ABSTRACT
For a book that was of deep personal interest to its author, Stevenson's A Footnote to History: Eight Years of Trouble in Samoa has received relatively little attention from the literary critics and even his biographers generally make only passing references to it. Jolly's book contains a fine analysis of one striking example of this strategy, a tour de force on Stevenson's part, in which he uses an imagined walk along the Apia shoreline to show how the physical shape of the place reflects recent history, ending with this observation: Here, then, is a singular state of affairs: all the money, luxury, and business of kingdom centred in one place; that place excepted from the native government and administered by whites for whites; and the whites themselves holding it not in common but in hostile camps. Stevenson's Samoans have both the advantages and disadvantages of a childhood perspective and their concerns need therefore to be taken seriously.
