|
"I was often at Swanston, and it seems but yesterday that at the west end of Princes St, Louis stood by me tracing with his stick on the pavement the plan of the roads by which I was to come on my first visit. I had known him long before, but then began our friendship. It was that night, late, in his bedroom, after reading to me (I think) "The Devil on Cramond Sands", he flung himself back on his bed in a kind of agony exclaiming, 'Good God, will anyone ever publish me!' To soothe him, I (quite insincerely) assured him that of course someone would, for I had seen worse stuff in print myself"
(Charles Baxter in a letter to Lord Guthrie 25 March 1914. From The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson, ed. by Bradford A. Booth and Ernest Mehew, vol i [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995], p. 41.)
Charles Baxter (1848-1919) was a lawyer and one of RLS’s closest friends. They met in 1871 and developed a lifelong friendship. The two would often visit Swanston (see quotation above). Baxter, like RLS, had gone to Edinburgh University and both were members of the Speculative Society. Baxter was also part of RLS’s circle of friends in his student days of the 1870s, along with Bob Stevenson, Walter Ferrier and Walter Simpson. The young men would often drink in pubs on the Lothian Road, Edinburgh. He was a member of the LJR (Liberty, Justice, Reverence) League, the club RLS and his friends founded in a pub in Advocate’s Close, Edinburgh.
In 1871, Baxter became a Writer to the Signet and later joined his father’s law firm. Eventually, Baxter became RLS’s solicitor, dealing with his personal and financial business. After 1892, he also dealt with RLS’s publishers. With Sidney Colvin, he came up with the idea for the Edinburgh Edition of the Works of Robert Louis Stevenson.
Baxter married Grace Roberta Louisa Stewart in 1877, with RLS as his best man. He and his wife had two sons and a daughter. In the 1890s, Baxter went through a difficult period: he had financial problems, his wife died in 1893, and his father died the following year. Baxter had a breakdown and turned to drink. He had planned to visit RLS in Samoa, but while he was en route, he learned that Stevenson had died. Baxter was the executor for Stevenson’s estate.
In 1895, Baxter remarried. He and his wife Marie Louise Gaukroger had a daughter. Now retired, Baxter and his family lived in Paris and Sienna, Italy, returning to England during the first World War.
Baxter was a supportive friend to RLS during trying times in the author’s life. For example, in the quarrel with W.E. Henley, Baxter kept up his friendship with Henley while also helping RLS and Fanny through this difficult period.
RLS used Baxter as the inspiration for his character Michael Finsbury in The Wrong Box (1889). He wrote:
“Michael was something of a public character. Launched upon the law at a very early age, and quite without protectors, he has become a trafficker in shady affairs. He was known to be the man for a lost cause; it was known he could extract testimony from a stone, and interest from a gold mine [. . . ]. In private life, Michael was a man of pleasure; but it was thought his dire experience at the office had gone far to sober him, and it was known that (in the matter of investments) he preferred the solid to the brilliant” (RLS, with Lloyd Osbourne, The Wrong Box [London: Longmans, Green and Co, 1889], p. 16).
Stevenson also dedicated both Kidnapped (1883) and Catriona (1893) to Baxter. The dedications suggest that RLS was often thinking nostalgically about the time that he spent with Baxter in Edinburgh (a place which, at the time of writing these novels he would never live in again). In the Kidnapped dedication he wrote:
“I think I see you, moving there by plain daylight, beholding with your natural eyes those places that have now become for your companion a part of the scenery of dreams. How, in the intervals of present business, the past must echo in your memory! Let it not echo often without some kind thought of your friend” (RLS, Kidnapped [New York: Harper Brothers, 1921], p. x).
|
