Poetry · 1882
Moral Emblems
In the winter of 1881 Stevenson was ill at Davos, and his stepson Lloyd Osbourne had a toy printing press. What came off it is collected here: Not I, and Other Poems; two collections of Moral Emblems; A Martial Elegy for Some Lead Soldiers; and The Graver and the Pen. Stevenson wrote the verses and cut the woodblocks himself with a pocket knife, and the joke is sustained at every level — mock-solemn quatrains attached to pictures the verses keep having to apologise for, a preface explaining the artist's limitations, and an advertisement for the press's other publications.
These were printed in editions of a few dozen copies at the Davos Press and sold to friends. They are the least consequential thing Stevenson ever made and among the most purely enjoyable, and they were collected into his works after his death.
This Bibliomancer edition presents the collections complete.
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About this edition
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About the author
1850–1894 · Victorian
Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894) was born in Edinburgh into a family of lighthouse engineers, trained in law, and turned to writing travel essays and stories. Treasure Island (1883), A Child’s Garden of Verses (1885), Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) and Kidnapped (1886) made him famous. In poor health all his life, he travelled in search of a climate he could bear and settled in 1890 in Samoa, where he died at forty-four.
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