The publication of the Stevenson letters revived interest in his career,
both as man and writer. His first published book, as our readers will
remember, was "The Pentland Rising," a pamphlet of twenty pages issued in
Edinburgh in the autumn of 1866, when the author was but sixteen. At the
time of Stevenson's death copies of this little work were sold for upwards
of L20 a piece, but the price afterwards fell considerably. In 1868, he
wrote the "Charity Bazaar," a boyish skit, filling four pages quarto, and
which was privately printed. His next appearance in print seems to have
been in the pages of a college paper, the _Edinburgh University Magazine_,
which he and three fellow-students edited, and which lived through four
numbers only. These numbers were issued from January to April, 1871. He
says:
"A pair of little active brothers--Livingstone by name, great skippers on
the foot, great rubbers of the hands, who kept a bookshop over against the
University building--had been debauched to play the part of publishers."
The first number was edited by all four associates, the second by
Stevenson and James Walter Ferrier, the third by Stevenson alone, and of
the last he says: "It has long been a solemn question who it was that
edited the fourth," and then: "It would perhaps be still more difficult to
say who read it. Poor yellow sheet, that looked so hopefully in the
Livingstones' window! Poor, harmless paper, that might have gone to print
a Shakespeare on, and was instead so clumsily defaced with nonsense! And,
shall I say, Poor editors? I cannot pity myself, to whom it was all pure
gain. It was no news to me, but only the wholesome confirmation of my
judgment, when the magazine struggled into half-birth, and instantly
sickened and subsided into night."
Stevenson contributed six articles to the four numbers, one of which, "An
Old Scotch Gardener," he revised and reprinted in "Memories and
Portraits."
It will be news to many people that Stevenson was awarded the silver of
the Royal Scottish Society of Arts for a paper entitled "A Notice of a New
Form of Intermittent Light for Lighthouses." This paper was printed
separately from the Transactions of the Society in a thin pamphlet,
consisting of five pages of text only, beside the title-leaf. It has the
headlines, "Mr. R. L. Stevenson on a New Form of Intermittent Light for
Lighthouses," and contains five illustrations in the text.--_Publishers'
Circular._