English Visiting Speaker Seminar Dr Alistair Robinson, Northeastern University London 'On the Dark Coast: Wreckers, Lighthouses, and Robert Louis Stevenson's

It is well known that the writer Robert Louis Stevenson, author of Treasure Island and Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, was earmarked by his father for another profession: lighthouse engineer. In 1870 he was sent to the remote Scottish islet of Erraid to study the construction of Dhu Artach Lighthouse, which rises out of the Atlantic on an ocean-bound reef. Erraid inspired Stevenson and became the setting for one of the most memorable episodes in his novel Kidnapped and his short story ‘The Merry Men'. It is this last text that this talk is most interested in as it explores the connections between Stevenson's gothic tale and lighthouse engineering, and argues that the history of the Scottish lights illuminates two of the story's major concerns: wrecking — a practice that the construction of lighthouses disrupted — and colonialism — whose imperialistic values informed the attitudes of lighthouse engineers (including Stevenson's father and grandfather). The paper also identifies the connections that exist between ‘The Merry Men' and the many reports, books, and essays written by his family members on the topic of lighthouses. In the process, it situates this story as both part of a corpus of lighthouse texts spanning several generations of Stevensons and also as a response to that family archive.