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"Lew came home from the English Church in a great way, because, he said, the minister was preaching against Presbyterianism. No wonder he was angry! 'What,' said Lew with some warmth, 'an English clergyman preaching against a Church for which our forefathers have bled and died! How dare he!' So dear Lew did not go back to the church in the afternoon."
(Alison Cunningham, Cummy's Diary: A Diary Kept by R.L. Stevenson's Nurse Alison Cunningham While Travelling with Him on the Continent during 1863 (London: Chatto & Windus, 1926), p. 87)
Alison Cunningham, “Cummy” (1822-1913), was RLS’s nurse. Born in Torryburn, Fife, Cummy was a strict Calvinist. She became RLS’s nurse in 1852, remaining in the household until November 1872. She was deeply devoted and loyal to the Stevensons and loved RLS.
Cummy’s religious views had a strong influence on the young Stevenson: “if Louis spent, as he tells us, 'a Covenanting childhood', it was to Cummie that this was due. Besides the Bible and the Shorter Catechism, which he had also from his mother, Cummie filled him with a love of her own favourite authors, McCheyne and others, Presbyterians of the straitest doctrine. [. . .] In matters of conduct, Cummy was for no half-measures. Cards were the Devil’s Books. [. . .] The novel and the playhouse were alike anathema to her; and this would seem no very likely opening for the career of one who was to be a novelist and write plays as well. For her pupil entered fully into the spirit of her ordinances, and insisted on a most rigorous observance of her code” (Graham Balfour, The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson [London: Elibron, 2005], pp. 30-31).
Recent critics have suggested that Cummy’s relationship with RLS was problematic – for example, that her religious views were damaging to his health, his ill and feverish imagination turning religious stories into nightmares. But her religious views probably also inspired Stevenson, sparking the beginnings of ideas for what he would later write. Perhaps, though, this strict Christianity also influenced RLS’s decision in his early twenties to abandon the Christian faith (a decision which particularly hurt his father).
Stevenson was very fond of Cummy. He dedicated A Child’s Garden of Verses (1885) to her to thank her for the nights she spent caring for him when he was ill as a child:
To Alison Cunningham
From her Boy
For the long nights you lay awake
And watched for my unworthy sake:
For your most comfortable hand
That led me through the uneven land:
For all the story-books you read:
For all the pains you comforted:
For all you pitied, all you bore,
In sad and happy days of yore: -
My second Mother, my first Wife
The angel in my infant life –
From the sick child, now well and old,
Take, nurse, the little book you hold!
And grant it, Heaven, that all who read
May find as dear a nurse at need,
And every child who lists my rhyme,
In the bright, fireside, nursery clime,
May hear it in as kind a voice
As made my childish days rejoice!
(RLS, A Child's Garden of Verses [New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1895], p. ix).
Indeed, Cummy’s diary (Cummy’s Diary, preface by Robert T. Skinner [London: Chatto and Windus, 1926]), which she kept when the Stevenson’s travelled in Europe in 1863, gives a valuable insight into the kind of woman she was. The diary shows that she had a sense of humour and was preoccupied by issues like religious and national difference.
After Stevenson’s death, Cummy attracted some celebrity. A Child’s Garden of Verses had become increasingly popular in the early twentieth century. Many people wanted to meet the woman who had inspired and nursed RLS. Cummy seemed to enjoy the attention, delighting in talking about her time with Stevenson.
Alison Cunningham died at the age of 92.
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