Books: Records of a Family of Engineers

R >> Robert Louis Stevenson >> Records of a Family of Engineers

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The perilous experiment of bringing together two families for once
succeeded. Mr. Smith's two eldest daughters, Jean and Janet,
fervent in piety, unwearied in kind deeds, were well qualified both
to appreciate and to attract the stepmother; and her son, on the
other hand, seems to have found immediate favour in the eyes of Mr.
Smith. It is, perhaps, easy to exaggerate the ready-made
resemblances; the tired woman must have done much to fashion girls
who were under ten; the man, lusty and opinionated, must have
stamped a strong impression on the boy of fifteen. But the
cleavage of the family was too marked, the identity of character
and interest produced between the two men on the one hand, and the
three women on the other, was too complete to have been the result
of influence alone. Particular bonds of union must have pre-
existed on each side. And there is no doubt that the man and the
boy met with common ambitions, and a common bent, to the practice
of that which had not so long before acquired the name of civil
engineering.

For the profession which is now so thronged, famous, and
influential, was then a thing of yesterday. My grandfather had an
anecdote of Smeaton, probably learned from John Clerk of Eldin,
their common friend. Smeaton was asked by the Duke of Argyll to
visit the West Highland coast for a professional purpose. He
refused, appalled, it seems, by the rough travelling. 'You can
recommend some other fit person?' asked the Duke. 'No,' said
Smeaton, 'I'm sorry I can't.' 'What!' cried the Duke, 'a
profession with only one man in it! Pray, who taught you?' 'Why,'
said Smeaton, 'I believe I may say I was self-taught, an't please
your grace.' Smeaton, at the date of Thomas Smith's third
marriage, was yet living; and as the one had grown to the new
profession from his place at the instrument-maker's, the other was
beginning to enter it by the way of his trade. The engineer of to-
day is confronted with a library of acquired results; tables and
formulae to the value of folios full have been calculated and
recorded; and the student finds everywhere in front of him the
footprints of the pioneers. In the eighteenth century the field
was largely unexplored; the engineer must read with his own eyes
the face of nature; he arose a volunteer, from the workshop or the
mill, to undertake works which were at once inventions and
adventures. It was not a science then--it was a living art; and it
visibly grew under the eyes and between the hands of its
practitioners.

The charm of such an occupation was strongly felt by stepfather and
stepson. It chanced that Thomas Smith was a reformer; the
superiority of his proposed lamp and reflectors over open fires of
coal secured his appointment; and no sooner had he set his hand to
the task than the interest of that employment mastered him. The
vacant stage on which he was to act, and where all had yet to be
created--the greatness of the difficulties, the smallness of the
means intrusted him--would rouse a man of his disposition like a
call to battle. The lad introduced by marriage under his roof was
of a character to sympathise; the public usefulness of the service
would appeal to his judgment, the perpetual need for fresh
expedients stimulate his ingenuity. And there was another
attraction which, in the younger man at least, appealed to, and
perhaps first aroused, a profound and enduring sentiment of
romance: I mean the attraction of the life. The seas into which
his labours carried the new engineer were still scarce charted, the
coasts still dark; his way on shore was often far beyond the
convenience of any road; the isles in which he must sojourn were
still partly savage. He must toss much in boats; he must often
adventure on horseback by the dubious bridle-track through
unfrequented wildernesses; he must sometimes plant his lighthouse
in the very camp of wreckers; and he was continually enforced to
the vicissitudes of outdoor life. The joy of my grandfather in
this career was strong as the love of woman. It lasted him through
youth and manhood, it burned strong in age, and at the approach of
death his last yearning was to renew these loved experiences. What
he felt himself he continued to attribute to all around him. And
to this supposed sentiment in others I find him continually, almost
pathetically, appealing; often in vain.

