Moral Emblems
Moral Emblems is a collection of poems by Robert Louis Stevenson, illustrated by the author. It originally consisted of two small booklets of poetry and engravings, both published in limited copies in Davos in 1882. Stevenson was both the author and the illustrator, the engraver, and, in collaboration with his stepson Lloyd Osbourne, then aged thirteen, the editor. The title Moral Emblems was reused for a posthumous collective edition published in 1921, which gathered several of Stevenson's booklets, most of which he illustrated and originally printed in Davos between 1881 and 1882 by Lloyd Osbourne. The original editions of Moral Emblems are highly sought after and appreciated for their graphic and literary qualities and playful dimensions.
Context
Publisher
Samuel Lloyd Osbourne, born in San Francisco in 1868, was the second child of Samuel Osbourne, an American military officer, and his wife, Fanny, born in 1840. Samuel Osbourne was considered a "womanizer," and his wife Fanny left him in 1875 and moved to Europe with her three children, "partly to escape as much as possible from unpleasant associations and partly to give her daughter the advantage of an education in foreign art schools."After a stop in Antwerp, they settled in Paris, where Fanny and Isobel attended classes at the Académie Julian. In April 1876, Hervey, Lloyd’s younger brother, died in Paris from an illness probably identified as a form of tuberculosis. Warned that Lloyd’s health was also in danger, Fanny decided to take her surviving children away from city life by moving them to Grez-sur-Loing, a village in the Gâtinais region frequented by many painters. It was there that they met Stevenson. Lloyd was eight years old, and Robert-Louis was twenty-six.
File:Stevenson by Fanny Osbourne.jpg|left|thumb|178x178px|Portrait of Robert Louis Stevenson by Fanny Osbourne, 1876.
If the story of Robert Louis falling in love with Fanny during the summer of 1876, through the open window of the hotel in Grez-sur-Loing, is perhaps just an "absurd" family legend, the young Lloyd was charmed:
The affection the child had for the one he called "Luly" grew alongside his mother's feelings:
In January 1880, Samuel and Fanny Osbourne divorced; in May 1880, Fanny married Robert-Louis Stevenson in San Francisco. Lloyd accompanied them on their honeymoon trip to Calistoga and then to Silverado, during which Stevenson made some "unenthusiastic and futile" attempts to teach him geometry and Latin. However, as Lloyd Osbourne noted in 1922 in his introduction to Treasure Island, "What intrigued me most of all was that he was as fond as I was of Mayne Reid, Fenimore Cooper, Jules Verne, and Marryat This idolized stepfather was the most wonderful, the most stimulating playmate."
Author and illustrator
When Stevenson traveled to Davos with Fanny and Lloyd during the winter of 1880–1881, he had yet to publish a novel or achieve any literary success. He released An Inland Voyage in 1878 and Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes in 1879. The partial publication—under the pseudonym “Captain George North”—of Treasure Island in the children’s magazine Young Folks between October 1881 and January 1882 coincided with his second stay in Davos and the creation of Moral Emblems. During this time, Stevenson was also rewriting Treasure Island for publication as a book, intending for it to be illustrated.Stevenson’s experiments with illustration in Moral Emblems reflected his particular interest in the relationship between image and text, with “visual arts influencing his literary production.” This dynamic manifested in several ways:
While staying in Braemar in 1881, Stevenson drew the map that inspired his first published novel, Treasure Island. The second version of this map, recreated from memory after the original was lost, became a key component of the book: “It is part of the narrative it frames both the production and reception of the story.”
This central role of images paralleled the rise of a new form of children’s literature in Britain: albums illustrated in chromoxylography. These works redistributed narrative information between text and image. Stevenson, following these developments closely, sought collaborations with prominent illustrators of such albums, like Walter Crane, who created frontispieces for An Inland Voyage and Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes, and Randolph Caldecott, whom Stevenson unsuccessfully approached for a future project.
In private correspondence, Stevenson lamented the lack of illustrations in the serialized version of Treasure Island published in Young Folks, which otherwise attracted “not the slightest attention.” He envisioned an illustrated edition from Routledge, the publisher of Crane and Caldecott, specializing in children’s picture books.
