by Laurie Atkinson

Yesterday, Leslie Stephen, who was down here to lecture, called on me and took me up to see a poor fellow, a bit of a poet who writes for him, and who has been eighteen months in our Infirmary and may be, for all I know, eighteen months more. It was very sad to see him there, in a little room with two beds, and a couple of sick children in the other bed; […] the gas flared and crackled, the fire burned in a dull economical way; Stephen and I sat on a couple of chairs and the poor fellow sat up in his bed, with his hair and beard all tangled, and talked as cheerfully as if he had been in a King’s Palace, or the great King’s Palace of the blue air. He has taught himself two languages since he has been lying there. I shall try to be of use to him. (Booth and Mehew 2: 117)

On 12 February 1875, Scottish novelist and poet Robert Louis Stevenson met William Ernest Henley at the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary. Henley was recovering from surgery on his foot as part of his life-long struggle with tuberculosis (his other leg, the left, had been amputated in 1868). His illness and long convalescence gave rise to the sequence of In Hospital poems (published 1903) by which he established his reputation as a poet. Also from this period is his poem ‘Invictus’ – a stoical statement of self-determination later reprised by Nelson Mandela.

Stevenson quickly made himself ‘of use’ to Henley, and likewise did Henley to him. In April, the man ‘with his hair and beard all tangled’ (a feature of more than one description of Henley; cf. Stephen) was discharged and returned to London; but he and Stevenson became regular correspondents and developed a close friendship. With the encouragement of Stevenson and his friends, Henley was launched on his literary career, as a poet, journalist, critic, and – significantly for readers of H. G. Wells and Rudyard Kipling – editor of a series of magazines. Henley returned the support: in the early 1880s, when Stevenson was mostly living abroad, Henley acted as his unpaid literary agent and was instrumental in securing the contract for the publication of Treasure Island (1883). Henley was also one of Stevenson’s early collaborators. They wrote three plays together, Deacon Brodie (1879), Beau Austin (1884), and Admiral Guinea (1884), although none were of much interest to theatregoers. The failure of the plays and, it has been suggested, Henley’s jealousy of Stevenson’s success and embarrassment over his financial support (Booth and Mehew 1: 61) led to a disastrous quarrel in 1888 (Henley accused Stevenson’s wife of plagiarism) and the end of their cordial relations.

This is not, however, the sum total of the collaboration between Stevenson and Henley: the most famous outcome of their friendship is a more abstract form of co-creativity. Another description of Henley bears more than a passing resemblance to one of Stevenson’s best-known characters:

…a great, glowing, massive-shouldered fellow with a big red beard and a crutch; jovial, astoundingly clever, and with a laugh that rolled like music […]; he had an unimaginable fire and vitality; he swept one off one’s feet. (Osbourne 53)

Strong and confident, defiant of his disability, and with a charisma impossible to resist, Henley is considered to have partly inspired Stevenson’s character of Long John Silver. See, for instance, the opening of Treasure Island, chapter 8, Jim Hawkins’s first encounter with the opportunistic pirate:

His left leg was cut off close by the hip, and under the left shoulder he carried a crutch, which he managed with wonderful dexterity, hopping about upon it like a bird. He was very tall and strong, with a face as big as a ham – plain and pale, but intelligent and smiling. Indeed, he seemed in the most cheerful spirits, whistling as he moved about among the tables, with a merry word or a slap on the shoulder for the more favoured of his guests. (Stevenson 52)

Stevenson owned to the influence. Shorty before Treasure Island’s publication, he wrote in a letter to Henley:

I will now make a confession. It was the sight of your maimed strength and masterfulness that begot Long John Silver in Treasure Island. The idea of the maimed man, ruling and dreaded by the sound, was entirely taken from you. (Booth and Mehew 4: 129)

This February, then, is not only the anniversary of the meeting of Henley and Stevenson, but also of the inception of a co-created character (and much of the modern iconography of the pirate) which lives on in 2025. In publishing, in theatre, and as a source of inspiration, the Stevenson-Henley collaboration demonstrates a range of the possible forms taken by literary co-creativity. The creative potential of such partnerships, but also their attendant struggles for control, pervades much of Stevenson’s writings – not least, his most diabolical pairing, in The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), for which he may also have drawn on his complicated relationship with the ‘masterful’ yet ‘dreaded’ Henley (see Murfin, pp. 29-52).

Works Cited

Booth, Bradford A., and Ernest Mehew, editors. The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1994. 8 vols.

Henley, William Ernest, Invictus: Selected Poems and Prose of W.E. Henley, edited by John Howlett, Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2018.

Murfin, Audrey. Robert Louis Stevenson and the Art of Collaboration. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2019.

Osbourne, Lloyd. An Intimate Portrait of R. L. S. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1924.

Stephen, Sir Herbert. “William Ernest Henley,” The London Mercury, February 1926, p 391.

Stevenson, Robert Louis. Treasure Island, edited by Wendy R. Katz, Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1994.