Snared by these interests, the boy seems to have become almost at
once the eager confidant and adviser of his new connection; the
Church, if he had ever entertained the prospect very warmly, faded
from his view; and at the age of nineteen I find him already in a
post of some authority, superintending the construction of the
lighthouse on the isle of Little Cumbrae, in the Firth of Clyde.
The change of aim seems to have caused or been accompanied by a
change of character. It sounds absurd to couple the name of my
grandfather with the word indolence; but the lad who had been
destined from the cradle to the Church, and who had attained the
age of fifteen without acquiring more than a moderate knowledge of
Latin, was at least no unusual student. And from the day of his
charge at Little Cumbrae he steps before us what he remained until
the end, a man of the most zealous industry, greedy of occupation,
greedy of knowledge, a stern husband of time, a reader, a writer,
unflagging in his task of self-improvement. Thenceforward his
summers were spent directing works and ruling workmen, now in
uninhabited, now in half-savage islands; his winters were set
apart, first at the Andersonian Institution, then at the University
of Edinburgh to improve himself in mathematics, chemistry, natural
history, agriculture, moral philosophy, and logic; a bearded
student--although no doubt scrupulously shaved. I find one
reference to his years in class which will have a meaning for all
who have studied in Scottish Universities. He mentions a
recommendation made by the professor of logic. 'The high-school
men,' he writes, 'and BEARDED MEN LIKE MYSELF, were all attention.'
If my grandfather were throughout life a thought too studious of
the art of getting on, much must be forgiven to the bearded and
belated student who looked across, with a sense of difference, at
'the high-school men.' Here was a gulf to be crossed; but already
he could feel that he had made a beginning, and that must have been
a proud hour when he devoted his earliest earnings to the repayment
of the charitable foundation in which he had received the rudiments
of knowledge.

In yet another way he followed the example of his father-in-law,
and from 1794 to 1807, when the affairs of the Bell Rock made it
necessary for him to resign, he served in different corps of
volunteers. In the last of these he rose to a position of
distinction, no less than captain of the Grenadier Company, and his
colonel, in accepting his resignation, entreated he would do them
'the favour of continuing as an honorary member of a corps which
has been so much indebted for your zeal and exertions.'

To very pious women the men of the house are apt to appear worldly.
The wife, as she puts on her new bonnet before church, is apt to
sigh over that assiduity which enabled her husband to pay the
milliner's bill. And in the household of the Smiths and Stevensons
the women were not only extremely pious, but the men were in
reality a trifle worldly. Religious they both were; conscious,
like all Scots, of the fragility and unreality of that scene in
which we play our uncomprehended parts; like all Scots, realising
daily and hourly the sense of another will than ours and a
perpetual direction in the affairs of life. But the current of
their endeavours flowed in a more obvious channel. They had got on
so far; to get on further was their next ambition--to gather
wealth, to rise in society, to leave their descendants higher than
themselves, to be (in some sense) among the founders of families.
Scott was in the same town nourishing similar dreams. But in the
eyes of the women these dreams would be foolish and idolatrous.

I have before me some volumes of old letters addressed to Mrs.
Smith and the two girls, her favourites, which depict in a strong
light their characters and the society in which they moved.

'My very dear and much esteemed Friend,' writes one correspondent,
'this day being the anniversary of our acquaintance, I feel
inclined to address you; but where shall I find words to express
the fealings of a graitful Heart, first to the Lord who graiciously
inclined you on this day last year to notice an afflicted Strainger
providentially cast in your way far from any Earthly friend? . . .
Methinks I shall hear him say unto you, "Inasmuch as ye shewed
kindness to my afflicted handmaiden, ye did it unto me."'

This is to Jean; but the same afflicted lady wrote indifferently to
Jean, to Janet, and to Ms. Smith, whom she calls 'my Edinburgh
mother.' It is plain the three were as one person, moving to acts
of kindness, like the Graces, inarmed. Too much stress must not be
laid on the style of this correspondence; Clarinda survived, not
far away, and may have met the ladies on the Calton Hill; and many
of the writers appear, underneath the conventions of the period, to
be genuinely moved. But what unpleasantly strikes a reader is,
that these devout unfortunates found a revenue in their devotion.
It is everywhere the same tale; on the side of the soft-hearted
ladies, substantial acts of help; on the side of the
correspondents, affection, italics, texts, ecstasies, and imperfect
spelling. When a midwife is recommended, not at all for
proficiency in her important art, but because she has 'a sister
whom I [the correspondent] esteem and respect, and [who] is a
spiritual daughter of my Hond Father in the Gosple,' the mask seems
to be torn off, and the wages of godliness appear too openly.
Capacity is a secondary matter in a midwife, temper in a servant,
affection in a daughter, and the repetition of a shibboleth fulfils
the law. Common decency is at times forgot in the same page with
the most sanctified advice and aspiration. Thus I am introduced to
a correspondent who appears to have been at the time the
housekeeper at Invermay, and who writes to condole with my
grandmother in a season of distress. For nearly half a sheet she
keeps to the point with an excellent discretion in language then
suddenly breaks out:

