 Fleeming Jenkin From Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin by RLS (London: Longmans, Green & Co, 1912), p. ii "As everybody knows, Louis Stevenson was only intermittently in Edinburgh during the years that followed; its 'icy winds and conventions' always drove him away. He never looked really well or happy there, and I believe he owed some of his lightest-hearted hours to the friendship of Professor and Mrs Jenkin. One can scarcely imagine what he would have done or been without them. Certainly it is impossible to recall the Louis Stevenson of the seventies except as one 'a favoured one of' that delightful Jenkin coterie"
(Flora Masson, "Louis Stevenson in Edinburgh", in I Can Remember Robert Louis Stevenson, ed. by Rosaline Masson [Edinburgh: W. & R. Chambers, 1922], 127)
Henry Charles Fleeming Jenkin (1833-1885) was Professor of Engineering at Edinburgh University. Jenkin is perhaps best knows for his invention of telpherage (a system of using electricity to transport vehicles or goods). He worked (among other things) as a railroad engineer and later a cable engineer, helping to lay cables for the telegraph system in the Mediterranean.
Jenkin had many interests, including art, languages and drama. Indeed, RLS was not only one of Jenkin’s students, he also participated in the amateur theatricals that frequently took place in the Jenkin household. Fleeming and his wife Annie Austin Jenkin welcomed Stevenson into their home, and RLS had fond memories of the time he spent with them.
RLS wrote about Jenkin in “Talk and Talkers: I”, referring to him as Cockshot: “[Cockshot] has been meat and drink to me for many a long evening. His manner is dry, brisk, and pertinacious, and the choice of words not much. The point about him is his extraordinary readiness and spirit” (“Talk and Talkers: I”, in Memories and Portraits, The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Swanston edn, vol xi [London: Chatto and Windus, 1911], p. 89).
For more about Stevenson on Jenkin, see Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin (1887) – an account of Jenkin’s life from his ancestors to the present, but also of RLS’s personal memories of the professor.
Further Reading:
Hempstead Colin and Gillian Cookson, A Victorian Scientist and Engineer: Fleeming Jenkin and the Birth of Electrical Engineering (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000)
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