A Fine Bogey Tale

A Poetry Tale about Robert Louis Stevenson, told by Hello Doggo.

Bournemouth, autumn, eighteen eighty-five. Fanny Stevenson remembered being woken in the small hours by her husband crying out in horror. So she woke him.

He was not pleased. Why had she woken him? He’d been dreaming a fine bogey tale. She’d interrupted the first transformation scene.

He later explained he’d spent two days racking his brains for a plot. On the second night, he dreamed a scene at a window, and a man who, pursued for some crime, took a powder and changed in front of his pursuers. The rest, he admitted, he wrote awake, though he thought he saw the hand of his Brownies, the little people who staged plays in his sleep.

His stepson Lloyd Osbourne remembered him coming downstairs in a fever and reading out nearly half the book. Lloyd doubted the first draft took even three days.

Then, the family story goes, Fanny gave her verdict: it ought to be an allegory, and he’d written a mere story. Stevenson burned it — and wrote the whole thing again.

You may have heard he was high on cocaine at the time. A splendid rumour, but as far as anyone has shown, that’s all it is. He was ill, on prescribed medicine, and there the paper trail ends. Some scholars even doubt the bonfire.

Months earlier, the same man had published A Child’s Garden of Verses. In it, a moon with a face like the clock in the hall, who shines on thieves on the garden wall. He always did know who was out there in the dark.