Stevenson’s Picturesque Excursions: The Art of Youthful Vagrancy

Abstract

Explores ways Stevenson reformulated the late-eighteenth-century picturesque in a number of his late-nineteenth-century essays and travel writings. Argues that although essays were tailored to suit particular periodical audiences, the picturesque emerges in his work as a significant aesthetic vehicle by which he attempts to promote a form of latenineteenth- century aestheticism and a bohemian rebellion against the constraints of modern life. Claims that despite being influenced by Ruskin, who had attempted to reformulate the picturesque as a means of educating the middle-class traveler socially and aesthetically, Stevenson’s interest in this aesthetic model was differently motivated: while Ruskin promotes a form of excursive sight that might take account of the suffering of ruined and picturesque figures, Stevenson’s essays force middle-class readers to turn their gaze back upon themselves. Asserts that by enacting a form of class transvestism, Stevenson staged his own affiliation with the poor and was able to give voice to desires for aesthetic agency and freedom from the constraints of modern bourgeois life.