ABSTRACT
In a letter dated 8 April 1882, from his winter dwelling in Davos, Stevenson wrote to his mother protesting that “I have this winter, nished Treasure Island, written the preface to the Studies, a small book about the Inland Voyage size-The Silverado Squatters and over and above that upwards of ninety-90-Cornhill pages of Magazine work. No man can say I have been idle”.1 His tone is defensive, as if he were confronting charges of idleness that may or may not have been made by his parents. In fact, he undersells himself here, because during this stay in Davos he had also produced his rst self-illustrated series of poems, Moral Emblems. Less than a month previous to this letter, on 20 March 1882, Stevenson had written to his mother about his favourite new endeavour: “Wood-engraving has now drave [sic] suddenly between me and the sun. I dote on wood engraving. I’m a made man for life. I have an amusement at last.”2 This is the rst reference to a joint project Stevenson undertook with a thirteen year-old Lloyd Osbourne in producing the rst series of illustrations and accompanying poems for Moral Emblems, a project that has been largely overlooked by Stevenson scholarship and biography, but one that must take a place of signicance in the creative life of the author.3 By late March, Stevenson was sending completed copies of Moral Emblems – a total of ve illustrated poems – to friends and family, deriding his own efforts, but also clearly proud of them. The series was produced at a very signicant time in Stevenson’s life (and in Stevenson scholarship), while he was rewriting Treasure Island for its publication as a book, which he had hoped would be illustrated. It was also undertaken during a period in which Stevenson was writing his essays for the Magazine of Art; as this chapter argues, Moral Emblems therefore constitutes an experiment in practicing some of his own theories on textual illustration.