'It was fully my intention to have left this at Martinmass, but the
Lord fixes the bounds of our habitation. I have had more need of
patience in my situation here than in any other, partly from the
very violent, unsteady, deceitful temper of the Mistress of the
Family, and also from the state of the house. It was in a train of
repair when I came here two years ago, and is still in Confusion.
There is above six Thousand Pounds' worth of Furniture come from
London to be put up when the rooms are completely finished; and
then, woe be to the Person who is Housekeeper at Invermay!'

And by the tail of the document, which is torn, I see she goes on
to ask the bereaved family to seek her a new place. It is
extraordinary that people should have been so deceived in so
careless an impostor; that a few sprinkled 'God willings' should
have blinded them to the essence of this venomous letter; and that
they should have been at the pains to bind it in with others (many
of them highly touching) in their memorial of harrowing days. But
the good ladies were without guile and without suspicion; they were
victims marked for the axe, and the religious impostors snuffed up
the wind as they drew near.

I have referred above to my grandmother; it was no slip of the pen:
for by an extraordinary arrangement, in which it is hard not to
suspect the managing hand of a mother, Jean Smith became the wife
of Robert Stevenson. Mrs. Smith had failed in her design to make
her son a minister, and she saw him daily more immersed in business
and worldly ambition. One thing remained that she might do: she
might secure for him a godly wife, that great means of
sanctification; and she had two under her hand, trained by herself,
her dear friends and daughters both in law and love--Jean and
Janet. Jean's complexion was extremely pale, Janet's was florid;
my grandmother's nose was straight, my great-aunt's aquiline; but
by the sound of the voice, not even a son was able to distinguish
one from other. The marriage of a man of twenty-seven and a girl
of twenty who have lived for twelve years as brother and sister, is
difficult to conceive. It took place, however, and thus in 1799
the family was still further cemented by the union of a
representative of the male or worldly element with one of the
female and devout.

This essential difference remained unbridged, yet never diminished
the strength of their relation. My grandfather pursued his design
of advancing in the world with some measure of success; rose to
distinction in his calling, grew to be the familiar of members of
Parliament, judges of the Court of Session, and 'landed gentlemen';
learned a ready address, had a flow of interesting conversation,
and when he was referred to as 'a highly respectable bourgeois,'
resented the description. My grandmother remained to the end
devout and unambitious, occupied with her Bible, her children, and
her house; easily shocked, and associating largely with a clique of
godly parasites. I do not know if she called in the midwife
already referred to; but the principle on which that lady was
recommended, she accepted fully. The cook was a godly woman, the
butcher a Christian man, and the table suffered. The scene has
been often described to me of my grandfather sawing with darkened
countenance at some indissoluble joint--'Preserve me, my dear, what
kind of a reedy, stringy beast is this?'--of the joint removed, the
pudding substituted and uncovered; and of my grandmother's anxious
glance and hasty, deprecatory comment, 'Just mismanaged!' Yet with
the invincible obstinacy of soft natures, she would adhere to the
godly woman and the Christian man, or find others of the same
kidney to replace them. One of her confidants had once a narrow
escape; an unwieldy old woman, she had fallen from an outside stair
in a close of the Old Town; and my grandmother rejoiced to
communicate the providential circumstance that a baker had been
passing underneath with his bread upon his head. 'I would like to
know what kind of providence the baker thought it!' cried my
grandfather.

