Stevenson, Robert Louis - Speculative Society
£1,560
Auction: 16 May 2008 at 12:00 BST
Description
Small photograph album belonging to Charles Baxter, c.1872, containing carte-de-visite of Robert Glasgow Brown, Charles Gordon [signed in ink below], Walter Grindley Simpson, three photographs of Robert Louis Stevenson, Walter Henley & Charles Baxter, friends together from the Speculative Society, contemporary morocco with brass clasp; Stevenson, Robert Louis Kidnapped. London, 1907. Pocket edition, 8vo, author's signature clipped from letter and pasted to front free endpaper, folding map, original cloth (2)
Footnote
Note: Robert Louis Stevenson and Charles Baxter met while Stevenson was still at university. Both members of the Speculative Society and cofounders of the short-lived L.J.R. Baxter was Stevenson's crony in the tempestuous university and post-university days when the latter, in fairly regular conflict with his bewildered parents, was trying to find himself as man and writer. On Stevenson's exiguous allowance of ten shillings a week the two frequented pubs, and less decorous places, in the grimier
streets of Edinburgh, acquiring a stock of memories which lasted
them the rest of their lives. Stevenson's most famous work, KIdnapped, was dedicated to Baxter in 1886, "If it is stranger for me to look back fropm a distance both in time and space on these bygone adventures of our youth, it must be stranger for you who tread the same streets - who may tomorrow open the door to the old Speculative... or may pass the corner of the close where that great society, the L.J.R., held its meetings and drank its beer..."
The others characters shown in the album include Robert Glasgow Brown, a friend from the Speculative Society and co-founder of the Edinburgh University Magazine; Walter Grindley Simpson, the friend who accompanied Stevenson on his a canoeing trip along the River Oise through France and Belgium accounted in An inland voyage (1876); Walter Henley, the poet, essayist and editor who collaborated with Stevenson on various dramatic works including Deacon Brodie.