Welcome to the LRB podcast. If you subscribe to the LRB, you can get the first 12 issues for just £12.

To find out more, go to lrb.me forward slash listen. That's LRB.m.m. forward slash listen.

Hello and welcome to the London Review of Books podcast. My name is Thomas Jones, and today I'm talking to Andrew O'Hagan, who's written a piece in the current issue of the LRB about the friendship between Robert Louis Stevenson and Henry James and others in their circle and the time they spent together in Bournemouth of all places in the mid-1880s. Hello, Andrew, and thank you for joining me.

Hi, Tom, it's a pleasure.

So, Bournemouth, it seems a long way from Treasure Island or the Scotland have kidnapped,

or even the Edinburgh inflected London of Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde.

How did Stevenson come to be there?

It's funny with Stevenson.

He once said that he took a little bit of Scotland in his shoes with him, wherever he went.

And it's true that whether he was on the back of a donkey in the middle of the savann

or in the gold mines of California,

or even in Bournemouth, that seemingly genteel health spa

that it was becoming in the mid-1880s, he was ever so Scottish and looking out from

his house, Scary Vour, named after one of his uncle's lighthouses on the Western Isles in

Scotland. They called it Scary Vore after that, and he used to sit at the upper window there,

looking out to see, in all as he could

see by his own account was these fictional characters he'd written about or was about to write about

he was he had kidnapped in mind at that time and the trials of david balfour out at sea but also of Treasure Island and the seafaring past was all very vivid to him.

That was the thing about Stevenson.

He was a writer who lived with his material right in front of him

and right on the tip of his tongue, as it were, at all times,

no matter where he was situated.

...