But the sally must have been unique. In all else that I have heard
or read of him, so far from criticising, he was doing his utmost to
honour and even to emulate his wife's pronounced opinions. In the
only letter which has come to my hand of Thomas Smith's, I find him
informing his wife that he was 'in time for afternoon church';
similar assurances or cognate excuses abound in the correspondence
of Robert Stevenson; and it is comical and pretty to see the two
generations paying the same court to a female piety more highly
strung: Thomas Smith to the mother of Robert Stevenson--Robert
Stevenson to the daughter of Thomas Smith. And if for once my
grandfather suffered himself to be hurried, by his sense of humour
and justice, into that remark about the case of Providence and the
Baker, I should be sorry for any of his children who should have
stumbled into the same attitude of criticism. In the apocalyptic
style of the housekeeper of Invermay, woe be to that person! But
there was no fear; husband and sons all entertained for the pious,
tender soul the same chivalrous and moved affection. I have spoken
with one who remembered her, and who had been the intimate and
equal of her sons, and I found this witness had been struck, as I
had been, with a sense of disproportion between the warmth of the
adoration felt and the nature of the woman, whether as described or
observed. She diligently read and marked her Bible; she was a
tender nurse; she had a sense of humour under strong control; she
talked and found some amusement at her (or rather at her husband's)
dinner-parties. It is conceivable that even my grandmother was
amenable to the seductions of dress; at least, I find her husband
inquiring anxiously about 'the gowns from Glasgow,' and very
careful to describe the toilet of the Princess Charlotte, whom he
had seen in church 'in a Pelisse and Bonnet of the same colour of
cloth as the Boys' Dress jackets, trimmed with blue satin ribbons;
the hat or Bonnet, Mr. Spittal said, was a Parisian slouch, and had
a plume of three white feathers.' But all this leaves a blank
impression, and it is rather by reading backward in these old musty
letters, which have moved me now to laughter and now to impatience,
that I glean occasional glimpses of how she seemed to her
contemporaries, and trace (at work in her queer world of godly and
grateful parasites) a mobile and responsive nature. Fashion moulds
us, and particularly women, deeper than we sometimes think; but a
little while ago, and, in some circles, women stood or fell by the
degree of their appreciation of old pictures; in the early years of
the century (and surely with more reason) a character like that of
my grandmother warmed, charmed, and subdued, like a strain of
music, the hearts of the men of her own household. And there is
little doubt that Mrs. Smith, as she looked on at the domestic life
of her son and her stepdaughter, and numbered the heads in their
increasing nursery, must have breathed fervent thanks to her
Creator.

Yet this was to be a family unusually tried; it was not for nothing
that one of the godly women saluted Miss Janet Smith as 'a veteran
in affliction'; and they were all before middle life experienced in
that form of service. By the 1st of January 1808, besides a pair
of still-born twins, children had been born and still survived to
the young couple. By the 11th two were gone; by the 28th a third
had followed, and the two others were still in danger. In the
letters of a former nurserymaid--I give her name, Jean Mitchell,
honoris causa--we are enabled to feel, even at this distance of
time, some of the bitterness of that month of bereavement.

'I have this day received,' she writes to Miss Janet, 'the
melancholy news of my dear babys' deaths. My heart is like to
break for my dear Mrs. Stevenson. O may she be supported on this
trying occasion! I hope her other three babys will be spared to
her. O, Miss Smith, did I think when I parted from my sweet babys
that I never was to see them more?' 'I received,' she begins her
next, 'the mournful news of my dear Jessie's death. I also
received the hair of my three sweet babys, which I will preserve as
dear to their memorys and as a token of Mr. and Mrs. Stevenson's
friendship and esteem. At my leisure hours, when the children are
in bed, they occupy all my thoughts, I dream of them. About two
weeks ago I dreamed that my sweet little Jessie came running to me
in her usual way, and I took her in my arms. O my dear babys, were
mortal eyes permitted to see them in heaven, we would not repine
nor grieve for their loss.'

By the 29th of February, the Reverend John Campbell, a man of
obvious sense and human value, but hateful to the present
biographer, because he wrote so many letters and conveyed so little
information, summed up this first period of affliction in a letter
to Miss Smith: 'Your dear sister but a little while ago had a full
nursery, and the dear blooming creatures sitting around her table
filled her breast with hope that one day they should fill active
stations in society and become an ornament in the Church below.
But ah!'

Near a hundred years ago these little creatures ceased to be, and
for not much less a period the tears have been dried. And to this
day, looking in these stitched sheaves of letters, we hear the
sound of many soft-hearted women sobbing for the lost. Never was
such a massacre of the innocents; teething and chincough and
scarlet fever and smallpox ran the round; and little Lillies, and
Smiths, and Stevensons fell like moths about a candle; and nearly
all the sympathetic correspondents deplore and recall the little
losses of their own. 'It is impossible to describe the Heavnly
looks of the Dear Babe the three last days of his life,' writes
Mrs. Laurie to Mrs. Smith. 'Never--never, my dear aunt, could I
wish to eface the rememberance of this Dear Child. Never, never,
my dear aunt!' And so soon the memory of the dead and the dust of
the survivors are buried in one grave.

