COUSIN OF "R.L.S."

Auckland Star, Volume LXVII, Issue 117, 19 May 1936, Page 9

COUSIN OF "R.L.S."

KINSMEN CARRY ON. FAMILY REMINISCENCES. OPPOSITION TO MARRIAGE. (From Our Own Correspondent.) SAN FRANCISCO, April 28. A small, stooping man of 75 years was seen walking along Sixth Street in Los Angeles with two volumes under his arm and he finally ended up rather exhausted in a chair. The two books which he offered in the literary mart on Sixth Street, bounded by Hill and Figueroa Streets, from among many others like them at home were written by the owner's cousin, Robert Louis Stevenson, original, editions, one autographed.

Dr. George F. Stevenson seldom comes to town. Since 1913 he has lived alone —he never married —on the country place near Newhall where Louis, as he calls the great author, once lived. It was owned by the family of Robert Louis Stevenson's wife, the Californian, Fannie Osborne, and Dr. George Stevenson inherited it in a roundabout way. The books were brought from' Samlia after the author's death.

Dr. Stevenson as he rested, chatted of the controversies that are now forgotten except by biographers. "The family" opposed Robert Louis Stevenson's marriage to Fannie Osborne, whom he met on the steamer coming to the United States, and who remained with him, an attentive wife, to the last. He also recalled the rumpus between publishers as a result of the author's selection of Scribner's and his widow's of Colliers, and the books he now carried represented the editions of the rival houses back there at the turn of the century.

"Louis," began Dr. Stevenson, "and I got on all right, only I offended him when my mother objected to his marriage to a woman who had been divorced. Anyway, I saw him in New .Jersey, where I was living then, and later in Australia and also in California." ■

When Louis visited his family in New-' Jersey George took him to a medical college to see about an operation. The writer promptly fainted. Later George took him to an asylum and Louis liked that better. It was there, his cousin declares, that he got the notion of writing "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde." "Louis was born in Scotland," he went on, "another brother Jim in Ireland, where lie became a clergyman, and I in America. My father, a physician, had come here early and served in the Union Army. All three of us were tubercular. Jim died while preaching a sermon and all the world knows how Louis died in Samoa. Louis had written me to come and live in California if I wanted to get well. I did, and I got perfectly well. He was about ten years older than I, so if he had lived he would have been about 85 now. Poor Louis! Poor Fannie!" Dr. Stevenson said he seldom went to Los Angeles from his home at Newhall, only distant some 32, miles north west. "I don't want strangers to call on me," he said. "I want to be let alone."