys it. If your first-person narrator has to miss a scene you need, hand the scene to somebody who was there and put their name at the top of it.

The map before the plot

Treasure Island began as a map. Stevenson drew and coloured an island for a boy on a wet holiday, named its coves and hills, and the story grew out of the naming. You can see the discipline in the finished book, where distances hold, the stockade sits where it should, and no character crosses the island faster than the ground allows. Draw the place before you plot it. Geography that refuses to bend is a constraint, and a constraint is what most stalled drafts are short of.

The clause that alarms

Jekyll's will directs that on his death, or on an unexplained absence of more than three months, everything he owns passes to Edward Hyde. Utterson reads it as evidence of blackmail and stays wrong about it almost to the end. One legal sentence carries the whole threat, because the clause only makes sense if something the reader has not been told is true, so plant a document early whose wording is a shade too specific. Let a careful reader feel the wrongness before the plot confirms it.

The commissioned account, with one permitted gap

Jim Hawkins opens by explaining that the gentlemen have asked him to write the whole particulars down, and that he will keep back only the bearings of the island, because treasure is still lying there. Three things arrive in one paragraph: a reason to be writing, a named audience, and permission to leave one thing out. The declared gap licenses every quieter gap that follows. Tell the reader at the start what your narrator will withhold, and the withholding stops feeling like a trick.

Testimonial frame and embedded documents

The novella is assembled out of testimony rather than told straight through. You get a friend's anecdote at a street corner, a maidservant's account of a murder seen from a window, a butler at the end of his nerve, a physician's sealed narrative, and last the culprit's own written statement. Each new document corrects the one before it. The same reasoning built Dracula, where Stoker works from journals, letters and a ship's log: a horror corroborated by ordinary people is harder to argue with than one asserted by an author.

Doubling as structure, not decoration

The double is the shape of the book. Jekyll and Hyde share a body and a house with two entrances, a respectable front door on the square and a blistered back one on a side street. The Master of Ballantrae sets two brothers against each other and lets the charming one be the ruinous one, and once the pairing is structural every scene inherits a second reading, so the reader does the moral work without being lectured. Pair your people, then keep your own opinion out of it.

Objects that carry the plot

Danger in Stevenson usually has a physical token you could pick up. The black spot is a scrap of paper handed to a man to tell him his crew has voted against him. The map, the sea chest, the cheque signed in a strange hand and the broken half of a walking stick found beside a body all do the same job, since each turns an abstract threat into a thing with a location, which is why so much of the plot can be described as a series of handovers. Give the menace an object and it stops being weather.

Place as pressure on the body

Weather and ground in Stevenson act on people physically. The island gives the crew fever off its marsh, so the setting starts killing characters without any help from the plot. The heather in Kidnapped exhausts David Balfour and Alan Breck until the exhaustion itself is the danger, and London fog closes over the city on the morning after the Carew murder and turns an errand into a groping search. Setting earns its place when a character would behave differently in a different room. Anything else is scenery.

Buying the Victorian furniture and missing the control

Writers reach for whilst and upon and thereupon, and the result is costume. The antique part of Stevenson is structural: long sentences that stay grammatical all the way to the end, and a narrator with the manners of his class. The words inside those sentences are mostly short and modern. Strip the vocabulary back to what you would say out loud, keep the syntax formal and complete, and you get the effect without the fancy dress, because the gap between plain words and formal syntax is where the whole style lives.

Treating the sedulous ape as a permanent address

Stevenson copied his models as an apprentice and then left them, which is the half of the story that gets dropped. Mario Vargas Llosa puts the warning plainly in Letters to a Young Novelist: imitate a writer's dedication and discipline, and avoid the mechanical reproduction of the patterns and rhythms of the writing. Set yourself an end date. An imitation kept up for years produces a competent forger, and the exercise was only ever a scaffold, so the building has to stand on its own once you take the scaffold down.

Confusing withholding with hiding

Stevenson withholds the explanation and leaves the evidence out in the open. The will, the cheque, the maidservant's testimony and Lanyon's collapse are all available to the reader well before Jekyll explains himself, and a second reading finds the answer sitting there the whole time. Copying the mystery without the evidence gives you a narrator who knows something and coyly declines to say it, and you can feel the difference between a puzzle and a withheld card. One rewards attention, the other punishes it.

A level voice over material that cannot carry it

The calm voice works only if the thing being reported is bad enough. Stevenson keeps his register flat over a trampled child and a man clubbed to death in the street, and the flatness does something because the content is fighting it, while the same flat voice over a missed train gives you indifference and reads as a writer with nothing at stake. Check the pressure before you check the tone. If nothing in the scene wants to shout, there is no point holding it back.