There was another death in 1812; it passes almost unremarked; a
single funeral seemed but a small event to these 'veterans in
affliction'; and by 1816 the nursery was full again. Seven little
hopefuls enlivened the house; some were growing up; to the elder
girl my grandfather already wrote notes in current hand at the tail
of his letters to his wife: and to the elder boys he had begun to
print, with laborious care, sheets of childish gossip and pedantic
applications. Here, for instance, under date of 26th May 1816, is
part of a mythological account of London, with a moral for the
three gentlemen, 'Messieurs Alan, Robert, and James Stevenson,' to
whom the document is addressed:

'There are many prisons here like Bridewell, for, like other large
towns, there are many bad men here as well as many good men. The
natives of London are in general not so tall and strong as the
people of Edinburgh, because they have not so much pure air, and
instead of taking porridge they eat cakes made with sugar and
plums. Here you have thousands of carts to draw timber, thousands
of coaches to take you to all parts of the town, and thousands of
boats to sail on the river Thames. But you must have money to pay,
otherwise you can get nothing. Now the way to get money is, become
clever men and men of education, by being good scholars.'

From the same absence, he writes to his wife on a Sunday:

'It is now about eight o'clock with me, and I imagine you to be
busy with the young folks, hearing the questions [Anglice,
catechism], and indulging the boys with a chapter from the large
Bible, with their interrogations and your answers in the soundest
doctrine. I hope James is getting his verse as usual, and that
Mary is not forgetting her little hymn. While Jeannie will be
reading Wotherspoon, or some other suitable and instructive book, I
presume our friend, Aunt Mary, will have just arrived with the news
of A THRONG KIRK [a crowded church] and a great sermon. You may
mention, with my compliments to my mother, that I was at St. Paul's
to-day, and attended a very excellent service with Mr. James
Lawrie. The text was "Examine and see that ye be in the faith."'

A twinkle of humour lights up this evocation of the distant scene--
the humour of happy men and happy homes. Yet it is penned upon the
threshold of fresh sorrow. James and Mary--he of the verse and she
of the hymn--did not much more than survive to welcome their
returning father. On the 25th, one of the godly women writes to
Janet:

'My dearest beloved madam, when I last parted from you, you was so
affected with your affliction [you? or I?] could think of nothing
else. But on Saturday, when I went to inquire after your health,
how was I startled to hear that dear James was gone! Ah, what is
this? My dear benefactors, doing so much good to many, to the
Lord, suddenly to be deprived of their most valued comforts! I was
thrown into great perplexity, could do nothing but murmur, why
these things were done to such a family. I could not rest, but at
midnight, whether spoken [or not] it was presented to my mind--
"Those whom ye deplore are walking with me in white." I conclude
from this the Lord saying to sweet Mrs. Stevenson: "I gave them to
be brought up for me: well done, good and faithful! they are fully
prepared, and now I must present them to my father and your father,
to my God and your God."'

It would be hard to lay on flattery with a more sure and daring
hand. I quote it as a model of a letter of condolence; be sure it
would console. Very different, perhaps quite as welcome, is this
from a lighthouse inspector to my grandfather:

'In reading your letter the trickling tear ran down ray cheeks in
silent sorrow for your departed dear ones, my sweet little friends.
Well do I remember, and you will call to mind, their little
innocent and interesting stories. Often have they come round me
and taken me by the hand, but alas! I am no more destined to
behold them.'

The child who is taken becomes canonised, and the looks of the
homeliest babe seem in the retrospect 'heavenly the three last days
of his life.' But it appears that James and Mary had indeed been
children more than usually engaging; a record was preserved a long
while in the family of their remarks and 'little innocent and
interesting stories,' and the blow and the blank were the more
sensible.

Early the next month Robert Stevenson must proceed upon his voyage
of inspection, part by land, part by sea. He left his wife plunged
in low spirits; the thought of his loss, and still more of her
concern, was continually present in his mind, and he draws in his
letters home an interesting picture of his family relations:

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