ABSTRACT
The selection of books from his Viennese library Freud brought with him to London and now on the shelves of the Freud Museum does not include most of the nineteenth-century English novels he is known to have read — in his own or borrowed copies — in the course of his life. There is no Dickens, no George Eliot, no Meredith. One novel, however, by a Scottish author, which has thrilled boys in many countries since its first publication in book-form in 1883, did find its way onto his London shelves: Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-94). As his choice of works by Rider Haggard, Charles Kingsley, and Rudyard Kipling also shows, Freud shared his friend Silberstein’s predilection for tales of adventure in far-away lands and on the high seas. The copy of Treasure Island he had acquired in Vienna was part of the Tusitala edition, published in 1925. He did not, however, have to wait for that acquisition before becoming interested in Stevenson’s writings; he had already consulted Across the Plains, With Other Memories and Essays, first published in 1892, while preparing his Interpretation of Dreams. The item in this selection of earlier pieces which most concerned Freud was, not surprisingly, ‘A Chapter on Dreams’, in which Stevenson opens to the reader ‘that small theatre of the brain which we keep brightly lighted all night long, after the jets are down, and darkness and sleep reign undisturbed in the remainder of the body’. Stevenson then introduces a number of plays performed in the interior theatre in the course of a single life, which he confesses, in the end, to have been his own. One of these proved to mark an important stage in the gestation of Stevenson’s most memorable uncanny tale: The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886).
