Monterey and Stevenson

Laureen in front of where Stevenson once lived

In the latter part of 1879, a young unknown writer lived in a small Oceanside village called Monterey. He would be there only a short period, but the impact of that village would stay with him the rest of his life and influence what he would go on to write.

Robert Louis Stevenson was so little known, that most people just called him Bob.

He truly would not be the Robert Louis Stevenson of writing fame until the publication of his bestseller, Treasure Island, in January of 1882. 

Laureen and I love the city of Monterey. In fact, we try to get there at least once a year. There is something about walking the waterfront, driving beneath tall billowing trees, walking shoeless across the sandy beaches – the same sand that may have been there during Stevenson’s stay.

The entire Carmel Valley, where Monterey is located, is gorgeous.

Not many folks realize the man who penned such literary classics as Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, resided there in a modest boarding house.

Robert Lewis Stevenson's old abode

The writer would wander the hills, valleys, riverbanks, and streets soaking everything in.

‘The town, when I was there, was a place of two or three streets, economically paved with sea-sand, and two or three lanes, which were watercourses in the rainy season, and were, at all times, rent up by fissures four or five feet deep. There were no streetlights. Short sections of wooden sidewalk only added to the dangers of the night, for they were often high above the level of the roadway, and no one could tell where they would be likely to begin or end,’ he wrote of the village of Monterey in his work entitled, Across the Plains with Other Memories and Essays, in 1892.

Today, that image of Monterey seems so out of date – well, I guess it is, since it was written 131 years ago.

Nearly 30,000 residents now make this charming old California town home.

“I love Monterey,” Laureen said, as we turned onto Pacific Street from Highway 1.

I nodded. “We better, since this time of year seems to include large amounts of rain.”

It was raining as we drove near the Monterey Historic Park. There was a promise of some sun later in the day as the clouds kept teasing us by tearing apart and then sticking back together like a kid eating cotton candy.

Some of the beautiful natural sites to be seen in Monterey

In all the times we had been to the city by the bay, we had never visited the Robert Louis Stevenson’s Museum on Houston Street.

“Why haven’t we visited it before?” I asked Laureen, slowing at a red light.

I bet during Stevenson’s stay there hadn’t been any red lights. Nope, just big wide sandy based paths going here and there across Monterey.

They knew how to lay out streets in 1879, no traffic lights and probably no stop signs either. 

“Whoa, Nelly,” a farmer may have said. “We have to stop at the stop light and let Bob cross the street before us.”

“It’s Robert.”

“Sure, it is, Bob.”

A romantic story is the basis for Stevenson’s stay in Monterey, and that deals with a woman by the name of Fanny Osbourne.

She was married to Samuel Osbourne, but their marriage was a rocky one since he was not faithful to her. In fact, so unfaithful was he that she finally left the cheating Sammy in 1875 and moved to Paris. In April of 1876, her young son, Hervey passed away from tuberculosis and she had him buried at Pere Lachaise Cemetery.

That’s the same graveyard where Oscar Wilde, Sarah Bernhardt, Marcel Marceau, Jim Morrison, and many other well-known artists, writers, and musicians are buried today.

Soon after her son’s death, Fanny moved to Grez-sur-Loing, where she met Robert Louis Stevenson, though he was probably still known as Bob back then.

She was a successful artist and magazine short-story writer, able to support both her and her remaining children, Isobel, and Lloyd in good stead.

Fanny became friends with Stevenson in 1876. The young man, ten years her junior, showed promise as a writer and she encouraged and inspired him with the talent she believed he had.  

They became very close when she suddenly jetted back to the United States, to California to be exact.

Actually, she did not really jet since such transportation was still more than six decades away, but rather boated back from France.

In two years, Fanny notified Stevenson that she was finally divorcing the cheating-dog Sammy.

Stevenson was thrilled with the news and planned to join her, but he didn’t have the funds for the trip and his parents refused to pay.

“Wait until you write Treasure Island, then you can afford passage,” his mother may have said.

“What’s a treasure island?” Stevenson may have replied.

Anyway, he saved up his money for the following three years and moved to Monterey in 1879 to be with Fanny who was suffering from an emotional breakdown dealing with the personal trauma over the divorce.

It was during this short stay in Monterey that Stevenson found his writing voice, which would lead to his long list of literary successes; Treasure Island in 1882, A Child’s Garden of Verses in 1885, Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in 1886, Kidnapped in 1893, and other books, poems, and essays.

He and Fanny married in May of 1880. 

After the publication of Treasure Island, he and Fanny found it difficult to travel anywhere without throngs of folks wanting his autograph.

I know the feeling.

He would die on December 3rd, 1894, at the young age of 44 from a stroke while they were living in Samoa.

But it is his short say in Monterey that had brought Laureen and I back to this beloved town.

In his essays, he wrote about the woods surrounding the village at that time and mentioned how during the winter, with all the fog and rain coming off the coast the land would blossom into nothing but green.

And, then in the hot summers those very same forests would ignite into infernos. 

From, The Old Pacific Capitol – 1880, ‘These fires are one of the great dangers in California. I have seen from Monterey as many as three at the same time, by day a cloud of smoke, by night a red coal of conflagration in the distance. A little think will start them, and, if the wind be favourable, they gallop over miles of country faster than a horse. The inhabitants must turn out and work like demons, for it is not only the pleasant groves that are destroyed; the climate and the soil are equally at stake, and these fires prevent the rains of the next winter and dry up perennial fountains. California has been a land of promise in its time, like Palestine; but if the wood continue so swiftly to perish, it may become, like Palestine, a land of desolation.’

Some things never seem to change with California. Large forest fires during Stevenson’s time and large forest fires in the present.

The Stevenson House, where the museum is located, is a two-story adobe building that has existed since the earliest days of Monterey.

It has been used to house government officials, families, artists, writers, and fishermen from the Mexican Era. It was even a rooming house called the ‘French Hotel.’

When Stevenson arrived back in 1879, he was very ill from his long and arduous journey across the United States. He wrote about these travels in his book, The Amateur Emigrant, published in 1895. 

Friends at the French Hotel nursed him back to health so he could court Fanny Osbourne.

“You have to be well, Bob, if you want a woman to fancy you,” a friend may have said.

“It’s Robert.”

The Stevenson House is a must-see when visiting Monterey, with several rooms dedicated to the author. 

This particular area of the house is actually referred to as the Stevensonia rooms.

A fireplace to warm your toes

Artifacts dating to the time Stevenson stayed there are to be seen, and since donated by his family, along with information concerning his life as a writer and his bohemian adventures.

One photograph intrigued me. Stevenson and a large group of people spread around a large dining table filled with all sorts of food. It gave me a sense that this historic figure of a writer was just a man. A man enjoying time with family and friends possibly. Of course, it turns out that the dinner was a luau, and his friends included one of the last monarchs of Hawaii, King Kalakaua.

His lucky black velveteen writing jacket is prominently displayed along with other mementos of Stevenson and Fanny’s life together as they traveled the world, including an old steamer trunk emblazoned with his name and destination: Samoa. The whole place just gave a sense of humanness. 

Items on display concerning Stevenson's personal life

It is rumored that the setting for the novel Treasure Island was based on Monterey, and that this story may have been the driving force for the film, Pirates of the Caribbean.

Now, that is something to ponder while stretching one’s toes in the sands near Monterey Bay.