ABSTRACT
The interrelated influences of William Wordsworth and evolutionary theory preoccupied Robert Louis Stevenson from the beginning of his career, originating in an early meditation on memory in 1871. In Stevenson’s Wordsworth annotations, praise and criticism are often intermingled, reflecting his deeply ambivalent response to the poet. Stevenson is perhaps thinking of Smethurst when he muses in an essay three years later that “a man who carries a pleasant face about to his friends and neighbors” does more good than someone like Charles Darwin. Stevenson also takes issue with Wordsworth’s portrayal of a benevolent natural world. The paradoxical phrase “austerity of joy” reflects Stevenson’s Wordsworthian effort to celebrate the beauties of a violent natural world. Stevenson quotes ambiguous imagery from “Brougham Castle,” which permits both bleak and benevolent readings of nature. Stevenson associates the distance between his grandfather and himself with that separating the old minister and his animal ancestor, both of which are linked by evolutionary inheritance.
