Record Number: 30399

---

Reading Experience:

Evidence:

My dear Mrs Oliphant, I address you freely, because I have a full heart just now; and I had rather speak foolishly out of my enthusiasm than hold my tongue afterwards in a state of clear and cowardly common sense.
How you wrote A Beleaguered City, I cannot think; I had not supposed it had been in you; but God bless you, in all soberness, for having done so. I look in vain for anything like it, since the Pilgrim’s Progress − or before. How it might read to posterity, is a thing neither I nor you can tell; but to your contemporaries, or to some of them, it will be truly good news. And this, after all, is the great affair; to these, we speak with comprehensible accents; to posterity, or to all but a few of them, nous autres morts will speak a flat, unresonant dialect. Whether I like the Maire more than Lecanus, or more than the curé, I cannot tell. They are all three admirably touched, and full of significance to the main issue. All their humours tell; they show our Babel, toiling here a while, as we hope, in the midst of a clearer universe. Shelley has said something in poetry, which youe have said over again, and most pleasantly glossed upon, in the idiosyncrasies of all your characters: ‘Life like a dome of many coloured glass (I quote from a bad, a heartless memory) stains the white radiance of eternity’.
I have thought often, how many arrows an author shoots into the air − I daresay, so have you. In the Beleaguered City, you have lodged some three or four in my heart. I have cried heartily; I feel the better for my tears; and I want to thank you. Let that excuse this otherwise inexcusable letter and believe me gratefully your very much obliged reader
Robert Louis Stevenson

Century:

1850-1899

Date:

Until: Jan 1879

Country:

Scotland

Time

n/a

Place:

Edinburgh or Swanston

Type of Experience
(Reader):
 

silent aloud unknown
solitary in company unknown
single serial unknown

Type of Experience
(Listener):
 

solitary in company unknown
single serial unknown

---

Reader / Listener / Reading Group:

Reader:

Robert Louis Stevenson

Age:

Adult (18-100+)

Gender:

Male

Date of Birth:

13 Nov 1850

Socio-Economic Group:

Professional / academic / merchant / farmer

Occupation:

Writer

Religion:

Uncommitted

Country of Origin:

Scotland

Country of Experience:

Scotland

Listeners present if any:
e.g family, servants, friends

n/a

Additional Comments:

n/a

---

Text Being Read:

Author:

Margaret Oliphant

Title:

A Beleaguered City.

Genre:

Fiction, History, Geography / Travel

Form of Text:

Print: Serial / periodical

Publication Details

New Quarterly Magazine (January 1879)

Provenance

unknown

---

Source Information:

Record ID:

30399

Source:

Print

Author:

Robert Louis Stevenson

Editor:

Bradford A. Booth

Title:

The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson, April 1874-July 1879

Place of Publication:

New Haven and London

Date of Publication:

1994

Vol:

2

Page:

301

Additional Comments:

Letter 599, To Margaret Oliphant, [January 1879], [Edinburgh]. Co-editor Ernest Mehew. The foregoing material in square brackets has been added by the editors.

Citation:

Robert Louis Stevenson, Bradford A. Booth (ed.), The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson, April 1874-July 1879, (New Haven and London, 1994), 2, p. 301, http://www.open.ac.uk/Arts/reading/UK/record_details.php?id=30399, accessed: 10 May 2024

---

Additional Comments:

Editors’ Note 1, Letters 2, 299 reads: “Mrs Margaret Oliphant (1828-97), Scottish author of over a hundred novels; she also wrote biographical and historical works and was a lifelong contributor of critical articles and reviews (as well as fiction) to Blackwood’s Magazine. A Beleaguered City, one of the best of her stories of the supernatural, appeared in the New Quarterly Magazine for January 1879 and was published, slightly expanded, in book form in 1880. It tells how the unseen spirits of the dead (‘[italics]nous autres morts[end italics]' they describe themselves [sic] in letters of fire on the front of the cathedral) occupy a small French town for three days and expel the inhabitants. The story is narrated by Martin Dupin, the rationalist mayor, with contributions from other eye-witnesses, among them Paul Lecamus, a mystic − the only person to make contact with the spirits. The novel concerns the reactions to the miracle of people of differing characters, social positions and religious attitudes, and dramatises the leading religious issues of the time. (See R. and V. Colby, ‘A Beleaguered City: A Fable for the Victorian Age’, Nineteenth Century Fiction, March 1962.”