In 1882, Stevenson published two articles in the Magazine of Art, where his friend William Ernest Henley had been the editor-in-chief for a few months, on the relationship between text and illustration. The first article examines the anonymous illustrations of an 1845 edition of The Pilgrim’s Progress, which follow Bunyan's text in a manner described as "literal to the brink of madness" and share with it the same "disregard for style," the same clarity, and an "almost comical simplicity." The second article focuses on two illustrated versions of the story of the 47 rōnin. Stevenson, who shared with William Crane an appreciation for the synthetic vision of reality found in Japanese prints, particularly notes how the illustrator seeks "the maximum effect with the minimum of detail."
Printing press
In 1880, shortly before his twelfth birthday, Lloyd Osbourne—still called Sam, like his father—received a small hand press as a gift. While family tradition attributes the gift to Stevenson, it is not certain whether this much-appreciated present truly came from Robert Louis, who may have wanted to welcome the child into his future family but was quite penniless at the time, or from Sam Osbourne, Lloyd's father, who was about to lose custody of a son he was deeply attached to due to ongoing divorce proceedings.Small presses of this kind were popular among American youth at the time. According to an article published by The Young Californian in 1872, San Francisco could then “boast seven amateur newspapers; five of them had eight pages, and the other two had four.” The popularity of these machines grew in the United States starting in 1872 when William Kelsey introduced the Excelsior, a lever-operated tabletop press designed for small-format printing and targeting “amateurs, especially young amateurs.” This model was quickly imitated by over twenty manufacturers in the United States and England.
In an article published in The Scotsman in 1932, W. Dods Hogg specified that Lloyd Osbourne’s press was not merely a toy: “It is too solidly constructed to have been designed solely as a child’s plaything In skilled hands, it can produce results that are nothing to be ashamed of,” though it was limited to a maximum format of 10 × 15 cm.
According to Victoria Ford Smith, while such presses were not strictly toys, they often played a role in either a “father-son relationship, intended to strengthen familial bonds o demonstrate paternal authority,” or as a means of learning collaborative work through amateur newspaper projects.
In keeping with the practices of the time, young Osbourne also began publishing a newspaper, The Surprise, while attending Locust Grove School, located near Sonoma. After a brief attempt at daily publication under the title Daily Surprise, he settled on a biweekly schedule.
In the first issue of this new format, published on March 6, 1880, he announced that he had “secured” the collaboration of a “special” artist—his stepbrother Joseph Dwight Strong—and anonymously published the first stanza of Not I!, a poem by his future stepfather, though he occasionally diverged from the manuscript’s punctuation. As compensation for this contribution, Stevenson humorously suggested in a letter to the editor a “68.005 percent discount” on his “usual” fee of half a doughnut per column.
Early publications in Davos
In the summer of 1880, accompanied by Fanny and Lloyd, Stevenson returned to Scotland. After a tuberculosis diagnosis, doctors recommended the “new Alpine cure” and referred him to Dr. Karl Rüedi, a well-known figure in Britain and the primary physician for the English community in Davos. Robert Louis, his wife, and his stepson arrived in Davos in November 1880 and settled at the Hotel Belvedere.Stevenson wrote little during this “entirely boring and unprofitable” winter. Instead, he became absorbed in a Kriegsspiel involving hundreds of toy soldiers, with increasingly complex rules, which he played with Lloyd. In November 1880, Lloyd printed 24 copies of a one-sided leaflet titled Martial Elegy for Some Lead Soldiers, selling them to spa guests for a penny each.
During the summer of 1881, the family returned to Scotland. Lloyd visited the printer R. & R. Clark—who would later publish several of Stevenson’s works—and improved his technical skills.
In November 1881, Robert Louis, Fanny, and Lloyd returned to Davos. This time, they rented the chalet Am Steinn, which had a spacious attic perfect for spreading out their Kriegsspiel. That winter proved productive for Stevenson: he completed Treasure Island, wrote The Silverado Squatters and The New Arabian Nights, and outlined Prince Otto.
Meanwhile, Lloyd continued doing small printing jobs, later claiming that this was his way of contributing to a structurally unbalanced family budget, partly due to the costs of his education—particularly the German lessons given by a "dying Prussian" who would, according to Lloyd, use "a pocketknife pointed at my throat to ensure I got the accent right."